Zalaris ASA

OSE:ZAL

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

Good morning. My name is Hans-Petter Mellerud, I am the CEO of Zalaris. Please also welcome our CFO, Gunnar Manum. He is here with me today for this webcast presentation of Zalaris Q2 2021 results.We are using Teams for this purpose and hope that we will deliver on your expectations. [Operator Instructions]. Please observe that the presentation is being recorded. You will find a link to the recording on the Investor part of our website. Without further ado, let's move on to the presentation.After living with, COVID-19 for 5 quarters, operating under these conditions has become the new normal, and Team Zalaris continued delivering on all customer commitments. The majority of the team is still working from home. Revenue for the quarter ended at NOK 185.4 million, a slight reduction compared to last year, mainly due to currency movements of approximately NOK 11 million and an increase in deferred project revenue of NOK 7 million. We delivered an adjusted EBIT of NOK 11.4 million, down slightly from NOK 12.7 million last year, mainly coming from reduced processing volumes related to COVID-19 and temporary use of external consultants within professional services in Germany.During the quarter, we continued our strong signing streak, building up our future annual recurring revenue, ARR, through several new BPO agreements and extensions. The total new BPO contracts awarded year-to-year have expected ARR of NOK 71 million and net ARR of NOK 43 million when fully implemented. We completed our first acquisition since 2017 with ba.se Service & Consulting, GmBH, a leading provider of payroll and HR services within the German retail sector, providing a platform for further growth in Germany and Central Europe.New BPO contracts won as of 30th of June '21 and revenue from ba.se represent an expected increase in total annual revenue for Zalaris of more than 10% over the next 12 months. During the quarter, we successfully completed the NOK 120 million equity issue at NOK 60 per share with the purpose of financing further acquisitions. We paid a dividend of NOK 1 per share altogether NOK 19.6 million for 2020. At the end of the quarter, cash and cash equivalents were NOK 212 million, up NOK 83 million from last year.Taking a closer look at the figures quarter-by-quarter, consolidated revenue for Q2 amounted to NOK 185.4 million, down from NOK 198.4 million in the same quarter last year. As already mentioned, the lower revenue compared to last year is mainly due to currency movements. COVID-related temporary reductions within Managed Services in the Northern European region and significantly more deferred revenue resulting from implementation projects than the same quarter last year. I will comment on this a couple of slides ahead when looking at Managed Services in more detail.EBIT ended at NOK 11.4 million, slightly down from the same quarter last year. We continue optimizing our cost base as also exemplified through our FTE levels decreasing 1.2% to 714 FTEs. I will also cover the road map to our communicated 10% EBIT target later in the presentation.Our business model with long-term agreements and recurring revenue is in these times one of the favorites among investors. We have offered software as a service, business process as a service and outsourcing delivery models since we were founded 21 years ago. More than 90% of our revenue in Managed Services, around 55% of our revenue in professional services is recurring. Delivering payroll and HR services based on 1 common IT platform, the Zalaris PeopleHub, supported by local competent resources, has been key to our success and 20 years of uninterrupted growth. Our approximately 880 employees deliver services from 12 countries. In addition, we can deliver to 150-plus countries through partners with our PeopleHub concept.Our short-term aim is to deliver services with all solutions and people for all EU and European economic area countries. From the outset, our goal was to help customers reduce their direct process costs by 20% to 30% by outsourcing their payroll and HR processes to us, at the same time enabling them to operate seamlessly across borders. Triggered by COVID-19, large companies across the globe are reprioritizing their investments towards solutions that enable unified access to payroll and HR data for analytical purposes, digitization of growth flows, reduction of cost and securing business continuity of business-critical payroll.Working from anywhere has become the new normal, driving the need for fully digitized people processes. Even though we see many are delaying large investments needed projects to support working from anywhere and secure business continuity are being prioritized. Team Zalaris is extremely well positioned to support existing and new customers navigate and position themselves in this situation. Our innovative product and services portfolio cover the whole payroll and HR value chain.Our customer base of medium and large-sized customers is diverse in all our market-facing countries. Our largest market unit is Germany, delivering 31% of our revenue. Germany and the U.K. are our markets with the largest potential. Poland and U.K. are our fastest-growing market units. Poland has doubled revenue since our acquisition in 2017 and is now 100 people strong. However, we shall not forget that our potential in the Nordic is still large. If we were to achieve the same penetration in Sweden, Denmark and Finland, as we have in Norway, we could double our total revenue. As we will discuss later, our recent signings showcase this potential. As communicated in May and closed now in the beginning of August, we have acquired ba.se Service & Consulting GmbH, a leading provider of payroll and related HR services to the retail industry in Germany. Ba.se had revenue of EUR 6 million for the year ended 30th of September 2020, and an EBITDA of around 