Volue ASA

OSE:VOLUE

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Volue's Presentation of the Fourth Quarter 2021 Results. My name is Trond Straume, and I'm the CEO of Volue. Together with me today, I have Arnstein Kjesbu, who is our CFO. There will be opportunity to submit questions throughout the presentation and we will hold a Q&A section at the end.Volue with it's heritage has been pioneering greentech for decades with focus on industries critical to society. Our research work started the power industry more than 50 years ago, and we're now one of the largest software companies in Norway. Creating Volue in 2020 has helped us become a front runner with digital coverage along the clean energy value chain, from monitoring using sensors to realize cash in trading. Building from our success in the Norwegian home market, we have now earned the trust of more than 2,200 customers across more than 40 countries. At the core of our value offering -- at the core of our value offering is our platform. We measure success by how the platform is utilized by our customers, led by more than 30 billion automated calculations in the cloud, we execute more than 25 million trades every year.Our sensor platform collects 120 trillion data points from a 45,000 installations. These numbers increase every year and this is how we retain 99% of our customers. Volue is active in 3 segments, all with relevance to the transition to renewable energy. For the Energy segment, we decided to expand from a dominating Nordic position in 2013 and into Continental Europe. Since then, we worked to expand our platform into thermal, solar, wind, batteries, et cetera. This is important to our customers as they continue to operate their existing assets while expanding capacity in new asset types.For our Power Grid business, we enjoy a strong market position in the Nordics with decades of experience, supporting our customers, building probably the strongest grid in Europe and now being tested by the EV revolution. We believe that we can expand our footprint on the back end of our market position in the Energy segment.With our Infrastructure business, we have so far been focused on SaaS transformation in a home market with more than 900 customers in the infrastructure construction business and covering 84% of the population in Norway with our water and wastewater business. Combined with ongoing expansion to Sweden and Denmark, we believe in further increased profitable growth in Scandinavia.Before we come into the performance of the fourth quarter, I'd like to reflect back on 2021. And I'd like to measure our performance against the priorities and ambitions we shared with you this time last year. On the left, you can see what we said. Our goal was to reach NOK 1 billion in revenues with more than 20% EBITDA margin. We want to achieve this by accelerating ARR growth in parallel with acquisitions, increased sales performance and listing the company on Oslo Stock Exchange. I'm very proud to announce that we met our ambitions. In fact, we exceeded revenue goals and adjusted EBITDA margin. We delivered a strong 17% growth in ARR, while acquiring ProCom and completing 2 integrations. Taking into account that we delivered this performance despite managing the cyber incident in Q2, I'm really impressed by the relentless efforts from the whole team, creating an even more robust company entering into 2022.Now let's look at some of the key developments of the Volue Group in the fourth quarter. Looking back at the financial performance in the quarter, we delivered revenues of NOK 312 million, which represents 30% growth compared to last year. The Energy segment was the largest growth driver with an impressive 51% revenue growth. We continue to grow our recurring revenues to NOK 188 million, which is 17% higher than Q4 2020. SaaS revenues ended on NOK 65 million in fourth quarter, which is a strong 36% growth compared to the same period last year.Looking at the subsequent events. We completed the integration and rebranding of both Likron and ProCom. With 2 acquisitions completed, we're starting 2022 with a fully integrated sales and marketing team. We have more than 2,200 customers and we closed more than 3,200 contracts last year. And we delivered on our market expansion strategy by opening an office in Tokyo, Japan. The exploration of North America as a new market is progressing and the fact that we continue to close business in the U.S. helps increase our understanding of the market potential. We managed to close a number of strategic contracts during the year, and fourth quarter was no different. We ended the year with a strategic breakthrough contract with the largest renewable energy company in Spain, cementing our position as the market leader in Iberia.For the section of results for the fourth quarter of 2021, I will hand over to Arnstein Kjesbu, our CFO. Arnstein?

