FormPipe Software AB

STO:FPIP

Earnings Call Analysis

Formpipe Ends 2023 with Strong Growth

Formpipe experienced a robust end to 2023, marking a 7% growth and a 10% increase in ARR. The annual contract value (ACV), though satisfactory at SEK 9 million, is targeted for improvement moving forward. SaaS revenues climbed to SEK 36 million, aligning with the company's 13% EBIT margin for the quarter. All three business areas—Sweden, Denmark, and Private—exhibited positive developments. For the year, the company reported an 8% top line growth reaching SEK 525 million, with a notable 58% EBITDA increase to SEK 115 million.

Strategic Product Developments and Margin Improvements

The company has experienced a demanding yet progressive quarter with strategic developments aimed at reinforcing product maintenance and ensuring smooth future operations. A concerted effort was made to integrate core maintenance features into their flagship product, streamlining future maintenance. This initiative is a pivotal step in enhancing the product's long-term viability and operational efficiency. Margin improvements were noticeable across all three business segments due to strategic initiatives set years prior, specifically in private growth. With substantial investments maturing, the company now leverages a scalable business model that escalates the top line while maintaining a fixed cost structure.

Operational Efficiency and Enhanced Profitability

The Swedish Public segment displayed marked advancement in operational efficiency, overcoming previous organizational challenges. Simultaneously, the company's Danish business sector realized enhanced profitability following the successful renegotiations of key contracts. These improvements are integral to the company's continuing success and reflect their ability to adapt and refine their operations to optimize financial outcomes.

Growth Initiatives and Market Expansion

New growth initiatives have been identified to expand the company's market presence and enhance its product offerings. To cater to the public sector, the focus will shift towards delivering more refined products that support top-line growth, harnessing the prowess of their established customer base and product platform. For private sectors, the exploration of serving smaller, less sophisticated customers with the anticipation of expanding alongside these clients marks a strategic move to cast a wider net and capture additional market share.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Banking Sector

The banking segment of the private sector faced headwinds due to softer macroeconomic conditions. While challenges persist with competition and market saturation within fintech, the company sees a stable momentum and no expected dramatic changes in the near future. An observed uptick in the ERP segment activity is a positive sign, indicative of renewed business interests and potential growth opportunities.

Partner Relations and Allegations

Amid allegations against Temenos, a major partner, the company remains steadfast in their relationship, which has spanned over 15 years. The Lasernet platform's robust API integration with various ERP systems fortifies the company's position despite the controversy. The company's customer base, especially in banking, is secure, and it intends to continue serving those clients effectively without being swayed by external market discourse.

Stable Public Sector Demand and Growth Prospects

The public sector presents a stable demand environment, largely attributed to the substantial existing client contracts and applications. Though recruitment in professional services appeared conservative, there is scope to scale these services to provide additional value to public customers. This untapped potential signals growth prospects and indicates a pathway for increased employee onboarding to meet service demands.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Welcome to this Live Q with Formpipe. I will be back later for the Q&A session, and you can already now post your questions below the stream.

But now it's time for the CEO, Magnus Svenningson; and CFO, Joakim Alfredson, to present the fourth quarter. Welcome.

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

Thank you, Fredrik. 2023 ended strongly. So first of all, thank you to all my Formpipe colleagues. It's been a great first 6 months for me.

Today, we'll talk about the Q4 in short, some business highlights. Joakim will give us some financial details, and then we'll talk a little bit about 2023 as a year. And then finally, little bit on the next steps for Formpipe.

We ended 2023 strong with a growth of 7%. We had a 10% growth in ARR, which I believe is very important for a source company. The ACV came out at SEK 9 million, and we -- that is a figure we should do better in the future. So it is okay. And as we spoke about previous quarters here, we have had a bit of churn on the private banking side. But again, we will work harder on the ACV in the future.

And the SaaS revenues, they are up to SEK 36 million. So that's a good one. And of course, extra proud for the good profitability where we come in on a 13% EBIT margin for the quarter. So important to note also that all our 3 business areas, Sweden, Denmark and Private, is contributing to this development. And it's really, really nice to see this development.

Now if we look at the quarter business -- from the business perspective, the beauty of public is, of course, the large installed base and the large amount of contracts we hold with public sector in Sweden and Denmark. Now that doesn't stop us from selling more, which is very important.

