Itera ASA

OSE:ITERA

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Arne Mjøs, executive]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for the third quarter for Itera. My name is Arne Mjos, I'm together with Bent Hammer, he will take the financial review, but we'll start with the highlights of the quarter and the business review. And then I will hand over to Bent to go into the details about the financial review and the outlook. And we also have a chat today. So, if you have any kind of questions, so please post your questions and we will follow up on that after, in the last section about the Q&A. But also if you have any kind of questions later, you can pose either to Bent or myself and we will have a follow-up on that.Okay. Let's look at the highlights for the first quarter. If we look at the financial figures, we achieved a 14% organic growth in the third quarter, and we have an EBIT operating margin of 4.5%. We will look into the figures quite soon, but let's look at other highlights. If you start with the market environment, we see that there has been some kind of uncertainty in the macro since, I will say, from the second quarter. But it's extremely important to look at that kind of environment have different impact on industries. For example, banking, insurance and energy sector, which is our main sectors, we don't see the same coin of turbulence. But of course, it also has some impact in terms of longer sales cycle and tougher competition. What we need to do from Itera perspective is actually to putting more efforts into the customer facing of the company.We are coming from a more quite weather demand, were quite high. And we were looking for the supply part that was has been the bottleneck for the growth, but now it's more the opposite. So if you're looking at the supply side, it's more softer from a slowest pace, of course, in terms of intake of new employees where the number of employees increased by 61 in the last 12 months is up by 21% and new employees in the third quarter.So, that has actually some kind of temporary impact because of the macro. If you look at book-to-bill, it always has some kind of seasonal variation. Of course, it's always lowest in the third quarter. In this quarter, it was 0.6% but if you look at the last 12 months, it was 1.0%.As you know, we have a large operation in Ukraine. It's more or less business as usual with no big changes compared to other quarters. What I will say is actually that we see increased interest from new customers because there's a lot of focus on the rebuilding of Ukraine. So that we can also see there's a lot of activities that also will bring back the growth path of the Ukraine operation, not at least when the war in Ukraine is actually find some kind of solution.If you look at the profitability, it was for the EBIT margin, 4.5%. It is some impacted by, of course, the continued high inflation. There are also some fewer working days in this quarter compared to the same quarter last year that had some impact on the EBIT and also the growth. Bent will have a bridge on that later in the presentation. And we also have the economic investment case in the cloud application services, which is a more long-term drive according to the changes in our industry itself.As we reported in the second quarter, we have already started on some kind of, we call it, business optimization. So, of course, we need to increase the focus on demand generation, but we're also looking at a very concrete efficiency measures. So, this kind of business optimization program Bent will tell you more about that later in the presentation. But, of course, it will also have some margin improvements going forward. He has estimated something between 1.2% to 1.6%.We are very happy that we also achieved the EcoVadis sustainability gold medal that means that Itera is rated amongst the 2% of all companies in our industry in sustainability. That's, of course, is extremely important for Itera as a company and all the employees of Itera, but not at least also our customer are also requesting this kind of high standard because we're also adviser for our customers when it comes to sustainability, where the utilization is also an extremely important part how you can do this all kind of reporting and also how you can develop a business in a more sustainable way.I'm also very happy that the Board of Directors decided to make a supplementary dividend of NOK 0.4 per share that will be paid out in 10th of November. So, in total dividends for 2023 is up by 40%, totaling SEK 0.7 per share. So we're very happy that we can also increase the dividend payout this year.Okay. If we look at the figures, as I told you, we have 14% organic growth in the quarter. Year-to-date, it's 22%. So that's very good. And I think also if compared with your peers, I think we are quite satisfied with that performance. If we look at the opposite operating margin, it was 4.5% in the quarter, 9.3% for year-to-date. Of course, it's lower than our targets. But of course, if you look at the changes that we are doing also including the business optimization, we also believe we can improve that going forward because we will have the same intake of supply before we see also that demand can consume this intake of employees. So, a number of employees was 762 at the end of this year. That is 9% higher than 12 months ago.What is also important to mention, and we'll go back to that, if we look at the business model that we are not, the scalability of Itera is more also based on using technology and the capabilities of Itera. So, you don't need to always look at the connection between the growth of revenue and the growth of people