[Arnstein Kjesbu, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Trond. I will now go through the financial performance for the fourth quarter in 2021. Volue has finished off a very strong year. We are proud to say that we met our financial ambitions and most of all, the financial KPIs that we are most pleased to deliver on is a growth in recurring revenue. This is core, and we keep on building the base quarter-by-quarter. Following a challenging cyber in Q2, we are pleased to report a strong second half of 2021.Our performance in the fourth quarter is very solid. Operating revenues ended at NOK 312 million. This gives a growth rate of 30% in Q4, with an organic growth rate of 21% compared to fourth quarter 2020. The Energy segment grew with 51%, and we especially see this through uplift in recurring revenues in addition to strong growth in nonrecurring revenues following trading advisory services from a very volatile power markets. Volue continues to invest in scaling the organization to meet our long-term ambitions, and this has partly influenced our margins in the period. Adjusted EBITDA margins ended at 18%, somewhat down from last year. The Cyber insurance settlement on NOK 20 million is not included in operating revenue and hence settlement has not improved our adjusted EBITDA margins.We currently are taking strategic investments to scale for further growth that impact our adjusted EBITDA margin. Growth and scalability is core for our business for improving our margins over time. And we will keep on strengthening our product offerings and SaaS platform. We expect the R&D CapEx to increase going forward, up from the level in Q4 to capture new market opportunities.Our main growth is coming from the Energy segment with a growth rate of 51%. We see a very strong volatility in the power markets and this creates a tailwind for our trading advisory services as a part of the portfolio. The power market volatility creates increased demand for our services, our business outside Nordic is growing rapidly and in the home market, we see a strong development within portfolio management as a service, combined, this creates a strong growth in SaaS revenues.The adjusted EBITDA margins improved following a strong uplift in SaaS and overall sales, with an improvement in adjusted EBITDA margins from 16% to 19%. The investment level from -- for the era will increase going forward. For our Power Wood segment, we had a quarter with a strong growth of 19%. The growth is driven by strong sales and good progress on project deliveries, giving us a solid uplift in ARR levels and furthermore, we have a good market outlook. The margins in the quarter is strengthened from Q3, but decreased from -- compared to last year. The main reason for this increased activity to expand our market footprint. The combination of increased activities from the market expansion and go-live of our delivery project in Sweden pulled the profit margins down for the area compared to Q4 2020. However, we expect margins to improve for the area going forward.Volue also invest quite significantly in addressing a new market for distributed energy resources, which impacts margins. We expect the CapEx levels to increase for the area going forward. For our Infrastructure segments, we are pleased to see that the shift in business models are progressing as planned. This is an expected short-term revenue impact, but building shareholder value more quickly. Overall, strong ARR sales in the quarter. The margins is stronger compared to Q4 2020 with more of a spending moved towards R&D investments. We continue to invest in our SaaS platform and the CapEx level going forward will slightly increase in the midterm range.Growing our recurring revenue is core for Volue as a software company and a growth journey is based on the uplift in our annual recurring revenues. Our share of revenues from ARR is 64% for the last 12 months and in the quarter, Volue generated NOK 188 million in recurring revenue, creating a growth of 17%. The growth rate in ARR is driven from all our segments and in 2021, SaaS revenue grew with 50%, leaving the SaaS share on 21% out of total revenues for the last 12 months. And this we are very pleased with it.Growth in annualized recurring revenue base is mainly driven by new sales. As stated previously in the presentation, we see strong sales in the quarter, and this gives an uplift in the base. Since the IPO, our recurring revenue base has grown with 27%. This combined with low churn is a proof point of our growth patch and profitability plan. At the end of Q4, our ARR-based annualized recurring revenue on a 12-month basis is [ NOK 753 ] million. In the base, we also see a growth due to some uplift to upsales on existing customers and price increases. The base was growing with 20% from Q4 2020 and during the period, we have seen almost no churn. This leaves our churn level at 1%.Then I will give the word back to Trond Straume who will go deeper into the industry development and the strategy.

