Crayon Group Holding ASA

OSE:CRAYN

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q3

[Kjell Arne Hansen;Head of Investor Relations, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to Crayon Group's third quarter result presentation. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen, and I am the Head of Investor Relation for Crayon.

With me today, I have our CEO, Melissa Mulholland; and our CFO, Jon Birger Syvertsen. Together, they will take you through the highlights and financial results for the quarter. As usual, after the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. And for those of you who are following the live event, you can submit your questions via the platform. A recording of the webcast will be available on our IR pages, after the live event has ended.

And with that, I hand it over to Melissa.

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Thank you for attending the Q3 earnings call with us today. I am pleased to share results where we delivered 51% growth in gross sales, resulting in 55% year-over-year gross profit growth at NOK 993 million. The gross profit growth also results in continued profitability improvements, with 57% increase in our adjusted EBITDA to NOK 127 million. These results exemplify the continued strong demand we see around the world. This is built on our customer-centric and agile approach to respond to the changing business environment. Despite fluctuations in the macroeconomic environment, the Crayon business has never been stronger and it is due to the strong IT demand and our customer-centric approach.

Looking into the specifics, we continue to see strong growth across all our business areas and geographies around the world. We do not see slowdown in IT, but rather a focus on the need to optimize budgets and continue finding productivity gains. With the strong Q3 performance, we continue to reaffirm our 2022 outlook, based on the results to date.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

As highlighted in the introduction, Crayon has been on a continued growth journey for the past 4 years, with an annual gross profit growth rate of 32%, driven both by strong organic growth and accretive acquisitions. The growth opportunity is driven both by strong market fundamentals, as public and private sector continue to invest into digital platforms to drive efficiencies and address new opportunities, and by Crayon's unique business model, leveraging both service capabilities and transactional capabilities across all the major vendors.

This growth opportunity is clearly an attractive opportunity for Crayon, as the growth drives profitability improvements. The growth is profitable in its own right, and on top of that, there are further scale benefits, as we continue to scale up international operations, leading to further margin improvements over time.

As the business scales up in international markets, we also see a continuous improvement in our EBITDA margins, which now stands at 21%. The combination of growth and margin improvement, imply that our adjusted EBITDA grows at an even higher pace with a 45% annual growth rate 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 in our ability to continue to drive strong growth going forward.

Through this journey, Crayon has been and continues to be on a growth journey, going from a Nordic company to an international company. And by now, Crayon has come a long way on this journey. The light gray bars represent our international business. 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. As of now, this gross profit has almost quadrupled over the course of 4 years, driven by strong organic growth across the portfolio and recently also our acquisitions.

Despite strong growth rates also in the Nordics, our international markets now amount to 58% of the gross profit in the company over the past 12 months. Still, even at 58%, 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 change towards profitability in our international markets is even more pronounced. The international markets collectively delivered NOK 444 million in EBITDA during the last 12 months, which is a significant improvement of NOK 460 million over the same tough 4-year time period. We have now reached a stage where there is clear line of sight to the international business overtaking the Nordic business, not just on gross profit contribution, but also on profitability.

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 well above 30% in the Nordics over the same time period. The EBITDA margin of 30% plus we see in the Nordics, is what we see as representative for our business model, when operating at scale. Although some of the international markets don't operate at similar margins, as a whole, we are still only at 19% EBITDA margin for our international business, which clearly indicates the potential for profitability improvements, as we continue to scale our international footprint.

In Q3, we delivered a strong gross profit growth across all regions, with a 55% gross profit growth rate. Even when adjusting for constant currency, we delivered an extremely impressive 50% gross profit growth in the quarter, driven by strong market fundamentals and continued execution on our growth ambitions. Excluding Rhipe, we delivered 33% organic growth rate, which is a strong result, which also reflects the seasonality adjustments we discussed in Q2.

