Crayon Group Holding ASA

OSE:CRAYN

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Unknown]

Good morning, and welcome to the presentation of the results for the second quarter of 2022 for Crayon Group Holding ASA.

My name is Melanie Coffee, the VP of Communications and PR at Crayon. And with me today presenting key developments and financial results of the quarter are CEO, Melissa Mulholland, and our CFO, Jon Birger Syvertsen.

The financial results and presentations are available for download from the Investor Relations section of our website, and this live audio cast will be available on demand after the live event has concluded. Those of you who are following the audiocast can also submit questions through the online platform.

And with that, I hand it over to you, Melissa.

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Thank you for attending the Q2 earnings call today. I'm pleased to share our results where we delivered 53% growth in gross sales, resulting in 39% year-on-year gross profit growth. The gross profit growth also results in tangible profitability improvements with 29% increase in our adjusted EBITDA to NOK 330 million.

As a reminder, our 2019 adjusted EBITDA was NOK 292 million. It is a clear demonstration of how far we've come as a business to see that in Q2 alone this year, we generated more EBITDA than all of 2019. These results exemplify the resiliency of our business model, which was built on the backbone of a customer-first culture, innovation at its core and staying focused on supporting our customers with licensing and software cost savings and increasing the share of wallet with cloud-based services.

Despite fluctuations in the macroeconomic environment, with inflation and recessionary concerns, the Crayon business has never been stronger, and that is due to the strong IT demand we see in delivering improved productivity and cost efficiency, as well as our loyal and committed employees. I want to thank each of our employees, customers and partners for the commitment in Crayon over the past 20 years.

Looking into the specifics, it is great to see that we are driving growth across all our business areas, demonstrating the relevance of our business model, combining our licensing expertise with expanded service capabilities. From a geographic perspective, we are also seeing growth across all our regions, and we see the growth continue to contribute to our profitability improvements.

Finally, as Q2 is one our largest quarters, we continue to reaffirm our 2022 outlook based on the results to date.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Now Crayon has been and continues to be on the growth journey. And over the past 4 years, we've had an annual gross profit growth rate of 30%. But equally important is that this growth translates into profitability improvements and margin improvements. And as the business is scaling up in the international markets, we see continued improvements of our EBITDA performance, which now stands at 21.5% margins. The combination of growth and margin improvements imply that our adjusted EBITDA grows at an even higher pace than our gross profit growth with 48% annual growth rate in our adjusted EBITDA over the past 4 years.

Now this is all history. The important point here is that this strong growth and continuous margin improvement has been driven by a very clear strategy and go-to-market model based on the combination of software and cloud and services. And this model remains just as relevant in the current market environment as it was 4 years ago, which gives us a solid confidence and opportunity to continue to drive strong growth and margin improvements going forward.

This growth implies that Crayon continues on our journey from a Nordic company to an international company. And Crayon has come a long way on this journey. The light gray bars represents our international business that is outside the Nordics. As recently as 2018, Crayon had NOK 558 million in gross profit from the International segment, representing 38% of the total gross profit in the company. In June 2022, the last 12-month gross profit has increased almost 4x to NOK 2 billion, driven by strong organic growth across the portfolio and recently also our acquisitions.

Despite the strong growth rate also in the Nordics, our international markets now amount to 55% of the gross profit in the company. Still even at 55%, we are a long way away from realizing the potential in the international markets. The market potential for our services outside the Nordics is orders of magnitude larger than the market potential in the Nordics, and we will continue to invest in driving growth outside the Nordics.

As to profitability, the international markets collectively delivered NOK 394 million in EBITDA during the last 12 months, which is a significant improvement of NOK 408 million over the same time period. As recently as year-end 2018, we had a negative EBITDA margin in our international markets in aggregate, while today, we are at a 20% positive EBITDA margin. Again, we have been able to achieve this improvement while we have also improved profitability in the Nordics, delivering a continued strong EBITDA margin of 35% in the Nordics over the last 12 months.

The EBITDA margin of 30% plus we see in the Nordics is what we see as a representative for our business model when operating at scale, although some of the international markets start to operate at similar margins. As a whole, we are only -- we're still only at 20% EBITDA margin for our international business, which clearly indicates the potential for profitability improvements as we continue to scale our international footprint.