And a few cool things. Last time I was here, I spoke about meetings live, and that is a cool product for meeting, allowing municipalities and other bodies to meet digital and do voting, et cetera. And now we see that picking up. So we have named a few more customers. Now something happened. We have nailed a few more customers in [ Arboga ], Europe and Stockholm, if I remember correctly.

And then we have Fiskeristyrelsen and Vingåker kommun. So Fiskeristyrelsen in Denmark, they were a long-time TAS customer. But now they are also into our case and document management solution. So that is also cool upsell. And then again, a few new frame agreements with Sundbyberg, Avfall & Vatten, Knivsta kommun.

And we have also have to touch Landbrugsstyrelsen in Denmark, a contract that we have renegotiated. And that is now sort of on a new baseline where we have a good cooperation with the customer, we do extension works, do deliver professional services. And as we do so, that contract will expand and be larger over time. It will take some time before we get there, a few quarters. But again, we have that as a baseline now and look forward to do more with that client in the coming quarters.

Then we have the Lasernet platform, and Lasernet is really a cool product. Some -- if you put it short, it is about if you have information that you want a person or a machine to read, then you need Lasernet. And if we look at the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, we have done the number of deals we are supposed to do over the quarter. And I want to mention a few, OFA-Bamberg, that is a medtech company; Schwäbisch Media, yes, that is a media company; RKW is a kitchen supplier; and for all you Swedes out there, Pågen, probably you had that kind of loaf of bread many times in your life.

And it's this sort of -- this little snapshot of customers attests to how useful the Lasernet product is. Any company that has a reasonably sophisticated supply chain or manufacturing process needs this product. So that is sort of really cool and sort of good progress.

Then we have the other current area, banking and finance, where we did 5 new banking deals and where we have sort of a larger ACV, a big one here around SEK 1 million, really, really good. That is also in line with what we should do. And we got a reward from Temenos. Temenos is one of the core ERP suppliers we work with. And we got a Solution Provider of the Year award, which I think, for us, is a really good sign on how well we do onboarding and working and marketing through and together with our partners.

This was then my little queue line to you. You have Joakim to dwell into the figures.

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

Excellent. All right. Hello, everybody. Let's talk some more about the numbers we have here today.

We're very proud of the closing of the year. We think that we have done tremendous improvements during the year in terms of profitability and continued growth, and Q4 really marks this as well. So we see that we continue this positive trend that we set out, started pretty much a year ago, and we are continuously strengthening quarter-by-quarter.

Especially visible is this, on the recurring revenue line, which grows 20% compared to last year's Q4. We do have an opposite effect on the delivery line. We see lower levels of deliveries coming through, and this is very much to do with the new agreement we have with Landbrugsstyrelsen in Denmark. Q4 is the first quarter where we solely are live now with this new agreement. In Q3, we were actually live with both the old and the new agreement. So now we're living under the new agreement, and that then we will see lower levels of delivery revenue coming through.

Summing this up, we have a growth, as Magnus mentioned, of 7% quarter-on-quarter. Coupled with a really good cost control, which is actually down from last year, we can see that the profitability is increasing quite sharply from last year's Q4. We're up SEK 11 million comparable.

And looking a bit on the different business areas, as Magnus mentioned, we see positive development and contribution from all 3 business areas here, and that is very, very good news. Diving into each area, starting with Sweden public to the left there, we see the profitability going from SEK 45 million EBITDA up to around SEK 63 million.

And we can see that the organization is functioning better. The efficiency in the -- especially the delivery organization is improving, which also means that we have been able to take on more projects with in-house resources and being less reliable on third-party or subcontracting resources.

Looking at Denmark, they have very successfully renewed and prolonged, especially the case in document management contracts. This has been going on from 2022 and also into '23. And we see that effect coming through very clearly on the recurring revenue line where we managed to renew these contracts at a higher price point and securing them for a long period ahead.

So happy news. Here, we also see, if we look at the details and the delivery line, we see that, that one is down from SEK 77 million to SEK 64 million. So that is an effect that we are becoming more used to.

Looking at private, we see that the scalability now is really shining through. And we are continuing the good growth with a good cost control, as mentioned, where the costs are relatively flat from last year with the top line increasing.

A bit more detail here. We see that the recurring revenue grows from SEK 143 million up to SEK 174 million, SEK 30 million plus there, but we, at the same time, are actually lowering the consultancy revenue, down from SEK 29 million down to SEK 18 million. And this is -- as we have communicated before, we are pushing deliveries to partners to have a more streamlined software model here. We are now down on a level that we probably will be at going forward. So looking ahead, we will not see that lowering delivery revenue sort of lowering the top line growth.

