Lime Technologies AB (publ)

STO:LIME

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 update. My name is Nils. I've been working at Lime since 2006 and had a role as CEO since 2 years back now.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Hi, I'm Maria. I joined Lime in November of last year, so it's soon been here for 6 months.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Great. So let's get started and get an overview of what we do at Lime.

[Maria Wester, executive]

And before we start, please feel free to write any questions in the chat, and we will answer them end of the session.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Thank you, Maria, for reminding us about that. So let's give you an overview about Lime as a company. And as I said before, we've always been running Lime with a very long-term perspective, and that has left us with a fantastic footprint, as you can see. In more than now 20 years, we have grown in average 9% per year and an EBITDA margin of 25% in average per year. And I think that's something to be really, really proud about.

But no matter how we looked, how we've been, how our numbers turned out, our goal more or less has always been the same and keeps being, and that is to help companies to become really, really strong in sales and customer care so they can help their customers in a good way. And we do that by delivering really, really strong software, combining that with great expertise.

So we have now scaled our business and we have done this for many years. So today, we are in 6 markets, 10 offices. And the last markets that we opened up was Netherlands in 2020. We entered Germany in 2021 with also the acquisition of Userlike. And now in 2022, we started our engineering hub in Krakow, Poland. And today, we are around 400 employees.

Looking at the users and customers, we today help more than 80,000 users more or less on a daily basis. So more or less, we have a big impact on the business society and the life of many, many end customers. I would argue that customer care has always been important, but we can see that in a world where services and products are becoming more and more alike, and there is also a price pressure that are increasing, I would say great customer service is a really great way to stand out and a competitive tool.

So I think one of the most common questions that I get nowadays is about the market situation. And if we look back, we've been through a couple of tough times before in our history. We had the IT crisis in 2000, the financial crisis in 2008, COVID entering 2020, and it's also been a quite tough year in 2022. But if we look in all these crises, we have continued to perform long-term profitable growth. And looking at those crises, we have continued in the same pattern. And I think that's something that I feel really, really proud about.

And for me, it's a lot about mindset. We have always tried to use tougher times to build a stronger Lime because we focus on the long term. And so we are ready for the market more or less when the market gets better and open up again.

So before we dig into the numbers, let me give you a little bit of overview of Q1. And we started the year in a really good way, I would say. I'm really happy about that. We continue to combine strong growth with great profitability in a quite turbulent market and delivered a growth of 22%, an EBITA margin of 26% and an ARR development of 14%. If we look a bit and zoom out a bit, I would say the market, in general, we see a growing market, which is good, of course, because we get the underlying pressure there. But also the trend of digitalization, of course, helps out and also the need for companies to find a more efficient way to always try to be better and improve their customer relation and create better customer value.

We handle many business-critical processes today. We talked about that in Q4. And therefore, it feels really, really nice that we, during this quarter, launched the new add-on, Lime CPQ. And that will help our customers to improve their quotation processes. And I think the timing for this release is really, really great because we know that in tougher times, companies need to improve and strengthen their sales organizations. And by making it easier to send better and more accurate quotations, we can definitely free time for the sales reps and making it possible for them to spend more time facing the customer.

We see a little bit longer sales processes in Q1, but I still see that we have growth in our order intake and we win many deals within our industry verticals, and of course, winning deals within the verticals exactly in line with our strategy. But as always, in a challenging market, we need to work even harder in the sales process, doing more activities and performing those activities in a better way and stay really, really close to our existing customers as well.

Looking at the long-term profitable growth. We continue to deliver strong numbers and combining what we always have done, and that's in our DNA, good strong growth and good profitability. And in Q1, we delivered the best result in many years and quarters, I would say, in our home market. Sweden is growing by 21%, and if we compare that to Q1 in '22, we grew 8%. And we also see a great performance in our consultancy business, Expert Services. And when we combine these 2 revenue streams, good growth in our subscriptions and good growth in Expert Services, that builds up a really strong organic growth.

Looking at the organization. We can -- we are really glad to say that we onboarded 26 new employees in Q1. We are today a very attractive employer, and we can see that in the market. At the moment, we have a good candidate pipeline and we can also see that our employee churn is decreasing. Today, it's rolling 12 months 6%. And our goal here is to continue to hire. And as always, it's a balance. So we need to keep our ear to the ground, of course, and ensure that demand drives intake during the year.

