Smartcraft ASA

OSE:SMCRT

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Gustav Line, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to SmartCraft's Q1 presentation. My name is Gustav Line. I'm the CEO of SmartCraft. Today, we will give you an update on Q1 and our position in the market. We'll also give you an opportunity to meet our CTO, Christian Saleki. And after that, we'll meet our CTO -- CFO, Kjartan Bø, who'll take you through the financials.

After a short summary, we'll move to a Q&A session. And you can also ask questions in the webcast player during this presentation. But first, let's start with the highlights from Q1.

We saw a 33% increase in revenue in Q1, driven by both new sales and upsales and the effect of the acquisitions we have done in 2021. Our main focus is to grow annual recurring revenue, so-called ARR. Last quarter, we invested for ARR growth, and I'm pleased to see that we have a record of 21% organic ARR growth in Q1 compared to Q1 2021. Also compared to Q4 2021, our ARR grew by 7% in Q1. And this is a result of our great solutions and also the great sales efforts from our team.

We continue to have a very high percentage of our revenue as recurring revenue. We want to remove the onetime costs for our customers and make it easier for them to start using our solutions. As far as I know, we are more or less best-in-class with 95% of our revenue recurring.

We have a long history of profitable growth. And this quarter, we see an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%, which puts us among the best software companies in our region.

We continue to make our software easy to onboard and easy to use. And we know that if you -- if our users are comfortable using our digital tools and if they use them properly, they are less likely to churn. We have invested in several initiatives since the summer and are pleased to see that churn has dropped from 6.2% last quarter to 5% in Q1.

We have also initiated several new partner initiatives, which we believe will be important for future sales. SmartCraft has high profitable growth, high cash conversion and no debt. That is a great position to be in these days. And we are in a great market with lots of potential. We have great solutions and a great team to bring the solutions to the market.

There is -- it is a challenging macro picture with the war in the Ukraine, with supply chain challenges and rising inflation. However, this does not seem to affect the demand for our solutions. Our revenue is not linked to materials or customer revenue, and any inflationary pressure on our costs will result in higher prices for our customers.

Also, remember, we work with SMEs, and we see a long tail of -- an awaiting list of projects and service tasks in both public and private sector. We have a very positive view on the future as we experienced a continued and strong demand for our solutions. As a specialized SaaS player within construction, we have identified a market opportunity of about -- of above NOK 10 billion in the Nordics only. And this market is expected to grow by double digits annually.

And there are 4 factors driving the growth. Firstly, there is a global shortage of skilled workers. Secondly, new construction projects activity is high, and there is -- there are an increasing number of aging buildings in need of renovation. Thirdly, more rules and regulations have been introduced in the construction industry, and there is also an increasing demand to deliver documentation digitally. And also, the consumers are starting to demand better visibility and insight into the construction projects, similar to what they are used to in their private life where they can get information on apps and through their normal devices. And lastly, software is now available as a cloud service, and users can easily download apps to use the service. And this has lowered the bar for our customers to invest in digital solutions.

Our solutions help construction companies to increase productivity and to increase their margins. We believe that the construction companies that prioritize and modernize their business processes will be the winners in this industry in the future.

We see several ways that we can grow the business. First of all, we have a very strong sales force, and we have also a great digital marketing. And combined together, they do a great job. And we have a very good reach in the market, both winning new customers but also upselling to existing customers. And we see some great cross-sell opportunities. It is still early days, and most of the upside will be in the years to come.

We also believe that we will do some strategic add-ons in existing geographies that will fit nicely to our existing solutions. And with a healthy cash position and no debt, we are in a good position to grab the opportunities the market offers, both in terms of organic growth and acquisitions. And we are in dialogue with several potential acquisition targets in existing and new geographies. At the same time, we are patient. Capital discipline is priority #1, and we will only pursue the right acquisition targets at the right price.

So this was a short market update. Let's look at some of the operational and financial highlights for Q4.

So we have engaged in several partner activities and initiatives that will open up for new revenue in the future. These partners are not resellers. They are partners where we both have great benefits from joining forces. Just to give you some examples.

