Bimobject AB

STO:BIM

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Carl Silbersky, executive]

Warm welcome to Q1 2022 financial report audiocast. My name is Carl Silbersky; and with me today, I also have Martin Lindh, our CFO. Questions are to be submitted to -- at the e-mail [e-mail], and we will answer them post the presentation.

Okay. Let's walk this through. Highlights in the quarter. Our platform continues to grow, and we're passing 3 million registered users. We started the year on a positive note with our ARR growing to SEK 106.2 million. Most importantly, our renewal business improved as churn decreased and average revenue per account continued to increase.

This was the last quarter of converting legacy contracts, and we do not expect delayed renewals to be a significant factor going forward. In the quarter, we completed a credit systems that now lets brands pay for sponsored search results, which greatly simplifies usage here. As adoption keeps growing for searches, we anticipate sales of credits to become a revenue contributor of its own, and we expect that to be happening in the late part of 2022.

The quarter also marked another milestone in BIMobject's development, our investment in Prodikt and the sustainability platform, more on that later in the presentation. Digitalization and digital building process are rising in popularity, and that's exactly why BIM building information modeling is starting to move from an industry outlier to industry standard. We see and foresee an increasing need for manufacturers to expand their digital products reach as the construction industry is maturing and the need for digital building models will -- with the correct data is increasing in demand. BIMobject is the go-to company, a leader in building information modeling.

In the independent surveys, we are consistently ranked as the #1 platform for architects. And with over 3 million users in global reach, we can leverage and scale and provide go-to-market for new solutions and services. With our recent investment in Prodikt, we will help them scale out their solutions and service to millions of architects, engineers and constructors. Two -- finally, we are addressing the major digitalization and sustainability pain in the industry. And for that one, I'd like to go to the next slide and speak a little bit about what we're doing for our customers.

Given that all information and product can be housed in BIMobject on our platform, an AC -- or sorry, an architect, engineers and constructors can access this data anywhere. And the result is that you get better collaboration between a manufacturer and -- in all aspects, communication and understanding what the needs are. And by here, you can test IDs what -- you can share models with architects. And they can -- they hereby creating a better understanding of your products. Icons of Denmark is a major Danish furniture manufacturer and they're using BIMobject to better understand what their clients needing are, the demand in different projects and also for -- to grow and fine-tune their own collections.

If we go to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about how we're executing on our strategy. At BIMobject, we have 3 strategic pillars that we're executing on. The first one, on the professional user side, we are making sure that to maintain our market leadership in terms of traffic and size. The second pillar, on the manufacturing side, we want to make sure that we are the first choice for manufacturers, and we're executing here on making sure we maintain global leadership and expand our customer value; and thirdly, increase our share of wallet.

The third leg of our strategy is the sustainability side. And here is the -- this is a massive industry of $1.7 trillion today. And what we want to establish here is a new leg for our business is to establish a leadership in this industry for building manufacturers. The first step there is the acquisition of Prodikt. But I want to walk them through and how we're executing on the various pillars. And first and foremost, let's look at the platform and how it has developed.

Today, it's the May 6, and we are having a physical Annual General Meeting this morning, and it's been almost 3 years since we had a last physical meeting. And for -- I've been the CEO here for 2 years. But let's look back on where we were 3 years ago.

We had nearly 400,000 BIM objects 3 years ago. Today, we had 1.4 million BIM objects. That's nearly 3x growth. That's far as more than 3x growth in the number of objects on the platform today. We were at 1.1 million users today, that's -- sorry, we were at 1.1 million users. And today, we're at 3.1 million. That's nearly 3x growth in the number of users on the platform. And we also accumulated our downloads. I mean we used to be 35 million 3 years ago, it's today, 110 million. So we truly are a global platform on scale, and we continue to maintain our leadership here.

But if we go to the next slide, then we'll go to the what's -- to be the first choice for product manufacturers. I mean we continuously improve the platform to make it easier for search. And a year ago, we redesigned the whole platform to cater better for the users and our manufacturers' needs. Please, if you haven't seen it, go to bimobject.com and check it out.

But also every quarter, we put a cadence in place that we're releasing new and improved functionality for manufacturers. In this quarter, we are making it easier for brands to showcase their solutions as well as the ability to drill down on your audience to better understand who is using and who is interested in your products as a manufacturer.

So on top of this one, we released search ads. Search ads is a major thing for BIMobject. And as I mentioned earlier, we expect this to be a major revenue contributor going forward. But in the quarter, we completed the credit system that we put in place that now lets brands pay for sponsored search results and e-mail campaigns, which greatly simplifies the usage. As adoption keeps growing here, we see, and we have seen a major adoption happening. We are following this one, and we will also be reporting on the revenue.

The third pillar of our strategy, to establish leadership and sustainability. With here, as I mentioned earlier, we have invested in to Prodikt. But just to give you some understanding of this, of Prodikt. With 1.4 million objects on platform, we are now adding environmental data to those objects. And that's the meaning with the acquisition of Prodikt. We're helping architects and engineers to have better data at their hands.

And we also then giving these services out to our manufacturers and giving them the opportunity to gather the environmental data into the BIMobject. From a user side, we are clearly adding a whole new user base, and that's the developer's side. And that's everybody who is doing any kind of construction will be a new -- could be using our platform in a whole new way.

