Smartcraft ASA

OSE:SMCRT

Earnings Call Analysis

SmartCraft Posts Strong Growth and Margin

SmartCraft, a software provider for the construction industry, demonstrated strong financial performance in its latest report. The company's annual recovery revenue reached NOK 387 million, with a solid 14% organic annual growth in Q4 compared to the previous year's Q4. The organic recurring revenue in key markets Norway and Sweden climbed by 17%, contributing to almost 90% of SmartCraft's recurring revenue. Total revenue for the year grew by 20% to NOK 402 million. The adjusted EBITDA saw a significant boost, spiking by 27% to NOK 167 million, pushing the EBITDA margin to an impressive 42%. Furthermore, the company noted a decrease in churn from 7.9% in Q3 to 7.2% in Q4, indicating improved customer retention amid a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Surging Leads and a Strong Norwegian Market

The company reported a significant 122% surge in leads compared to the previous quarter, alongside a robust 5% sequential increase as well. Thanks to consistent marketing efforts and strategic partnership deals, nine new franchise chains of plumbers were onboarded, signaling access to a broad network of potential customers.

Stable Revenue Pipeline and Low Churn

Revenue pipeline remains stable at prior quarter's levels, which, when combined with a notably low churn rate, suggests a potential spike in revenues once the market revives.

Spiking Brand Exposure and Successful Trade Fairs

Year-over-year, the company's brand exposure soared by nearly 600%, driven by a mix of digital campaigns and high-profile trade fair presence, indicating a stronger market visibility.

Boost in Online Sales and Lead Conversion

Online sales ramped up, climbing from 21% to 28% year-over-year, demonstrative of a successful push towards digital channels. Moreover, the conversion rate from meetings to sales improved marginally from 55% to 58%, hinting at increasing sales efficiency.

Revenue Growth and Recurring Revenues

The company saw its total revenue grow by 18% for the quarter, with a sharp focus on increasing its share of recurring revenue, which is foundational to the business model.

EBITDA Margins and R&D Investment

While the EBITDA minus R&D CapEx margin was slightly down, the adjusted EBITDA margin rose by 1.1 percentage points, pointing to underlying profitability improvements, excluding certain year-end adjustments.

Strong Cash Flow and a Resilient Balance Sheet

The balance sheet has remained stable, with a net cash positive stance, bolstered by an operating cash flow increasing by 11% compared to the same quarter last year. The company's main performance metric, the Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), grew by 21% year-over-year, with organic growth at 14%.

