Carasent ASA

OSE:CARA

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Dennis Hojer, executive]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this quarterly report presentation from me and our CFO, Svein Martin. Dennis Hojer is my name, and I'm the CEO for Carasent. And if you have any questions during the presentation, feel free to type them and we will answer them after the presentation.

So we will go through the highlights of the quarter and give you a business and market updates, and we will also go into the figures and I'll speak a little bit about the outlook.

So the highlights of the quarter. We had a revenue growth of 46%. We're off -- 16% of this came organically. We signed our first customer, Webdoc customer within Norway, which is a milestone achieved and looking forward to continue to develop this into the Norwegian market. We had a very strong sales for Webdoc in Sweden, where we signed 37 new clinics in the quarter, which gives us the hope that the market is starting to come back after the pandemic. We also signed a few larger clinics, which have been a challenge for us during the pandemic. So we are looking forward to this trend onwards. And we also signed my successor, our new CEO, Daniel Ohman, which I will speak a little bit about later in the presentation.

And we still sit on a strong balance sheet in order to execute on our M&A agenda, where we have NOK 771 million currently. So we are in a strong position to execute on that strategy.

You can go to the next slide. So just a quick summary of where we are now. So what we do, basically, we have our base and fundament in EHR systems for different segments throughout the Nordics. We also offer a broad ecosystem of integrated third-party services. And we -- as previously mentioned, we have a strong M&A agenda, where we have completed 3 acquisitions the last 2 years. And we are continuing to execute on our growing strategy where we want to grow organically and also throughout M&A in the dimensions where we want to offer and broaden our ecosystem of new products and services to our customer base. We want to expand our business to new geographies and also to new Cara segments.

And just a historical graph of where we come from and where we are heading. We are continuing to grow, where we have strong organic revenue growth, and we continue to increase the revenues from our existing customer base where we want to offer new services onwards.

You can go to the next slide. So just a brief summary of where we come from, where we are and where we are heading. We come from a place where we only have Evimeria as the base. Now we have 3 EHR bases, basically, where we have Evimeria's Webdoc. We have Avans Soma's [indiscernible] and Metodika [indiscernible], where we also offer various amount of add-on services to those EHRs.

And currently and in the future, we do see the potential of only investing in 1 functionality, which can be implemented to all our core systems, which give us a great possibility to scale our business onwards. So when we develop new features and develop new add-on services, we can implement them to all our customer segments at once, which gives us a great scalability potential.

So our recruitment of a new CEO, Daniel Ohman. We came to an agreement here during the second quarter. Currently, Daniel Ohman is the CEO of the GHP Specialty Care Group. So he comes from the customer side. We actually have some clinics of GHP today. So we have been facing each other on the opposite side of the table. And he has been within the GHP business since 2006, and have been a part of the great success that GHP have created during the years. So his knowledge about the industry will benefit Carasent onwards a lot. He has also experienced from growing the business internationally, which is a great fit because that's what Carasent also aim to do now and in the future. And he will start within Carasent no later than the 2nd January, 2023.

So I'm very pleased to hand over the task to Daniel Ohman. It feels very comfortable. And I'm very sure that he will complete the task very good.

You can go to the next slide. So just a brief overview of the Norwegian market since we are starting to take some bites of the market. So within the Norwegian market, we see that there's approximately half the size of the Swedish market, which give us approximately 3,000 clinics to address. And it's a potential revenue for us of NOK 0.5 billion. And -- but the difference to the Swedish market is that all of the markets within Norway is addressable for us. Whereas within Sweden, we only have a 50% addressable market due to some regions' regulations.

And we have basically 3 main competitors within Norway and its PatientSky, WebMed and Pridok, where WebMed and Pridok is very strong at the fast leg at the primary care segment and PatientSky wants to take a position in all the segments that Carasent is addressing.

So -- and within the Norwegian market, they are basically where Sweden were 8, 9 years ago. So they have just started the cloud journey where the caregivers want to change to cloud offers. So we think that Webdoc, the success we have done within Sweden, will be a very great fit to address this need within the Norwegian market.

You can go to the next slide. So we continue our path to growth where we want to expand our business organically where we want to offer new services to our existing customer base. And of course, we have to acquire new customers, and that will end up in our organic growth. And we still have a very active pipeline of M&A targets. But due to the market, we have a distance in the expectations of pricing where we see a great potential onwards when the expectations have to go down, and we are a very great positioned within the M&A strategy since we have a strong balance sheet. And onwards, we also see and we are seeing synergies throughout our entities where we can provide new business opportunity that weren't -- been possible if the companies weren't within the Carasent Group.

So with that said, I leave it over to you, Svein Martin, for some financial review.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Sure. Thanks, Dennis. So as an intro, looking at our key metrics continue to be strong during Q2. We had revenue growth of 46% in Q2 and 52% in the first half of the year. The organic growth was 16% in Q2 and 19% in H1. We will look more closely on the drivers for this growth later on in the presentation.