Looking at the different geographies, in the Nordics, we are seeing strong growth of 18% with particularly strong performance in Norway and Denmark. In Europe, we see an even stronger 43% growth rate with strong performance across the board, but in particular relevant to call out is Switzerland where we continue to see strong growth in our core services and business model, and CEE, which continues to drive strong growth across the region as we are maturing in the different local markets.

APAC and Middle East continued to perform strongly, both in the Rhipe business, which we acquired last year, and in the organic part of the business, and we are seeing a strong underlying market. This is an area where we see the clear benefits of the geographical diversification of our business as it is also important to keep in mind that all the markets around the world are affected differently by the current economic environment, and all across APAC and Middle East, we are currently seeing strong growth and business momentum across the region.

The U.S. growth rate of 16% is reflecting the lower levels of growth investments into the U.S. market over the past quarters, which has led to a strong margin improvement, but is now limiting the growth rate. As such, it is encouraging to see the acceleration of growth investments into the U.S. market now in Q3, which we expect to drive strong growth in the quarters ahead.

We're also seeing strong EBITDA performance across the different markets. The margin for the quarter in isolation is in line with last year, as the strong margin improvement in APAC and Middle East from underlying scaling of the business and synergy capture from the acquisition, are offset by continued investments in resources to drive further growth, in particular across Europe and U.S. And we're happy to see that we've continued to expand our staff during the quarter, despite the continued challenging environment with significant demand for talent across the globe.

Also, looking at the business mix for Q3 2022, we see continued strong growth across the different segments of the business, which is encouraging and important for our overall business model.

Looking at the Q3 results, there are a few trends which are important to reflect on. In software and cloud, we clearly see a strong underlying demand, which, combined with our clear focus on continuing to drive growth, resulted in a strong year-over-year improvement with 55% growth in this segment. In addition to this, we also see the seasonality effects discussed in Q2, which implies a slight flattening of the seasonality curve for the larger quarters, benefiting the smaller quarters. We're also seeing strong growth on channel, both as a consequence of the Rhipe integration, but also strong underlying growth across the different markets.

Looking at our service business, we delivered 19% on our software and cloud economics practice and we are in particular seeing strong traction and demand for these services in Europe. On the consulting side, in particular APAC and Middle stand out for delivering strong growth and EBITDA improvements, both from the Rhipe acquisition, but also from the existing business footprint across Middle East, India and Southeast Asia.

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

We continue to see strong demand across the IT sector across all markets. According to Gartner, they see a 4% increase in spending levels, representing $4.4 trillion and reiterate the demand for IT as enterprises leverage digital and IT initiatives to mitigate the macroeconomic environment. CEO and CFOs are shifting how they spend their IT budgets.

The volatility in the economic environment changes the context for how investment in technology will be applied. There will continue to be increasing spending in some areas and accelerating declines in others, but the materiality impacting the overall level of technology spending will not continue. Consumers, enterprises, and governments, all face challenges, as inflation, interest rates, skill shortages and supply chain disruptions influence market realities and the outlook on the future. For businesses, rather than cutting IT budgets, they are increasing spending on digital business initiatives.

In looking at Gartner's data further, CIOs have many priorities to balance simultaneously in lieu of the economic environment. There are 4 key things that they are focused on across the industry. The first is using digital technology to realize operational efficiency and cost savings. Second, using digital technology to transform the company's value proposition, revenue, and client interactions. Third, using cloud for new initiatives while maintaining operational on-premise environments. And lastly, expanding operational landscape to include hybrid work, remote, and edge environments.

In looking at the chart, you'll see in the upper right-hand quadrant orange spheres representing software growth, and the blue spheres for services growth. Both are capitalizing the market growth opportunity based on the reasons just shared. Each of these market drivers for IT spend, position Crayon to continue to capture market share, based on a resilient go-to-market model.

At Crayon, our business is customer-centric. We pride ourselves on customer loyalty and building long-term client relationships, as this has been key to our success over the last 20 years. We are often asked how our business is differentiated from a highly concentrated set of software resellers in the market today. And it's simple, we are not a pure software reseller and never have been.