Together with the strong growth from integrating Rhipe into our financials, we're looking at 39% growth overall. There is some support from currency during the quarter, but even in constant currency terms, we're delivering 30% gross profit growth in the quarter.

Taking a moment to reflect on what we are seeing in the different geographies and starting with the Nordics, we're very happy to see continued organic growth in the Nordics of 14%, driven in particular by strong performance in Norway, Denmark and Iceland. In Europe, we see continued strong gross profit growth of 27% with our performance in Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe, are some of the key highlights during the quarter. APAC and Middle East continues to drive strong growth in the quarter, and we're very happy to see that our Rhipe business continued to perform strongly on top of strong organic growth in the region. U.S. also continues to drive growth with 25% gross profit growth in the quarter. We are also seeing strong EBITDA growth across the different markets.

The margin for the quarter in isolation is somewhat reduced as we have continued to invest in resources to drive further growth, and we're happy to see that we've continued to expand our staff during the quarter despite a challenging overall environment for talent attraction and retention across the globe.

Also, looking at the business mix for Q2 2022, we continue to see strong growth across the different segments of the business, which is encouraging and important for our business model. We are obviously seeing strong growth on channel as a consequence of the Rhipe integration but also very strong underlying growth across the other business areas.

In terms of seasonality, it is worthwhile to note that we saw a somewhat slower Q2 for Software, Direct, than what we have seen historically as there is more business shifting on to recurring programs and less focus on end-of-quarter deals with the different vendors. To be clear, we do not see this as a change in the underlying demand, but rather as a slight shift in the seasonality between the quarters during the year.

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

As highlighted, we grew across all business areas. Starting with the Direct business, we continue to deliver strong momentum across all market clusters with accelerated performance from the Nordics, CEE and APAC, with large customer wins with strong margin results.

On the channel side, we had a record quarter in delivering revenue, gross profit and EBITDA results with margin improvement across our mature markets. With the inclusion of Rhipe, it doubles our total channel business and further scales our ability to support SMB customers. In looking at our services business, we delivered 19% growth on our software and cloud economics practice with continued margin improvements in our most mature markets. Anglepoint continues its success in being a SAM enterprise leader, which contributed amongst other things to these results.

On the consulting side, Rhipe and Sensa contributed to delivering strong EBITDA and GP performance, which further showcases the importance of strong M&A, as well as integration post acquisition. Sensa and Rhipe have been great additions to the Crayon portfolio.

As I always say, we are a people-first company as our employees continue to remain the foundation of what we are able to deliver to our customers and our partners. Starting with our culture, we celebrated our 20-year anniversary in May across 47 countries, where we organized local celebrations with a global theme and shared the stories digitally. It was the first time many countries came together after 2 years working remotely, and I'm proud to see how we have grown not only in employee size, but also in sharing a common company culture.

A few highlights to mention. We continue to be recognized for the best place to work in India and France, and this is thanks to our great leadership that we have in place amongst those countries. Additionally, diversity, equity and inclusion remain a priority at Crayon. And in June, this was showcased by celebrating Pride by altering our logo and sharing employee perspectives, both publicly and internally, to further educate one another on how we celebrate diversity in all aspects.

Lastly, we continue to focus on ESG through our employment efforts with training and philanthropic initiatives that will continue into the remainder of the year.

To deliver upon our customer-first strategy, it is clear we need to build and expand our capability across the breadth of software and cloud vendors. We started our business with a Microsoft-centric approach in 2002. And while Microsoft continues to be a strategic partner for us, you can see that we have a full breadth of partnerships equating to over 21 to date.

Taking a deeper look and sharing some incredible highlights around our achievements, I'm proud to announce that we have achieved the AWS Premier Partner status and have passed the AWS Migration Competency. This is a significant accomplishment in building up the technical capability over the past 2 years and it is critical to providing our customers with the confidence in delivering AWS solutions. We are one of the largest global resellers of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, which showcases our licensing heritage and breadth.

A few more highlights to mention. We are the global leader on SAM services for Oracle, which is the foundation of our business. And on the Microsoft side, we were recognized as Partner of the Year in Norway, Estonia and Romania, as well as nominated for operational excellence with Rhipe.

