Bimobject AB

STO:BIM

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this presentation for the BIMobject Group's second quarterly presentation for this year. As usual in these presentations, you can send questions to us that we'll try to answer at the end of the call. And this can be sent to the e-mail address you see in the bottom here, [e-mail]. So please send your questions to [e-mail] and we'll try to pick up as many of them as we can at the end.

But first, let's introduce our usual group of panelists. So my name is Lisa. I'm your host for this meeting. I am joined here by Martin Lindh, who's the CEO of BIMobject. Welcome, Martin.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

And we are also joined by Per Goransson, who is the CFO of BIMobject. Welcome, Per.

[Per Goransson, executive]

Thank you.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Great. So Martin, I will hand it over to you to kick off the presentation.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you, Lisa. And it's really great to have you all here on this quarterly report presentation. And today, we plan to do it a little bit differently. We plan to have a bit more focus on explaining a little bit the market context that we are in, especially the connection between BIM and sustainability, which we hope you will enjoy to hear. And then we will, of course, go to the numbers as well and talk about those that happened over the last quarter. But without further ado, let's ding into the market context that we operate in, which is developing in a quite exciting way.

When doing this, let's first start to talk about some of the most fundamental challenges that are in the building industry that we operate within. And this is quite important to start that because it really gives an insight in why we're doing the different initiatives that we're doing. But first off, 1 of the first challenges we have in the industry is around digitalization where about half of the construction projects today are using BIM in developed markets. And compared to other industries, that's, of course, very, very low. And it is improving. It is, but it has gone at a fairly slow rate. And -- but steadily increasing every year.

Secondly is around the productivity. The building industry and building projects and processes in itself are very complex project. And therefore, it has not been so easy to increase the productivity historically, and it's a very low productivity rate comparison also to the other industries.

The third challenge then of the industry that is around the climate. And around 40% of CO2 emissions in the world is attributed to the building industry. So these are the 3 very large challenges that the industry is working on to improve. When going a bit deeper into the climate, that is also a very sort of like a multifaceted area. But I think here, we should just try to clarify a little bit around it. And I think one of the good -- one of the best places to start is also to understand the different targets that has been set for different countries. And most countries have set targets, and they are very clear about their commitments. They -- by 2030, that is within 6 years of time, they want to have quite clear reductions in their overall CO2 emissions. And then not only that has been made a commitment, but also a year for which they will reach carbon neutrality. And that is around 2050, some basically a little bit earlier, some countries a little bit later.

Now to do this, if we then take a look at also going back in the relation to the building sector, you can see that the fair share of the CO2 emitted by countries is related to the building sector. And given the reductions that we talked, the share size of the reduction that needs to be done, there needs to be some changes in the building industry to achieve this.

The problem though has been that given the complexity of the building industry, it hasn't really been able to transform itself to the required levels. So what we have is a legal wave like legal waves, in plural, that push the need for transparent product information into construction to be able to transform and make sure that these commitments are made. And to give a couple of examples of this, we have first off here -- so what's happening here is that there is a ton of different regulations being rolled out across markets and especially Europe. And Europe has been very skilled in finding ways to change like to influence the industry.

And we have some here and there is even more that is being deployed. And they are very detailed and very constructive. In the U.S., you also have some initiatives going into these directions. It's more either on building standards that are then adopted differently to different segments in the market, and you also have different sophistication levels in different states where you can say like California is more closer to what we're doing in Europe, whereas other states are not as far.

But what does this mean then? Well, we have a couple of examples for you here on some of the EU initiatives that are being rolled out that will give you sort of like an understanding of the implications that they will have in the market. First off, there's construction product regulation which is harmonizing product information, setting standards of what the product information should be and it's going to be part of the CE marking of products. So in order for you to market and sell products in the European region, you need to be compliant with this and sustainability information is also an important part of this, of course.

So you need to have -- you need to know the sustainability impact from your product. Secondly, you have the CSRB, which is a regulatory framework around how to declare CO2 levels for companies. And this will affect all companies in Europe over a certain size. And already now over 50,000 companies are affected in the European region. And so you will, in your annual report, are obligated to declare your CO2 levels and the numbers will be audited by an auditor.