Rather, we support our customers by solving concrete business challenges across 3 core scenarios; the first is cost optimization. We assess the software and cloud licensing needs to deliver technology efficiencies and ROI. By doing so, we identify what a business requires to run their business optimally and cost-effectively. This results on average of 30% cost savings.

The second scenario is around how to optimize a customer's IT environment in the cloud. This is around migrating and/or transforming the cloud environment to managing operations, and with the cloud continuing to evolve, customers need continued support to manage those effectively.

Lastly, we support around data optimization. This is centered around how to drive business productivity and efficiencies, leveraging data and machine learning algorithms to obtain insights and recommendations to improve an outcome. For example, in the manufacturing process, being able to detect errors in the product by training a model through machine learning to look for anomalies. In doing so, this saves the business costs, and improves time savings on the production of their models.

And looking at this further, our business model is services by nature. We have an expression which is Optimize to Innovate, meaning we can optimize a customer's IT environment to help them in the cloud with delivered increased productivity, fueled by our solutions and services. On the left-hand side of the Crayon logo, you have the services we offer across the software and cloud advisory portfolio and licensing. We support our customers with an assessment-based approach, understanding their IT needs, and then determining what license requirements will support their working environment. In doing so, we build a trusted relationship with the customer, which expands further the ability to support across other service lines we offer.

Moving up the loop, we can detect if entitlements are not optimally used and can support in helping the customer optimize their cloud and license portfolio. On the right-hand side, we help our customers by advising and providing cloud services from backing up their data to migration, to modernizing their cloud environment, and securing their IT estate with cybersecurity. All of these aspects are fueled by our knowledgeable team, where we have specialization of skills across each service line.

Exemplifying this further is our team in Ukraine. When the war began, our Ukrainian colleagues stayed committed, to helping customers navigate the complexity of moving information out of on-premise data centers to the cloud, to provide a more secure environment and enable business operations to be managed remotely. Our team is small, but growing in size, as we continue to hire due to the high demand with Ukrainian customers.

This example shows how we were able to respond quickly to customer needs and focus on supporting migration-based scenarios, resulting in over 20,000 users move to the cloud across AWS and Microsoft. For the employees that remained in Ukraine, they stay committed to customers, demonstrating extreme resiliency. Keeping up business as usual seems impossible, but was necessary for the team's spirit and morale.

Not only did the team deliver beyond expectations, but it also speaks to the culture of the company, where we stepped in globally to aid the evacuation of employees, as well as family members. Additionally, we supported in fundraising across the company, and supported where possible in customer cases. Proud of the inspiring and heroic work achieved by the Ukrainian team.

To highlight a customer win for this quarter, that exemplifies our customer-centric approach, our Swiss team supported COOP, a cooperative comprised of retail, wholesale and production companies with over 95,000 employees, generating over CHF31.9 billion in sales in 2021. They engaged us to help scope the potential savings and provide a long-term strategy for their business needs. As I always say, our business model from day 1 is to sit on the side of the customer and advise them according to the business outcomes they would like to achieve.

In doing so, we help standardize their procedure across 8 of COOP's largest companies and provide a plan for how to manage their licenses. We saved millions in cost savings and provided them a long-term cloud strategy. This was done with a high quality and level of trust that speaks to our go-to-market model of adding long-term value to customers.

As I always say, people are our greatest asset. This talented team is why I joined Crayon and continue to love this company as we are a diverse team spanning 47 countries, working and learning from one another. From a hiring perspective, we continue to stay focused on growth across all of our markets in hiring talent. And looking at 2022 year-to-date, we are now a size of 3,350 employees, represented by 31% female and 69% male. We stay committed to our diversity goal of achieving 40% in women by 2025. And looking at the retention numbers, we are at 93% year-to-date. Hiring and retaining talent continues to be a top priority for us, as we pursue our growth ambitions ahead.