Lastly, you will see achieve partnerships with vendors such as Snow, Meta and DocuSign based on our agile and quick time to market. Furthering, scaling our vendor breadth is crucial to our long-term customer success.

Now looking at an example of a customer win. In Q2, we delivered a multimillion dollar win with a global mining company that employs 40,000 people around the world. This customer needed support with optimizing and managing their software vendors across Oracle, Microsoft and Flexera, to name a few. We help them through understanding which licenses they needed to run their business, while ensuring they maintain compliance and governance. With our SAM expertise, we helped them save costs and increase their compliance adherence across their operations. This is a great example of what Crayon has built its business model in by saving costs and increasing efficiency in the business.

Services remains a core part of our strategy to drive incremental growth through increased value creation with our customers and partners. In looking at our services strategy, we have categorized our business across 3 areas: the first, which is optimizing tech ROI speaks to our foundation around optimizing the IT estate. This encompasses cloud economics and now what we call FinOps. I will share more about the strategy momentarily.

Second, to our services focus is cloud adoption, which supports a customer's cloud environment from delivering professional and managed services. And lastly, we support our customers with a data-driven enterprise through our depth of data and AI capability with our team of data scientists and engineers. With this foundation in place, let me take you through an example of how we are working towards delivering more managed services to our customers through the launch of a new global service called Compliance Recording.

Since the pandemic, Microsoft Teams became a fundamental pillar for thousands of businesses, providing a mission-critical platform for collaboration, communication and inclusion. While Teams became an industry standard, regulated verticals and customer service focused industries have advanced need for communication. Crayon's compliance recording service accommodates those customers and caters specifically to their needs. This service offers an automated way to capture Teams recording based on government policies. This solution allows the communication through voice, video and tech to be monitored to ensure compliance standards are met, but also supports internal control measures and faster implementation across companies, especially highly regulated industries.

With the acquisition of Sensa, we were able to build on their skill set and services expertise by scaling out this IP and compliance recording service across Crayon. And looking at an example of a case study and win in Iceland with Íslandsbanki. They employed 450 highly regulated users through financial institutions and were deploying Skype for Business and needed to migrate to Teams. Microsoft Teams recording functionality did not meet the compliance requirements for this company. And as a solution, we were able to leverage this compliance recording service built on Azure as well as their own data center infrastructure to operate and manage their business. In doing so, they were able to cope with regulatory pressures, manage risk effectively and follow compliance processes internally.

To add another example of how a global managed service is critical, is the scalability of this offering to a customer base in the U.K. called Kvika. They are a financial conglomerate in the U.K. They had a clear business need to finding more ways to increase efficiency in their IT organization and adhere to compliance laws such as MIFID. We supported them with implementing this compliance recording service through the delivery of Sensa and is built on the Azure Cloud. In doing so, they were able to effectively migrate risk and reduce the total cost of ownership, freeing up IT resources.

Crayon was founded with a software asset management focus, helping customers navigate licensing complexity while reducing costs and increasing efficiency in the business. Modernizing this further, we are deeply focused on scaling through intellectual property. We create this with our Cloud-iQ platform and finding ways to drive more automation to better serve our customers through increased visibility in cloud spend and licensing needs.

The view on the right showcases our financial operations called FinOps, which will be connected into a singular view of our Cloud-iQ platform in 2022. This provides better cross-company collaboration for customers and partners. It encourages the ability to innovate with more information to adapt to changes in the IT and business environment and increases visibility to cost distribution and lastly, yields ROI. This is a great example where we bring our licensing strength and services acumen together to increase the share of wallet for our customers.

Highlighting our SAM focus, I'm very proud to share that Crayon and Anglepoint have been recognized on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SAM Manager Services for the third year in a row. And the market has been very responsive to our positioning of different offerings in the market. Anglepoint, a fully owned Crayon company is a world-class leader in enterprise SAM. Their knowledge and expertise of the enterprise customer base is exceptional. And this is based on their systematic processes, high degree of quality and expertise in audit and compliance for enterprise-grade customers.

We made a strategic decision to segment our customer base, so we maximize Crayon and Anglepoint skills in the market. Anglepoint delivers best for 5000-seat customers and above, with a consultative approach and defined methodologies and Crayon is well known for innovation and scale with enterprise mid-market and SMB customers. We're focused on building IP that delivers the governance and cost optimization.