Summing this up to the group, we see a top line growth of 8% to SEK 525 million for the year and with an EBITDA expansion of 58% to SEK 115 million for the year. So good progress in all areas. And this is the last time you will see the business like this, as Magnus will come back to. We are combining the Swedish and Danish public business areas into one called Public. So next time, they will be reported under the same business area. And it's simply a combination of the 2. So to track the history, you can just combine those.

Looking at the recurring revenue, you remember these slides from before, we are at the level exceeding 70% of the revenue. Looking at the rolling-12 recurring revenue graph there, we see a year-on-year growth of 20%, which we're very proud of. And we've had a high growth rate in the recurring revenue for a very long time now. And looking back to last year, so we see that we've actually grown this by 70% with average rates.

The recurring revenue is now covering around 95% of our fixed operating costs. And we see that this upward trend that we started a year ago is really keeping in, and we are continuing this positive trajectory that we have mentioned.

Looking at the ACV details, Magnus touched on this. But this quarter, we actually have a negative currency effect of SEK 12 million coming through, which means the Swedish krona actually strengthened against other currencies during this quarter. The ACV, without the currency effect, is something to SEK 9 million split on plus SEK 11 million for the SaaS side and actually churning of SEK 2 million on the support and maintenance side.

And as Magnus also mentioned, the private, yes, we have a plus SEK 6 million in ACV, but that contains some churn, which we have seen in the banking side of the business, unfortunately. These are our newer banks having difficulties to find extended funding to continue their business in this market we're in right now.

Sweden public does a fairly good Q4, closing an ACV of SEK 3 million, which is a fairly high number on the quarter. Outgoing ARR, something at SEK 405 million, which is actually down, as you can see from the opening balance due to this large currency effect. But it's up 10% from last year.

That was it for me. Handing over back to you, Magnus.

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

So we have 2023 as a good year. Our net sales up 8% to SEK 525 million. We have also now started to gradually increase our EBIT up to 9%. And then finally, this strong cash flow allows the Board to propose a dividend to SEK 0.5. So this is a really good, solid foundation for 2024. So it's really a good baseline.

And then, of course, the question is, what do we do now? And there are some ideas on this. And as I came to Formpipe about 0.5 year ago, to me, it's obvious that there is so much potential here, especially around our installed base. And we have launched a program we called Pursue Potential. And this is really about how we can utilize our team, our portfolio and our installed base to accelerate our growth and profitability.

And when it comes to Public, it is -- we have treated that. It's been 2 business areas: one in Sweden and one in Denmark. And there are quite a lot of similarities between those 2 markets because it's a regulated market. It's a law of public procurement. There are similar, not identical needs in the market. So our product platform is able to serve both of the markets.

So what we're doing now is that we are pooling these to teams and markets together under one leadership, allowing us to focus our product development efforts towards functionalities and offerings that drive top line. We have more than 300 customers within the public sector. So we are in daily interaction with the public sector. That allows us to thoroughly understand the needs of the public sector.

So this is a way for us to truly focus on this very important area, start a dialogue and also start moving our product portfolio to solve the needs of the public sector going forward. It also allows us to utilize our competence in a more efficient manner because in order for us to be successful and our clients to be successful, we see that we need to, through our offering, we need to add such things like cybersecurity, like AI, like automation. And this is -- these are the things that we will focus on now going forward as we merge these 2 business areas.

I also want to mention the fact that we have Thomas à Porta as Executive Vice President heading this. He has been with us for several years, have a long, long and strong history with the public sector. So that's a really experienced and clever team coming together to deliver on this.

Then secondly, we have the private sector. Now the private sector with -- as I was here last time, we noted that private sector during the year had turned into black figures. Now black figures are great, but we see good potential to improve the margins within the private sector. And this is why we overhauled the customer journey, making the Lasernet platform easy to find, consume and use. And in short, this means that we look over the product structure and the business model, allowing it to be easier to consume, easier to land and expand, easy to -- easier to use for our partners, et cetera.

We also start looking into other areas. We are now very -- we have a good footprint in the Dynamics world. We have a good footprint in the bank and finance world. But there is a world outside of that, which we're also starting to look at. And we have also appointed Michael Rogers, who has a long, extensive experience with Formpipe to head that business area.

