Lime Technologies AB (publ)

STO:LIME

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Erik Syren]

Good morning, and welcome to Lime's Q1 update. My name is Erik. I'm the CEO at Lime. And actually, this is my last week as the CEO. Friday, I will leave it over the responsibility and our new captain, Nils Olsson, he will also be our presenter today.

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

Yes. Thank you, Erik. Really look forward to it.

[Erik Syren]

Perfect. So let's start then. Lime, we are developing and selling CRM software. We have today 8 offices in the Nordics and also in Netherlands. During the last 12 months, we have reached a turnover of SEK 348 million and an EBITDA of SEK 103 million. During the last 20 years, when I have been a part of Lime, we have accomplished 90% growth in average per year, with 25% EBITDA margin in average per year. Today, we are a SaaS company, and the majority of our revenue are recurring revenue. And we have a low-risk in our customer portfolio, in our customer base. We're not doing deals with one customer. We're doing deals with many hundreds of customers every year. And today, the 10 biggest customer stands for less than 8% of the revenue, we have a low customer dependency. And if you ask people about Lime, they hopefully and probably say that we have a high engagement among the employees, high commitment and a strong -- very strong corporate culture, something I'm really proud of being a part of. Okay. When the pandemic came to Europe 12 months ago, we promised you to be -- see the crisis, the pandemic as an opportunity. We will continue. We said already in the beginning, that we will continue to invest in growth, both invest in product development, sales and marketing, open up new countries, new markets and also look for acquisitions. We should use a tiger strategy attack when the danger appears. We have continued this also during the first quarter. We have invested both in product development, sales and marketing, recruiting a lot of people. We had a new trainee program that started in January. And also now in Q1, we have decided to open up a new office in Germany, and we have also acquired a new company, Userlike, working with unified messaging, very interesting and give us great possibility going forward. The agenda today, first, we will talk about the business climate, the order intake in Q1. After that, we look into the numbers, revenue and the profitability. And after that, we will talk about the acquisition and the investments in Germany going forward. And last but not least, a short summary of everything. So let's proceed. So let's start with order intake in the business climate, Nils.

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

Yes. And as we have reported before, our customer concentration is low. Today, the top 10 customers stand for 7.8%, and the biggest client stands for 1.4%. So as Erik said, low-risk in our business. And the order intake in Q1 has been good, and we have continued to close many deals in all our markets, actually, within our focus verticals. So to give you some examples, we have Ikano Bostad and Ikano Bolig, a real estate company, in Denmark and in Sweden. We have closed a couple of utility deals, Fjordkraft in Norway and Bodens Energi here in Sweden. And one of our bigger verticals, the wholesale vertical, we have closed Lena Maskin in Norway, Koja in Finland and ATS-Orwak in -- here in Sweden. Besides that, we won a public tendering process with Nacka Kommun, a deal worth SEK 5 million, so a quite big deal for us, and it's within ticket handling systems.

[Erik Syren]

Perfect. Let's look into the numbers then in Q1, and let's start with the annual recurring revenue. We had 11% growth in annual recurring revenue during the first quarter, compared to the same period last year. And if you look at the split between subscription and the service agreements, we can see subscription had a growth of 16% and service agreement, minus 7%. We are not satisfied with those levels. We aim to be higher than that. And we believe that we will come back to normal levels when the markets open up again. And we are affected by pandemic and the COVID-19 situation and especially in Norway, Finland, Denmark and Netherlands. So we'll come back to that later on in this presentation. If we look at the revenue streams, we can see that subscription still has a good growth pace going forward, 20% growth during the last 12 months. The service agreements, the orange one, on a stable level still. And if we look at the blue one, the upfront, 1% this transformation, as we have said earlier and previously, is more or less over for us, only 1% in upfront revenue. And if you look at the gray one, expert services, good growth in Q1 and approximately 70% of the revenue in expert services coming from existing customers still. So a stable revenue stream also coming from existing customers and expert services. If we look at the growth numbers, we can see that we had 11% growth in overall in Q1 and 14% during the last 12 months. If we look at the split between the markets, we can see that Sweden, we had a pretty good pace, 11%. And the rest of the Nordics only growing by 10% during Q1. And we also see the same trend last 4 quarters, Sweden, 15% growth during the last 12 months, and 11% outside Sweden in Norway, Finland, Denmark and Netherlands. As I said, they are more affected by the lockdowns and restrictions in those countries. And we expect that the market -- when the markets open up again, they will come back to normal growth levels. And we see that the business climate getting better also in those countries, we have seen that in Q1. If we look at the profitability, we have seen an improvement in the profitability since Q4 '19, quarter-by-quarter. We also had a really good profitability in Q1, 28%, more or less the same levels as last year, and that's despite we doing a lot of investments, recruitments, sales and marketing in Netherlands, for example. So that's good. We keep the good profitability. During the last 12 months, we can see that we have reached 29.3%, and that's an improvement by 33% compared to the same period last year. So a good improvement compared to last year. The driver behind a good profitability. That's -- we have a really good scalability in our business. And if we look at the personnel expenses, as a percent of sales, this one going down. We reached 56% in Q1 this year. And during the last 12 months, we reached 54.5%. We also see the same trend in other OpEx, other operating expenses, also going down as a percent of total sales. So we reached 14.9% in Q1 and 15.6% last -- during the last 12 months compared to 18.7% in the same period last year. So good scalability. And of course, that help us in developing a good profitability in our business. So let's look into the investments we have done during the first quarter and especially Userlike and the decision to open up a new country.