Our new FinOps platform will drive value to all customers and is fully integrated to our cloud provisioning platform, Cloud-iQ. And this will deliver even more value for our customers across all segments. This innovative platform approach towards SAM and FinOps brings scale, automation and governance to our customers, which Gartner recognizes and can be seen in the Magic Quadrant today.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Now having already reviewed the gross profit and EBITDA development in the quarter, we will now turn the attention to other areas of the financial statements and starting with the working capital. For Crayon, generating a strong cash flow from an underlying -- for our underlying business is obviously a key financial objective. And for a high turnover business like Crayon, working capital is a critical part of our cash flow results. As a management team and as a business, we invest significant time and efforts into driving working capital improvements. And it is thus very positive to see that over time, these efforts across the organization are paying off.

Before diving into the Q2 working capital, it is important to keep in mind that our business is seasonal. And as a consequence, the relevant comparison for working capital is always year-over-year. However, independently of this seasonality, Crayon has a consistent track record of negative working capital, which is attractive as it implies that working capital is a source of funds and not a use of funds.

Starting with the working capital. In Q2, we have accounts receivables of NOK 8 billion, while accounts payables to vendors amounts to NOK 8.3 billion, resulting in a net trade working capital of minus NOK 372 million, which is a reduction and thus an improvement of NOK 259 million compared to June 30, 2021. This improvement is, however, offset by a negative development on other working capital, leading to a less negative working capital in Q2, partly driven by the intra-quarter seasonality with more business earlier in the quarter and partly driven by the right working capital profile now being integrated in our business. But to some extent, it is also reflecting customer behavior. And this is something we are, at the moment, putting significant effort in from the business side to drive collections, in particular, in some of the markets that are more exposed to the economic climate at the moment.

Cash flow from operations in Q2 2022 was NOK 449 million. And the main driver for the cash flow is the changes in the working capital and the seasonality pattern follows the changes in the working capital. More relevant, to get a view across the -- across time is the last 12-month cash development, where end of Q2 2021, we had NOK 1.4 billion in cash. In the period, we have generated NOK 1,716 million of unadjusted EBITDA. We have an impact from negative net working capital of minus NOK 540 million. CapEx has a negative impact of NOK 107 million as we continue to invest in platforms and other elements to scale the business.

Acquisitions, net of cash amounted to NOK 2.4 billion, while tax and interests amount to a negative NOK 212 million with new equity contributing NOK 760 million and bond issue -- the new bond issue contributing NOK 1.8 million with currency translation and other effects, contributing NOK 250 million. For a total cash position, end of year, end of quarter of NOK 1.2 billion.

Now the cash position is just one part of the picture. If we look at our total liquidity reserve across cash and our RCF facilities, we have a liquidity reserve of NOK 1.6 billion, which is in line with the position end of June last year despite having completed the major acquisition in the same time period.

Also, before we move to the P&L, I would like to remind everyone of the change in accounting principle, which was implemented in Q1 2022, where revenue from the resale of software and cloud licenses is accounted net of related costs, cost of sales, in other words, under the aging principles. This has no impact on our gross profit, EBITDA, operating profit or net income, whereas the historic revenue number, for software and cloud licensing is now similar to the gross profit number. As such, under the old methodology, we would have reported a revenue of NOK 12.3 billion in the quarter, while we now reported revenue of NOK 1.3 billion.

We will continue to report on gross sales going forward for the benefit of the investor base, which is comparable to the historic revenue information.

Now on the P&L statement, we have already covered the items down to EBITDA and the operating performance underlying this. Depreciation and amortization continues in line with the plan, with depreciation and amortization increasing year-over-year due to amortization of the intangible assets identified in the Rhipe acquisition and depreciation in the investments into IP and ERP systems in previous periods.

Interest expenses increased year-over-year as a consequence of the NOK 1.8 billion bond, a somewhat higher average draw on our RCF combined with increasing underlying interest rates. Other financial income expenses is a negative contribution of NOK 187 million, which is driven by currency appreciation on our balances denominating in other currencies than Norwegian kroner, offsetting the gains of this line from Q1. And here, I would like to stress and remind everybody that this is specific to the period and is not a recurring item. So as such, when evaluating the overall profitability development of the company, we should not include this in the assessment.