18%. We financed the transaction with cash. It is expected to be accretive already this year, the purchase price considered as an upfront payment and net performance-based element.The deal joined 2 leading providers of payroll and HR services in Germany and significantly enhances Zalaris presence and capability to serve the people-intensive retail sector. Ba.se serves approximately 30,000 employees of numerous customers, with footprint in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, with a team of around 80 people located in Hagen near Düsseldorf, Germany.The combination is a good match as we both have beefed our delivery capability on SAP's leading payroll and HR solutions. This gives us critical months and will, over time, allow us to utilize the scale of our platforms to offer new innovative solutions based on PeopleHub to ba.se's existing customers. Ba.se is also delivering some accounting services that we will explore the potential of expanding to a new service line.The addition of the ba.se team with their long experience in the demanding retail sector will increase our ability to serve this interesting customer segment. In addition to increasing our critical volume and presence in the retail industry, ba.se will give us a new location close to many of our existing and potential new customers in the Düsseldorf area. In total, this will make us more than 280 people strong in Germany and one of the leading players in payroll and HR outsourcing as well as related consulting services.The ba.se team has already displayed our competitiveness and ability to deliver organic growth by signing 2 new deals while we have been finalizing our agreements. Ba.se will be fully consolidated from this August. So welcome to the ba.se team.Then let's look at our segments. As previously mentioned, in Managed Services, we continue to see the impact of temporary lower volume of travel controls and other services resulting from COVID-19 related business activity and volumes amounted to approximately NOK 3 million to NOK 4 million for the quarter. Adjusted for the currency movements, the revenue for the quarter of NOK 125.8 million is similar compared to the same quarter last year. Keep in mind that most of the new signings from Q4 last year until today are still in the project phase and not recognize revenue before they are in production.In addition, in Q2, NOK 11.5 million was deferred versus NOK 3.1 million in the same quarter last year, and Gunnar will come back to this in his part. Despite the lower revenue, Managed Services continued improving their margins, delivering an EBIT of NOK 16.1 million for the quarter. Key drivers were implementing the Zalaris 4.0 service delivery concept and various digitization initiatives.As previously mentioned, we have signed a number of new outsourcing agreements for PeopleHub services that have an expected ARR of NOK 71 million when fully implemented. We unfortunately have 2 customers leaving us such that adjusted for this churn, the net ARR effect is estimated to NOK 43 million. We hate losing good customers, and we'll do what we can at the next turn to win back the customers with our new fully digitized solutions. In the previous quarters, we have continuously reported a strong pipeline. It was thus with great pleasure that we could continue our signings streak from Q1 and Q2 for our PeopleHub platform-based solutions. In the quarter, we signed new long-term customer agreements with, as previously mentioned, approximately NOK 32 million annual contract value and ARR when fully implemented.In addition to previously communicated groundbreaking agreement with German mobile phone operator Telefonica Deutschland O2 to provide fully outsourced payroll for their 8,200 German employees, we have won a number of significant deals during the quarter, including a 5-year agreement with existing customers Felleskjopet that has increased the scope from single country payroll that we were providing in Norway to multi-country payroll, including fully outsourced payroll services to their approximately 1,000 [indiscernible] employees in Sweden. Add to this, we are implementing a comprehensive suite of SuccessFactors-based services as their new global HR solutions. Our new agreement with Nordic insurer Tryg to provide fully outsourced payroll to their Nordic operations is another demonstration of the value that we can deliver to companies in the financial services sector. Delivering fully outsourced services based on our PeopleHub platform to CLAAS, a producer of farm equipment in the U.K. is a good example on how we are able to gradually build presence in our new markets.Our renewal and expansion of our agreement with industry champion Siemens to provide outsourced payroll services to their approximately 8,000 Nordic employees. This is another example of a long-term relationship started in 2003 that has now expanded from covering Norway and Sweden to cover the whole Nordic with a multi-country solution, fully integrated with the customer global HR solution.As our pipeline is far from empty and continuously is being strengthened with new interesting opportunities, we expect the positive situation and new signing in all our markets to continue.As already mentioned, many new BPO contracts in the last 3 quarters have resulted in a significant amount of annual recurring revenue which is still not reflected in our P&L, but which will materialize in actual revenue going forward. We understand that it is challenging to forecast the financials of these for many of you and will now seek to better visualize our own estimate of this as seen on the following 2 graphs showing the bridging of ARR for Managed Services of NOK 439 million in Q2 versus the expected increase to NOK 550 million when fully implemented and how this will pan out over time. The under value of contracts yet to go live per 30th June is about NOK 68 million and net NOK 55 million after churn of NOK 17 