The organic growth recurring revenue growth was in line with the overall for the quarter and 20% for H1. So growing our recurring revenue base is a key focus for us going forward. In Q2, we had more than 90% of our revenues were recurring in nature. So our net retention rate was 108% in Q2, which we will also look more closely on, on the following pages. And the margins was around 28% -- 29% on the EBITDA level. And our ARR as per June was NOK 169 million.

So if we look at the historical development, we have grown our revenues consistently now for many quarters with stable margins. And we see that Q2 was another step in that -- executing on that growth plan. We had revenues of NOK 47 million, up 46% from last year. and EBITDA margin was, as mentioned, 28% in Q2. So the organic growth in recurring revenues was 16% during the quarter. And that if we break down the drivers for that growth, it came from 8% or NOK 2.4 million came from our existing customer base and 7% or NOK 2.1 million came from new customers.

So our net revenue retention from existing customers is typically driven by a combination of underlying our organic growth for our customers and also upsell of various digital services. And that was also the case during Q2, what are our variable add-ons such as SMS services diluted the growth somewhat given higher vaccination activity in Q2 2021.

So acquisitions that we have done, such as Medrave open up cross-sell opportunities between our different products that can help drive this ratio also going forward. And if we look at the total, we had a currency -- negative currency effect of approximately NOK 1 million and acquisitions generating approximately NOK 10 million, so bringing the total growth to 44% on recurring revenues.

Our annual recurring revenue base grew 25% within the quarter, driven by similar factors as mentioned on the previous page, both upsell existing new and -- from new customers and acquisitions. And we had the total ARR of NOK 169 million at the end of the quarter. And approximately 20% of our ARR is transaction-based related to these variable add-ons.

If we look at full P&L, we saw EBITDA margins of 29% in H1. This was driven by an increase in the gross margin since last year of approximately 1%, and that is due to a slightly higher gross margin on the acquisitions that we have done, basically, because the acquisitions has a lower share of add-ons from third parties. That is the main COGS that we have in our business.

We had an increase in personnel and general operating expenses due to that we are doing quite a lot of investment into management capacity and infrastructure now to facilitate long-term scalable growth basically. So that cost margins to decrease somewhat compared to last year, also due to the acquisitions that is diluting operating margins in the short-term.

If we go to the next page, we continue to invest significantly into organic initiatives. We see that the main increase in our CapEx level is related to these new initiatives, new expansion initiatives, consisting of Webdoc's expansion into Norway and the Webdoc X, which is our new EHR platform, our product for the European -- broader European market, where we have a plan to launch commercially next year. So these initiatives is currently not generating any revenues but have potential to drive the long-term organic growth, and that is why we are doing the investments now to extend our growth runway significantly. While the investments into existing markets is decreasing gradually as a share of revenue compared to the last few years.

So our cash generation in existing markets remains robust. If you look at the adjusted EBITDA and the CapEx related to existing markets, we see that the EBITDA level, as mentioned, is being affected by some investments we are doing for facilitating long-term scalable growth. But we see that underlying cash generation remains robust. If we look at our outlook and guidance, their performance and growth rates, that was basically in line with our guidance for Q2. We have a strong balance sheet as Dennis mentioned to pursue the growth opportunities that we want to pursue. And also we maintain our guidance for 2022.

So with that, we can open up for questions. I see that we have gotten a few questions already.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

First question from Christopher [ Castberg ]. How do you anticipate the EBITDA margin will change for H2 and for 2023?

So we see that the factors that I mentioned will continue to be with us for the coming quarters given that -- these are the investments we are doing now that will affect margins somewhat in the near-term. However, we maintain our guidance and -- on the EBITDA level and see that we expect to not materially deviate from that in '22. And for '23, we haven't provided the guidance. But we can basically see that these factors pull in 2 different directions where we do some near-term investments that as mentioned, but also that our underlying cost base is highly scalable related to our existing products in our existing markets.

Next question from Emilia DNB. Maybe this one's for you, Dennis. Do you see improvement in demand from larger clinics? Or are the 37 new clinics, primarily smaller clinics?

[Dennis Hojer, executive]

We do see more activity from the larger clinics. And of those 37 clinics, we start to see some larger clinics materialize as well. So that's something that has changed from the previous quarters that we have had. So we hope that this will continue onwards. So this is -- we have a great feeling for that. So yes, it's larger clinics as well.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Great. And what is the comparable figure to the 37 new clinics for Webdoc last quarter, Q1?

That's 29 clinics. So there isn't any more questions posted. So I guess we can wrap up, Dennis.

[Dennis Hojer, executive]

Yes. Let's wait maybe another minute if there are any more questions. Seems like the questions are up. So we say thank you for everyone to participate on this presentation. And I wish you great continuing this summer. So bye-bye, everyone.

[Svein Bjornstad, executive]

Thanks a lot. Bye.