But altogether, this results in a reported pretax result of NOK 21 million in the quarter versus NOK 184 million last year, with the discrepancy driven by the other financial income and expenses.

Income tax expenses of NOK 10 million is somewhat lower than the income tax expenses in the same period last year, driven by the other financial income and expenses. This resulted in net income of NOK 11.5 million compared to NOK 165 million last year.

When it comes to the balance sheet, we have already discussed the net working capital. Intangible assets increased year-over-year driven by the Rhipe acquisitions, leading to increases in particular, on contracts and goodwill. On the liability side, we have the NOK 1.8 billion loan as a bond loan, while the NOK 300 million bond loan maturing in November 2022 is now seen as a current liability as it has less than 12 months to maturity. This is the main elements of the balance sheet. And of course, there are more details to be found in the notes to the financial statements.

Looking at the net interest-bearing debt. Following the Rhipe acquisitions, we are now at the level of NOK 1.3 billion. This implies a leverage of 1.6x comparing to the adjusted EBITDA or comparing to the pro forma adjusted EBITDA, including the historic reported periods of Rhipe of 1.4x, which clearly demonstrate that Crayon has a strong balance sheet to continue to drive our M&A strategy.

Furthermore, as we continue to drive growth and margin improvements, this will further support the deleveraging both through cash generation and through reducing the leverage ratios as our adjusted EBITDA continues to grow, providing Crayon with flexibility when it comes to executing on M&A or returning cash to shareholders as appropriate.

Now having reviewed the financials for the full quarter, we'll turn our attention to the outlook, where we maintain our 2022 outlook and see our Q2 results as a clear demonstration that we are on track to delivering on our 2022 outlook. The total gross profit growth over the last 12 months has been 39.3%, which is in line with our outlook of 35% to 40% and our medium-term outlook of 20% gross profit growth. For the adjusted EBITDA margins, we are at 21.4%, while still being on strong track to deliver on our margin expectations of 22% to 23% for the full year as we have invested significantly in the business over the quarter to drive growth in future quarters.

On the net working capital side, we are somewhat below our guidance with 13.1% compared to a 15% to 20% guidance, and we have put in place multiple measures to continue to drive our working capital performance in line with our expectations for the full year.

Finally, on the CapEx side, we are at NOK 107 million over the last 12 months, which is slightly ahead of guidance as we continue to invest in platforms and in various tangible items to support the onboarding of new employees such as laptops and office facilities.

With that, we're now done with the formal part of the 2022 presentation, and we turn it over to the Q&A.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Thank you. And we now have a few questions from the audience. I think the first question where there is a number of people who asked the question is around the margins in APAC and Middle East, which in the quarter in isolation, as measured in -- as a percent of adjusted EBITDA as a percent of gross profit is lower than in Q2 2021?

I do think it's important here to reflect on the fact that from a margin perspective, the businesses are different because we're then comparing the business with a combination of Rhipe and Crayon across the region, which is a much larger business. And the business also clearly had a strong quarter in Q2 2021. So it's a tough comparable with a very high margin in the quarter in isolation. When you look at the LTM margins for APAC and Middle East all up, you see a stable and healthy continued strong development. So -- and going forward, like we do across our regions, we do expect the margins to continue to improve over time.

Then there is a question on other working capital also from several analysts and increase year-over-year, what's behind it and what's expected going forward?

Clearly, a large part of this increase is coming in from the Rhipe acquisition, where Rhipe historically was operating with a positive working capital and a large part of this is present in the other working capital category.

That being said, we still given sort of -- given the totality of the working capital and the sensitivity to timing basically of invoicing and receiving outgoing and ingoing invoices and the cutoff between accounts receivables and payables and other current receivables and payables, we do encourage and also ourselves, look at the totality of the net working capital across the 2 categories. And we do see there is room to continue to improve that performance to drive us back to the historic trend levels despite the negative input and negative input and impact from the Rhipe acquisition.

Then we have a question, and I think I will pass this one to Melissa. How much of your organic growth for the quarter is driven by price increases?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

So our business model is not a pure resell model that's impacted on variability of pricing changes. And that's because our customer-centric approach creates a dynamic in which we tailor our offers around building an IP such as Cloud-iQ or even services that creates a pricing structure that is -- that varies depending on the needs of the customer. .