million. This additional revenue and base represents an increase in future revenue of estimated NOK 111 million. This additional annual recurring revenue will materialize during the next 12 to 18 months, as shown in the above graph, and will, when implemented, increase Zalaris' total revenue to more than 10% over the next 12 months.Then let us take a closer look at Professional Services, our Consulting practice. Adjusted for currency movements, Professional Services revenue were in line with the levels last year with a revenue of NOK 59.6 million, a positive development in Poland compensated for somewhat reduced revenues in Germany. EBIT levels were somewhat down to NOK 3.6 million for the quarter. We made significant changes in our German Professional Services organization during the quarter, including introducing a flattened structure and a training program to build a new generation of resources. This stabilized and improved a challenging resource situation with high turnover of consultants.We maintained our revenue levels and deliver our customer commitments through compensating with higher-than-normal user external consultants. In addition, we have implemented the, as I previously mentioned, a trainee program to secure a constant inflow of resources. This is also temporarily affecting the margins.In Professional Services, we see that Application Maintenance Services or AMS, helping customers maintain their payroll and HR systems mostly on long-term or subscription basis, continuing at more than 51% of the total revenue in Q2. The AMS revenue proves particularly important in times as these, when customers are looking to work with proven and known suppliers for smaller projects with defined outcomes. Developing AMS services as a group while offering is a key focus area for our Professional Services business unit, and this is also a [ swifter ] farming ground for cloud and outsourcing projects, and we have seen that this works.So important to acknowledge when evaluating our Professional Services business is that contrary to many consulting businesses, around 51% to 60% of revenue is recurring. And as mentioned on the previous slide, this is a key contributor to that 82% of our Q2 revenue in this segment came from customers that were also customers in Q2 last year. So with this, I hand over to our CFO, Gunnar Manum, who will take you through the financial part of the presentation.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Hans-Petter. Revenue for the quarter was NOK 185.4 million and the lower revenue compared to last year was mainly due to currency movements of approximately NOK 11 million and some volume reductions within Managed Services.Within Professional Services, a small reduction in revenue in Germany was offset by increased revenue in Poland. As mentioned by Hans-Petter, there has been some temporary staffing issues in the consulting business in Germany that has had an impact on the revenue from professional services for the period.The EBIT of NOK 11.4 million for the quarter was NOK 1.3 million lower than last year, of which approximately NOK 1 million is currency related. The EBIT and EBIT margin to the Managed Services in Northern Europe increased through improved customer margins and better utilization of resources, partly through the increased number of customer projects being implemented, which will result in revenue increase going forward. Improvements in Northern Europe was offset by lower EBIT in Germany, mainly due to the temporary use of external consultants within Professional Services and the ramp-up of new BPO contracts in Managed Services. We continue to target an EBIT margin of 10%, which will be achieved through scale that is revenue growth and further efficiency improvements. Hans-Petter will address this further in his outlook.As has been mentioned, a number of new BPO contracts has been or are being or will be implemented in the months ahead. Hence, we have made significant investments in future revenue through these projects. In the second quarter, NOK 12 million in project costs were capitalized versus NOK 5 million last year. And NOK 11.4 million in revenue was deferred in the same period versus NOK 3.1 million last year. Total revenue deferred year-to-date was NOK 20 million versus NOK 5.4 million last year. This revenue will be recognized over the contract period from the start of the regular service delivery.Looking at some of the P&L items, lower total personnel costs compared to last year of NOK 14.4 million is mainly due to additional personnel costs being capitalized on the customer contracts and currency changes. The increase in other operating expenses of NOK 8.7 million is mainly due to M&A costs in the period of NOK 5.1 million and the increased use of external consultants.Net financial income for the quarter was negative NOK 12.1 million compared to positive NOK 19.8 million last year. This includes an annualized currency loss of NOK 7.3 million on the EUR 35 million bond loan and other currency-denominated items. Last year, there was an unrealized gain on these items of 25.6 million. This resulted in a net loss for the quarter of NOK 6.4 million compared to a gain of NOK 22.4 million last year.On to the cash flow. During the quarter, the company paid a dividend of NOK 1 per share and completed an equity issue at NOK 60 per share, which generated net proceeds of NOK 115.9 million. Another negative operating cash flow for the quarter of 3.4 million, contributed to by the cash settlement of expired restricted stock units for employees or approximately NOK 7 million. The cash balance at 30 June was NOK 212 million.On the balance sheet, we see that the net interest-bearing debt decreased from NOK 242.4 million at 31 March to NOK 154.4 million as 30 June mainly due to the equity issue completed during the quarter.So that concludes the financial section, and I hand over to Hans-Petter to present the outlook for Zalaris.