So this is now you need to really understand what the real numbers are for your company. And the relation here to us and the product is that if you, for instance, are in our sector, and let's say that you are building a product manufacturer, and so -- and you have products that have a large effect. It might require a lot of energy to produce those products and so forth then the product information here is crucial because that is what's accumulated up to the reporting of the CSRB and the vast majority of your CO2 emissions will be related to your products.

And so the same thing is when you're like building material distributor of your like property owner of this industry, it also trickles down to the products you use and the progress you have in the building products -- projects. Then there is the GPP regulatory initiative, which is the digital passport, basically requiring building products to have their information in a digital format with QR code, so it's easily identifiable and easy to capture the information related to the products that have been put into a building.

So that is really an enforcement towards digital format. The fourth one we would like to share today is an CBAM and CBAM is also another initiative that moves from requiring sustainability, like carbon information about products to actually attaching costs to it. Because this here is for companies outside of Europe that are exporting into Europe, their products. They also need to have a carbon information about their products, and they will be taxed upon them. So the higher the CO2 footprint they have, the higher tax they will pay. And this really has a strong impact, of course, because now we're talking about real money that it costs if you do not have worked on your sustainability forms of the products.

This, of course, these legislations, they are starting to get rolled out. In some places, they already have been and in some places or some product categories and more and more are being also rolled out for. This puts a large pressure on the industry to act. And this article we have here is from March this year. It's related to the CABM initiative, and it's for -- it's basically saying that 10% of Swedish companies were reporting for the CBAM -- to CBAM. And that means that we have over 5,400 companies that didn't even file a report of that they need to be compliant with this initiative. And then, of course, there's also the companies affected that imported their products to Europe that wasn't related to this.

And so now all of the companies here that sort of missed this reporting is also facing potential fees that they need to pay for not being compliant to the directive. Then -- so coming back to BIM here because this BIM is super important here. I have been presenting about BIM in my earlier quarterly reports and explaining how it is standard way to work digitally in the building industry. It's used everywhere in the process -- different stages of the process by all different user groups in the industry. And that it basically digitalizes each and every product in a file where you both have the geometries, you have a 3D version of the building products and you also have the product information related to it in file as well.

And this is, of course, something that we at BIMobject Group has been working quite a lot with but this is becoming quite important given the context we are talking about because if you have a regular building project, you have around 50,000 different products in that building. And that in product information, of course, becomes quite important, and you need to do a lot of reporting. And there's a lot of different stakeholders that needs to do reporting on the different products. And that complexity, of course, is not good for the whole productivity of the industry. And therefore, also creates the need to use BIM and to go towards digitalization.

Our mission as a group, we set this in our strategy in end of 2022 was -- is to connect and digitize the building industry, making it smarter, faster and greener. And this is really where we move towards. And we do this by being a world-leading provider of reliable digital product information. And this is really core for us as a company. This is really where we build our capabilities within and we build our products around, really support the industry. And we also try to do this towards many different stakeholder groups here. As you see, we have property owners. We have architects, engineers and constructors, you have the building product manufacturers and also distributors, which we will talk a little bit later on as well, where we -- all of these players here needs to have good and transparent product information and they need to collaborate.

And this also places us in a very central position here because we see that the needs for change are quite large. And for us, if we sort of like summarize what we really see is important here is to address a couple of needs in the market. The first 1 is to make sure that the building project can make informed product decisions based on accurate product information, that can be everything around the design and functionality of the product, but also sustainability information and so forth. But you need to have the right information at the right time in the building project.

Then also, there is a need, all actors move towards digitalization. And this is also connected with the second bullet here of the need for collaboration and coordination. Because this is crucial when making product selections that there's a good collaboration and coordination here. So it's smaller choices made. Finally, we see also it's kind of important for this transition to be successful that we can help to allow each and every stakeholders to succeed, both individually as well as collectively when moving towards digitalization and process improvements and so forth, Because otherwise, there might be some stakeholder here that will be blocking others.