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Arnstein. The purpose of Volue is to help our customers succeed with a transition to renewable energy. Traditionally, energy production, like thermal and nuclear are being phased out in favor of renewable energies such as solar and wind. These new asset types are nonregulated, meaning that the production capacity is weather dependent. In addition, renewable energy is being installed where climate and political conditions are being met, not necessarily within the geographical reach for the critical demand. The consumer side becomes more unpredictable in a world that is ever more dependent on electricity. This means that the load on the grid is creating problems. The result is volatility in the power market, creating more opportunity and more risk for the power industry. Our customers are now talking about the need for wall-to-wall digitalization across processes and disciplines to manage the transformation. For a company like Volue, who has been serving a conservative energy industry for decades, this represents a shift change. So helping power producers, distributors and industrial consumers manage this transition, that is what we do, and we know how to do it.So here we are in a world ever more dependent on electricity. We closed down nuclear and coal power plants to deliver on our goals for the green transition. The new energy sources are a part weather-dependent solar and wind assets. Gas prices are rocketing as the geopolitical challenges leads to shortage of gas supply. The power industry has been widely recognized as stable, predictable and conservative for a century. However, a number of factors and colliding incidents creates concerns for governments and regulators. The consumers are left with unprecedented high power prices.In Volue, we have Europe's largest team of power market analysts. They see increased risk of power blackouts in certain weather scenarios with low wind and solar production in combination with low temperatures. This is a risk that is predicted to last for the next 10 years. We were all shocked by what happened in Texas last year, but this can be a reality in Europe too, when the balance between demand and supply gets out of control. In fact, the power industry battles this balance every single day.Here's a typical example. This is from Germany in April last year. Due to differences in supply and demand, customer was facing in balance cost of up to EUR 1,730 per megawatt hour. A disaster for the holder of the imbalance. And a unique opportunity for the company prepared to capitalize on a volatile market.Let's have a look at what the future holds. Even for Volue, having Europe's largest analysis team, it is hard to give an exact guidance for the energy market. The explanation can be in parts described by these 2 charts. The green shift triggers a close race between the increase in supply and demand with periods of shortage of supply. Also bear in mind that the new production capacity being fed into the system is by and large a weather-dependent renewable energy sources. So in many ways, you can say that our end markets is experiencing what we think is a perfect storm, a storm that is projected to last for decades. And this is why we created volume. We offer an unrivaled landscape of capabilities, allowing our customers to increase performance in a volatile market.We define the clean energy value chain in 3 steps: analyze, plan and operate and monetize. For each step in the value chain, our customers carries out a number of activities to monetize power production. So our unique coverage along the clean energy value chain puts us in [ full ] position to deliver game-changing services that helps our customers increase top line and reduce risk and protect profit margins.It is interesting to hear from our customers how Volue helps drive top line growth. To date, we focused on delivering 5% improvement to the -- translating to EUR 40 million increased revenues annually. Another example is the utility who achieved a return on investments in 3 months and saw a 3% improvement in the first quarter after go-live. So now we're looking to find the next 5%, 10% in total. In conversations with executives, we are often challenged if we can provide evidence upfront before commitment. Our answer is that we only need to realize 0.5% improvement to provide ROI in 12 months. In that way, it's an easy value-based sell. That concludes industry development and strategy.Now let's shift our focus to summary and outlook. Our services are very sticky as we are ingrained in the customers' business process and value creation and providing an integrated value chain in the cloud is the answer to our customers ask for wall-to-wall digitalization. And for us, this also opens up opportunities to cross-sell and upsell our capabilities, fueling growth.Looking back at the highlights of 2021. We continued delivering on our strategy of international expansion, and we closed more than 3,200 deals. The market remains strong and attractive, and we believe the integration of ProCom and Likron will further help cementing our position as a leading provider in Europe.As we did for 2021, we've set some priorities and ambitions for 2022. An important goal for us this year is to invest in market expansion outside our European home market. And we want to achieve that whilst maintaining a healthy EBITDA margin in line with Q4 2021. At the core of our growth strategy is to grow our recurring revenues through our ongoing SaaS transformation. The energy market is still quite fragmented, and we believe there is an opportunity to take a leading position in a much needed market consolidation. We operate in an attractive end market, and we focus on our investments for long-term scalable growth. And as we continue to pursue synergies within the Volue Group, we see there are many opportunities for increased operational efficiency.With a successful 2021 behind us, we are quite bullish about the future. We are now looking to exceed our NOK 2 billion revenue target for 2025. And there are 3 reasons why we believe in growth. First of all, our end market is growing. Our customer spend on advanced software solutions is growing as a consequence of the green transition and market changes. Second is European growth. We now have a solid footprint in the European market, and we continue to invest in sales and marketing outside the Nordic region, which still represents our largest source of revenue. Lastly, we believe Volue has a great opportunity to realize synergies by cross-selling our expanded portfolio of offering.Looking at our recurring revenues. We see that SaaS contracts holds double the amount of recurring compared to a traditional contract. This is because we take a larger responsibility when operating the software with an associated SLA or service level agreement. As we progress with SaaS transformation, we believe in an uptick in margins with EBITDA level of towards 30%. An important driver for the IPO was the opportunity for structural growth and using the volume share as a currency. We operate in a highly fragmented market of smaller, specialized players, which not necessarily can fully support their customers on their much needed transition to renewable energy.When we look at the landscape, we see 2 categories of players. One is established companies with a solid revenue stream but maybe with a somewhat dated technology stack. The other category of players is younger companies with great technologies, great people and IDs, but without a significant revenue stream and market penetration. We find these 2 categories of companies attractive for M&A, one for market access and the other to strengthen our capabilities along the value chain. We believe that Volue with its size and market reach can bring value to the industry by acting as a consolidator.So to summarize, we see the shift in noncontrollable energy sources lead to increased volatility and complexity for our customers, requiring more advanced software solutions. We in Volue, we help our customers with wall-to-wall digitalization of the clean energy value chain. Our ongoing SaaS transformation leads to growth in recurring revenues and uptick in EBITDA margins. And over time, we believe in EBITDA levels towards 30%. And we have increased our 2025 ambitions.Thank you for your attention, and we will now open for Q&A.