Lastly, we stay committed to ESG. I'm proud to share that based on this level of commitment and demonstration in improved results, we are now listed on the ESG 100. Additionally, we are recognized as the fastest rising company based on the rapid acceleration of activities across Crayon. A few examples to highlight is the obtainment of ISO 14001 around environmental management as well as our Global Carbon Reporting and continued focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will continue to make progress against the goals outlined in our ESG report that we published in May.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Wrapping up the presentation, we will now conclude the review of the financials and we will start with the working capital position. For Crayon, generating a strong cash flow from 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, and we have significantly intensified those efforts in Q3.

Before diving into the Q3 working capital, it is important to keep in mind that our business is seasonal, and as a consequence, we're seeing significant variability in working capital between the quarters. However, independently of the seasonality, Crayon has a consistent track record of a strong working capital position, which is important as it ensures we can continue to drive growth, while continuing to drive positive cash flow from the business in order to continue to reinvest in growth opportunities.

Starting with the working capital, end Q3, we have accounts receivables of NOK 5.4 billion, while account payables to vendors amount to NOK 5.2 billion. This results in a trade working capital of NOK 224 million, which is an increase of NOK 57 million compared to September 30th, 2021, indicating a performance on trade working capital, in line with history, as we have continued to enforce strict payment terms and drive ongoing collections from our customers.

Furthermore, we have other working capital, which includes things such as payable public duties, taxes, accruals, and other short-term receivables and payables, totaling minus NOK 198 million, which is an increase of NOK 424 million in other working capital year-over-year compared to Q3. As a reminder, we saw a similar increase of NOK 653 million in other working capital year-over-year in Q2, and the Q3 performance is at the same level or even better than what we saw in Q2. This results in a working capital of NOK 25 million on September 30th, which is an increase of NOK 481 million year-over-year, driven by other working capital, which implies that we are at the same relative level of working capital performance, as we saw in Q2.

To be clear, we continue to see significant opportunities for improving this working capital position back to the historic levels, through strengthening our collection processes and our credit processes, and we will continue to drive those efforts, aiming at improving the working capital position in Q4 and beyond.

When it comes to cash flow, we have the same underlying seasonality and we're seeing a cash flow from operations in Q3 of NOK 497 million negative, which is in line with previous Q3, as the quarter-over-quarter working capital situations reflect the same level of working capital performance. However, in order to look across the cycles, it is helpful to look at the development of the liquidity over the past 12 months, where we have executed significant transactions and fundraising.

The waterfall below illustrates how the net cash position and liquidity position has improved. In Q3 2021, we had NOK 796 million in cash. During the last 12 months, we had an unadjusted EBITDA of NOK 778 million, while the change in net working capital had a negative impact of NOK 616 million, as seen from the cash flow statement. CapEx had a negative effect of NOK 124 million, while acquisitions net amounted to NOK 2.4 billion, and tax and interest amounted to NOK 243 million, while new equity in total has increased cash with NOK 771 million, and the new bond loan contributed NOK 1.8 billion in cash.

Finally, currency translation and other effects including IFRS 16 amounted to NOK 217 million negative, leading to a net cash position on September 30th of NOK 605 billion. In addition and importantly, Crayon has a revolving credit facility available, which has been increased by NOK 650 million during the Rhipe acquisition, which leads to a total liquidity reserve of NOK 1.4 billion on September 30th, an increase of NOK 0.5 billion from the NOK 0.9 billion in liquidity reserve end Q3 last year, which positioned us well for continued investment in growth both organically and inorganically.

Q3 2022 continued to demonstrate the margin trajectory development and opportunity in Crayon. Nordics continued to deliver strong EBITDA margins, well above 30%, while APAC and Middle East continued to improve margins, both from the underlying scalability, as we scale across the region, from the synergies in the Rhipe integration, and further margin inclusion of -- including the Rhipe business.

