Bimobject AB

STO:BIM

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Welcome to this presentation today, where we will hear about BIMobject Group's Q1 report. We are soon going to hear from our group of panelists, who will do a recap of the presentation itself. And as always, at the end of this call, we will answer some questions. So if you have questions during the call, please send them to the e-mail address you see here, that's [e-mail], and we will try to answer as many of them as we can at the end of the call.

But first, let's introduce our panelists on the call today. My name is Lisa Norlander. And with me, I have Per Goransson, who's the CFO of BIMobject; Martin Lindh, CEO of BIMobject; and Peter Bang, who is Chairman of the Board. Welcome, all.

And Peter, you've been on the Board of BIMobject since 2020 and you've been Chairman since 2022. And this will actually be Peter's last presentation with us. Peter has declined to be reelected as Chairman. And this is then due to another quite time-consuming assignment that Peter has as CFO of Salling Group since last year.

So Peter, we will start the presentation with you today.

[Peter Bang, executive]

Thank you very much, Lisa. And as you said, I became CFO in Denmark's largest retailer 7 months ago, and I'm rather busy in that job. So over the time, I've decided that I would not be ready to be reelected for the coming AGM. And -- but I would also say that BIMobject is in a very good shape. So it's an okay timing to change Chairman.

I think and believe strongly that BIMobject is in an excellent shape for growing right now. We have created stability in the company. The strategy is in place. We have a strong sustainability agenda, with the acquisition of -- and consolidation of Carbonzero. We have a road map towards profitability, and we can finance that growth, so we can take our own decisions.

And finally and most important of all, we have a super strong management team, with Martin in front as CEO. I think we have a super consistent management team and very committed to take the journey of BIMobject to the next step.

So I would also like to say thank you to the management team and thank you to the Board. There will be a new Board after the AGM, and I'm sure it will be a super competent Board, taking this company to further heights.

So with those comments, I'd like to hand over to you, Martin, to take us through the Q1 results.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you, Peter. And what can I say, more than it has been a true pleasure working with you throughout these years. It's not been -- always been like an easy job that we do here, but at least you have made it as easy as possible for us to navigate through all these different initiatives that we have been working on together. And we, of course, also wish you all the best with your new journey with Salling Group, which is quite exciting that as well.

But now let's start the presentation, and we'll do that by introducing our new listeners to who we are and what we do as a company. So we are in the space of BIM, building information modeling, which is the way that the construction industry is digitalizing itself. And this technology, BIM, is used throughout the building process by all the different stakeholders and throughout the construction process, when the building is being built as well as after it stands as a complete building.

And why it's so powerful is that when you digitalize it, you sort of like break it down on a project level basis into sometimes objects, and those consists of both the geometry part and also you have product information part which is sometimes referred to as [ metadata ].

And that product information, I mean, it's the simplest format, it would be the object ID, but of course, there's a lot of other information to each product that is quite relevant. It could be its properties, it could be functionalities, connectors or what have you and also sustainability data and so forth.

And who we are, BIMobject Group, well, we are a powering digital building design worldwide. And basically, we have a couple of platforms and we're quite connected into the industry.

So we have more than 4 million registered users accumulated since we started and user from over 100 countries around the world. Of those, we have 250,000 that are monthly downloading users, as that will be unique users that every month comes and downloads product information from our platforms.

Users come from most of the well-known architect firms in the world. And currently, we run 3 platforms, 2 of them being BIM platforms, BIMobject global platform. Polantis is a French platform. And we have also Prodikt, which is a project and a sustainability platform that is currently operational in Sweden and about to expand to the Nordics.

We also have more than 120,000 product pages from over 2,000 building product brands. And those product pages are typically families of products, so they can contain actually multiple variations of different products and so forth. And here is also some of the brands that we have as clients in our company.

And now let's take a look at some of the highlights of the quarter. Our ARR continued to expand, both from a yearly as well as a quarterly growth perspective, reaching SEK 135 million at the end of the quarter. Our turnover increased from a yearly perspective and landed at close to SEK 40 million. Our profit on EBITDA level continue to improve on an annual basis. And as you will hear also in some other parts of the presentation, we start to see a slowdown of the general market activity of the construction industry.

In this case, when it comes to the growth rate of our monthly downloading users, we see that it continues to grow, although in a lower rate than in previous quarter. But nonetheless, our cash position strengthened by a couple of millions, reaching SEK 223 million in the end of the quarter.