ABAX is a European tracking solution used by field workers. So we have -- we're integrating with ABAX, which is a great opportunity for both ABAX and our customers.

Optimera is the largest distributor of building materials and lumber in Norway, with 3,000 member companies that are, of course, very interesting for SmartCraft.

Norgeseliten is one of the largest chains of electrical contractors in Norway, with almost 2,200 electricians in 197 companies.

And then 24SevenOffice, which is a leading cloud ERP system in the Nordics. We also see great opportunities on their customer base and how we can work together.

And finally, as an example, Catenda, which is a leading BIM platform provider, which enabled us to build BIM capabilities for our customers.

And now I would like to give the word to our CTO, Christian Saleki, to give us some insight into how we think about our solution and our stack.

[Christian Saleki, executive]

Thank you, Gustav. Hi. My name is Christian Saleki, and I am the CTO of SmartCraft. It is a great pleasure for me to meet you all for the first time today.

I have chosen a few topics that I would like to share our perspective on with you, starting with securing our current and future resource needs in R&D. As a soft solution provider, we are continuously competing for the best and the brightest talents among developers. Over the years, our employer branding has served us well in attracting and keeping talented developers in our teams. We have also been quite active with initiatives such as working with team culture and working closer with universities, which have also contributed to our cause.

But we do recognize that we need to expand our strategy even further to secure our future resource needs. So during Q1, we chose to gradually introduce distributed teams so that we can pursue talents far outside of our local offices. We will still focus on building strong local teams, but we believe that with outsourcing as a supportive strategy, we can scale our teams faster when we need to. We can also find specialized competency faster when needed. So overall, we believe that this combination will strengthen our capabilities for the future.

As we know, our customers are in the earlier stages of digitalization. We also know that usage simplicity in our solutions is the key to keep attracting customers towards digitalization. This is one of the main reasons for us to keep our technical stack separated midterm.

SmartCraft offering consists of a combination of targeted best-of-breed and all-in-one solutions. Our best-of-breed solutions cover specific needs in the construction industry, like detailed calculation or safety assurance at a building site, while our all-in-one solutions are suitable for our customers' project management needs, starting from initial offer to planning, purchasing and invoicing, which is suitable for general contractors such as plumbers and electricians, just to mention a few. Both of these categories aim to lower the entry bar for our customers through ease of use and a great user experience.

Now combining these perspectives, we do see overlapping needs between the segments. But when we zoom in, the details and flows differ quite significantly. So merging all these needs into one stack might lead to a poor performing solution for all target customers and have a negative effect on our product department's productivity. So instead, we focus on flow and specific needs with an all-in-one approach. This also aligns well with our ambition to have easy and fast onboarding in our solutions, which in turn will lead to even faster rates of digitalization.

Now looking in the past, we had a starting point where our platforms were basically standalone solutions. And over the years, we have focused on finding the dots between our platforms with a customer-centric perspective. So we are gradually moving from stand-alone platforms to connected solutions while also aiming to be more data-driven in our product decision-making process. We keep focusing on integrating our platforms where value is created for our customers. And the most recent example of this is our integration between our property management solution and our quality and safety solution.

So in sum, in midterm, our strategy is to grow our technology with our customers' adoption rate so that we can match customer needs to our technology output.

This concludes my session, and I would like to hand over to our CFO, Kjartan.

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Thank you, Christian, and good morning to you all. As we communicated in February, we made some strategic investments in Q4 to boost growth, and we can see an accelerated growth in Q1.

ARR has an organic growth of 7% quarter-on-quarter and 21% year-on-year. ARR is ending Q1 at NOK 279 million.

Our recurring revenue has an organic growth of 18%, and we maintain our recurring revenue share at a high level. As before, the majority of our recurring revenue is fixed price subscriptions, which is also what we include in our ARR. Sales to both new and existing customers have been good in Q1, but contributing to the growth is also the reduction in churn of 1 percentage points to 5%.