So when we design solutions, we really try to think about this for the industry. So what we're doing, we're powering digital building design worldwide. And we have done so historically with our 2 platforms, BIMobject and Prodikt and we have around more than 4 million registered users in more than over 100 countries, most of the world. We have around 250,000 monthly downloading users and being used by most top architectural firms in the world. And we have a lot of product information already in form of BIMobjects and also the different brands that we cover on our platform.

So this is -- for us is a very good starting point, which we feel is important also to have in order to support the industry in the right way. All right. So how are we then meeting these needs of the industry today with the solutions we have. Well, what we do have, we have bimobject.com, which is a global website where we have BIMobjects that are being downloaded by the user side of the industry. And we have Prodikt where you can upload a building project, the whole model. and then have a very powerful assessments in terms of climate implications on this platform. And you can also do product selections and exchange products and see how you can optimize the project in different stages through the building process. We also, in a very early stage, have started to develop the BIMobject application and that will serve as a functional tool for the user side of the industry to better manage their RVT files and also with some smart functionalities attached to it. And for our building product manufacturers who have their building products, we help to digitize them through our BIM and LCA solutions.

We do BIM objects also environmental product integrations, which contains all sustainability parameters for the building products. And finally, we also provide a data connection solution for the industry, where we help to connect and share data to different stakeholders and different solutions across the industry. And this is a very nice starting point for us to help the industry in the transition. But of course, we're also continuously working on improving complementary solutions to help the industry in the transition.

With that, then let's move over to the quarterly business update, and we'll keep that a little bit shorter today due to the lengthy introduction.

But let's first start off with the financial highlights. We had a continuous growth in the ARR of 5% in the quarter. And that will be 8% adjusted for FX rates, which I believe is a more accurate measure in this metric in particular. Turnover growth of 6%. Our loss was minus 5.1% in EBITDA, and there was a slight increase in the loss as well versus the last year, but it's roughly in the same size. And in line with the lower activity in the market, we also saw a slowdown in growth of our monthly downloading users, and we were at around 5% growth versus Q2 last year or the end of Q2 last year. And that we have seen a gradual reduction now for some quarters. But we believe that, that is quite reflective of the overall market activity as we still have quite stable net promoting score ratings of our platforms.

Then also, we have a remained strong cash position of SEK 223 million in liquid assets in the company. The events happening in the quarter were a couple of them, and the external event was that we deployed a new solution of -- towards our distributors and coming back a little bit to what I just presented, we deployed a solution to distributors to help them with product information. And distributors, they tend to have a vast amount of articles in their assortment. And of course, then faces extraordinary challenges in terms of reporting and getting this information in an accurate and good format.

And so that solution was rolled out during the quarter. And secondly, we also closed -- as some of you might note this when we present the assets we have in the company, We mentioned we only have 2 platforms. And before we have 3, and that is because we now have closed Polantis. It's a French BIM platform, which was very similar to BIMobject. But over the years, most of the traffic has moved over anyway to be BIMobject, so it was time to close this platform and consolidate it into BIMobject and that we did during the quarter. Other internal events that we are working quite focused on is we are integrating our platform technologies during this year. That is between the BIMobject platform and the Prodikt platform.

We also develop -- continuously developing solutions towards new and growing segments and related to the transition that the industry is in the middle of. Also, we are working quite a lot at the moment with the commercial organization to help them with these new environments we're in and train and educate them around new products and new solutions and the integration we do in our company. And for a quarter-by-quarter performance, we can see that we continue to improve our net sales, and this is mainly driven by the uptick in ARR. We are on a stable EBITDA level despite we also make investments to secure the future growth and we still have a cash runway at 6 years, which is a stable level also since last quarter.