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

Good. So let's start with our acquisition, and we are very happy to announce the acquisition of Userlike today, a fast-growing SaaS company in Germany with their office in Cologne. And they have a market leader position in unified messaging, and we will come back to that -- what that actually means. Userlike have a really good platform, and you can say that they have 4 different products or 4 areas of use, website messaging, messaging inbox, chatbot solutions and messaging CRM. Website messaging, that's very much about to have a live chat on the customer's web page, so you can increase the interactions and the communication with the customers. Messaging inbox is also about communication and interaction with the customer, but you do it within the customer's favorite messaging app, such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, for example. If we look at the chatbot solution, there are a lot of repetitive questions that are coming up on a daily basis. And there, we can help solving those questions with the chatbot instead of human interactions. And we have the messaging CRM. There is a good API for handling integrations towards CRM systems such as Lime, for example. So who are Userlike? Userlike is a fast-growing SaaS company, growing approximately 30% per year and have, today, EUR 4 million in annual recurring revenue. It was founded in 2011 by 3 founders, David, Pascal and Timoor. And in total, they have built up a team of 35 employees. And working with the different type of messaging and increasing communication with our customers.

[Erik Syren]

Just to be clear here, they are profitable. They're earning money, and they will not affect our profitability negative going forward in this year. So they are profitable and has a good profitability. Thank you.

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

And this is some of Userlike's customers. And you can see that it's a really strong brand. They have a good position in the German market, but also in the DACH region. In total, they have 1,800 customers. So not all customers are as big as this, but a long tail of customers moving on. So I would say that this is a trademark that they deliver a quality software.

[Erik Syren]

They are actually the market leader in unified messaging in the DACH countries, both in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. So that gives us a good position in those countries.

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

Definitely. So what is our strategy here with Userlike? The goal here is to support Userlike on their growth journey going forward. They have had good growth in the past, and we will help them so they can keep and develop their existing strategy going forward, which means that we will keep the organization as it is to today and of course, grow it and we will keep the Userlike brand as it is today. So think of it more like Userlike, a Lime Technology company. At the same time, we always are looking for possibilities to improve our product offering, both to our new and our existing customers. So therefore, we launched Lime customer experience. It means that we will develop add-ons to initially Lime CRM, so we can sell them in all our existing markets, both in the Nordics and also in the Netherlands. Then we have our entry into the German market. And with this acquisition, we also took the decision to actually expand. And I've been talking about this, that this goes in line with our internationalization. So it feels really, really good to go into Germany and open up a new Lime office in Cologne. We can, of course, since Userlike is already there, we can use the same offices as Userlike had. And that's something different that we can try this time compared to our other offices. We also have the 1,800 customers that Userlike have today, which means that we get the possibility to start cross-selling Lime CRM towards utilizes customer base. If we look at the reason why we chose to go into Germany, when we actually entered Netherlands, we had 2 options. Should we go to Germany or should we go to Netherlands? We chose Netherlands to start with. And therefore, it feels really, really good to start now in Germany as well because it's one of the biggest CRMs market in Europe. It's -- the competitive environment is quite similar as the Nordics and the Netherlands. You have a couple of big American players there and some local ones. So we are familiar with the competitive landscape. And if we look at our focus industries, we can see that there is good potential, both in utility, real estate, wholesale and the consultancy vertical. So how we will do this? We will actually start the recruitment of a new sales manager right away and also look for 2 new trainees, so they can join our trainee program that we start in August. We know that one way to create success is to transfer knowledge. So therefore, we will take help from 2 experienced Lime coworkers that will help out setting the processes, both within sales and expert services. And of course, create the Lime culture that we know is one of our biggest competitive advantages.

