Strongpoint ASA

OSE:STRO

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Jacob Tveraabak, Chief Executive Officer]

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this Q2 presentation of StrongPoint results. My name is Jacob Tveraabak. I will be presenting the main highlights today as the CEO. And with me, as always, I have Hilde Horn Gilen, our CFO. Before diving into the Q2 figures as such, I want to provide a short intro of StrongPoint to the, hopefully, satisfaction of both existing and, of course, new shareholders. So StrongPoint. Why on earth are we starting with a slide like this? Well, with the pandemic, there's -- has been -- is an unprecedented growth in grocery e-commerce. We are starting to get our fair share of attention both in Europe, in U.K. and overseas, as shown in some of these fabrications -- or publications that have been out there recently. And why is e-commerce so important for StrongPoint? Well, this is really the reason or the foundation behind, what we call, the double opportunity. So e-commerce is driving, on the one hand side, the margin pressure in the stores as more and more of the sales are going outside stores, leaving an opportunity for StrongPoint to provide the retailers and grocery retailers, in particular, with technology to make the store more efficient. So that's number one. Number two is that e-commerce, in and of itself, provides an opportunity for us to provide established players in the grocery retail market with the absolute best-in-class solutions needed to handle e-commerce efficiently. So that is the double opportunity for StrongPoint and why we are so preoccupied with what's happening in the e-commerce space. And as such, our purpose is really ensuring that we get retail technology in every shopping experience, online and offline, for smarter and better life. We are focusing on grocery retail. Why is that? Well, in addition to being the, by far, largest grocery -- I'm sorry, retail segment is also one of the most pickiest and difficult segments to serve, and we have the solution for that. There's naturally spillover effects to other retail sectors, but grocery is our focus. And if you have been following StrongPoint, you would see that the list of names and logos here is ever increasing quarter-by-quarter, which we are very, very proud of. And finally, before going into the Q2 figures, I just want to reiterate again StrongPoint's financial ambitions: a revenue of NOK 2.5 billion in 2025 and an EBITDA margin of 13% to 15%. And this is now as a pure retail technology company after we, in this quarter, divested our Labels business unit and, in Q4, divested our Cash Security business. And we're well on track to deliver on these financial ambitions. Now what's happened in Q2? 3 points. As always, I'll be going through the financials of the main figures. I'll talk about customer success and, lastly, provide a little bit more flesh to the bone on what's happening with achieving the ambitions for 2025. So number one, we have a very solid revenue growth in this quarter. We are growing 13% organic compared to last -- same quarter last year. Per technology, which we are basically growing across the board, but it should be pulled out that Norway, in particular, has had a very good quarter, up 30%, 3-0 percent, compared to same quarter last year; and Sweden, 17%. We are, in the first half, growing by 15%, all organic, in StrongPoint. And it should be said, although we don't talk about the order reserve, just this quarter, Norway announced deals worth NOK 300 million plus just this one quarter. So we're very proud of that as well and expecting those deliveries to be happening over many, many quarters to come. EBITDA. Clearly, NOK 12 million is not good enough. This corresponds to a less than 5% EBITDA margin. I think when we talk about the EBITDA, we need to explain why is this happening, and it's happening because of one reason, and that is Spain. If we had adjusted for Spain, I'll talk a bit more in detail about that, but if we had adjusted for Spain, just achieving breakeven, we would have been at NOK 32 million EBITDA and just south of 13% EBITDA margin. So it shows that we absolutely, as a group, have what is needed to get to the profitability levels we were -- want to be at. So I need to jump into talking about Spain as all the other markets are doing relatively well. As some of you would remember, we had a new -- or have a new managing director in Spain as of end Q1. And as you might expect with a new MD, you want to sort of really understand the details of the business. And what we haven't covered is, unfortunately, a discrepancy between the actual inventory and the registered inventory, particularly of cash management solutions. This is not something that happened within 1 quarter. This goes many, many quarters and years back. And what we're really doing here is accounting for that here and now in this quarter, but this goes back many, many quarters. I want to assure you, we feel very confident that this is the one-off write-down that we're doing. There's not going to be any more write-downs in Spain. So this is a cleanup of, call it, old fund or lack of control over many, many quarters. Operationally, we have a NOK 6 million negative EBIT impact, and that constitutes really of 2 things. One is the cash management sales are not at prepandemic levels, but they are growing. That's good. And they're increasingly growing as we're talking but not at the levels where we want it to be yet. And the other thing is that we have so many good grocery technology sales that are not just now commencing to be delivered. Commencing now, I'll be talking about Glovo but also self-checkout solutions, Click & Collect solutions coming into Spain, commencing in Q3 and going on. So I feel very confident that we will be improving our Spanish operations significantly, of course, not seeing the one-off come again but not least also the operations improving as we are moving on the business in Spain to also be a grocery retail technology provider. I need to talk also about the customer success that we've had in this quarter. So in Norway, we've had multiple sales orders announced: Coop Norway with a large electronic shelf label contract, NorgesGruppen with payment solutions. So cash wasn't dead in Norway after all. And just after this quarter, we also announced a similar type of deal with REMA 1000. So very happy that we see our Norwegian customers being very, very happy with the solutions we provide. Our marketing team has done a tremendous job in getting the attention of, in particular, our e-commerce solutions out there. So we're still growing the number of pilots in the U.K. and U.S. We have recently, in this quarter, also announced that Føtex in Denmark, part of Salling Group, put up their first Click & Collect locker. And just a couple of weeks later, Coop Denmark did exactly the same. So it's gearing up for a battle for the e-commerce customers in Denmark as well. And then finally, I should say, because we talked about Glovo in Q1, finally, we are now seeing integrations with the end customers' POSs happening, and I couldn't be more thrilled than to announce that Glovo has struck a deal with Carrefour using our picking solution to ensure that Carrefour's customers get the groceries as fast as only Glovo can deliver. And with that, of course, there is a lot of attention, in particular, in Spain but also outside Spain as Glovo is such a technology unicorn, providing or choosing StrongPoint's picking solution. So all the reasons we're very thrilled about the recent customer success stories announced and what's to come. Final page for me before leaving the word to Hilde. How are we doing on the strategic ambitions? Well, we have said for a long time, and now we really are a pure retail technology company. We will be posting a financial gain of the transaction. That's not to say that -- what the price is, but I can assure you that we achieved a price which we are very happy about. And we're very happy for Labels to have found a good industrial partner to grow it. But for StrongPoint, this means we have a lot of power. We have a very strong balance sheet to do the right things also going forward. So we are on the path to achieving the NOK 2.5 billion, 13% to 15% revenue -- or sorry, EBITDA margin. And we're doing that with also a number of investments and recruitments in the areas where we are going to grow. We have been growing our retail technology team with 30 people over the last year, in sales, in marketing, in IT security. And we are continuing to expense all the investments that we are doing. So there's no hidden gems in the balance sheet of investments awaiting to be depreciated over time. We're costing it all at this point in time. So I'm just very, very happy about the direction we're going in. We have the megatrends with us, and we are ready to capture and capitalize on those. So with that, Hilde?

