Smartcraft ASA

OSE:SMCRT

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Good morning. My name is Gustav Line, and I'm the CEO of SmartCraft. It's great to be here to present the fourth quarter results. Before we look at the agenda, let me start with some highlights. As a SaaS company, we are focused on building recurring revenue, and I'm very pleased to report 30% annual recurring revenue growth in Q4. Our annual recurring revenue, so-called ARR, was NOK 260 million at the end of the year. The organic ARR growth was 17%, which implies an acceleration compared to the growth of 16% in Q3 2021. ARR is the most important performance indicator for a Software-as-a-Service company like ours. Remember that we have an annual churn rate of only in the range of 6%, which means that this is highly reliable revenue streams going forward. We continue our profitable journey with a 37% adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4. In these volatile times, we are in a good place with a healthy cash position and no debt. This enables us to invest both in organic growth and targeted acquisitions. When we reported Q2 results in August, we announced that we would invest in sales and marketing and development initiatives in the second half of 2021 to drive growth. We have followed our plan and invested in several growth activities and are really pleased to see the positive effects already early in 2022. 2021 has been an eventful year with the implementation of 3 acquisitions and the IPO with the changes in routines and processes. I am proud that we are able to successfully deliver as planned in 2021, and that the organization is now aligned and motivated around our goals for 2022. For today's agenda, we first look at the market situation before moving on to operational and financial highlights in Q4. After a short summary, we will finish off with a Q&A session. And you can ask questions in the webcast player during the presentation. We have a very positive view on the future as we experience a continued and strong demand for our solutions. As a specialized SaaS player within construction, we have identified a market opportunity of NOK 10 billion in the Nordics only. And this market is expected to grow by double digits annually. There are 4 factors driving the growth. Firstly, there is a global shortage of skilled workers. The workforce is aging and the industry does not attract enough new resources. Secondly, new construction project activity is high, and 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 this digitally. The consumers are also starting to demand better visibility and insight into construction projects. This is similar to Insight Day, getting most other parts of their private and professional life. And lastly, software is now available as a cloud service and users can easily download apps to use the service. This has lowered the bar for customers to invest. Additionally, younger workers are used to digital tools and to a certain extent they will force the construction companies to use modern digital tools. We believe that the construction companies that prioritize and modernize their business processes will be the winners in this industry in the future. We have extremely happy users and those who start using a digital tool like this never look back. Let me try to illustrate how our solutions simplify life for contractors and craftsmen, freeing up time that they can use productively. Typically, 90% of our users are mobile and work on building sites. Their digital tool is the mobile phone with an app. In the office, the users have a rich web client for administration and management, who oversees all the projects. In this example, a site worker travels to the customer to create a quote on a job. The necessary information is captured on site digitally, which is the basis for project and resource planning and the purchasing of materials. All acceptances and changes are captured and stored digitally. Likewise, documentation and required checklist also follow the project. Time spent on the project is registered by the workers on site, which in turn creates the basis for payroll and reporting. This was a relatively simple example. For larger projects, we provide more functionality like tender calculation and more documentation. Our solutions integrate to accounting system and suppliers and have more detailed functionality. But I think this gives you an idea of where SmartCraft adds value. The glow is in the flow. We make sure the information flows seamlessly between the parties involved. In the beginning of the presentation, I touched upon the strength of a SaaS-based business model. It is a business model with extremely high degree of recurring revenue and extremely high gross margin. When you are able to combine this with an efficient machine for new sales, low churn, and successful M&A add-ons, we are in a great position to create shareholder value. As a Nordic leader, we have a big customer base and a big user base for cross sales and upsells. We are leading the consolidation in the industry with 7 add-ons in the last years. I think we are in a good position with a strong revenue growth, high EBITDA margins, low CapEx and high conversions from meetings to sales. Our organic growth in recurring revenue was 18% in Q4, up from 17% in Q3. Our total organic revenue growth for the year was 15%, which is more or less in line with what we've done the last 10 years. 96% of our revenue in Q4 was recurring. And this, combined with the fact that we have a stable and low churn at 6% tells me that we are in a good position. In Q4, we continued our focus to upsell solutions and services to our existing customers. We experienced that several of our development initiatives that open up for upsells were finalized in Q4. And so far, in 2022, we can see early signs that these initiatives are paying off. In Q4, we have lowered the bar for new customers to invest in our solutions. We have reduced and removed onetime costs and invested in processes to make onboarding even better and smoother. As an example, in Q4, we have been trying out a new third-party solution for customer self-service. In our solution, Bygglet, more than 6,000 users interacted on average 28x with a self-service tool. This represents 160,000 interactions in 3 months, and it's a great example of how we help our customers to be self-sufficient and at the same time save our time and resources. Like I talked about in the Q3 presentation, we are continuing the cross solution initiatives to tie the solutions better together and to allow for cross sales. 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. This was a short market update. Let's look at some of the operational and financial highlights for Q4. 2021 was an unusual year for us with several acquisitions and also the stock market listing. In many ways, we can say that we are entering a new era from 2022, and we are entering 2022 in very good shape. In Q4, we have paved the way for growth in 2022 by investing in development projects for upsell and lowering the investment bar for our customers. We have also engaged in several partner initiatives, which open up for potential new revenue. We also believe that the reference stories from Consti and JSB, showing how well known construction companies digitalize, will be a door opener to similar customers. Software is all about the people. At the end of 2021, we have aligned the organization for further growth. We now have the same goals, methodology for measuring progress, and outcome-based road maps. Product owner roles are in place and we have increased the use of user experience designers. In a market where development resources are scarce, we are currently testing outsourcing some of our developments. We have a tight relationship with our cloud service providers and we also see how we together can use the cloud to reduce our carbon footprint. Now I want to give the word to Kjartan before I join him for final remarks and a Q&A session at the end. Kjartan?