We also see that when vendors such as Microsoft in Q1 had increased their price for the first time in many, many years, they actually created an opportunity for us to drive increased demand because we were able to open the conversation with a customer by supporting them through those pricing changes. And that actually was favorable to our business. So I would say our business is quite different in that regard around pricing changes.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Then we have a question from [ Alexander Lager ]. Could you please explain the rise in other expenses year-over-year?

And clearly, first of all, we look -- we generally look at the cost base across personnel cost and OpEx because amongst others, the split between contractors and employees affects the split between other expenses and personnel costs. And of course, as we're coming out of COVID, we're also seeing slightly higher costs for basically travel and social events.

And to Melissa's point and to her explanations, we did actually invest quite significantly in this in Q2 in order to drive and ensure that people do see and recognize the attractiveness of Crayon as an employer and our ability to meet and generate excitement and attention among the employee base. So that's -- there's clearly been a pickup of that in Q2. But of course, it was also -- there was also an element of a resurgence and a closing out of the pandemic and the work from home environment there.

But of course, we do expect the other expenses to continue to grow in line with our -- with the increase in our overall cost base, which we need to address and drive growth on in order to deliver on the targets going forward.

Then we have a question from [ Thomas Tang ]. To what degree is your business impacted by the current macro uncertainty?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

While the macroeconomic environment clearly is facing recessionary concerns and inflation, we see that all around the world. However, we still see a very strong demand for IT. And the reason for that is that IT is a necessity for companies to run their business. And Crayon is so well positioned to support customers in creating cost-saving opportunities, delivering ROI, but also expanded productivity and security in the workforce. The examples shown around the compliance recording is a great one of that.

In the pandemic, people were really rushing to digitize their businesses. But they may not have thought about security or even data governance that is essential for them that could create additional risk down the line. So I would say our business model is so well positioned to deliver results against this macroeconomic environment, which we have seen over and over again.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Good. Then we have a question from -- let me just scroll through and just make sure we've covered. There's a question on our payment for capitalized assets, which was a fair bit higher in Q2 than what it was in Q1, and it's above our annual run rate?

Which is a fair question. And that is indeed correct. A large part of that is related -- or roughly half of our payments for capitalized assets is related to tangible assets and the other half is related to intangible assets. Tangible assets typically follow employee onboarding and growth. But there has been -- but also office moves and other things will influence this on a somewhat on and off basis, whereas the intangible assets is strategically what we're looking to invest in.

We're currently and we're still tracking on our overall guidance. But of course, an important part of the strategic evaluations and the discussions we have as a company is to what extent we can and should drive further investments into platforms and other elements to drive scalability in the business. And if we choose to go further down that path, of course, we would need to come back with an updated CapEx guidance for these items.

Then there is a question from -- also from [ Haneda Tonsan ], Arctic on the margin in APAC and Middle East.

And in addition to what we have discussed previously, I also think it's important to highlight, as we did in the presentation, that we're seeing a slight change in the seasonality overall with Q2 -- end of Q2, which is slightly weaker than what we've seen historically, driven predominantly by -- partly by more recurring and less annual agreements, but also by less push from vendors for end-of-quarter deals. We see this all up as a positive movement for the business, and we're clearly seeing and have visibility on those deals and the timeline for those.

But of course, a small delta of gross profit, just to run the numbers, NOK 10 million of gross profit, plus or minus, is a percentage point on EBITDA margin in the quarter in isolation. And we're clear, we're maintaining our guidance for FY '22 precisely because we see that level of business, and we see this coming into Q3 and Q4.

Then we have a question of -- well, then we have a question from [Peter Kosin] on the working capital follow-up, on working capital situation in Rhipe versus Crayon.

And as I addressed, we're seeing a large part of the growth in other working capital is driven by the integration of Rhipe into our business?

And also a question following up on my comment during the presentation that we're also seeing some increased pressure from customers.

And I think here, it's important to highlight we operate globally. And the payment behavior and the dynamics in the different markets is different. In a lot of the markets we operate, our ability to actually drive out proactively and drive collection is an important part of ensuring the cash becomes available to us on the time line we need as we operate with a negative working capital, we're collecting cash from customers ahead of paying vendors on average.