This leaves me with a very, very -- as always, in the IT industry, a very interesting, exciting 2024 to look forward to. And I will, over the year, come back to how we progress with these 2 very, very interesting stories that lies ahead for public and for private.

Before I close the presentation, just coming back to our financial targets where we have -- delivering well on the annual revenue growth. We delivered well on the share of recurring revenues. We are back on giving a dividend. And then on the margin goal, we are starting a journey towards delivering on that goal by 2025.

And with that said, I am about to initiate the Q&A with you, Fredrik.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Thank you, Magnus and Joakim.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

And I think we shall start with a question from the web. Does the SEK 20 million in ACV in Joakim's graph mean that new sales is actually SEK 20 million, i.e., without the churn banks, the ACV would have been SEK 10 million higher?

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

No. I think that the -- I have split the ACV graph there in one positive box and one negative box. So the churn is visible in the negative box, and the new sales and the upsells is visible in the ACV plus box. But it's a good thing that you mentioned that because I actually forgot to mention that, that when comparing to last year's Q4, last year's Q4 looks a lot better with SEK 30 million in the new sales. That included the big agreement with Landbrugsstyrelsen at that time, which amounted to exactly SEK 10 million. So it's pretty much on par with last year there.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Okay. But I mean the statement about without any churn, it would be SEK 10 million higher. That's right, although you have churn in other areas than banking, I suppose. Yes?

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

Yes, that is right. That is right.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Great. And once again, I want to highlight the opportunity to ask questions below the stream. So I want to start with deliveries in Sweden. It's an area where you want to expand. However, in this quarter, the number was down 14% year-over-year. Could you give us some color on the development there?

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

Yes. First, numbers-wise, perhaps. And the numbers -- the revenue doesn't really tell the full story here because what we have done is that we have increased the efficiency and the profitability in that business. So we are now able to do more of the contracts with our own resource instead of using subcontractors.

So looking at Sweden, we see that the cost level is actually down compared to last year, and a big part of that is found in the COGS where we have the subcontractors. So even though the revenue is fairly flat, we see much healthier profitability in that side of the business.

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

And as a comment to that as well, looking a little bit in hindsight, we should potentially have been a little bit more aggressive in recruiting new resources as well. So we are working on that now. So we -- that we're aiming to have that being more positive going forward.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Okay. So you have basically set the organization for further profitable growth then, I suppose?

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

We're a more professional organization now than we were 1 year, 1.5 years ago.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Okay. Capitalization of R&D increased somewhat compared to the same period last year. Why is that? And what kind of product development are you increasing the investments in?

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

It's actually major -- primarily 2 explanations to that. The first one is that, I don't know if you recall, back -- if you back up a year ago, we had some issues with the Danish product, TAS. And we had to do some, yes, firefighting basically to keep the customers alive or keep the systems going at the customer site. What we now have done is made sure to incorporate that into the core product and make sure that we have that code base in a good manner inserted into the core product to make sure maintenance going forward is much smoother and easier. So that has been a large task during Q4, actually.

And also, we have initiated a bit of what Magnus touched upon with the Lasernet product. We are looking at how we can make that into a more easy-to-consume product going forward. So that has driven the cost side a bit this quarter. In particular, we're looking ahead a bit, we see that we will not be on this level. Going forward, we will be slightly lower than we were in Q4.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

I see. And you've touched upon this, but you have an ambition of increasing your margins. And looking at each of your 3 segments, the improvement relative to Q4 last year was quite substantial in all 3, actually, it's on the EBITDA level and your target is for the EBIT level, although. But still, could you elaborate a bit on what's driving the improvements in the 3 segments?

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

I think that we are pretty much delivering on what we set out to a couple of years back when we initiated this journey. That was aimed at primarily growing private rapidly. So we invested heavily in private, of course, punishing the margins for quite some time. We have now come to the end of that, and we see that we can maintain a very fixed cost level and still grow top line at sufficient rate. So we're very happy with that scalability in the private business area.

But then, of course, we've had some bumps on the way with the Swedish Public, but that have now settled. And we now see the organization being operated much more efficiency and professional, basically. So it's improvements all around, I would say. And to mention lastly, Denmark, I mean, we -- with this very, very successful renegotiations or renewals of these case and document management contracts, we see a higher profitability in that side of the business. So we're very happy.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Okay. In the report, in the CEO letter, you mentioned new initiatives to increase growth and improve the portfolio of products and so on. You touched upon it, but could you elaborate a bit what initiatives are we talking about here?