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

Thank you, Gunnar. As previously mentioned, our ambition to deliver 10% EBIT has been communicated continuously since our acquisitions in 2017. When defining the new integrated organization in '17, we established structure and starting to handle the new combined entity and expected growth. Delivering on our 10% target was subject to growing our revenue past our -- or post acquisition.All our new geographies, except Germany, has delivered growth. Poland, for example, has more than doubled in size and currently counts more than 100 employees.Germany, on the contrary, got an extra challenge when in addition to being integrated into the Zalaris organization helped to integrate the sumarum organization and the German leg of the ROC organization, integrating 2 professional services organizations with different cultures and combining with a new Zalaris culture was much more complex than anticipated.Looking at it in retrospect, I and we should have handled this differently and quicker. However, we have now all of this behind us. We are now fully integrated and working as 1 organization. Coming from the Nordic, we were also naive about the time it would take to create excitement for our Mobile First and digital solutions.If there is one aspect of COVID that has been positive for us and that now comes to show is that the whole world now aggressively pursue digitization of all their people processes. We see that our PeopleHub solutions thus over the last 6 months has gained significant traction in all our markets, also in Germany and our new geographies. Both our own employees and customers are excited.With our recent wins, unsecured ARR growth, we now have the road map and see the light in the tunnel to deliver the promised 10% on the basis of our Q2 baseline and above subjective. In our Managed Services business unit, adding the already contracted additional revenue of NOK 111 million coming from base and the net ARR effect of contracts won without recognized revenue in the Q2. Continue implementing Zalaris 4.0 and finalize our IT platform consolidation, resulting in an increased contribution from Managed Services of 2%, which is still short 2% of our target for this business unit.In our Professional Services business unit, grew revenues 5% through additional capacity and price optimization, maintain existing utilization and improve the contribution from Professional Services with 2.4% from replacing external consultants with internal and reducing recruiting costs from a more stable workforce. At the same time, maintained the absolute level of our group and the regional overhead, which should be capable of running an organization when surpassing the NOK 1 billion in revenue mark.Thus, realizing additional growth within our outsourcing and PeopleHub based services, which is now well within reach has the potential to improve this picture further.On organic growth has been an important element in developing Zalaris into the company and capabilities that we currently represent. As mentioned on my last slide, our acquisitions of German sumarum and U.K.-based ROC in 2017 has transformed us from being a Nordic NOK 100 million per quarter company to a leading European player with approximately twice the revenue and a significant presence in the German and U.K. markets. We are now operating under 1 common brand, common IT infrastructure and solutions.We have many of the leading global and regional organizations as customers. We have a road map to reach our communicated 10% EBIT target that is well within reach, as we continue scaling our solutions as reflected in our new signings and landmark [indiscernible].Integrating acquisitions has taken time with our recent improvements and wins we have started harvesting the results of our hard work. As explained in our previous presentations, we have actively been pursuing nonorganic growth options for some time. Our prioritized focus is on companies that can either help us utilize our scale in existing markets or that can help us expand into the rest of the EU countries. In terms of utilizing scale, this can either come from cost synergies or utilizing our platform infrastructure capacity to the fullest potential.As I had mentioned previously, the incremental cost of adding new customers on our platform is limited to additional license costs but less additional hardware and operational costs.As a second dimension, we are looking at additions to our portfolio, HR technology, preferably solutions that are natural add-ons to expand our leadership in the payroll and transactional HR space. In terms of size, we do prefer smaller, easier digestible deals. Over the last 2 quarters, we have been involved in 4 structured processes, and we have succeeded with ba.se. With ba.se, we were able to acquire a good company with excellent customers and an experienced team that delivered results. Pricing was acceptable.In all our other 3 cases, we were beaten on the finish line, outbidden by others with bigger appetite and deeper pockets. Unfortunately for us, we had invested time, energy and money, but at the end we are satisfied that we maintain discipline and staying with our defined limits.We continue our search for good candidates with the right characteristics and price that will support us in delivering on our growth ambitions and ability to serve customers. Succeeding with long-term M&A-based strategy required capital discipline and a clear path on value creation.With our risk infusion of capital, we should be able to acquire targets that will take us well past the 1 billion and 100 -- NOK 1 billion and EUR 100 million mark in revenue. Signals from the capital markets are very positive in terms of our ability to raise additional financing, including equity, bonds and debt if that becomes necessary for any potential larger transactions.So again, arriving at my last slide, let's sum up. We continue our daily work on being a better version of ourselves compared to what we were yesterday, represented by our #BestingOurselves. We will continue our focus on creating satisfied customers at every customer touch point and journey. We also believe that happy employees is key to have happy customers. We will continue realizing our road map to 10% EBIT, adding more revenue with higher incremental margin, utilizing our fixed cost base and execute on further operative improvements.Our goal is to continue our growth streak and deliver our 21st year of continuous growth. And as just mentioned on my previous slide, we continue looking for acquisition opportunities. This is key to meet our growth aspirations. With ba.se, we have one under our belt and are ready for more.With this, we open up for questions.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. So we have an incoming question. Last quarter, you reported a coming churn of NOK 11 million. Now this figure has increased to NOK 28 million. Could you please comment on this high 3.5% churn level year-to-date?