[Kjartan Bo, Chief Financial Officer]

Good morning. My name is Kjartan Bo. I'm the CFO of SmartCraft. It is great to be here to present for you today. I have a bit of a cough. So I apologize in advance. In these next 2 slides, I will go through the financial highlights of Q4. And we continue our strong growth in Q4 with a total ARR growth of 30% year-over-year. The organic ARR growth has increased from 16% in Q3 to 17% in Q4. Our recurring revenue has an organic growth of 18%, and we have a recurring revenue share of 96% in Q4. Of recurring revenue, 90% is subscriptions on fixed price. Note that we include only fixed price subscriptions in our ARR. Total revenue has a solid growth of 38% year-over-year. The acquisition we closed in the last 12 months is, of course, contributing to much of that growth. We have executed on our plan to grow the recurring revenue. And as said, we have an organic growth of recurring revenue of 18% in Q4. As part of our plan to transition nonrecurring revenue to SaaS services, nonrecurring revenue in Q4 has decreased by 39% year-over-year and ending organic growth of total revenue at 14%. We continue to have a strong profitability. We see a decrease in adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4 from 41% to 37% year-over-year. The decrease is driven by the dilution from acquisition of more than 3 percentage points. We have also invested in sales and marketing and development as planned for the second half of the year as we communicated in Q2. And we also have increased cost base as we are a listed company. All of these investments had a negative effect on the margin. We regard these as short-term effects and our guiding for the medium term remains unchanged. As we have invested in development, we develop more features and we go faster to market. As a consequence, we also capitalize more and Q4 CapEx constitutes 8% of sales. In Q3, we communicated on an ongoing evaluation of development projects for the group as none of the recent acquisitions had capitalized development costs so far in 2021. The evaluation is now complete and we capitalized an additional NOK 3.7 million for the period January to September. In the balance sheet, we see a few changes from Q3. We are still in a net cash position as we repaid our loans in connection with the IPO. The acquisition of HomeRun included earn-out considerations for 2021 and 2022. The 2021 earn-out targets were reached and the earn-outs have been included in the PPA. It will be paid out in 2022. In the cash flow statement, we have a strong cash flow from operations, offset by the capitalization and the negative effects of currency changes. The highlights in the financial table. We are maintaining a high gross margin. We have increase in payroll and operating expenses. This is driven by acquisitions and the contributed cost base as well as our investments in sales and marketing and development and increased cost base after listing. Financial items in Q4 are interest income and loss on currency changes. To sum it up, we have done 3 acquisitions in 12 months, which all have a dilutive effect on margin, but all of our solutions are profitable and have solid growth. We are in a net cash position and we are self-funded. This puts us in an excellent position to further execute on our strategy of profitable organic growth and M&A. Now Gustav will take you through a summary of outlook before we open up for Q&A.

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Kjartan. Our IPO targets 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. As Kjartan said, 2021 was a year with many changes. We onboarded 3 new solutions and people. Additionally, the listing in June required new internal and external processes, which we have implemented in second half of 2021. With the business rhythm now in place and a tuned organization focusing on the same goals, we stay very optimistic about capturing the future market opportunities. So Kjartan, please join me and let's move to the Q&A.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you very much. We have a few questions. [Operator Instructions] So first one, you have made several acquisitions, as you touched upon in the presentation. Can you talk a little bit about the integration work? How far have you come on that? And are there additional synergy effects that you expect to show and materialize during the coming quarters and 2022?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. Okay. So it's a great question. We have spent some time aligning the organization and making sure everyone is tuned in and understand and have the same goals. And like we talked about, we're now ready to move to 2022, and it's a new era for us. We did talk in last quarter about some of the initiatives we started, like Cordel and Kvalitetskontroll, are working closely together to make an integration. Bygglet and EL-VIS are also working together. And Congrid and HomeRun has also moved into the same offices and also doing things. So there's quite a lot of things happening. And I think we can expect to see the results in both the coming quarters, but also going into 2022, '23.