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

Now first of all, we need a very, very -- so a little bit, as I said, one of the big assets here is our installed base when it comes to public. So we really need to now make sure that we serve that properly because there are a lot of needs and challenges within the public sector. We are a leader in digitalization. We have a strong product platform. We have a lot of competence, but we need to utilize that in a more efficient and focused manner. And this is what this is about.

So it is to take the development efforts we do today to make them more focused on the products that we'll sell tomorrow and also facilitate the efficiency of the public sector. And with -- so given the installed base and the experience we have, our product platform and the people, we need to start that transformation so that the money we spend on research and development goes more into functionalities that drives top line. This is sort of the key thing here. And given our position in the market, this is something we can do -- we will be able to do very, very well. So that is sort of for the public sector.

And as I said, private, we are active in 2 ecosystems. When we look at, for example, our -- how our revenue is distributed over the product, we see that we tend to do one large sell to a customer because we have a sophisticated product that is needed by sort of a sophisticated user. We need to look at how can we land a bit earlier at a less sophisticated customer and grow with that customer. Those kind of questions is that we are now starting to work with.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Okay. Interesting. So in some way, you want to capture a larger market by approaching smaller customers as well then. Is that what you said?

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

Yes. Well, I mean we want to make our offering more accessible to more clients, yes, because it is we -- every time I meet the customer, sort of the right customer, they always say that this is absolutely a product that we need. So we do so much good things. So we have a lot of potential there and harvesting that by being easy to find, consume and to use. That is sort of what we will focus on our resources on going forward.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Okay. Once again, I want to highlight the opportunity to ask questions on the web. You mentioned in the report or throughout last year, I should say, that softer macroeconomics have had a negative impact on your numbers, especially within the banking sector, some of the newer banks, for example. So what is your current market outlook for the private segment?

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

We spoke a little bit about that. And of course, the private -- the banking segment is -- you've probably read a lot about sort of the fintech industry. There's a lot of competition going on. So that is sort of on the margin, we have seen some turns and some challenges there. But again, talking about the future is always difficult. We see a good momentum in the business. We see a good momentum in the -- when we look at our pipelines. We -- when I look at that, I can't see that there will be any dramatic changes going forward and sort of neither positive or negative.

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

No, I think on the positive side is that we have seen more activity also in the ERP segment. But in the banking, with more deals coming through, so the activity is higher than a year ago, which is positive.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Interesting. And let us stay with the private segment and the banking and financing offering. One of your, I suppose, the biggest partner within that area at least, Temenos, are accused by short sellers of having inflated its numbers. What is your view on that? And could it have an impact on Formpipe?

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

As being very active on the stock market, we read about these kind of things before. And yes, Temenos is a very important partner to us. We work with them for more than 15 years. So we have a long relation with that team. The Lasernet platform is an API-based platform. So it integrates very well with different -- a lot of different core ERP systems, for example, [ man both or machine ].

We have more than 100 banks on our customer list. We operate crucial solutions for them around their customer communication. So we see, from our perspective, we see that we have good direct contact with the clients. We can -- we operate with different ecosystems. And from our viewpoint, it's very difficult to sort of have some sort of view on this particular discussion more than that.

From our angle, Temenos is a good ERP platform. We have a good -- in our joint customer base, we have good relations with that end customers. So we will just continue to do what we do, try to sell more and to serve our clients well, continue to do so, in cooperation with Temenos.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

I see. Sounds reasonable. And let's move on to the public sector and especially Sweden, the data I've looked at pointed towards a rather soft last quarter of last year. However, both you and your peer, Addnode, I mean numbers were quite strong in my view. So what's your view of the public market into this year?

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

This is sort of one of the beauties with our public business, it is the large installed base of contracts we have and clients, and also the fact that we do sort of application close services with our existing clients. And we see, as we said a little bit, we should probably have been a little bit more aggressive when it comes to recruiting professional services, for example. So we see a sort of good stable demand of our services in the public market.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Interesting. So there's room for additional employees providing value to the public customers.

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

Yes, absolutely.

[Fredrik Nilsson, analyst]

Interesting. Thank you very much.

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

Thank you, Fredrik.

[Joakim Alfredson, executive]

Thank you.

[Magnus Svenningson, executive]

It's great being here.