Carasent ASA

OSE:CARA

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Dennis Hojer, executive]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's presentation, our first quarter report of Carasent. My name is Dennis Höjer, and I will walk through the first half of this report.

And the agenda for today is, of course, to mention some highlights, the business and market update, we will go with some financial review and the outlook.

So a quick summary of the first quarter for Carasent. We had a revenue growth of -- a total of 59%. Of this, 22% coming from organic growth. Although 25% of our recurring growth is coming from organic growth. And we are doing some changes in our reporting structure in order to reflect our new organization on fourth.

And also Webdoc X and the initiative to adapt by booking to the Norwegian market is progressing according to plan.

The acquisition of Medrave was closed in early January this year.

So a quick glance of Carasent today. As many of you probably know by now, our main focus is cloud-based provider medical record software solutions, addressing the private healthcare segment within Scandinavia. We have -- last year, done 3 acquisitions. One of this is Avans Soma. The other one is Metodika and the third one is Medrave last year.

And we still see a great potential in growing in our growth strategy, where we want to provide our customers with new products and services in order to be -- in order to offer a holistic solution to our customers and also to expand our services into new geographies and also to expand our existing offers to new segments.

And today, we have NOK 168 million annual revenue, and we are 129 employees, and we have more than 2,000 clinics now, including the Medrave clinics.

And just an overview of our track record. We have historical growth of 57% revenue growth throughout the years. And this is the 30% coming organic initiatives, and we have a net retention rate of 116%.

Some words. As you probably are aware of. We are a society where we're getting more and more citizens, and we are also getting older and older with new kinds of medicines and stuff. And with that comes the need for more healthcare. And we have an underlying problem in order to solve this demand. And one of the solution in order to solve this demand is to digitalize the healthcare sector and this is where Carasent wants to position -- where we want to position ourselves.

So historical, we have today many different platforms. We have platforms addressing segments within our entity in Evimeria, we have platforms addressing another type of segments within Avans Soma and also Metodika and so on.

And what we want to do on forth is to combine this in order to become one platform. For example, when we develop new tools already now, we do it so that they can be used within all the existing platforms. With that, we can provide with value to all our customers, but we don't have to spend as much money. We only have to invest in one function, which can be implemented to all our customers.

And we will progressively work together towards one single platform where every function is available for our different kind of segments.

We can go to the next slide. And just a quick overview of the reporting changes. We are going to do a historical. We have been more like an investment company where Carasent been the owner of different entities. And we have also provided with information connected to those different entities.

Of forth, we are building a new organization where we want to act as one company, as one organization, where we have management and admin. And we also have a development part of the organization, which we refer to as global services, which will provide our different geographies with solutions. And then we will build a go-to-market organization within the different geographies that we want to address, where we today have a footprint within Sweden and Norway.

And just to illustrate where we have come from, where we are today and where we want to be. I explained it a little bit on the slide before. But previously, we come from a perspective where we were only at an area within the group, and we offered a third-party solutions to our existing customers.

And now, we are existing of many platforms within our different entities where we are also providing third-party integrations and different kind of add-ons to our customers.

But in the future, as I mentioned, when we build new services, we want them to be able to be used within all our solutions so that we create value for all our different segments and all the customers throughout the group.

And some words about our last acquisition, Medrave. The rationale behind that, of course, it puts another product into our portfolio. So we expanded our product portfolio in line with our growth strategy.

And what Medrave does, they provide clinics with reports in order to analyze the quality provided from their healthcare and with the reports, they are able to implement improvements in their care offer to the patients.

And also, Medrave, they have more or less all the primary healthcare clinics within Sweden using their tools. They have started niche offer. So this gives Carasent lots of opportunities to cross-sell the web platform to those customers since it's an attractive segment for us.

And Carasent's path to growth on forth. We are investing heavily in a different kind of initiatives in order to continue our organic growth on forth where upselling net potential from our existing customer base and also from new customers.

And we also want to accelerate this growth throughout M&As, where those 3 dimensions is the key and an M&A should provide us with some kind of synergy for the products and the competence that we have within the group already. And of course, when we have done the M&As, we see the potential in harvesting synergies throughout the entities.

Like example I mentioned from Medrave where they have a customer base, which we now have access to in another way that we didn't have before with the acquisition of Medrave.

So with that, I say thank you, and I leave it over to you, Svein Martin.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Thanks, Dennis. So looking at the figures in summary, Q1 was a strong financial quarter for Carasent. As Dennis mentioned, we had a revenue growth of 59% year-over-year. And of that 22% was organic growth. And the organic growth was driven by strong development in our recurring revenue base, which grew 25%.

And we had net retention rate of 116% for the group in the quarter and adjusted EBITDA margins of 31%. And at the end of Q1, our annual recurring revenue was NOK 168 million.

So the quarter was another step in executing on our long-term growth plan, where revenues continued to grow rapidly, both from acquisitions and organically. We had NOK 45 million in revenues in Q1, and that's compared to NOK 28 million the same quarter last year, corresponding to a total growth of 59%.

In addition to that, we have consistently delivered strong margins during the last few years, and we had the EBITDA margins of 31% in Q1.

Looking a bit at the revenue mix. As mentioned, we have updated our reporting structure to focus on products and geographies rather than legal entities as we have done previously. This is to reflect the organization. And you can see the product categories we will report going forward on this slide where Webdoc EHR and Other EHR is our base product where we have ambition to move customers from the older, older EHR system to the web-based solution over time. And we grew our Webdoc revenues, 17% in Q1. And adjusted for currency effects, the underlying growth was 25% on Webdoc.

Both Other EHR and Platform Services category grew around 90%, and that was driven by the acquisitions completed as well.