because we also have all the capabilities that enable the growth of Itera more than actually the number of employees itself.Okay, let's go to the business review section. Just to have some more comments about the market, let me start here. I think the headline is quite mixed market environment. We see a very strong demand for digital technology and the new technology, I will say, in terms of cloud, data, AI and also security services. I guess you have also heard about that for a long time. That is a market that is still very hot for all kind of industries, I will say. So they need this kind of solution, but of course, the investment ability for different sectors have different patents, I will say.But in general, I will also make a focus on that. Of course, the customers have invested a lot into what we call external phases such as revenue and customer experience to drive their revenue. But more, we also see that there's some kind of change that the customer will focus more on efficiency effects and also optimization. How can we operate more efficiently because of this cost inflation and this higher salary that we have seen in the market or in more or less all markets. So, of course, finding solution that is more short term that adds value in terms of efficiency, optimization, whatever is extremely important for the customer. But as well also, they are looking for digital transformation in the business because that also have impact both on the revenue side and also the efficiency of the operation.Of course, the continued cost inflation at this high level, we also need from Itera look at both the pricing mechanism for our customer and also not at least the efficiency itself. What I also will mention for Itera perspective, as I said in the beginning, our main revenue stream is actually coming from banking and insurance and energy sector. We do not have a lot of customers in the retail, for example. So we've not hit that much of the macro environment. Of course, there are some impacts, but that's why I'm saying in my organization that we also need to compensate that by increasing the time on customer facing. So that is also something that we are doing, coming from a quite high attention on the supply side and moving that high attention to the demand side of the business.Today, we have 14 offices in Itera. I think that's very important. We have established a new office in Herning, West in Denmark, Western part where there is a lot of energy sector in the energy company, which is a quite hot market because of Denmark is quite good in the renewables, that is, every part of the world is actually a key focus. So going into Herning is a good timing, I will say, in terms of the sector that we are targeting. We have a strong footprint in Copenhagen, not at least for the banking insurance, the other main segment of Itera. So, I think that's a quite wise decision to establish this new office in a very lean way connected with the customer that we grow together.So this is Itera, 14 offices. For me, it's a very large scalability that we have in Itera. And then I go back to the model we have in Itera, we are a growth company. We are always focused on the people growth. That's the most important first thing we focus that everyone in Itera is growing because then our customers growing and also the company is growing. So that's the core part of the -- mindset of Itera. And if you look at the inside of Itera, that is how we are doing our consultancy business, but we are also looking at the outer circle, which is more how could we establish more package offering or more industrialized offerings that increase both the speed and usability and also subscription revenue of Itera. That is why we have established this kind of digital factory at scale and these kind of services because it's not only consisting of people, is also consisting of digital capabilities that we have industrialized in Itera and we can reuse and also increase the revenue instead of only increasing one-to-one with the people behind.So, the scalability of Itera more as a software company, I will say, where we are combining industrial services also, will be more and more an important part of Itera's business model and also increasing the growth rate and also not at least the profitability of Itera. And that is also connected to what I will say, we heard a lot about AI coming in. That is something that has started much earlier when the cloud was established with the cloud computing for many years ago. So, a lot of company do still have a lot of system on a local data center or what we call the on-premise. And we have seen the new cloud, public cloud capability is much stronger, much faster, more provide more agility whatever, but not at least also innovation.So, a lot of customers need to go from a cloud transformation into digital transformation of the business through digitalization and automation. And the last step is actually, I think everyone sees the potential of AI, where we are also using algorithms and machine learning to increase the automation and the real value creation. But in order to use AI, you need to have been using the cloud, you need to have control of your data. You need to have access to your data. So when you're talking about AI, you need to really also have the model in place. And that is what we see as a driver for increasing the cloud transformation and also not at least the digital transformation to have the data platform in order to utilize this kind of technology.And during this quarter, we have also managed to win new customers, about 10 customers, more or less, that has onboarded this quarter to drive AI transition with more business offering