And one -- and what were then some of the main events happening in the quarter? Well, in regards to press releases, we have a few to share. First of all, we kicked off a smaller partnership in Australia with Connected Built. And this was an opportunity that emerged, and it helped us to get a foot into the Australian market. We also announced a collaboration with White Arkitekter, that I will come back to later in this presentation. And Per, with a long and dedicated and I must say a well-deserved promotion, elevated to becoming the CFO of our group.

In addition, on the internal side, we engaged in various integration projects between BIMobject and Carbonzero to streamline our offerings due to the complementary functionalities and natures of the platforms. There are some great skill set and experience from both sides, and we make sure to bring the best of it with us for the future when conducting these initiatives. We foresee this integration project will continue throughout 2024.

We're also onboarding more and more of the distributors that signed up in 2023, and providing them with product information. Finally, we're also allocating more and more resources towards initiatives that we believe will be important to secure future growth for our combined group.

For our more frequent listeners, this page might be a bit redundant as we, for several quarters now, have reported on similar macro figures. However, due to the new macro environment we're in, the cyclical nature of the different indicators and how our markets or industry, and finally, we, as a company, become affected by those, it makes sense to provide updates on how we view the situation.

And let's do like this. I think in general, I think it's fair to say that even if inflation is coming down in most markets, there is still some hesitation to which extent. The interest rates, which have been at quite high levels now for a while, will hopefully come down soon as they typically follow suit. How much? Well, that we'll see.

For the building industry, this matters quite a bit. As with higher interest rates, fewer new projects will be launched. And this has been the case for now for quite some time. And we do have several markets in which all projects have kept the markets going, but these old projects starts to become completed, and then there's a natural decline in the market activity approaching, some of which we start to notice also in our SaaS metrics.

However, there are also some positive light in the tunnel. First of all, the long-term forecast for the building industry remains promising. On top of that, we believe, by being in the digital and sustainability-related part of the industry, we are a bit more protected, even if we not always can affect the consequences of cost-saving programs or even bankruptcy of some of our clients. We also believe that tougher times for our clients can have a positive effect, such as larger willingness to improve, both from a digital as well as sustainable perspective.

When it comes to this quarter, we saw a slower market activity from new sales in EMEA, while the U.S. market remained strong. Our [ NR ] levels were down a bit as well as the growth in monthly downloading users which, as previously mentioned, went down a bit, but nonetheless, remained positive. Our bookings and services remain high as well as we continue to see strong demand in some select segments in the market, one of them being for sustainability-related tools and services.

Despite these headwinds, we are performing quite okay as a company. I say okay, and as I -- and of course, no one else in our management team is happy about single-digit growth rates, and we have a lot bigger aspirations than that, but also because we are progressing as a company. We keep expanding our [ AR ] despite the increasing churn that we see. Our revenue went down a bit, but this is more related to some hopefully temporary challenges we have within our content team and one of our suppliers, which we are working with to improve.

We're also ramping up more and more dedicated initiatives into growth areas such as product technology, project solutions and sustainability, and a plan to revisit these areas as they progress during the year. We also continue to be a well-financed company, a great asset to have for many reasons, but amongst others, to provide the flexibility to invest where and needed to capture emerging opportunities, also to acquire if and when needed. And finally, to avoid fundraising at periods of depressed demand in a traditional operational market we engage in or similarly in the stock market, with less attractive stock price levels and so forth.

It's easy to forget, but in the -- not long ago, we were more than 250 employees in a quite turbulent organization, looking at ramping down our activities. And instead today, we're less than 150 employees, including expansions into product services and sustainability within Prodikt, while also we invest quite a bit to secure solutions for the future. I would say that partly thanks to this leaner and meaner structure we now have, it also allows us to better build the platform for these new and complementary tools and functionalities.

And let's move over to one of these areas that we're working with, with these solutions for AECs. And in the quarter, we signed a collaboration with White. And this is a way of moving forward in our offering towards AECs, and in this collaborations, it is to improve White's way of working as well as to improve the way they work in making well-informed product selections in order for them to reach their vision of having all of their projects being regenerative and climate neutral by 2030.

Prodikt, which is our collaboration and sustainability platform, is the primary service in mind, but also partially supported by the desktop version of BIMobject that we're building.

And now some more details on the financials of the quarter, Per.

[Per Goransson, executive]

Yes. Here, we have the ARR metric, net sales by type and operating costs from a quarter-over-quarter perspective. And the annual recurring revenue metric is key as it shows development in constant currencies. And as a contract value as of balance sheet date, it also provides a bit of forward-looking guidance to our revenues. And as Martin mentioned, you can see we have a single-digit growth during the last year, but through a relatively tough markets.