I have broken down the ARR for the last quarters. As you can see, we have a consistent strong ARR growth, driven both organically and by acquisitions. I also included the operating cash flow to underline that our growth is based on a profitable growth mindset and in a healthy business perspective. We are self-funded with cash conversion at 110% on average.

As you can see in the top left chart, we have had a good organic growth in 2021 and in Q1 2022, with 17% and 21%. But I also want to show you a bit more history.

In this chart, we have summed up the like-for-like revenue and growth the last decade. As you can see, our companies have a consistent growth back to 2011. We also have a medium-term guiding of the same level going forward.

In Q1, total revenue has a solid growth of 33% year-on-year, which include the acquisitions. We continue to have a strong profitability. We have increased the adjusted EBITDA margin from Q4 up to 40 percentage points. We are confident in our ability to increase the margin in the acquired companies. And in Q1, the dilution from the acquisition is less than 1 percentage point. We are now back at a 40% level even including strategic investments, the increased cost base as a listed company and a slight reduction in R&D CapEx level. The R&D CapEx is approximately at an estimated level of just 0.5 percentage points below.

Our balance sheet remains strong, with intangible assets and equity as the main elements. We are still in a net cash position, and we are self-funded, generating cash each quarter. The main change in Q1 visible in both the balance sheet and the cash flow is the increase in deferred revenue. Q1 is the quarter with the majority of invoicing of 12-month subscriptions. We see a distribution of invoicing throughout the year as customers are making changes in their subscriptions and payment plans. But we expect Q1 will remain as a seasonally strong cash flow quarter in the future.

Let me round off with the highlights in the financial table. The highlights are that we are maintaining a high gross margin of 91.5%. We have an increase in payroll and operating expenses driven by acquisition and the increased cost base. EBITDA is over 40%, including the acquisitions, and financial items is mainly loss on currency changes, and a reduction from last year is interest expenses.

Now Gustav will take you through a summary and outlook before we open up for Q&A.

[Gustav Line, executive]

Thank you very much, Kjartan. So we are very pleased with the start of 2022, and we believe we are in a great position in an untapped market that is growing. Our targets from a year ago stay firm. We guide at 15% to 20% organic growth in the medium term. And in the medium term, the adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to increase due to scalability and synergies. .

So that concludes the presentation. So Kjartan and Christian, please join me for the Q&A.

[Unknown Executive]

Okay. Thanks a lot. We have a range of questions that have been posted through the webcast player, and we encourage viewers to continue to submit questions if you have any.

So first, approximately how much of your organic growth was from new sales this quarter? And a question -- another question along the same lines. Could you comment around a little bit on how -- what is driving the acceleration of ARR growth quarter-on-quarter?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes, it's like you want to answer that one, Kjartan. So that's fine.

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Yes. Our new sales versus upsales to existing customers is quite the same in Q1 as we have had before. New sales constitute about 2/3 of our growth.

And the second part of the question?

[Unknown Executive]

Yes, that was regarding the acceleration that we've seen in the ARR growth from Q4 '21 to Q1 '22. Can you comment a bit on what's driving this?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Yes. The 7% increase from Q4 to Q1 is a mix of -- as we are increasing prices in Q1, which is a part compared to Q4.

Also, our strategic investments has had a great impact. The strategic investments we did in Q4 with scaling down on nonrecurring revenue and increasing recurring revenue, easing the onboarding of customers, all have contributed very well in Q1.

[Unknown Executive]

Thanks. There are several questions around churn and the positive development that you have in terms of the churn trend. Could you share some insights in what changes more specifically you've made to reduce the churn? And what are you focusing on day-to-day to achieve this?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. I think it's important to also note that we had a very low churn for many years. Our churn has been very stable at about 6%. And we see a downwards trend lately, which is very positive from 6.2% to 5% in the last quarter.

I think to me, churn is a mindset. It starts with development, how can we make some really great solutions that are very easy to use, how can we onboard our customers in the easiest way because we know if our customers can use our solutions and they like our solutions, they will be less likely to churn. How can we make sure that our customers utilize as much as possible of our solutions because then they get the full value of their time and investment.