Price Increases and Future Revenue Impact

Prices were adjusted upwards between 5% and 8%, moderated from the previous year's 8% to 10% increase, aligning with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Revenue effects from these price hikes are anticipated to present a tailwind throughout the next year, as they are implemented with contract renewals.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Gustav Line, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to the Q4 presentation. My name is Gustav Line, and I'm the CEO of SmartCraft. Today, we'll talk about the financials, but I'll also talk about the market and what we do to grow our position. I'll be joined by Kjartan, our CFO, a little bit later, who'll take you through some more details. And then, in the end, we'll be -- have a Q&A session, and you're more than welcome to post questions in the digital tool as we go along.So, first of all, SmartCraft, what do we do? Well, we deliver software to small and medium enterprises in the construction industry. And these are faced with several challenges. First of all, in good times, they have a margin between 0% and 5%, which leads to a high level of bankruptcies, especially when times get tougher. And when you look at the statistics -- and I'm going to talk about some statistics for the Norwegian market, but they are quite applicable to other markets as well.So if we look at the statistics for the Norwegian market, 29% of all the bankruptcies are actually related to the construction industry. There's also a high level of conflict between the construction companies and their customers. And we can see this when we look again at statistics, that 1/3 of -- or actually the top 3 complaints are from construction companies, or about construction companies.And another thing that is bugging this industry is that there's a high level of accidents and, unfortunately, deaths as well. And again, looking at statistics, 29% of all work-related accidents are actually from the construction industry. So in order to do something about these challenges, the regulators and the local authorities have enforced more demand for documentation and reporting, which means that it's more difficult to be a construction company because you have to comply with all the rules and regulations and have all the documents to prove it.So what we do is to provide overview and insight -- and business insight for these companies. And we give them control of the people out in the field and material related to the projects and the documentation that they need and the information that is captured for this documentation. And having this information digitally means that we can also avoid conflict, because we will be able to have digital tracking of information with the customers.We do have checklists for health and safety that people can use in their mobile tools when they're out in the field, which basically means that they have safety at their fingertips. And we also provide checklists to make sure that the projects are built according to rules and regulations, which is very important, again, to beat these challenges. So what we do is to make sure that they are in control of these mission-critical areas. So we are in need to have a solution helping customers to increase revenue, but also to increase their margin.Our main target segment is the renovation part of the construction industry. And if you look at the graph to the right, you'll see that renovation is part of the industry. It's bigger than the new build part of the industry and it's also less volatile and it has a consistent growth over several years. So we think this is a very good position to be in.When you read about the challenges facing the construction industry and that everything is really difficult these days, bear in mind, this is about the new build part of the construction industry. It's about the challenges facing architects, engineers and so on.The renovation sector is actually doing quite okay. 97% of the buildings that you can see around you are actually existing and there are only 3% that are being built new every year in a normal year. So these existing buildings are in need of renovation and maintenance and services and that's basically what our customers do.Another thing that is important to bear in mind is that -- the energy efficient needs for existing buildings, to be more energy efficient. It's a trend that has been going on for years and that is a very good thing for us because most of our customers are actually electricians and plumbers and they are very much in demand to help out to make these buildings more energy-efficient. And lastly, bear in mind, the construction industry is among the least digitalized industries, so there's a great opportunity in this space.We have a leading position in the Nordics and we have had consistent and strong growth over several years. You'll also see that our margin is very strong. Bear in mind, we've done 10 acquisitions over the last 5 years, which actually means that our margin increase from 36% to 42% is quite strong because we've lifted these 10 companies from about 0 margin up to being part of the group with now 42% margin. Today, we have more than 200 people across the Nordics, which I think is a very good base for further growth, both in the Nordics and also outside.So let's talk about the Q4 highlights. Our annual recovery revenue is at NOK 387 million. And we have a 14% organic ARR growth in the last quarter compared to Q4 a year ago. We also see that our adjusted EBITDA is at 39% and the underlying growth in EBITDA is actually 1.1 percentage points.Also, when we look at our churn, I'm really pleased to see that our churn -- in Q3, our churn was 7.9%, but it was actually trending down at the end of Q3. And then, when now that we report churn in Q4, it's down to 7.2%. So really pleased to see that churn have come down in a macroenvironment that has been challenging. But as you can see, we've been doing quite good.As a matter of fact, when we look at the market, and we look at the 2 biggest markets, Norway and Sweden, we can see that we have an organic recurring revenue in Norway and Sweden of 17% in 2023. 