[Erik Syren]

And then support them in the growth going forward with new recruitments 2022 and 2023. And we will decide when we see the traction in countries, how many we will recruit each year. So perfect. So let's proceed to the summary then. If you look at the financial targets, our new ones, Lime's objective in the medium-term is to achieve an annual net sales growth above 18%. We have reached and achieved 14% during the last 12 months. We are not satisfied with these levels. We can do more. We are affected by COVID-19 and the pandemic, and we expect the market, especially outside Sweden, to go back to normal growth again, when the societies open up again. So we can do more than that. The EBITDA margin, Lime's objective in the medium-term is to achieve an annual EBITDA margin above 25%, we have reached and achieved 29.3%. We are above the target. We are satisfied with the profitability in Q1 and also during the last 12 months. However, we will prioritize growth before profit. We would like to use the profitability to invest in even more growth going forward. And that's something we do now, both with the acquisition and open up the German office. The capital structure, the net debt in relation to EBITDA should be less than 2.5. We are at minus 0.1 today. We will finance the acquisition with debt. We have good terms with the bank. And 100%, we will handle with our cash and together with debt from the bank. The dividend policy, we have a dividend policy to pay out 50% of the net profit. The proposal from the Board is to pay out 53% of the net profit, SEK 2.5 per share. If the Annual General Meeting this afternoon agreed with that one, then we will do that dividend payout in the beginning of next month. Summary then, in Q1, the business climate, the feeling is that it's getting better and better. We have seen a good growth in order intake during the first quarter. A good mixture between our focus verticals and the markets. So we are pretty satisfied with the order intake and positive when we see that the business climate is getting better and better. However, we are not satisfied with the growth and the growth rate in Q1, 11%, we can do much more than that and 14% during the last 12 months. We are a rapid growth company, and we expect this one going up going forward. Profitability, the adjusted EBITDA margin reached 28% in Q1, the same level as last year. Good profitability, both during the last 12 months and also in Q1, and we would like to use the profitability to invest in even more growth going forward. Investments, I'm very, very happy to announce that we have acquired the fast-growing SaaS company Userlike and decided to open up a new total and new market for Lime in Germany, in Cologne. So that's really good news from us this first quarter. Thanks for listening, and let's go over to the questions then.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, we have some questions today. So can you talk about the start of Q2 and the current business momentum? How does your Q1 growth compared to the overall market? It seems that overall market in 2020 was flat while you kept growing at high pace.

[Erik Syren]

Let's start with the first question then. As we said in our comments here and also during this presentation, the feeling is that the climate is getting better and better, and we have seen a good start of Q2 as well. So during the first 4 months, we are happy with the order intake so far. However, we are still affected by COVID-19 and we expect that the market will be a little bit better and better. And when the vaccine and the societies open up again, the program coming out there, then we expect that the market will go up again, up to the levels -- the growth rate levels we have seen before, between 10% to 12%. But it will take some time, but week by week, month by month, we see the business climate getting better and better. And then the second question was?

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Your Q1 growth compared to the overall market.

[Erik Syren]

Still, we see that, as you said in the question, we had a flat growth in -- during last year. We -- the feeling is that the market condition is more or less the same, more or less flat. We have seen some numbers from different players in the CRM business. And we have seen more or less the same trend and same conditions. So yes, more or less flat in Q1 as well.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Should we expect a similar development in Germany as with the Netherlands? Or will German growth scale faster, thanks to the acquisition of Userlike?

[Erik Syren]

It will be interesting. This is the first time we do this when we have an acquisition, and we have customers we can start and talk to and try to cross-sell our Lime CRM products to and so that could be a shortcut for us going forward. Let's see what happens. But we repeat what we said when we opened up Netherlands, don't expect big numbers from Lime CRM in Germany the first 5 years. It will take 5 years to reach breakeven. We will invest in growth. But we do Germany because we need countries taking off when we are done in the Nordics. So at the same -- the same forecast, the same predictions as we had in the Netherlands, we can use in Germany as well. But if we see a better traction, we are happy. And hopefully, we can see that, and we can gain that, we did the acquisition and the customer base from -- in Userlike.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

How did you source the acquisition?