Another event that happened in the company was a Board change. We had a AGM in May. And there was a big rotation in the Board, where Pia, who is a former Board member was promoted to be the share person of the Board. And Pia has a long history about being entrepreneur and also investor in tech scale-ups in the Swedish region. We have Lars Jörnow, being Head of the EQT Venture Advisory team and also the EQT venture is our largest investor into BIMobject, joining the Board. We have David Johansson, also new into Board, who is an entrepreneur and a professional investor, and I would say, like a specialist into -- tech specialists into running SaaS companies. And also, we have Petter Bengtsso as a new Board member. And Petter could be best explained as a BIM expert from the Swedish market. He is previously also the COO of Zynka BIM and has a long history in the construction sector.

And what's also interesting with this rotation in the Board is that we now have 3 of the 4 largest investors in -- represented in the Board and also 24% of the total shares of the company represented by the Board. So with that, we now have a very strong owner-based and related board that is part of this company, which we're very happy about.

Then I'd like to leave over to you, Per, to go through a little bit more about the financials of this quarter.

[Per Goransson, executive]

Okay. Thank you. Here, we see the main revenue components in a quarter-over-quarter comparison connected to our ARR. We see stable growth in recurring revenue. Adjusted for currency effects, recurring revenue grew 8% to SEK 33.8 million in the quarter, now representing 81% of our total net sales. Sustainability Solutions is still a smaller share of total sales, but it's stood for a large part of the growth in the quarter. Core platform business of BIMobject is also growing, but at the low rate due to higher churn. Our services business stands for 18% of total sales in the quarter. It refers to customer projects where we produce content on behalf of the customer. and then net sales are recognized in line with the completion rate in these projects.

Adjusted for currency effects, net sales decreased 9% versus previous year. Production capacity improved quarter-over-quarter, but still slightly behind last year. If we look on the cost side, we see increased other external costs, plus 11% year-over-year, increase mainly relates to external consultants working on development projects that is also capitalized. Personnel costs increased 6% versus last year, which is mainly due to the annual salary review process, but also, to some extent, currency effects and slightly more employees.

And if we then look at the full income statement, the quarter is overall close to the financials in Q2 2023. The main changes lie in more revenue from recurring platform subscriptions as well as more capitalized development projects, while we also see less gross contribution from services versus currency commercial results and an increased cost base in general. EBITDA at minus SEK 5.1 million equals 12% of net sales and EBIT of minus SEK 7.2 million equals minus 15% of net sales, very much in line with what we saw last year.

In financial net, excluding currency effects, we have a stronger return on our liquid assets this year versus last year. In the earnings per share, it decreased due to the bought out minority in Carbonzero AB, which is now fully owned and integrated with BIMobject.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

All right. For the concluding remarks, we have -- first off, we have the ongoing rollout of the EU regulations that pushed digital transformation not only for the European players, but also for companies that are exporting their goods to the European markets.

Secondly, it's the role of BIM where it's a key technology to make our industry smarter, faster and greener. It's way to digitalize it and it's also super important when it comes to meeting these regulations for the different stakeholders in the industry.

Thirdly, it's the deployment of our new solution to our distributors, which make for us is a strategic step forward in supporting the industry and the transition that it's facing. Both on being the ARR growth that we had in the quarter despite the market activity is slowing down. And that concludes the presentation for today.

And thank you, everybody, for listening in, and we are now ready to answer some of the questions that has come in for today.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Great. Thank you for that, Martin. And we have had a couple of questions coming in to our e-mail. So we'll go through them now and answer them. And if you have any remaining questions that we don't address on the call, you can still e-mail [e-mail], if you have more questions. So first question here, do you plan in the near future to use AI? And do you see any possibility to work with AI for BIMobject?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes. Thank you for that question. And AI is indeed an interesting technology. And I mean, although we don't see this technology as something that completely will transform this industry in the very near future, we do see a lot of good application areas of it. One part being for our developers to make sure that they can develop faster and have more output in their work. But we do also apply this technology to parts in our products. So to make sure that they're efficient and streamline processes for users and so forth.