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

Then we have a question, turn on this one. Kari?

[Kari Eide Hartvedt, Analyst]

Kari from Pareto here. First of all, congratulations with reaching your 2021 goal of NOK 1 billion in revenues. However, I am wondering about the EBITDA margin. It's slightly softer compared to Q4 2020 and also Q3 2021. What are the primary drivers of that slightly contracting EBITDA margin in this quarter?

[Arnstein Kjesbu, Chief Financial Officer]

The main is, we keep on investing in our organization. And so this is a plan in increasing staff for expanding into new opportunities in the international markets. So that's the main reason why we see that lift. We also have a slightly impact -- one-off impact from a project loss. So that also is reflecting the margin on the power grid area.

[Kari Eide Hartvedt, Analyst]

Okay. And that's also leading to my next question. If this 18% EBITDA adjusted margin is the base for the 2022 target? How will you achieve that expansion from 18% to 30% from 2022 to 2025, that's only 3 years. So that will be a very rapid EBITDA adjusted margin expansion. How will you achieve that?

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

I can start off. The main reason and also what we are undergoing now is that we are changing our business models and going through for a SaaS transformation. So we are trading one-off revenues towards growing our recurring revenue base. And also the investments we are taking by increasing also the SaaS and SaaS platforms and public offering in international markets. We see this as the foundation for growth and also then following the EBITDA margins to trend uplift year-on-year. So that's the basis on that we see opportunities for growth in the markets, and we are grabbing into this, not too concerned about the EBITDA margins for 2022 to scale the organization and a company further towards 2025. You want to add on.

[Arnstein Kjesbu, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. So if you look at the volumes revenue profile, we have a large portion of annual recurring revenues and SaaS revenues. Our main cost drivers are great people. So for us, it's all about investing for future growth. And the margin is basically reflect on how much we invest. But if you look at the sustainable revenue base in the company, it's quite remarkable and provides us a very strong foundation to think long term and invest in growth, in terms of capabilities and in terms of geographical markets.

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

Then we have some questions, and I think we will -- you answer this on Arnstein. You have previously talked about opportunities for realizing the cross-sales in the portfolio of companies. Can you give us an update around this, especially towards the Energy segments?

[Arnstein Kjesbu, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. So when we created volume in 2020, we merged 4 companies. Now we've progressed by acquiring 2 more. So there's 6 companies in total that has an interest in the Energy market. For us, it's been paramount to integrate the companies, sell our products under one brand and we've now merged together the complete sales and marketing organization across the Group and across our geographies. And for us, this provides a fantastic opportunities to address our existing customer base of 2,200 customers in total. We cover 40% of the participants on the European power exchanges, and it provides some fantastic opportunities to not only cross-sell, but also upsell to our customer base. And for me, I am pretty confident and pretty optimistic about our ability to execute every day. And there's an opportunity that will continue to exist for the next few years.

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

And then just another question. You said that you're strengthening the organization. What do you mean -- what are you doing in this area?

[Arnstein Kjesbu, Chief Financial Officer]

So we're doing a few things. We are realigning our operating model. So we are working hard to professionalize our functions. So we're quite clear really early that we are professionalizing our sales and marketing function. Now we're professionalizing even further our R&D organization, our product organization, our delivery organization and preparing for scalable growth. And this is particularly important as we acquire more companies and go into new markets, for instance, Japan that we just entered in late 2021.

[Trond Straume, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. Then there is no more questions unless you have some final remarks. So that's kind of ending up our session if you have any more questions. Thank you so much for your time. It's fantastic to be able to present such a strong end of the year last year. And all in all, 2021, we're super pleased with the performance, and we're looking forward to give you the next update. Thank you so much.