17%. I think that's quite good. That accounts for nearly 90% of the revenue -- the recurring revenue of SmartCraft.So if you look at 2023 as a whole, now that we just finished the whole year, pleased to see that revenue has increased to NOK 402 million. That's an increase of 20%. And we see that the adjusted EBITDA is at NOK 167 million. That's an increase of 27%. And that's actually 42% margin, which we think is good, and also showing the scalability of the business, and the fact that we have a very low risk business model. And I'm pleased to see that we have a strong net profit and also very solid operational cash flow.So to look a little bit more about the market, I've taken out some statistics from our systems to show you the usage from our customers, just to sort of prove that the market is in fairly good shape. If you look at electronic invoices on our largest solution, Cordel, you'll see that the usage of electronic invoices has increased every quarter throughout 2023. That's the chart at the bottom left.If we move to the chart at the top right, you'll see that the average number of projects that the Bygglet customer -- and Bygglet is the biggest solution in Sweden -- The average number of projects that [ just ] Bygglet customer is working with is actually in Q4 -- sorry, throughout the year, more or less consistent as it has been over the last 3 years, again, proving that these customers are working in renovation and they have [ just ] plenty to do as they've had the last 36 months.At the bottom right, you'll also see a graph showing the checklists per customer. And I'm pleased to see that the amount of checklists per customer has actually increased a lot in Q4, again, showing that there is quite a lot of activity. This is on our solution Cordel.So moving to the segments. If we look at the Swedish market, we can see that we've managed to have a strong momentum in the last quarter. And if we look -- if we talk about some of the marketing and sales activities, I think we can prove that. Bygglet carries most of the revenue in Sweden. And in Q4, we increased the number of booked meetings by 88% compared to the year before. 88% increase in booked meetings.We also saw something else that we really liked and that's the fact that the sales time has been reduced to 21 days compared to 28 days a year ago. And the sales conversion, the fact that when we convert a meeting to a sales, has also stayed at a very nice and high level. So all these booked meetings is a good indication of future revenue. We also launched a successful pilot with an integration to Visma eEkonomi, which is good because it opens up a new revenue channel for -- in the Swedish market.If we look at the Finnish market, we still feel challenged in the Finnish market. The reason for that is that we have more customers, or we have customers that are more focused towards the new build area. And as you can see, there's a 51% reduction in building permits from September to December, which obviously affects these types of customers. So our growth in Finland is reduced due to the fact that these customers don't open up new projects, but they close down some of the ones that they have. So that's what we -- that's the challenge we have in Finland.On the positive side, we do see a lot of interest when we look at other parts of the market. We see a 100 -- we have 100% -- more than 100% growth in revenue -- sorry, in number of leads. And when we talk about a lead, it's a potential customer that we haven't had a meeting with, somebody that has responded to us or been in contact with us and we haven't had a meeting with them yet. But we've had an increase in -- 122% in number of leads compared to last quarter from Q4 to Q3.And then when we look at the customer revenue pipeline, that's the customers that we've had a meeting with, they have a budget and they are planning to buy software. That revenue pipeline has increased by 10%.Another thing that we think is positive is that the churn is at a really low level, which really means that our customers that have sort of downgraded, or they don't have projects that are live because the market is in decline, means that when the market picks up, this revenue will pick up really rapidly. So there is a growth tailwind that we expect when the market [ turns ].So if you look at Norway, the Norwegian market has stayed really strong throughout 2023, and we're pleased to see some great sales and marketing activities in the last quarter. We signed 9 partner contracts, and a partner to SmartCraft is typically a franchise chain of plumbers. So they could all be under one brand, under one franchise, and one franchise chain could consist of, let's say, 100 plumbing companies.So having signed these contracts actually access -- gives us access to a lot of potential customers. So we have renewed 6 contracts, and we have signed 3 new contracts in the last quarter. So we're very pleased with that. We also see that the number of leads have increased by 5% quarter-over-quarter, and that the revenue pipeline we have is strong and at the same level as at the end of Q3.We work in a structured way with marketing and sales, and we measure -- try to measure everything we do. And I'm really pleased to see the results we have in Q4. Our brand exposure means the marketing activities and the activities we do, where we get the response from, the people we try to reach, whether it's people leaving a name or whether we are at a fair and people leave a name, that's the brand exposure. That has increased by nearly 600% in the last quarter compared to the year before. We think that's pretty strong and shows that we are very visible out in the market.And we are very visible doing both digital activities on social media, but also attending trade fairs and so on. And in Q4, we attended 2 big trade fairs, Elmassan and Bygg Reis Deg. Bygg Reis Deg is only arranged every second year, it's in Norway, and it's this -- biggest construction fair in Norway.And the good news from these fairs is that we see that the number of stands and the number of people attending the fairs is at the same level as before COVID. So it seems that there is good activity in the market. There's a lot of people that are interested in going to these fairs and also learning more about the digitalization.We created -- we also saw something really good in Q4. We saw that our online sales increased from 21% online sales in Q4 '22 to 28% of new customers that came through online sales in Q4 2023. So we think that's a very positive thing, being able to automize more of our processes. So as a result from these marketing activities, we see that we have generated 23% more leads in Q4.And we also see something else that I think is very nice. We see that our conversion rate from meeting to sales has actually increased by -- increased to 58%. So we convert 58% of the meetings to sale compared to 55% in Q3 2023. So all in all, this has given us a really good start to 2024. And we're very pleased about the activities and the -- activity levels that we've had, but also the response we've seen in the market.So with that, I would like to give the word to Kjartan, who will take us through more of the details about the financials.