And then thirdly, with 110 million downloads, we are at the hand of millions of architects and engineers. But we're giving them the ability and the improvement to design with sustainable products, analysis and reports, provide sustainability reports when you are designing a new project. And this is a major thing, and we expect to report more on this going forward as we see.

Now I want to hand over to Martin to walk you through the quarter and the financials.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you, Carl. Let's now take a deeper look at the financial development of BIMobject, both for the quarter, but also its development over the last quarters. I believe it would make sense to also spend some time today to go through some of the changes that has occurred in the reported financial statements after the acquisition of Prodikt.

In general, we view the results for this quarter as a positive outcome of a dedicated work. It's, of course, not easy to transform a company. And although we have a belief that the company will continue to positively evolve over the coming years as we improve it, we remain humble to the fact that one quarter that is positive isn't enough to call it a solid trend.

In terms of ARR, or annual recurring revenue, which represents the total value of our contracts of our customers. We indicated in our last audiocast that our order book gained traction in Q4 2021. As orders usually take a couple of months before converting, the increase we see here in Q1 is, therefore, perhaps not that unexpected.

However, the increase in ARR is not only attributed to the inflow of new ARR. Other reasons to the positive development in the quarter was a reduction in churn, which came in to an all-time low in Q1, compared to the other previous periods included in this graph. And we also had a favorable development in downgrades. The development of these metrics were also, to some extent, expected as the project of upgrading contracts terms with our customers came to an end. Still some contracts remain, but those will be dealt with as a part of the regular renewal discussions, our customers insist in continuously have with our customers.

Upgrades came in a bit lower than the same quarter last year. The reason for this is we didn't increase price to the same extent this quarter than we -- that we did last year. But we remain positive on the overall development for the rest of this year due to: one, the marketing products we recently launched and the credit system related to that. And that has quickly gained adoption among the client base during the test phase, and we will start to increase the potential ways of monetizing on it. The second one is Prodikt's products, which we'd be starting to offer to our existing customers will also have a positive effect on the upgrades.

In terms of average revenue per account or ARPA, we saw a steady increase during last year, but a slightly lower outcome this quarter. In regards to net sales, most of it or mainly 80%, is attributed to our platform subscriptions, and we also have -- had a positive development in currencies that partially amplified that result.

Worth to mention is that top line of BIMobject is not connected to any of the directly affected regions related to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, as for any company, we could be indirectly affected by an overall decline of the construction industry and the manufacturers supplying it with materials during the rest of the year.

Sales of our services developed at a moderate pace during the quarter, and we hope we can see more substantial improvement also in this area going forward. For the rest of the year, we expect the scale-up of Prodikt to support contributing to the overall growth of BIMobject, but that will take some time as their 2.0 platform was first launched in February this year, and they start to grow their business from a very small base.

In terms of operating cost or on the cost side, we continue, during the quarter, to keep our spend at a stable rate. Majority of our cost base, which has been up to 75% historically, is related to personnel costs. We foresee to have inflationary effects on such costs in control for this year.

During the quarter, we had approximately SEK 2.7 million in costs, which could be worth to mention from a comparison perspective, of which about SEK 2 million were related to restructuring during the period and about SEK 0.5 million is attributed to the operations of Prodikt. We continuously work to improve the organization, but often such investments are now more frequently offset by other savings we achieved.

Therefore, we at this point don't foresee any larger costs or investments in the near future for BIMobject during the year, although costs obviously varies between different quarters. For Prodikt, we will continue to ramp up that organization throughout the year, and there will be some natural increase in spend that is related to that business unit.

Now let's take a look at the consolidated income statement we presented for the quarter. As earlier mentioned, the increase of net sales during the period was mostly attributed to the increase of platform subscriptions, the increase in operating income, along with a controlled cost base, resulted in an overall improvement about SEK 1 million, looking at EBITDA as well as EBIT result levels. In the consolidated income statement, we have now also included Prodikt as of March this year, and we, therefore, only have a minor effect on this quarterly income statement.

When comparing the 2 different Q1 quarters between 2022 and 2021, one might note a change in net financial items. This change is mainly constituted by FX effects related to internal loans denominated in the USD currency. Taxes had an effect from the acquisition of Prodikt and will return to normal levels in next or the following quarters.

Another effect of the acquisition, as you can note here, and also will do in the future reports we have is that we will start to include attributable earnings to the parent company as well as for noncontrolling interests.

And so now let's take a look at the balance sheet instead. It's a bit different when we look at the balance sheet in terms of how an acquisition is incorporated in it. And as the balance sheet reflects assets, equity and liabilities at the end of the period, the balance sheet of this quarterly report, therefore, fully reflects the effects after the acquisition of Prodikt. Most importantly, and despite having acquired Prodikt, we remain in a very strong financial position, and we, therefore, still are well funded also going forward.

Worth to mention here is that we, over the last year, having engaged in investing our cash at bank into liquid fixed asset funds to mitigate effects of inflation. So to correctly assess our cash position, one should, therefore, both include the items called cash and cash equivalents as well as the short-term investments that are on our balance sheet. At the end of the period, we had available funds, which were close to about SEK 300 million.

So in summary, we are a true SaaS company. 80% total revenue is built up by ARR. It reached SEK 106 million at the end of the quarter with a 12-year lifetime. For the quarter, we had SEK 16.7 million in operating loss, and we are well funded with about SEK 300 million in cash at bank.

Thank you. And now let's open for some questions for this audiocast.