[Erik Syren]

We -- as you know, we're working with the acquisition and that pipeline in our acquisitions like a sales process. We have maybe 50, 60 different discussions ongoing the whole time. We have met very, very -- quite a few players in this space. There are global players like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and there are local players in Europe in more or less all countries working with this kind of unified messaging functionality. So there are quite a few -- quite many we have had discussions with. We had one data process in Q4, we stopped and we consoled because the products and the feeling wasn't right for us. So we are very, very glad to sign this agreement together with Userlike because they are maybe the best one we have seen in the market. So very glad to have Userlike in our Lime family.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

It seems you expect that Userlike will keep its 30% growth pace for this year. Do you expect that growth rate can be maintained for several years?

[Erik Syren]

That's our objective and our target. We would like to support them in their growth journey, and we would like to keep the growth rates going forward. And that will help us in our growth rates in the Lime Group also going forward. So we gain a lot with the Userlike acquisitions. We gain resources, competence in this space. We have 1,800 new customers, we get a lot of revenue outside Sweden, not being so depending on Sweden going forward. We get 100% annual income revenue and we get a lot of new products for Lime technology offering. So we gain a lot with these acquisitions. So we were really happy today.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Will Userlike bring internal collaboration capabilities, similar to Slack, for example?

[Erik Syren]

We can do more in the Userlike product portfolio. We can develop and we have developed products like ticket handling in Sweden and in the rest of the group. We can use that in Userlike's product portfolio going forward. We will also look into other possibilities, FAQ and improve the chatbot and so on. So we have had that kind of discussions with the Userlike team, and we will work with the road map going forward. So we will improve the product portfolio going forward.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Does the current covenant structure still limit leverage to net debt in relation to EBITDA below 2? Or is that in an old covenant? So the first answer is that it's in relation to EBITDA.

[Erik Syren]

And yes, we are below that one. We can afford more acquisitions with debt. If we would like to do that, we will be around 1.5 when the acquisition is done in the -- so in May. So we are below our covenants, and we will keep the covenants going forward.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

How should we reason on the growth and margins in Userlike?

[Erik Syren]

We would like to use -- they have a good profitability. They will not affect the Lime profitability negative. However, we would like to use, and they have a really good scalability in their profitability. We would like to use their profitability also in growth investments. For example, about the German office, but also invest in the product portfolio. So we will recruit more people going forward and especially in development in Germany so they can improve their product portfolio going forward.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

How are you reasoning on the potential for more M&A in the short term?

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

We will continue to look for acquisitions. We are not done here. We can do more. So we'll continue, but we will not do many acquisitions in the same time, we would like to spread them out over time. So but we will continue to look for acquisitions.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

And final question, how does Userlike fit with Lime's local approach? Will it continue to grow in that only or could it grow elsewhere as well? How is sales made in Userlike, direct or indirect?

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

Userlike, they have a more scalable business. They have already done deals in -- globally. So that's something we need to find out and set that strategy together with Userlike. But we have the possibility to scale that globally faster than the local ones we do with Lime Tech. So that's a possibility.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Okay.

[Erik Syren]

Okay. Thanks, Magnus, and thanks for all the good questions. This is actually my last quarterly report. And next time you will -- it will be only Nils presenting. I'm very glad being a part of this company for 20 years, and I'm proud what we have accomplished, but we are not satisfied. We would like to accomplish more going forward. If the Annual General Meeting decides, I will enter the Board this afternoon. But I would like to say thanks to all the employees, my colleagues. You are amazing, keep the good pace. I'm proud of you. And thanks to all the customers. I'm really glad you have picked Lime as your CRM supplier. And thanks for all my partners as investors, I'm very glad to have you on board and supporting Lime in our growth journey going forward. So thanks, everyone. And see you going forward, but hopefully, in a different role, hopefully and good luck, Nils.

[Nils Olsson, President & CEO]

Thank you very much, Erik, and thanks for everything you have done for Lime. Thanks. So guys see you, over and out for me. Bye.

[Magnus Hansson, Chief Financial Officer]

Bye-bye.