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Good morning. So Gustav told you about the highlights of the quarter. Now let's look at -- a bit more at each segment. So the market environment is fairly similar as previous quarters. And we see a very good pace in growth in our 2 biggest segments, Norway and Sweden, as Gustav said. While Finland is still challenged by the enterprise customers and the new build market.Looking at the profitability, that is also very good. In Norway, at first glance, the EBITDA is decreasing. But as we had the year-end adjustments of capitalization, that is actually both in 2022 adjustments and 2023 adjustments, the underlying profitability is actually increasing. Similar in Sweden, we had some year-end adjustments, but we have a greatly improved profitability due to scalability in Sweden.In Finland, the topline performance is also reflected in the profitability, but with good cost control we maintain the profitability at a very high level.Total growth -- total revenue growth in the group in Q4 is 18%. And we focus very much on having a high recurring revenue share. Recurring revenue is what drives our business and enables the scalability. So in all parts of our nonrecurring revenue streams, we always evaluate if we can transfer it into a recurring revenue stream. And in Q4, we are now at more than 97% recurring revenue share.In Q4, we increased our marketing spending, primarily relating to the trade fairs that Gustav mentioned. These are held every other year, so we have no comparable cost in 2022. And together with the dilution from the latest acquisition, EBITDA minus R&D CapEx margin is slightly down.When we look at the EBITDA margin -- adjusted EBITDA margin, it's also down from last year. But if we exclude the year-end adjustments of the capitalizations, adjusted EBITDA margin is actually increased by 1.1 percentage points. And of course, looking at the R&D CapEx, that is also affected by the year-end adjustments. If we exclude the year-end adjustments from the R&D CapEx, Q4 2023 is isolated, 8.7%, and is an increase from Q4 2022 of 1.6 percentage points.Our cash flow is and has always been very strong. We are cash positive every quarter, and that is true, of course, also for Q4. Q4 2023 operating cash flow is increasing by 11% compared to Q4 last year. And we see a very strong growth the whole year through.When looking at the balance sheet, our balance sheet is very stable. It has the same structure as before, and we are net cash positive. There are, if we look at the details in the balance sheet, 2 items that is significantly changed from last year, that is deferred revenue and accounts receivable. The reason behind this is that we try always to improve our business and our routines. And what we formally have invoiced in January, the annual fees, are now invoiced in December 2023. And as we did the invoicing mid-December with the due date in January, these changes only affect the balance sheet. It does not affect the revenue or the cash flow.Our main metric, the ARR, grew by 21% year-over-year. Organically, the ARR grew 14%. And if we look quarter-over-quarter, it grew 4% organically. The growth is driven by, of course, sales and upsales, acquisition. But as we normally do this time of the year, we have increased our prices starting in December. We increased our prices in line with CPI. And as the inflation was lower this year than last year, so is our adjustments. We increased the prices now between 5% and 8%, versus 8% to 10% last year.While we increased our prices in December, the customer contract value and the revenue effect is spread throughout the year. This is because we increased prices upon the automatic contract renewals. So all our price increases and revenue effects have a tailwind throughout 2024.And with that, Gustav, the word is yours.