Margins in Europe are slightly reduced in Q3, as we continue to invest in scaling up the business in multiple markets, while the margins in the U.S. in Q3 clearly reflect investments in accelerating future growth in the U.S.

We have continuously iterated, that the EBITDA margins we see in the Nordics of above 30% represent the potential of our business model in a mature market, operating at a relevant scale, and we continue to be very clear on this potential, based on what we see across multiple markets such as Germany and India, where we have scaled our operations to a relevant level. However, going forward, we will continue to invest additional resources to drive growth, which implies that we will continue to see margins below the 30% mark for the near term.

We have already covered the items down to EBITDA and the operating performance underlying this. Depreciation and amortization is in line with plan and the depreciation and amortization increases year-over-year due to amortization of the intangible assets identified in the Rhipe and Sensa acquisitions, and the depreciation of the investments into IP and ERP systems in previous periods. Interest expense increases year-over-year, as a consequence of the NOK 1.8 billion bond and the increase in the underlying interest rates.

Other financial income and expenses and negative contribution of NOK 96 million, which is driven by currency appreciation on our balances on short-term financing on daughter companies in other currencies than Norwegian kroners. Altogether this results in a pre-tax result of negative NOK 100 million in the quarter, an improvement of NOK 28 million year-over-year. Income tax expenses are lower than in Q3 2021, driven by tax loss carryforwards from the Rhipe business in other markets, resulting in a net profit of negative NOK 69 million for the quarter, which is an improvement of NOK 71 million compared to Q3 2021.

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 acquisition, leading to increases in particular on contracts and goodwill. Tangible assets increased as a consequence of new lease agreements for office premises, in particular Oslo and Sydney.

On the liability side, we have a NOK 1.8 billion bond loan from the Rhipe acquisition, while the NOK 300 million bond loan maturing in November is now seen as a current liability and will be repaid in full on maturity. Elsewhere on the liability side, public duties increases from a combination of underlying business growth and a reclassification of VAT liabilities.

Looking at the net interest-bearing debt to adjusted EBITDA, we are now at a leverage ratio of 2.5% in what is seasonally one of the weaker points to measure this, which clearly demonstrate that Crayon still has a strong balance sheet to continue to drive our M&A strategy. Furthermore, as we continue to drive growth, margin improvements and working capital optimization, this will further support the deleveraging, both through cash generation and through reducing the leverage ratio, as adjusted EBITDA will continue to grow, providing Crayon with flexibility when it comes to executing on M&A, or returning cash to shareholders as appropriate.

Having reviewed the Q3 financials, let's now turn our attention to the 2022 outlook. Over the last 12 months, we have delivered 45% gross profit growth, well ahead of our FY '22 outlook of 35% to 40%. Even accounting for the fact that Rhipe was included in our November and December financial reporting for 2022, we are confident in our ability to deliver gross profit, in line with our guidance for 2022.

For EBITDA margins, we have delivered 21% over the course of the last 12 months, while continuing to invest in driving business growth. We remain committed to our EBITDA guidance, while we will also continue to look for opportunities to continue to accelerate our future growth rates.

On the net working capital, as we are approaching the end of the year, we expect the average net working capital during 2022 to be between 5% and 10% of the full-year gross profit, which is a natural outcome, given the year-to-date working capital performance. This is below our expectations for our medium term level of negative 15% to 20% of gross profit, and this medium-term level of 15% to 20% is something we remain committed to, and continue to work towards through our working capital initiatives.

On the CapEx side, we expect an increase in CapEx to approximately NOK 125 million, as the CapEx synergies from Rhipe have been more than offset by continued investments in platforms, to scale the business globally, along with tangible assets, primarily related to the growth of the employee base and new office leases in Sydney and Oslo.

And with that, I turn it over to Melissa for wrapping up.

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

To summarize, we continue to see a strong environment to support global growth across all of our geographies. We have a proven ability to deliver on profitable growth based on our customer-centric business model and go-to-market. Our customer focus on optimizing costs, optimizing cloud environments, and optimizing business productivity, position us to reaffirm our outlook, both the short and medium term.