value for effect for the customer. So, what we are talking about that AI itself is an opportunity, of course, but it's also even much larger opportunity because we need to be ready for using these kind of technology that will have a very strong impact of any business going forward.Yes. I just also want to mention some customer story in this presentation, and you can also look into the report for even more details. But one of the case I just want to talk a little about is actually Kredinor, that has established a new service, they call Kan in Norwegian, it's name is Kan but is [ can ]. So it's about where it played a key role in developing, implementing this kind of very innovative product for Kredinor which is actually some kind of game change, I will say, maybe in the Norwegian debt collection market.So that is Kan is a service that aim to enhance employees' financial well-being. It includes some kind of comprehensive overview of the debt and personal finances. You provide counseling with some kind of experts that look into your challenges with your economy and then you make some kind of action plan because we know that in Norway, about 20% of all employees that have some challenges with their economy also have health problems, right? So that's why it's so important that we established this company, Kredinor is a first mover, I will say, game changer that established this kind of service to help out with people, employees that have the challenges with the economy because it also have impact on the sickness and also the productivity for the business that they're working for.So this is some kind of solution that support the employer, I will say. So this is a service for the employer to support the employees that have some kind of challenges with the economy. So how do they support them with these challenges, to reduce the sickness and also to make sure that the productivity for the company is actually more or less as normal because we are helping out with the solution for the economy, right?So that is something that you can look into. Itera have a key role in this project with a multidiscipline team. We first established MVP now there is a beta version in the market, and we will continue to deliver more mass services depending on the feedback from the market. So you can go to Kan [indiscernible] to have more information about this solution.Another example is actually the insurance company Storebrand that we are helping to develop a new pension and insurance solution, they call it Bedriftsveilederen in Norwegian for small businesses. So, that is also very groundbreaking solution to help us with small businesses with pensions and insurance solutions.So small businesses may be businesses with up to 30 employees, normally maybe 5 to 10 or whatever, so instead of having a lot of complex manual processes, what kind of solution they need for pension and for insurance. In this case, we have fully automated the processes so you can go to the website and within 10 minutes establish pension and insurance solutions for your employees compared to what maybe, took several weeks to establish. So these kind of businesses do not have time to go into this. And also for the insurance company, they are really doing this in a much smarter way, more efficient way, and they are also increasing the sales targets.What I heard is actually that because of this solution, they are having a big impact of also the sales generation of new customers. So that's very fantastic. And our service design professionals from Itera had done this work together with Storebrand. And it was awarded as the winner of the UX Nordic Award 2023.So, we're very proud of being a part of the team by Storebrand to deliver this kind of solution. Okay. I just also would like to mention the public sector in Itera. We also have quite large access to the public sector because, of course, there's a lot of bid processes there. And for some of the largest buyer of services in the public sector, we have both in NAV and Skatteetaten that we won early this year. But now quite recently, we, as a part of a consortium was 1 of 3 winners of a 4-year agreement for the Norwegian Police with an estimated total value of NOK 4 billion.So that's what you call -- it's very good to have this frame agreement because that also has some kind of visibility and also not at least that public sector also have an important impact of the demand side for Itera digitization services. I just also mentioned, we have talked about the energy market report. That is something that Itera published by yearly together with Thema Consulting.So this quarter, we have also launched or published a report for the Northern European electricity retail market. So this is also an important driver for Itera to enter new customers, not beyond Norway, where we have a very strong presence. So going into Sweden, going to Denmark with more customers, it's always important to show the market that we have very deep domain knowledge about the electricity, which is, of course, the main driver for the green transition.So in this case, we launched this report, and it's extremely important tool for Itera when we are approaching new customer in other markets. I just also mentioned partnership. Of course, we have very privileged, I will say, partnership with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, whatever. So that's an important part. And also, in this case, just mentioned that we are not only working with a local Microsoft office, which is more presale oriented. We are also working directly with Microsoft's own consultancy services that are providing services for the largest clients around the world. And this Consulting