[Gustav Line, executive]

Thank you, Kjartan. So let's also talk a little bit about some product highlights. We talked earlier about the Visma eAccounting integration that was launched, or actually piloted in Q4, looking good going into 2024. Also, we have a new Accounting Connector that we have released sort of throughout 2023. And in Q4, we see that we pass 10,000 messages daily across this scalable, flexible platform. And these 10,000 messages are actually sort of connected to different accounting systems in a smart and very sort of flexible way. So we're very pleased with that. It shows that we are able to scale in a good and proficient way.We're also looking into how we can use AI in our interaction with the customers. So we're doing some tests to see how people working in customer success can utilize AI, but also how AI can be a direct tool to our customers. And the finding so far is that it looks really promising, but I'll tell you more about that later. And also, we are preparing for the launch of SmartCraft Calculation in Q2 and hopefully be able to tell you more about that in about 3 months' time.So to sum up the presentation, we are super focused on being close to our customers and listen to their needs and make solutions and services that fit into their needs and what is important for them to be competitive. We also want to focus on being very visible in the market to create a lot of leads and a lot of revenue -- building nice revenue pipeline in the future. And we want to see how we can automize as much as possible of our processes. We talked a little bit about sales automation and also about what we can do in self-service. We are very excited about that and we'll see how we can take more steps in that direction.We do have a very flexible and good business model, like Kjartan talked about. We will see how we can invest smart in good new initiatives to win market share, but also be a bit prudent on how we spend our money. We think it's good to be disciplined and get good return on investment.And finally, we have seen that the market for M&A has been fairly highly priced over the last 2 years. We can see that it's coming down slightly, which we think is promising and hopefully be able to do some acquisitions also in the near future.To sum it up also, we reiterate our medium-term guiding of 15% to 20% organic growth and we expect our margins to increase due to the scalability and synergy of our business.So with that, we'll move on to Q&A. And Kjartan, please join me and we'll take some questions.

[Unknown Executive]

So we have a question about the price increases for the yearly invoicing done in December 2024. What was the price increases that you have put in place?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

We have adjusted our prices in line with CPI. We do that every year. In December, we increased our prices between 5% and 8% depending on market and solution.

[Unknown Executive]

Can you put some more flavor on the development so far in 2024 with regards to churn and the development in Finland?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

I don't think we should disclose any 2024 figures at this stage.

[Gustav Line, executive]

And as we talked about, the churn has come down in the group from Q3 to Q4. It's a bit difficult to say whether it's going to go further down. But we continuously work to have good initiatives and make sure it goes as close -- as low as possible.

[Unknown Executive]

Can you say something about the development of the competitive landscape? Do you see any new entrants or players leaving?

[Gustav Line, executive]

We think in 2021, we saw -- well, with the bonanza we had in the IPOs and so on in 2021, we saw a lot of new entrants coming into the market. Then with the challenges that [ has ] been facing the macroenvironment both in construction and other markets, that has slowed down dramatically. So we have actually seen less competition over the years -- last years. But obviously, there are also some changes with EQT acquiring 2 competitors in the Swedish market. We don't really see a change at the moment. We think that's -- it's good for competition, it's good for attention in the market and also maybe an opportunity for SmartCraft going forward, especially in the short-term.

[Unknown Executive]

The M&A activity has been low for a while now. Do you see more attractive targets in the Nordic region? How about outside the Nordic? Do you see potential to expand beyond your core markets in the next couple of years?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. So, like I mentioned at the end of the presentation, prices have been -- price expectations have been really high and they are starting to come down, which is good. It makes discussions a lot easier. We have a long list of potential targets both in the Nordics, but also outside. So yes, with more normalized expectations, we expect to be able to do more M&A than we have done in 2023.