Thank you everyone for your time, and we look forward to speaking with you again in our next earnings call. We will now transition to Q&A.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

And as we start to dive into the Q&A, there are a -- there is a significant number of questions. We will do our very best to address all of them. Multiple questions touch on the same topics and we'll try to combine those. And if there are questions which are still unresolved and you have continued questions, we're always available for follow-ups. So please reach out to [e-mail].

I think we'll start with a question from Oliver Kielland on the organic growth, with your organic growth numbers were very strong this quarter. How much of this is due to price increases by Microsoft and other vendors?

I think what's important first and foremost are the -- to reflect on here, is that our business is not a direct pass-through of Microsoft's price increases and costs. The only significant price change from Microsoft to customers happened at the beginning of this year. So in terms of looking at the growth rates quarter-over-quarter within this year, there are no effects from that.

As we discussed in Q1 as well, it's hard to be specific on exactly what level of impact those price changes would have, because obviously it impacts the customers' overall bills; it also impacts the amount of total spending. So of course, there is different dynamics at play, but in general, what we have seen following the price increases, is a strong interest and attention around our cost optimization services.

Then there is a question in multiple shapes or forms on the U.S., and the simplest formulation is, can you please give an update on the U.S.? Other formulations are around sort of the increase -- the decrease in margins and the increase in the cost base in the U.S. and the expectations for U.S. going forward? Melissa, do you want to add some more color to that?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Sure. U.S. clearly is a market that we still believe is critical for us in terms of long-term growth. And as shared previously, we have done a number of updates around hiring. We've essentially built a new leadership team and sales team starting in Q1. The ramp time to on-board those resources and the effect of that takes time. We do anticipate that we will begin to see the growth heading into 2023, as I know there are also questions around that as well. So really this comes down to, I think, establishing the people and the foundation across the U.S. market.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

That's a good -- there is also a few variations of the question on how the business would perform in a recession type environment, whether we see a risk of prices coming under pressure, margin squeeze and the likes?

I think first and foremost what we are seeing and what we are demonstrating and what we're continuing to see through our engagement in the different markets we operate, is that our core business model of helping customers reduce costs and spend on software and cloud purchases resonates us well, if not better, in an environment with more economic headwinds.

Secondly, what we're also seeing very clearly, is that the spend base we're representing, is the fundamental infrastructure spend for companies. The software and cloud spend in most companies is not a discretionary spending, which companies can choose to take on or divest in any given quarter. This relates to the core infrastructure of running their companies. And consistently and time and time over again, we're seeing that companies would much rather prefer to live without office space, than living without their Office 365 tenants. So from that perspective, we feel very confident about the business' ability to continue to perform.

I think secondly, what we're also seeing in the numbers we're demonstrating here, is that the current economic environment is different across the different markets globally. This is one of the clear benefits of the geographical diversification that we've now achieved in the business.

Looking at the market conditions in APAC and Middle East, we're seeing a very strong business environment across all of those markets and we're seeing continued strong growth there, which of course also translates into -- in Q3, APAC and Middle East demonstrating very solid numbers for us across the different business areas and across the different geographies we operate in.

Then there is a simple technical question on retention and basically just confirming the retention, the [ 93% ] retention per quarter in the presentation. Should we interpret that as 75% retention rate in year in Crayon hence? Melissa?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Yes. So I would say that the retention clearly has adjusted, but on an annual basis historically, we've been around 10%. So yes, there has been some impact in terms of talent retention, but overall, within the tech industry, we are still very much, I would say, ahead in terms of keeping talent in terms of all employees.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

Then there are a few questions on basically margins and margin development. Could you -- and a good summary of the questions is from Kristian at Arctic. Could you please elaborate on the declining LTM margins in all markets except APAC and Middle East? And why HQ EBITDA was not at the same level as in Q3? Given your FY '22 margin guidance, could you give us some flavors on which markets we should expect margin expansion in Q4?