So we have done several initiatives, both onboarding, making sure that they get quickly started and without any hassle and then also making sure we can guide them through the systems. We told you last quarter about some initiatives we've done where we've had sort of 160,000 touchpoints automatically through our electronic guides without us actually talking to our users. So that's quite a great way of scaling.

So we're doing several initiatives. We -- but it's all about information. It's about how our solutions work and making sure that we really take our customers seriously and make sure that they are happy users. So put the customer in the center and make sure we understand their needs, I would say. So again, it's a mindset.

[Unknown Executive]

Do you consider this churn level to be sustainable? And is there also some sort of theoretical minimal churn and sort of unless people go bankrupt or out of business? Could you reduce it even further?

[Gustav Line, executive]

I think our goal is, of course, to have 0 churn. I mean that would be fantastic. That's not possible. But we think that about 2% to 3%, maybe 4% would be the bankruptcy rate. So it'd be difficult to get below that. So I think we are at a pretty good level, but we'll see if we can take it lower. But I think if we can stay at sort of between 4% and 6%, that'd probably be reasonable.

[Unknown Executive]

Thanks. Then we have a couple of questions regarding the uncertain macro environment that we see generally and globally, I would say, for the time being, with raw materials, supply chains and price increases in general. So how do you see customers responding to this environment with inflation, potential labor cost inflation and material inflation? Are they investing more in software? Or are they becoming more cautious? Or any other general remarks regarding the macro environment and how that might impact you?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Well, I think looking at Q1, we have a record growth in Q1. And these macro challenges were actually present in Q1, but we see great demand for our solutions. And I think there are some reasons for that.

I mentioned in the presentation that our revenue is not linked to raw materials. They're not linked to our customers' revenue and so on. And most of our revenue is actually recurring. So it's not like we need to sell a lot, let's say, 50% of our revenue was recurring and 50% was additional revenue we had to capture every year. That revenue would be difficult to capture. But it's recurring. So it's actually part of the cost that the companies already have, which is -- and it's a pretty low cost.

So I think those are important things. But on a -- also, it's important to understand our customer base. They focus on mostly SME. Their customers are mostly SME customers as well. And in the SME space, there is loads to do. I mean we're talking about verandas and bathrooms and garages and things. It's a long, long, long waiting list for projects to be done. So there's no shortage of work so far.

So I think -- so we stay very positive on the demand in the market for our customers. And there's still a shortage of skilled people to be able to do the jobs. I think every company is lacking people, which means that they need to be more efficient with the people they already have. And our tools make sure that you get more out of the people you have. We increase productivity, but we also help you to reduce your margin because our solutions help you to buy the products at the best price at the right time.

So hopefully, that answered and gave some -- and I also want to talk about one more very important thing. This is not the first time that there's been a challenge in the macro environment. And SmartCraft, looking back, like Kjartan showed us over the last 10 years, we have had a solid growth at around 15% every year the last 10 years regarding -- regardless of what's happening in the macro environment.

So I think we have a pretty solid business model. We have a very low take rate from our customers, which makes us very resilient in challenging times.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you. There is one final question so far. Still time to post more questions if anyone has more. Were there any specific areas, geographical or product areas, where you saw especially particularly strong growth in Q1?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Yes.

[Gustav Line, executive]

Probably want to -- I was thinking it's pretty good all over, but yes.

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Yes, it was actually pretty good all over. We have certain levels in certain countries where the newly acquisitions, of course, are investing more in -- well, we are investing more in the growth of EBITDA, how can we scale up. But overall, on revenue and ARR, yes, all countries have been quite well.

[Gustav Line, executive]

And that's why we're a bit confident about the macro picture as well. We see a strong demand in all the areas where we work.

[Unknown Executive]

Thanks. There were no further questions from the webcast at this stage.

[Gustav Line, executive]

All right. So thank you very much for listening in. I hope you got some clarity and insight into SmartCraft. And again, thank you very much for your time.