[Unknown Executive]

How are you working to try the online sales [ this year ]?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. It's a good question. What we do is basically -- it's important that online sales should not -- that the customer shouldn't feel that we are jeopardizing the buying experience. So it has to be a good buying experience, so they just don't jump off during the buying experience. So not everything is easy to sell online, but some of our services and some of our software is possible to sell because it's quite easy to understand the concept and what you buy.For the more complex solutions like Cordel and Congrid, for example, it's a little bit more face-to-face. So we try to make a good customer journey, and really to make it as easy as if you were speaking to a person and easy to understand what you buy. And I think that's maybe the secret behind it.

[Unknown Executive]

Could you provide some further color on the success of your cross-selling initiatives, and what have you done in the pipeline related to this for 2024 and 2025?

[Gustav Line, executive]

The cross-selling initiatives are happening. It's not a big portion of our revenue, so it's not really a big sort of part of our revenue pipeline. But the good news is we see more of this happening, for example, in the Norwegian market, where we do more around electro, where we have several solutions. So we do more cross-selling. And you will see more cross-selling happening in 2024. We don't have a number on it, but it's going to happen. So again, still sort of early days, but it's part of our strategy to see how we can both synergize some of our initiatives, but also synergize some of our pricing. So it's easy for our customers to buy one if you have the other.

[Unknown Executive]

For 2024, do you expect the percentage of sales in marketing to be higher than last year?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Sales to marketing -- sales and marketing to be higher?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

I would say we expect to be roughly in the same level, but we always look at opportunities and how we can use marketing and sales to increase our growth. But we do have a very focused mind on cost control, and we'll not do any major pushes without being quite confident in what we do.

[Gustav Line, executive]

And just to add a little bit of flavor on that. I think you will see that our sales resources are not growing as much as our marketing resources. So we'll grow marketing at a higher pace than we do. We have a really good sales force and they are quite scalable as they are today. So we don't need to add a lot of sales resources. We'll spend more money on marketing.

[Unknown Executive]

Do you expect increased delay or defaulted payments from the customers in 2024?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Well, no, not really because we invoice our customers in advance. And of course, we have a potential for a month delay or something. But we are quite fast in shutting down their access if an invoice is not paid. So we don't expect any major increases in defaults and delays.

[Unknown Executive]

The organic ARR growth picked up quite a bit in Sweden relative to early in 2023. What is driving the improvement?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. We talked about this a few times at the last presentations, but for people that are not that familiar with it, we did some changes in the sales team in the beginning of 2023. We got a new sales leader and a new team leader in sales. And they have been driving sales in Sweden in a very structured way and I think that's been giving really good results. And yes -- and really, again, our solutions fit the market really well. So it's just a matter of being out in the market, being visible with marketing and so on, which is also part of the journey. So marketing and sales, very close follow-up, that gives good results.

[Unknown Executive]

Did you see an improving churn rate throughout the quarter?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

In short terms, yes. We did see increase in bankruptcies in Q4 in the market as a whole, but churn rate decreased quite steadily throughout the quarter, yes.

[Unknown Executive]

How much of the increase in other operating expenses was due to the new [ headquarter ]?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

The Oslo office. None of the expenses in 2023 are relating to the new office in Oslo. We moved in January 1.

[Unknown Executive]

Are you planning on hiring more sales and marketing and developers to reach your 2024 targets?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. We do plan to hire, but not that -- we do plan to increase our workforce more or less at the same pace that we've done in the past, which -- but not any dramatic increase. So it's very much keeping our margin -- or increasing our margin like we communicated as well earlier on.

[Unknown Executive]

Then we have one final question and that is, with a strong increase in lead generation, do you expect to be closer to the higher end of the guidance in 2024?

[Gustav Line, executive]

I think we gave quite a lot of information when we said that we have a good start to 2024. It's a tough market. We work hard to deliver on our guiding. I don't think we should say anything more than that. Of course, we'll do everything we can to have a great year and focus on every quarter.And with that, thank you very much for joining in, and thanks for great questions.