And we also have a strategic ambition to grow the Platform Services, consisting of add-ons to our EHR systems and also the Medrave, on growing that ratio versus the EHR solution going forward. And the acquisition of Medrave is a good example where we can get cross-sell opportunities between our entities. And the acquisition of trusties has the potential to drive this ratio in addition to organic initiatives.

Looking a bit more on the breakdown of our recurring revenue growth. We had a total gross of 62% within the quarter. And that was driven by strong organic growth, where -- composed of the 16% or NOK 4.1 million from the existing customer base; and 9% or NOK 2.4 million from new customers.

So this illustrates that we continue to -- that our customers continued contributions consistently grow their business and demands more services basically from our product portfolio.

And in addition to this, we had the currency effects affecting the revenues negatively with NOK 1.6 million organically and acquisitions bringing in NOK 10.9 million, bringing the total to asset growth of 62%.

Looking at our annual recurring revenue. We had a growth of 56% within the quarter. [ NOK 268 million ] at the end of the Q1. And that was driven by our upsell on existing customer base by NOK 16 million. We had new run rate revenues from new customers of NOK 10 million compared to last year. And then we had the churn of approximately NOK 2 million and then new acquisitions generating NOK 46 million in health revenues.

So the organical growth on an ARR basis was 22%, and net retention rate trailing 12 months was 113% in March.

Quickly looking at the margins. We had margins of approximately 31% in Q1. That was slightly down from last year, and that is because of the recent acquisitions, which currently has higher gross margin than our existing business driving the gross margins up, but lower operating margin currently due to the -- basically difference in business model and product characteristics. And we, as mentioned, when we have long-term ambition of moving Metodika customers over to the Webdoc platform, which we hope will drive margins in the long term.

Adjusted EBIT margins increased from 16.4% to 17.1% in the quarter.

If we look at the breakdown of our organic investments, we are investing quite heavily now into initiatives given that we see window opportunity on several different markets. The main new initiatives that we invested in is the Webdoc's expansion into Norway that Dennis talked about; and Webdoc X, our new platform and offering for the European market.

So these initiatives is currently requiring significant investments and not generating any revenues at the moment. But we see that and there is great opportunity to drive the long-term growth for our company. And we have as previously stated, the missions to secure our first commercial contract in Norway in the first half of this year and also to launch Webdoc X commercially in 2023.

Looking at our adjusted EBITDA versus the capital expenditures related to existing platforms in existing markets. We see that our margins is scaling nicely where we had a margin of 13% in Q1 compared to 11% last year. And capital development related to existing markets is also decreasing as a share of revenue, showing our scalability over time.

The performance in Q1 was -- 2022 was in line with the guidance we have provided previously on revenues of NOK 200 million and EBITDA margins in line with last year.

So with that, we can wrap up and open if there's -- there are any questions. We haven't received any questions in the chat yet, but we will wait a couple of seconds to see if anything pops up.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Okay, we have a couple of questions posted now. First one could you break down the net retention rate of 116% for the group. What are the main sources of this upsell? What was the group's net retention rate for Q1 2021 and what is the sustainable level for the group?

To the first question, we saw that the main avenues for the net retention rate is basically 3. We have our annual price increases, which we do per year, which grows basically relatively in line with inflation. And then the 2 main components of the growth is related to firstly, the underlying growth of our customers that they basically grow their business and need more -- and pay more for our product. And then we have the second part, which is related to our ecosystem of add-on services, where we basically sell more digital services to our customers over time.

And I would say that if we break those 3 components into -- break those 3 components down, approximately 40% comes from the new add-on services, 40% from the underlying organic growth of our customers and the remaining 20% is related to our price increases.

Next question -- and to address the second question. We have seen net retention rates ranging from 115% to 120% historically, and we see that as a sustainable level. In the long term is -- we expect to see those rates at similar levels between 110% to 120% basically.

And we hope that -- or we see the potential to that acquisitions such as Medrave adding value-added -- adding products to our portfolio can help drive those rates in the long term.

Next question, could you expand on the NOK 2 million in churn? Why did the clinic churn?

So the main driver of our churn is basically that the clinics is quitting their business for reasons other than that they are changing the product based on preference basically, and that has been like that historically and it's also the case in those NOK 2 million.

Next question, maybe you can take, Dennis. You write in the report that larger customers have continued to take longer time than expected. Could you expand a little on this.

[Dennis Hojer, executive]

Yes, I'd be happy to. We have seen the last 2 years, this has been quite hard. At first, the pandemic hit the customers and they didn't get any patients. So they had to change their operation. And the main thing was -- the main thing on their mind by then wasn't to change the EHR.

And then we saw that the markets were slightly opening, and we also signed some contracts with some larger customers. But then we met the obstacle [indiscernible] as we previously have said had solved the problems with onboarding those new large customers. And when this hit the market as well, the larger customers didn't focus on changing larger systems like we provide as well. So we have had some issues during the last 2 years with those larger customers.

Hopefully onwards when the pandemic isn't hitting us, hopefully, there aren't fourth or fifth wave, it will start to be normalized, but we still suffer some from this period of time.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Great. Next question, besides Webdoc X and Webdoc Norway, what are your main CapEx areas?

So we continuously invest quite significantly into our existing platforms, both in terms of -- we have some initiatives related to segment expansion and also developing new functionality within our existing software that has potential to basically drive organic growth within our existing markets today. So that's the main areas.

Final question. Can you comment on how Q2 has started and the outlook for the full year.

So our comment on that is basically that we -- as mentioned in the presentation, we reiterate our guidance that we have provided for the full year where we have revenues of more than NOK 200 million and also EBITDA margins in line with last year.

So that was all the questions. Thanks a lot for everyone for dialing in.

[Dennis Hojer, executive]

Thank you, everyone. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Bye-bye.