services now call Industry Solution Delivery.So, when we establish our digital factory scale and cloud community of excellence, what is called now, we were piggybacking on all the experience from this team that are collecting and building IP from hands-on implementation of digital transformation for the world-leading companies. So we have through this partnership that we have going into for the second year, but we have also started with them a very tight collaboration when we establish our own Digital factory, but that means that we have access to more than 15,000 experts and all developed IP based on these kind of best practices.So that's extremely important in Itera when we approach a very complex customer. We have the best practices and the best people, either from IBM or we can do it the same from the Google and Amazon, whatever, what is needed. So that's the partner Itera. But in this case, because our digital factory is not only connected to Microsoft because most of these processes, most of this experience is not directly connected to one specific technology. So we are using our digital factory at scale also for the other global tech giants, including Google, Amazon and not at least also IBM and its Red Hat Open Shift technology, which is really interesting because it provides this hybrid cloud environment that more and more customers are asking for.Okay. I just also would like to mention, as I said in the beginning, sustainability report is, of course, important for every business and not at least for Itera, we do not want to be in the line, we need to be about the best in the market. That's why we have this kind of -- we are happy with this new award becoming as a gold medalist for EcoVadis sustainability rating. And that means that we are about the top 2% of companies are industry on a global basis and the reason for that is, of course, important for all employees at Itera, which is also important when we are approaching customer because we also have a full range of services for helping out with customers doing this kind of reporting, but not at least also using digital technology to make the business more sustainable going forward.Okay. I just also mentioned that Ukraine is running more or less as normal. But what is also, I just want to mention that we are more and more having meetings, but not that we're also organizing events. In this case is an event that we organized together with Bergen Chamber of Commerce where our Director of Global Business Development in Itera, Odd Khalifi was actually the organizer from Itera perspective and made a very successful event in Bergen, where a lot of businesses and other communities where gathering in order to look at how could the Norwegian Western part can be engaged in supporting Ukraine, both for the short-term and long-term perspective.And there will be a lot of also new events, one is [ Warsaw ], whatever. Another one will be later in Bergen and other places. And we also believe there will be some kind of business delegation to Ukraine, maybe before the end of this quarter. So that is what we are doing in the interest for helping up with Ukraine, both on a short-term and long-term perspective. It's extremely important. And also, this is also a way to make a difference. I think there's a big support for Ukraine and also not at least for a rebuilding of Ukraine after the war, which will be one of the largest market in Europe for decades.Okay. Let me just finish before I hand over to Bent Hammer. Order intake, as I said, have some kind of seasonal variation. It was 0.6% in the third quarter. we have a 1.1% for the last 12 months. If you look at the number of new customers, we have 43 new customers in the third quarter. So there are some smaller and some also a potential larger customer coming in, and that's, of course, extremely important going forward.If I look at the existing customer, they had contributed to a 95%, more or less of the revenue in this quarter and 5% from this 43 new customers mentioned. And also, if you look at the share of revenue from our top 30 customers more or less the same, 83% and also that is extremely important because we are quite deeply connected into business process for these customers. So, that is extremely important when the macro actually changes that we have strong customers that have been together with us for so many years because of delivering high quality.We have strategic relationship, all these kind of stuff. So that's, of course, extremely important when we have this kind of macro environment. But we also, as I said, focus on building new relationships because we know that some of the top 30 cloud customer want would not continue to grow at the same speed that we have seen in the past. Some will, of course, do, but other will do not have the same pace. So that's why we need to compensate that with new customers. And so that has been a part of the strategy to also develop new customer in order to grow faster, but also have more stabilization if the macro for the existing customer also changes.And also, if you look at our skilled and innovative employees, we are not 762 employees at the end of the quarter, that's FY 61% last 12 months. So that is actually regulated, I will say, adjusted according to the macro environment. So we can always do this up and down for the time being, 61% is a good number for Itera. And most of 60% of the FTE growth the last 12 months has been in the Nordics.So if you look at the national ratio, it's about 50%, 51%. So that is the employees there of the employee mix of Itera. So I think that was the last slide I had, Bent, so I think I hand over to you to make a deep dive on the financial review.