I think first and foremost, it's important to reflect that the business is basically driven by gross profits and costs on EBITDA as the resulting outcome. At the end of the day, we invest in any given quarter, we make a decision on the resources we like to put in place, and those typically also has a timeline. So when you look at the different markets, clearly we're seeing margin expansion in APAC and Middle East, both as a consequence of strong growth and as a consequence of capturing the synergies from the Rhipe integration.

When you look at U.S., the margin decline clearly reflects the ambition to accelerate growth going forward because we've put in more resources. If you look at the history, you are seeing a history of growth -- relatively flatter growth rates and margin improvements, as we had not scaled the business and the cost base We've now gotten to a stage in the U.S., with the foundations in place for driving and accelerating the costs in the U.S., adding people and headcounts to drive future growth in the U.S.

When it comes to HQ EBITDA, if you look at history as well, you're seeing Q3 being seasonally one of the lowest cost levels. That does not reflect sort of a new cost level as such. That is an effect of the intercompany flows and the seasonality of the cost base on the U.K. -- on the HQ section. This is not sort of a -- this is not a new level of resetting or reduction of HQ costs.

And in terms of margin expansion for Q4; well, U.S. is clearly not a market where we would be expecting year-over-year margin expansion, given the continued investments. However, we are expecting profitability improvements. And I think what's also important, is to continue to reflect on the profitability improvements in the market year-over-year in absolute terms at the end of the day, that's what's driving the profitability.

And of course, as we are seeing stronger growth and stronger growth opportunities, there are additional opportunities for investing in resources to drive growth in the different margins. But in general, sort of to your questions, we would be looking to drive improving margins, basically driving more gross profit on a given cost base across all the regions, except U.S. for Q4.

Then we had a question on the Rhipe integration, which was an important question which we spent significant time addressing during the Q2 presentation. Do you want to give an update on the Rhipe integration, where we stand, Melissa?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Yes. Rhipe has been a great acquisition for us from a number of perspectives. I think first is the business has continued to perform during, I would say, the combination of the 2 teams. Second, we've been able to bring in key talent within Rhipe to a global level, giving job expansion for employees around the world. The third element is, Rhipe has really strong processes, and we've actually been able to take that globally and expand. So we've really gotten a lot of benefits out of the Rhipe acquisition, not just financially, but also globally in terms of the employees.

[Jon Syvertsen, executive]

I think it's encouraging to see and we're seeing continued very strong progress on integrating and building a joint business across APAC and Middle East.

There are then a few question on net working capital, and that's sort of the -- one good formulation of this is from Christoffer Bjørnsen at DNB. Seems other companies in the sector are also seeing working capital headwinds. Does this reflect software vendors being more strict on payments, or more of your ventures into markets where vendors do not invoice end customers? Furthermore, why should working capital revert to lower levels in the medium term?

And I think on the -- on this question, on the payable side of the equation, it's a constant from continued sort of -- continued constant payment terms from software vendors. Of course, we're also adhering to those on an absolute level and have been -- as we have been in the past, which is what's driving the seasonality and the variability of the working capital. So first and foremost, driving working capital improvements is about accelerating payments from customers through structured collection processes.

When you look at the magnitude of the balance sheet and the changes we're looking to drive to deliver on the medium-term guidance, this is basically about applying our internal best practice and our processes in a consistent manner across the different geographies to achieve the same results across the different geographies. So this is why we're looking to working capital, to revert to the lower levels in the medium term.

This is of course not done overnight, because it is about establishing the tooling and the platforms where we are implementing basically sort of software, to ensure that we have consistent and efficient processes for driving the dialogue with the customers in the collection phase of the engagements. It is also about ensuring that we have dedicated resources and centralizing those that can work efficiently. And it is about applying sort of a consistent methodology to the customer portfolio. So that's basically what's behind it.