Despite this -- the growth in ARR, recurring platform net sales dropped slightly over the quarter. That is due to date effect, currencies and minor one-off adjustments. There is also a small decline in services revenue as we faced shortages in the service production capacity. And in addition, we have a few larger projects where we prioritized platform business over the content margins and revenue.

If we look on the cost side, we see increased other external costs, but year-over-year, still a decrease. External costs include new initiatives related to Carbonzero business and versus Q4, we also have a busier trade show season in Q1. Personnel costs are flat more or less over the quarter, including annual salary revisions, but also less variable pay.

And here we have the income statement with a year-over-year comparison, where we conclude that we are clearly ahead of the prior year on most rows in the P&L, confirming the substantial progress we made during 2023. EBITDA at minus SEK 7.7 million and EBIT at minus SEK 9.9 million, still not profitable as we desire, but versus our cash position much under control.

And a final comment on the previous slide, you can add to the -- in today's interest rate environment, we also run positive financial net, which offset not in significant part of the operational loss.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

And here are some concluding remarks also for this quarter. First, we expanded our [ AR ] despite the slowdown in the market activity. Second, we improved our cash position. And thirdly, we're taking a very concrete step in strengthening our position within the AEC segment.

And with that, we thank everybody for attending this presentation, and are opening it up for questions.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you, Martin. And we have had a few questions coming in through the e-mail. The first one is regarding Prodikt. So the question is, Prodikt is in the process of upgrading its platform. Do you have a launch date scheduled for the next generation of Prodikt?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes. Thank you for this question. To put some context to this, Prodikt is, as we have presented in this presentation, a platform which architects, engineers, contractors, along with property owners, can collaborate around their projects through.

The first version was launched, I think, about 4 years ago, and this was then upgraded to a second version in 2022. And currently, we're working on an upgrade of that platform to add some of the missing functionalities, we believe, will be a complement to our current offering.

And although we expect this new version of the platform to be released in 2024, we do not yet have communicated a release date of it. And that one of the reasons for that is also that there's quite some dependencies to the ongoing integration we are doing between our platforms, prodikt.com and bimobject.com, after we acquired Carbonzero in the end of last year. So we will get back to that once we are getting closer to the launch date of that platform.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you, Martin. And the next question we have is around another platform called Plant. So the question is, Plant is a company that, through its proprietary software, provides services and helps real estate companies with their climate calculation and climate decorations. So the question is here, do we see that Plant mostly as a direct competitor in the segment of Prodikt offering or as a potential partner to us?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you. Yes. Plant is also a Malmö-based company, which has been a little bit in the news lately. And it's fair to say that it operates within our domains. As similarly to what we are offering our clients through prodikt.com, they are helping property owners and building projects with climate-related calculations, assessment and reports and so forth as you're mentioning.

However, what I would say is one large difference between our business model or at least as far as I have understood it, is that Plant offers more of like a semi-automated solution that is still quite dependent on manual overlays of their consultants, whereas Prodikt is more of a platform where the automation level is substantially higher.

And this means that they, to some extent, is a competitor of ours, although we believe that our offering to our clients is a radically different one and a more effective one. Nonetheless, we still congratulate them with their recent success in securing investment funds as well as to their recently communicated partnership with Serneke.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you. And the question here is, can you tell us something about the progress in developing solutions for the users of bimobject.com?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes. And we have several initiatives targeting solutions for the users of our industry, which are the property owners, architects, engineers and the contractors.

So on one hand, we're supporting them with the Prodikt platform, which we talked about. But we're also supporting the users that are typically using or downloading objects at BIMobject. And so far, we released a test version in a few markets, which is quite close to what we have on bimobject.com.

But this, what we're working on now is to change the user behavior because typically, an architect comes to BIMobject not every day, but rather a couple of days a month or a month to another. So what we're working on right now is collaborative features for our users and also the ability for them to work with other BIM content that is provided by us. So this is to make such a solution more relevant in the day-to-day work that they're conducting.

But we are planning to then release this at the second half of this year. So we will provide also more information about that when we get closer to a launch date of such a tool.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you. And I believe that was actually the last question that we had sent in for the call today. We are still available at this e-mail address, [e-mail]. So feel free to send in your questions there, and we can get back to you individually as well.

But I think that is it for today, and we are ready to wrap up the call. So thank you, again, everyone, for listening in, and we will hear and see you again in our Q2 presentation. Thank you, everyone.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you.