[Bent Hammer, executive]

Thank you very much. And good morning to you. Yes. So we are not at that, I would say, extreme growth trajectory that we have been in the previous few quarters, but we are still at a very solid 14% growth for the quarter and 22% for the year-to-date.On the cost side, we see that personnel expenses are up by 19%, and that's a combination of several factors. One is, of course, we have around 10% more employees on average. A second one is that the Norwegian kroner has been quite weak over the past several months. And that obviously, affects the translation of our foreign employees cost and so forth.Also, there is a pretty strong underlying growth in salaries as an impact of the high inflation rates that we've seen over the past year or so throughout Europe and possibly mostly dominant in the Central European area.On the other OpEx side, though, we have successfully managed to bring it down somewhat as part of our cost reduction program, which I will come back to in a few seconds. So we ended up with an EBITDA of NOK 16.9 million versus NOK 18.7 million last year. And then EBIT of NOK 8.7 million versus EUR 10.2 million in the corresponding quarter of last year.So part of the explanation of the EBIT is that we have 1.1 fewer working days in the space that we are operating. And also, we have had some softer utilization. And I would say in particular with the graduates that we onboarded this this August, there is a more difficult environment to deploy those junior resources. Looking at the cash flow from operations, we have what is seemingly quite disappointing negative EUR 2.3 million. But the reason for that is that the last day of the quarter fell on a Saturday, and that's when most of the receivables which you -- so we actually got a very high inflow of cash in the first week of October.So yes, we'll come back to us. We ended with a cash balance more or less on par with last year of NOK 42 million. And as Arne just mentioned, our number of employees were 762 at the end of the quarter, sequentially up 21% since Q2.If we look at the sequential development, we see that we have a very strong growth trajectory. And in fact, 2.5% growth over the past 24 months on average. We have an EBIT margin of 10.1% over the last 24 months, which is a bit down from the, I would say, COVID period of 2020, 2021, where we had, I'd say, unnaturally low OpEx from traveling and so forth.Quarter-by-quarter, we see that the third quarter is the weakest in terms of both the top line as well as the margins. And that has, of course, to do with that being the main vacation period over the year. This quarter compared to the corresponding of last year, as mentioned, also contained 1.1 fewer working days. And the impact of that is approximately NOK 3 million less in both revenue and also EBIT, which the latter is, of course, the dominant impact on our results.Let's see the bridge of the EBIT margin from this quarter to the corresponding quarter of last year is that we are supporting our Ukrainian colleagues that have been drafted into the military service by providing them some extra salaries. Obviously, the salary they get in the military service is quite low. So we want to protect their and their families by supporting with extra salary contribution.All in all, we have, I think, 9 employees now that are drafted in the services. We also had a negative impact of about 50 basis points from our reestablishment in Sweden. It takes a bit of time to build up and get that into profits. And also with the longer sales cycles that we have experienced lately, we have still some overcapacity in our cloud offerings where we need to be able to have a full set of capabilities and strength to be able to take any big accounts and help through their cloud transformation.The remaining business had a positive impact on EBIT margin of 0.6%, and that's mostly attributable to the cost savings program that we're running at the moment and speaking of which, given, of course, that we have this macro environment that we have at the moment, where we clearly see a softening of demand in the marketplace in total. We see that from our peers reporting as well that they're all actually since Q2 reporting lower utilization and a softer market in total. And though it's not a homogeneous picture across the board. We see that there are certain industries that are more hit and there are certain capabilities in our organization that is more hit this, as I think, Arne also alluded to earlier in his presentation.So we have taken a full run-through of all our business elements in a way from sales to delivery to people, to support functions, et cetera, to try to identify where we can have some cost savings and also where we can optimize the business by better collaboration across countries and also seeing if we can do things in a different way that is more effective going forward.So, some of all the activities that we have investigated, we have identified actions that we believe will improve our EBIT margin by 100 to 200 to 260 basis points when they're in full effect sometimes in 2024.Doing this, it's important to say that some cyclical changes in our business is nothing out of the ordinary. It happens from time to time. And it's important that we address this with a long-term view in mind and not get too trigger happy, I would say, on short-term actions and do things that will be detrimental to our