Bimobject AB

STO:BIM

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Carl Silbersky, Chief Executive Officer]

Warm welcome to BIMobject Financial Report Audio Cast Q3 2021. My name is Carl Silbersky. I'm the CEO. And with me today in the audiocast, I got Martin Lindh, our CFO. BIMobject is a global marketplace for the construction industry. Primarily, we help building product manufacturers reach, influence and understand building designers worldwide. A good example of that is our customer Electrolux kitchen. They look at the digital marketplace as a way to work closely with the customers throughout the entire process by partnering with BIMobject that gives them the opportunity to reach and influence architects and designers as well as transfer their digital brands like Electrolux, [AEG], Zanussi and all their kitchen appliances such as ovens, hubs and other appliances directly into the projects from architects and engineers. That has been a great success for Electrolux.Let's move on to the highlights from the Q3 report. Commercially, the third quarterly is typically a smaller quarter from a customer acquisition perspective due to vacations in Europe. The budget cycle in the construction is strong and the majority of decisions are made in Q4 and Q1. Our customers' marketing budgets remain impacted by COVID-19 this year, but construction activity has bounced back, which has provided us with optimism for 2022. That means that the ARR in the quarter ended at 6% plus at year-over-year SEK 98.5 million. The net sales is slightly down 8% at SEK 30.8 million, and that's important that we now are 77% of our revenues comes from ARR. Net sales from recurring revenue, as I just mentioned, is then SEK 23.8 million and is flat in the quarter. And the 3 major product launches in the quarter, which is very important that I want to come back to, is that included a whole new bimobject.com experience. And finally, launch of environmental product declarations has been done on BIMobject, more on that just in a while. Like I mentioned, new releases on bimobject.com has been our search and download portal for the world's architects and engineers. With this launch, we have completed an important monetization on the platform interfaces. We will continue to build on with this higher pace in the future launches. We've also done an update for the dashboard for our thousands of customers to provide more actual insights and tips for customers. And the third major thing we launched in the quarter is an opportunity for our customers to run e-mail campaigns and to reach the target audience on the platform, over 2.6 million architects and engineers. We had a fantastic feedback from the launches and the Net Promoter Score has been increasingly high, it's a warm welcome from the market. Following on from this one, this September launch, we are continuing to -- with these launches, and we will have another update here in mid of November, which will include refined audience analytics as well as marketing tools for our customers that we're starting to improve more and more. That means, in other words, we help our customers to put their brands in front of the users at any time -- given time they are searching for relevant products. That is a transformation wave for BIMobject and a new revenue stream. Finally, we remain focused on the long-term value creation. As we stated earlier, we are in a transformation that we continue and will have completed hopefully by the end of the year. And what we see is that the platform has continued to grow with new registered users month-over-month, we remain to be the largest BIMobject platform in the world, and we can see strong download. In November, we will cross over 100 million downloads. We remain to be extremely strong as a platform. The second part we often focus on is increase the revenue base. New brands and average revenue per accounts is continued something that we're working on to scale out our business. That we've done with the launches of new products, like I just mentioned, the opportunity to increase a customer revenue with the campaigns and more to come in the next quarter. Finally, shareholder value. We believe that ARR growth is critical for a company like BIMobject and that we're putting wholeheartedly. And we're seeing a lot of customers are bouncing back. And the key priority now is account expansion. We will continue to drive this and continue to grow our customers and, of course, also looking to increase our net revenue retention with more projects. Do remember, ARR is a company's real core value for a company like BIMobject, and that's the focus for us. Now Martin, over to you.

[Martin Lindh, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Carl. To start off, I plan to provide an update on the ongoing transformation BIMobject is pacing through and has been working with over the last year. This, I believe, can provide a good background before providing some more detail into the financials from the quarter. There has been some different elements of the transformation program. And you can say it first started off as a cost program launched in 2020 while at the same time, the organization and our [motors] of branding gradually has been moving towards a traditional SaaS structure. On the sales side, we have, from a previously local setup, actively transformed the organization into globally governed go-to-market model with dedicated teams such as SDRs, account executives and customer success team. As part of this transformation and to bring our existing client base into our new way of working, we have, over the last 12 months, also needed to update agreements with our existing client base. Focus within sales is on ARR, and we continuously work on optimizing our go-to-market model and how our different sales teams work most efficiently together. At the same time, we have modernized our product development organization into similar teams and are now working with quarterly releases of new products and features. Cost control remain a focus for us. This means that we continuously look and capture further cost opportunities, but still don't shy away from making necessary investments that we believe will create mid- to long-term shareholder value. Finally, we're also transforming the way we work and how we cultivate talent in the company. The incentive program launched earlier this year was a key element of that strategy. Into the financials and key metrics. And first off, let's take a look at our ARR, which is the annual contract value of our platform subscriptions. This we view as a key metric for creating value to our shareholders, and we report this metric in constant currency. Year-on-year growth for the quarter was 6% and from a quarter-to-quarter comparison, minus 2%. In regards to inflow of new ARR, we saw during the quarter slightly lower levels of inflow versus last year. This, we believe, is partially COVID-19 related in the sense of vacation was not fully utilized due to the travel restrictions in 2020. This trend we've also identified when looking at activity levels of our [ ACO ] users on the platform. The growth of ARR over the last year has been negatively affected by the transformation program launched at BIMobject, which I earlier described. Especially churn and downgrades have contributed to outflows that has reduced the overall growth rate. Churn continued to negatively impact the business also during the most recent quarter while downgrades to a lesser -- affected to a lesser extent. So far, 85% of contracts have been negotiated, and we expect that most of the remaining contracts to be completed at the end of this year. So far, it's too early to tell the actual effects of the renegotiations as the first ones started approximately a year ago, although we remain quite hopeful. In terms of P&L, where we report the actual income and expenditures over the period, we saw a minus 8% development in net sales versus last year and plus 2% increase versus last quarter. Worth noting is that the annual comparison is affected by minus 3% adjustment of FX, while there's basically no such effect when looking at it at a quarter-by-quarter perspective. Subscriptions is still building up the majority of income and accounted for 77% of the net sales in the quarter. Our service business, in which we [BIMify] products to our building manufacturer customers, kept increasing during the period. Operating costs has increased when looking at a year-over-year perspective from the all-time low in 2020 Q3 but declined versus the last quarter. All in all, we keep close control of costs and monitor the fine balance between being cost efficient without hampering our growth. Last quarter was kind of different from a personnel cost perspective, as we in that quarter launched an incentive program to our key employees. This quarter, it becomes more apparent that we have maintained the same cost level for personnel as we had in the first quarter. In the most recent quarter, about SEK 5 million can be attributed to nonrecurring cost activities, such as a strategic pricing study we conducted and a cancellation of a rent agreement for an office we used to have in Germany. Cash flow over the period was quite in line with the negative profits of the quarter. Worth noting though is that COVID-related subsidies of 2020 affected the year-over-year comparison in 2 ways. First, when we received the subsidies in last year and then also this year, when we pay them back. Over to you, Carl.