So this is, of course, something that we are very aware of happening and that we also continuously implement into our solutions.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you, Martin. And next question on a completely different topic. What kind of role could BIMobject have in rebuilding Ukraine?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes, that's a good question, too. So Ukraine as a market isn't a market where we have local representatives in. And -- but however, what we do have is a very quite good connection to Ukraine as a market. So today, we have providers that help us with the content development. So development of BIM objects that we use in that market. And they have quite skilled developers, which we happily work with Also, we have initiatives internally to allow our employees supporting different organizations providing civilian material to the countries on the side of their jobs.

But in regards to the rebuild of Ukraine, we do have -- I mean, we -- it will depend on the level they will use BIM when they are rebuilding the country. But of course, and also to the level that they need products that we have on our platform that they can use. And also, it will also relate a little bit to the extent that we can internationalize some of our other tools and platforms like Prodikt and this BIM application that we mentioned earlier. But we will, of course, do whatever we can to be supportive of this buildup in Ukraine.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you, Martin. And then we go back to the financials. So how big -- the increase in ARR, how big -- how much of that was related to Prodikt and how much of that was related to the old platforms. I assume that's the bimobject.com platform.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes. That's also a good question. We typically don't split the numbers in this way. We -- internally, we -- yes, we do look at that in products in some way, but we also look at the customer segments and different markets because some of these platforms, they cover the same customer segments and so forth. However, what we can say is that our core business, which is more like a traditional BIMobject business, you could say that's related to that platform. That is the largest part of our business by far. But -- and it's also growing despite this challenging market environment that I think this sort of like business model is a little bit more exposed to.

However, what's cool to say in this quarter was that the growth related to platforms like Prodikt or to also what we now introduced to the distributors actually has a significant more than the majority part of the growth that we had in this quarter, which was quite fun to see.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

And the next question is related to a product we spoke earlier about that is targeted towards architects or rather the end users of the bimobject.com. So the question is how is the tests around this product proceeding? And do we still have a plan to launch this during the second half of the year?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes. Thank you for that as well. Yes, we are continuously working with this application, and we are continuously also adding small improvements or features to it. And we also recently did so in last quarter. It is our ambition to continue to expand it during the second part of this year. And so we still have that ambition. And -- but also after that, we will continue to develop it because I think this is something that will progress over quite some time.

And also, I think today, I think by presenting also the product next to each other, I think that was one of the reasons that we did that, too, is to show that when we do this, we make sure that it all fits together. It is not only like a separate application. It should also fit with the other platforms we have in that whole environment. So this is something that we build simultaneously while building this application to be an independent application as well.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Next question, how much of the external costs in the report is related to consultants? Maybe you can answer this one, Per.

[Per Goransson, executive]

Yes. So as part of our integration project and the development of new solutions and so we're using more consultants than we used to support us with more complex tasks. I would say out of the SEK 15.8 million and excluding accountancy services in subsidiaries and so, I would say SEK 2.8 million is related to consultants that we see as comparable to FTEs.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

And then we have a question around churn and acquisition of new customers. So the question is, how has this developed so far in Q3?

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Yes. That's also a great question. And I think the whole the level of how we acquire clients and the churn that we have in our company, I think it's quite correlated to the overall market activity that we see across the different markets. And that is hard to say when that will be a large change in that. I mean, we know that it will be a little bit lower activity for some time. And not -- I wouldn't expect that it changes in Q3 either. What we did report today is, however, that we did have a slight improvement in our second quarter, which we were very happy to see, but is still, of course, is a lower rate than it was a year ago.

So -- and also when it comes to Q3, I think it's very early to comment on that. And I think especially in this time since it's the summer period. So it's very hard to make a prediction of what the quarter will be when there's so many different vacation periods called many different markets. But yes, so I think that's how good I can answer this question at now.

[Lisa Norlander, executive]

Thank you, Martin. And that was the last question that I had on my list. Keep in mind, you can still contact us on the [e-mail] e-mail. But for now, we will wrap up this call and let everyone back into the summer and Olympics fun. And we look forward to seeing you all in a couple of months when we present our Q3 presentation. So thank you for today, everyone.

[Martin Lindh, executive]

Thank you.