And of course, that require us to consistently put efforts and emphasis into driving collection with the teams locally on the ground. We're not seeing significant push for longer capital terms.

And in terms of working capital, there's a further question here on the levers.

Of course, the main lever is continuing to drive follow-up and efforts with our customers, and we're putting multiple -- also tooling and platform support for the teams doing so in place. But of course, sort of there is also significant opportunities for leveraging our portfolio of customer receivables, of which, a significant part is with public sector for working capital financing, if so what?

But that's for the future. But that's also why we're sort of overall seeing the -- seeing our working capital and our working capital position as an opportunity and as an asset for driving cash flow going forward.

Then I have a question from Eirik Øritsland, how many of your customers are currently SMB or consumer-driven companies? And I guess the question is then also partly in relation to our business resiliency.

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Yes. So I mean we have a total of 80,000 breadth SMB-type customers in our portfolio. Of course, we have a business model where we focus on Direct, which is more mid-market, reaching up into enterprise, but that's our history and precedence. And then, of course, we have the channel business, which scales into SMB, and that gives us breadth and scale. And to the CapEx questions, platform is crucial to that. So our Cloud-iQ platform gives us the ability to reach and tailor to SMB customers across the world.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Yes. Can you give some flavors -- another question from Eirik. Can you give some flavor around how many new hires you expect is needed to reach your growth targets?

I think this is an excellent question and sort of fundamentally, I mean, we're a people company. So scaling the business will require us to scale employees. Of course, we're also -- there are parts of the business which are to a much larger extent platform-based and scalable, in particular, software and cloud channel, but also on Software and Cloud Direct, we're seeing strong scalability.

So of course, the overall growth rate for the number of people will be lower than our total gross profit growth rate. That's fundamental in delivering on the margin targets, but still sort of -- we do need to add significant amount of people and capacity if we are going to reach our medium-term growth targets.

Then we have an interesting question. Moving forward, do you believe that with the Rhipe acquisition, APAC will overtake Nordics in terms of performance?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

It certainly has the opportunity to do so given the -- it's a -- less maturity around cloud and the market opportunity we see across APAC. I mean you're talking about significant populations across Australia and New Zealand, but then all around Asia, from the Philippines, to Malaysia, to Singapore, et cetera. Our growth there is clearly -- it's very much a focus. And with the expansion of Rhipe into the market that gives us further momentum to continue driving focus there. It's now one of our largest markets for that reason.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Then we have a question from Christoffer Bjørnsen at DNB. The growth in constant currency in the U.S. seems to have slowed materially during Q2. Is this market share losses, worsening macro or what? How should we think about this going into H2? Should it accelerate again or not?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

So clearly, the U.S. macroeconomic environment is challenged as they're going through fears around recession. However, we have a solid business in the U.S., delivering both profitability and growth. Of course, as we've spoken about many times, we are very focused on driving incremental growth in the U.S. through the expansion of the market and capturing market share. This is important because the U.S. is a staple in the ecosystem of IT, and we are continuing to do so in hiring and expanding our footprint in the U.S. market.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

No, and I think this is an important point. And of course, the market potential in the U.S. ahead of us is very significant, and we have a solid footprint, which we continue to grow and grow and expand. And this is clearly something we as a team put significant emphasis and effort into.

Then I have one final question [indiscernible] Markets. Can you break down the OpEx growth? How much of this is number of new employees? How much is wage inflation? How much is in other OpEx, et cetera?

I think -- and of course, it's a combination of all of those things. New employees is a part of it. But then in a quarter-over-quarter, we're seeing, depending on how you measure around 4% growth in the total employee base, which is actually very -- a solid number in light of the current market environment for talent and the war for talent. Wage inflation, of course, plays a role.

In particular, when you look year-over-year, in terms of the quarter in isolation, we're not seeing sort of any -- we're not seeing significant pressure as such on the overall wage inflation situation at the moment. It's -- we are seeing inflation picking up around us, and we are sort of continuously monitoring that situations. And we, of course, will have to ensure that we remain an attractive employer, but we're not seeing rampant wage inflation in Q2 in isolation.

With that, I think we have covered the questions in total. And we look forward to continuing to engage with all of you either during roadshows or other investor meeting activities. And of course, as always, if there are questions, feel free to reach out at [e-mail]. Thank you.