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

Yes, it's -- we are using it to the customers. And it's, as I mentioned previously, unfortunate, and it's not really that much more that we can say about it other than we are compensating with adding on a lot of new customers so that our net growth will be maintained.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

And if I could just add to that. I mean the -- there was 1 customer lost in the first quarter and then there was 1 customer lost in the second quarter, which was a fairly large customer, which explains the increase in churn in the second quarter. Though this is still reflected in the revenue figures, I mean this will be reflected in Q4, which you also see from the graph that Hans-Petter presented regarding the annual recurring revenue.

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

On that, we are not aware of any other customers leaving us in the near foreseeable future.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

Next question, the expected revenue per employee served in the BPO signings here today looks to be well below your current average. Is this correct?

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

No, not really. The pricing of the signings that we have made recently should be in line with what we deliver otherwise.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

Will ba.se be rebranded to Zalaris?

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

For now, we will keep the brand, and that's an evaluation that we will do together with the ba.se team as time moves. But we will integrate the ba.se into our internal systems, such that we can maintain the effective finance organization that we have in terms of the consolidation and tracking financial results. And ba.se will also be integrated in our people systems, that is both payroll and HR, both also from an effectiveness point of view. But it has also been a key for us since the inception to also use all the solutions that we sell to customers ourselves. It's a great way for everyone to understand what we are selling to customers and experience that firsthand by using it themselves.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

And a question relating to customer satisfaction. What is your customer satisfaction score? And how has this score developed over the recent years?

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

I do not have that, the latest results in front of me, but it has developed positively over time, but we still have ways to go there. And delivering payroll services is not something that creates lots of excitement around. It's something where you normally only hear about when customers -- when there is an issue and a little when everything works because it is expected to always work. But it's very key for us, and it's also one of the key strategic initiatives that we have to measure customer satisfaction at every customer touch point and to work actively to improve it over time with this -- with structured needs.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

And a final question. Zalaris did 2 acquisitions in 2017, that does not appear to have been very successful. What are your view on these acquisitions? How are they performing now? And how will the acquisition of ba.se be different?

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

Yes, I mentioned that partially in the presentation. I think, yes, clearly, I think what has not panned out as we had hoped and expected with our 2017 acquisition of sumarum and ROC is that we had expected to generate more organic growth from acquisitions earlier. And as such, we have been in a more stable situation, and there's some places also contracting because we have the -- we have consolidated, for example, in Germany 2 professional services organizations that has resulted in some consulting churn. However, we have learned from it. And I think if -- again, as I mentioned in my presentation, if prior to the acquisitions, Zalaris was NOK 100 million a quarter company or NOK 400 million a year company with the main access to the Nordic market. Now with the acquisitions, we are an NOK 800-plus million company double the size. And we are one of the leading European players. We have a solution that works and works well for a much larger market, 7x the size of the market that we have.So I think it's still -- we are very happy with what we have done. We wish that we could have come to where we are today quicker. But as with many things, if you think it's too complicated, you end up not doing it, and we did it. And now we're in an excellent position to harvest the results of the hard work that we have done over the last 3 years and utilized both the solutions and the very motivated organizations that we have in all our countries, the Nordics, Poland, Germany, U.K., Ireland, India, to then win new business for Zalaris and continue the growth streak that we have shown that we are able to generate in all our geographies over the last 6 months.

[Gunnar Manum, Chief Financial Officer]

And that was the final question.

[Hans-Petter Mellerud]

Okay, thank you, Gunnar. Thank you for watching. And contact us at [e-mail] if you have any further questions or need support from us.Thanks a lot for your interest. Bye-bye. Have a nice day.