There's also a question on the Q4 net working capital guidance and the use -- without any significant use of receivables factoring. As we report in the notes to the financial statements, there is a factoring facility, which is seeing relatively limited use, which is also limited in its overall feasibility and its current leverage in some of the Nordic markets. And yes, we're expecting to reach our Q4 net working capital without any significant expansion of factoring, as a lever for doing so.

Then there are a few questions on foreign exchange, which I'll try to address as well. One from Oliver Pisani at Carnegie. Does FX boost your organic growth via effectively higher vendor prices that might be priced in U.S.?

No, I wouldn't say so. The reason there is a delta between constant currency growth rates and the reported growth rates, is basically the consolidation effects of the business operating in different currencies around the world, and as we consolidate, we're using the current exchange rates. Whereas in the previous quarter, we used the exchange rate at that point in time. So a business which is reporting constant -- which is reporting a similar gross profit last year and this year, might have a different gross profit when measured in Norwegian krone.

In general, across the businesses we run in the different markets, we're buying and selling in the same currencies. To the extent that there are sort of -- there are currency fluctuations affecting the pricing, that would obviously go up and down, and that's not sort of an immediate margin impact for us as such.

There is also a question on -- and when it comes to EBITDA margins, actually as you're -- as we're seeing consistently the constant currency revaluations or the constant currency analysis has a bigger impact on gross profit and on EBITDA. Predominantly that's because more of the profitability still is in the Nordics than in the international markets. So gross profit -- and the gross profit tends to be more sensitive to the constant currency than EBITDA. And this also implies that sort of when constant currency is positive to the growth rates, it's slightly negative to margins. It's not a major effect, but it's a slight negative effect.

And then there is a question also related to foreign currency on the fundamental drivers behind the numbers and other financial expenses. Predominantly that is about the -- between quarter and inter-quarter variability on the short term intercompany receivables across the group. Yes, we conduct business in the same currencies as we buy and sell, but as those currency flows across different companies, there is always -- it's always giving the rise to temporal effects, and also when there is a mismatch between the actual payment timelines on customer receivables and vendor payables, it gives rise to these elements.

I think on this, it's also important to point out that there is a counter-post to this effect as well, which is seen in the other comprehensive income in the equity statement, where we're seeing a significant gain on the currency this year, year-to-date, which is actually larger than what we've recorded as a negative impact in other financial expenses.

Then there is a question basically on the fundamental drivers behind the working capital environment, which I think we have addressed by now as well. Have you noticed any fundamental drivers behind your working capital movements? Are you confident that this will reverse?

No, there is no fundamental driver and sort of large sort of specific challenges as such. We are -- time and again, we are selling something which the customers is fundamentally dependent on for operating. For most companies, sort of access to the cloud and access to their core productivity software, is as instrumental to operations as other basic utilities like power infrastructure. So we're continuing to see extremely low credit losses and extreme -- and customers are ultimately consistently paying their bills. But we are seeing some slowdown in the process, in terms of the number of touchpoints and the efforts we need to put in, in order to ensure that receivables are settled on time.

And then I will end with a final question here for Melissa. Do you see any customer postponements due to economic slowdown that could potentially impact your growth? Or is it vice versa since more customers want to save costs?

[Melissa Mulholland, executive]

Great question. No, we do not see economic slowdown given the current environment. If anything, I would say the cost savings aspect is continuing to grow. And as I shared in the presentation, our business is very agile and we have a deep focus around cost savings, but also how to optimize in the cloud. And that gives us scalability in terms of different market dynamics.

And also lastly to tie, the economic effects haven't been seen, globally speaking, within APAC and the Middle East, just in terms of the macroeconomic environment. So with that said, I think we've got a very strong foundation, which is reflected in our Q3 results.

[Kjell Arne Hansen;Head of Investor Relations, executive]

With that, we'll conclude the Q&A. And as always, we continue to be available. Please reach out at -- Investor Relations, [e-mail]. Thank you.