[Unknown Executive]

We have a few more questions. Could you provide some more detail around the investments you are making across R&D, sales and marketing?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, sure. Like we talked about earlier, I think software is all about creating recurring revenue, but also it's important for us to make sure that our customers can easily buy and onboard the solutions. So first of all, we have finalized some development initiatives in second half and especially in Q4, that has been very important, and sort of gives us a good -- like I said earlier, gives us a good start to 2022. But also, we invested in, like Kjartan said, decreased onetime revenue as we sort of onboard the customers on a SaaS basis and not charge for things like consulting and training and so on. So we're sort of offsetting some of that onetime revenue and rather make it easy for customers to onboard and to pay a lower fee and more easily onboard the solutions. I don't know, Kjartan, maybe if you have something to add.

[Kjartan Bo, Chief Financial Officer]

As Gustav said, we have finalized several development projects, giving us a great start during the year. And yes, we have nonrecurring revenue focus to transition to recurring revenue.

[Unknown Executive]

And can you also elaborate a little bit on the magnitude of sales, marketing and R&D investments in 2022, in dock terms? And how long do you think it will take to see the returns on your investment initiatives?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

I would say, we have invested now in the second half of 2021. As I said, this has, of course, a negative effect on margin in the short term, and we regard them as the short-term effects. That means that in the medium term, we keep our guiding, we see a positive effect already going into 2022. And yes.

[Unknown Executive]

You have also announced several partnerships and also framework agreements recently. Can you comment on the opportunities you see related to these partnerships announced in Q1 this year. And have you begun to see any new customer contracts as part of these frame agreements?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. I think these frame agreements are important because they are basically sort of a proof point from the partner that we are good to do business with. They typically go out and evaluate what type of solutions are in the market and they say, well, SmartCraft can deliver a really good solution for our members or for our customers. So we really approve of the solutions. So that's the start. And then together with the partner, we typically do marketing activities and sales activities. And that takes some time. It's not something that happens overnight. That's something that we're going to spend time on and the revenue is going to grow in 2022 and 2023 and '24. But the more type of these partners we have, the more we grow our revenue. So I think that's very good. Yes, we have some evidence of these partnerships, but not something I can disclose in detail.

[Unknown Executive]

One more question on your investments into product development. Is there any way you can give some color on which areas, products you are investing in?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, it is very much linked to what we said earlier on about, first of all, helping the customers to onboard easier. So that's one area. But also functionality and features and modules for upsell. That's quite important for us as well. And we have been working on this throughout 2021. And actually, it's good to see that we finalized several of those projects in late 2021, which we will benefit from in 2022.

[Unknown Executive]

A few questions on your M&A strategy and the M&A market. Can you update us on how you see the M&A market at the moment? Is there any difference in competition by geography? Anything to say about the pipeline in general and pricing?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. I think in general, the market is fairly similar. There's a number of players and so on. But as there's been a pressure on the software market in general, especially the listed software companies, this price pressure has not been reflected in the M&A market as far as we see. So we see that we are in dialogue with several good companies. We see that the prices are still quite high compared to maybe the rest of the market, to the listed companies. And like I mentioned, we want to be careful about how we use our money, so we can create shareholder value. But again, we are in some good dialogues with some companies. And I think the market is more or less the same, but a little bit pricey, especially recently, and it hasn't come down due to the latest volatility.

[Unknown Executive]

There's one question from Finland. Admicom, a listed software company that has communicated its ambition to internationalize through M&A. Do you consider Admicom as a relevant competitor to your products?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

I think I have talked about Admicom in several presentations. They have a slightly different strategy to us. They're very focused on Finland. They are doing a lot of different things that we don't want to be engaged in, things like accounting and accounting services and financials and so on, which is fine. Unfortunately, it doesn't scale very well outside Finland. So at the moment, we'll see what happens, but it's not a company that we are very concerned about when it comes to the markets we're in.

[Unknown Executive]

There is one final question so far relating to your medium and long-term financial targets. You have an organic growth target of 15% to 20% in the medium term. Do you plan for the majority of this to come from new customers or increasing revenue per customer?

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

It will be a mix of both. We see that currently we have more new customer wins as our growth. But now that we finalize more development, have new features, we expect more growth also from existing customers and average revenue per customer.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you. There are no more questions from the webcast.

[Gustav Line, Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. So then I would like to sort of just finish off. So like we said, we think we're in a very good position. This is a great market. We have some great solutions. We have great people on board. And we also strongly believe in organic growth in the markets we're in. And then acquisitions will come on top of that, but we will also have capital discipline in order to make the right targets at the right price. So thank you very much for listening in and have a great day.