[Hilde Horn Gilen, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Jacob. As always, we'll be presenting the -- some of the figures. And with the latest slide presented by Jacob, the divestment will, as done before, influence the figures historically. So I have included this slide so that you understand the development of the retail tech and how it looks now that we have divested both Cash Security and Labels. Due to the IFRS, Labels is also excluded in our profit and loss figures. But in our balance sheet, historically, they are included. So be aware of that when you read our figures. The yellow column here on the revenue side shows that the rolling 12 are above NOK 1 billion, and it's a steady growth from 2018. So we came by that underlying Jacob's explanation about the growth that we are seeing for our solutions. If you look at the EBITDA, it's also in positive trend, although the rolling 12 end of June is obviously impacted by the Spanish write-down of inventory. So, yes, we will continue to show these figures, and hopefully, we will have an improved Spanish operations going forward. If we look further down in the profit and loss statement, you will find that we do have some positive currency effects and accounting for NOK 3 million in the year-to-date figures and NOK 2 million in the quarter. And if you look at the Q2 figures for the earnings per share, you see that we are slightly above last year, which then had a negative effect of currency. So you need to understand that. But still a good earnings per share, both adjusted and the normal one, in the quarter. And this leads to an increase of the rolling 12 earnings per share, as you find to the right in the slide, so almost NOK 1 adjusted for in the past 12 months. Looking at the cash balance. We started the year with NOK 75 million in a cash balance. We add the EBITDA for the continued operations of NOK 26 million. And we also add the EBITDA of the discontinued operations, that is Labels, for the first half. That is shown as discontinued operations, and that's the way we will continue to report it through 2021. A small change of working capital. So the largest deviations between the cash position at year-end last year and now end of Q2 are the repayment of loan that we did in Q1 and also the payment of dividend that we did in Q2. We have a credit facility of NOK 100 million, so that disposable funds is NOK 124 million. Now obviously, we have a cutoff situation. As of the 30th of June, we have removed the Labels business, but the payment for the first part of the transaction will come in 1st of July. So there is a cutoff there. And this leads to a increase of our net interest-bearing debt from Q1 to Q2. Now this is only temporary, as we received and have already received the first payment of the divestment of Labels. So 0.74 is the net leverage multiple. This will be minus from Q3 and onwards. And still, it's a fantastic, good financial position to fund the growth and M&A activities. So that's actually the presentation of Q2. You will find information -- much more information in our report. Please reach out if you have questions or comments. We will try to answer that as good as possible. And we will meet up again in Q3 report, 21st of October. And with this very nice picture of our locker from a summer place in Norway, Helgeroa, I wish you all a fantastic summer holiday. Thank you.