ability to take out the long-term potential that we believe is in our market. And we also are very eager to appear as a solid trustworthy and safe employer to our employees. So we try to screen them to the extent possible in such environment as well. And we believe that, that will be to our benefit in the future ahead as well.Back to the cash flow, yes. So I think there was about SEK 30 million more than usual that is spilled through to the subsequent quarter in terms of cash flow from operations. So that will then be founded in our Q4 cash. In terms of investment activities, we had some more of that related to the new headquarters in Oslo and also in a refurbishment of our office in Southern Norway. And we chose to finance that by taking on a 0 loan of NOK 5 million, so that we wouldn't be taking from our dividend capacity.The alternative would be, of course, to lease these assets. But since it's mainly furniture and things that have a longer lifetime than traditional leasing assets, we decided to do this as a bank loan. And it's the only bank loan we have. So it's a small thing.Looking at the 12-month cash flow, we have generated NOK 80 million from operations during the last 12 months, the corresponding 12 months before that, we generated NOK 67 million and 73 million the year before then again. So, despite this spillover to October, we still have a very solid cash flow from operations. And that, of course, then allows us to distribute this supplementary dividend payment of NOK 0.40 per share.We have been accustomed to doing a supplementary dividend at this time of year. So hopefully, it's a pleasant message to you, but not necessarily a surprise, although I hope you will find the amount to be on the upper side of your expectations.The share price has had a bit of a bumpy road lately. So we're now back to a 0 return if you count the dividend payments made in last November and June. And we have a current holding of approximately 950,000 owned shares, which were valued at about NOK 11 million. And we will continue to have focus on distributing earnings as soon as we have the cash available to do that. We don't use much cash for our working capital. So it's distributable to our shareholders.We have increased the total balance sheet by quite a lot, SEK 85 million over the past year, and a lot of that is due to the new office leases that we have entered into in Oslo for the new headquarters, a 7-year lease and also a 5-year extension to our office in Bina on the South Coast of Southeast and Coast of Norway. So that's a part of this IFRS 16 leasing standard that we have to capitalize these full office lease agreements.So, we still have a healthy equity ratio of 24%. And without this these so-called right-of-use assets, it would have been 31%. So very healthy in that sense. And cash balance also healthy and more so at the present time. Yes. So that was it from the deep dive into the financials. Just a quick word on how we see the outlook for the future. As mentioned, even though the overall market is a bit soft at the moment, there are variances in that. There are industries that are still investing significantly into digital transformation. And the underlying demand for digitalization is still very strong. There's an abundance of systems and processes that need modernization and digitalization. So as soon as the capital is available to the companies to actually perform this this modernization efforts, then I think we will still see demand at a very strong level.In the meantime, though, we will have a strict focus on our business optimization program to make sure that we preserve our margins to the best of our abilities. And again, without jeopardizing our future potential, yes. We have also, as previously mentioned, strong capacity to help our customers migrate into the cloud, which is a prerequisite to take use of some of these new AI tools that are coming along rapidly these days and which offers the potential to significantly improve productivity let alone new service offerings for customers.The productivity part though is possibly where the customers will redirect their focus do because that could offer a very quick payback to the investments in this.In terms of future potential also that we are, of course, hoping for a quick resolution to the ongoing war in Ukraine, and we are very well positioned to be part of the future rebuild of the country. And in particular, on the energy side, where Ukraine is a very strong contender to be a net producer of energy into Europe, and that has to be coupled with a top-notch digital standards as well. So this is a very strong position for us, and we are working every day to position ourselves for this to come.And of course, we will now focus on profitable growth. We still believe there is growth potential for us even in this market. And we will look in to generate as much cash from that as possible. So yes, thank you. I'm not sure if there are any questions.

[Operator]

We have no questions today.

[Bent Hammer, executive]

No questions. Okay. Arne and myself are always available for any one-to-one you might want to have with us to dig further into Itera as an investment case. So feel free to contact me, and we'll set it up for you. And if not, I look forward to seeing you back on February 15 for our Q4 and preliminary 2023 results. And I wish you a very good day and also a nice weekend ahead. Thank you very much.