[Carl Silbersky, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you very much, Martin, and I would like to open up for Q&A. Any questions coming in we will answer them now.

[Martin Lindh, Chief Financial Officer]

Okay. Let's go through some of the questions that have come in. As I can see some of them we have already answered with our presentation, but let's focus on those that can be more complementary instead. With us today, we also have David Kullander, our Chief Revenue Officer, to answer some of those questions. First, we have a question regarding average price when looking at our total portfolio versus our price levels in our packages and why the average is lower than the price list. Well, although we don't typically go into details of these matters, I guess you can say that like any other business, price lift shifts from time to time as well as discount strategies. And these are typical things that can affect the difference between list prices and what we call ARPA, average revenue per account. Secondly, we have a question regarding upselling and the focus of our customer success team going forward. David, why don't you share your thoughts on that?

[David Kullander, Chief Revenue Officer]

Yes. As we -- I hope you can hear me well, that we -- as we shared in the report, our focus is really to move from this year's building up of a contract base where we have renewed customers on standardized terms and conditions to an upselling motion starting in 2022. Our main focuses are on content sales, platform marketing services sales and then moving customers between plans from what we call basically standard up to premium. We feel that we don't want to provide a certain number and so on, but we definitely see a lot of potential of upselling. We haven't touched a lot of that this year. And also that through product development, we can create an even bigger span of things by these product launches we're doing now, we are creating a tool set for the customer success team to giving them more opportunities for upsell than we have had historically. So the product launches will also be extremely important for our upselling strategy in 2022. And as you know, you can tune into the launch webinars to hear more about what we're launching, if you want to go into the details.

[Martin Lindh, Chief Financial Officer]

Great. All right. Next question, I guess, it's more technical in a sense, and it's about how the number of brands develop in relation to ARR and why they might have different growth trajectories? Well, I guess this is due to that each customer does not equal one brand. Many of our larger customers have many brands. And it could also be that each brand paid differently to us for the services. We also have some customers on free plans that was offered historically. And here's an interesting question. David, what do you see as the benefit for us of being the largest platform within our niche?

[David Kullander, Chief Revenue Officer]

Yes. It's of course, one of the most important things in the marketplace economy, you talk about network effects and so on. And in our commercial operations, we see this clearly. And as we spoke about in the report, one of the highlights was that we have been named the best platform from manufacturing-specific BIM content in Europe by -- with no other manufacturers being mentioned in that same context. And this is an example of our strength when it comes to the international position, but we have local competitors in each market. There is basically some type of BIM portal, et cetera, product library in all countries in Europe and a few in the U.S. But there are virtually no other multinational portals like us. And so when it comes to multinational clients, we don't just have a big value argument, but we also have actually a cost-saving argument. But we can consolidate the presence from many local platforms on to BIMobject and actually cut costs compared to it. So we both have a higher value and a more attractive position. Also, I would like to highlight something that my team benefits a lot from is actually the scale that we can invest in product development at a higher pace than competitors can. I mean, obviously, as you've seen this quarter, we have released a lot of things. We've been doing some catch-up here. But when we meet with customers, we generally now get the review that we have the most sophisticated platform when it comes to things such as analytics, publishing and so on. So we -- it -- the size also gives us a product development advantage that we feel is playing more and more in our favor as we move on. It's hard for the local competitors to keep the same pace of development and sophistication and software, attract the same talent that we have in product development and so on.

[Martin Lindh, Chief Financial Officer]

Indeed. Okay. So let's see if there's any late questions that have come in. We have one question here regarding monetization of a user base and if that could materialize in 2022.Well, although we're proud to have our services for free for [ ACO ] users, and we don't have any immediate plans to introduce that, this is -- I guess you can say this is an area that we look upon from time to time in how we could create a sort of like a premium offering or similar to our [ ACO ] users. And I think that would then be covering most of the questions we have received. And by that, I would like to thank you for your time to listen to us BIMobject and look forward to the next quarterly presentation. Thank you.