So looking at the agenda. Looking to the order intake revenue, Maria will talk about the profit and then we sum it up with financial targets and also some Q&A at the end. So start looking at the order intake. And this is something that we communicate every quarter, and we can see that the customer concentration is still low and continues to decrease. The top 10 customers today stands for 6.5% of our revenue and the biggest customer stands for 1.2%. And this is, I would say, especially good in tougher market conditions because it means that we're not depending on 1 or 2 customers. We are doing deals with many customers all the time and have a very low risk in our customer portfolio.

This quarter, we continue more or less in the same pattern as we did in Q4 and closed many deals inside our verticals but also closing with new customers and improving existing customer solutions. And looking on the right-hand side, I think that we are happy to welcome a couple of new customers in our wholesale industry, really strong brands with Hydroscand, Essve, Toppoint in Netherlands and Arvid Nordquist.

Looking at the utility side, I think that we have performed really, really good the last couple of years now, and we still see that we have good traction in that vertical. And one of the customers that we can welcome this quarter is Trollhättan Energi. And also, if we look at the real estate vertical, I think we have built up a quite good pipeline throughout Q1, and one of the customers that we will lift up today is Besqab.

So looking at the revenue, we start with the ARR development. And as you can see, we have a still good pace in our subscription, 18%. We continue to decrease a little bit on the old service agreement, which is according to plan. And looking at the total, we have an ARR development of 14% in Q1.

Looking at our different revenue streams. We can see the development on the slide on the left-hand side the development since 2016. We started the transformation in 2015 from upfront to subscription. And we can see that subscription is steadily growing, as I said, 18% in Q1. And if we look at the last 12 months, we are growing 21%. And today, it stands for 54% of our revenue. The service agreement is today 7% of the total, and we continue that transformation. And I will say that we have had a quite good pace in Q1.

If we look at upfront, more or less the same as before, stands for less than 1% today. And as we mentioned before, Expert Services continues to perform well. Today, it stands for 38% of our revenue. And it will continue to grow but in the long run decrease as a part of the total net sales.

Looking at the revenue. We see that we have a growth of 22%, which I mentioned in Q1, and the last 12 months, we have 21%. If we look at the split between the segments, I mentioned it before there that Sweden performs really well in Q1 with 21% growth, which is a strong number, and the Rest of Europe 23% in Q1. Looking at more or less the last 12 months, we can see Sweden, 17%, and the Rest of Europe, 30%. Then we want Rest of Europe to continue to grow faster. So the 30% is -- we want to see that going forward as well because we want to build a more international company going forward. So I would say focus on the markets outside of Sweden will be an important area going forward for us.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes. Looking into profits. So EBITA in the first quarter reached 26%, which is in line with the same quarter as the year before. Looking at the latest 12 months, Q1 '23 is at 25.5% compared to 26.3%. The reasoning is that the latest 12 months for Q1 '22 is still affected by the pandemic with lower travel expenses, physical sales activities and employee activities.

On the right-hand side, we have the latest 12 months EBITA development. As you can see, we have reached a higher EBITA margin of around 29% during the pandemic. Now we are back to a more normal and lasting level to support our future growth, investing in sales, marketing, staff, our projects and so forth. The last 12 months in Q1 '23, we have reached an EBITA of 26% as we are now able to invest more in future growth. Since we have a good growth in our revenues, we have a positive underlying pressure on the EBITA margin. As we have already communicated, we will continue to prioritize long-term growth over short-term profitability.

And looking at the next slide on the OpEx development. On the left-hand side, we have our personnel expenses. That is the largest expense in our profit and loss. Looking at the personnel expenses in relation to the net sales, latest 12 months in Q1 '23 is at 57% compared with 55% in Q1 '22. The increase in our personnel expenses is explained by that we invested more in employee activities, staffing and compensation and benefits. The investment in our employees is contributing to a lower churn and better pay, especially in Expert Services compared with previous year.

On the right-hand side, we have our operating expenses. As you can see, our operating expenses increased by 17% in the quarter and 26% last 12 months. The increase during the last 12 months is due to that we have invested more in future growth by marketing physical sales events and product development than we could during '21 due to the pandemic.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Great. Thanks a lot, Maria. So let's look at our financial targets. And as you know, we have an objective to have a growth that should be above 18%, and the last 12 months, Q1, we are at 21%. We have the EBITA target of being above 25%, and we end up at the last 12 months, 26%. Capital structure, the net debt in relation to EBITDA should be less than 2.5, and we are at 0.8 today. And looking at the dividend, the dividend should be at least 50% of the net profit. And the Board of Directors has proposed a dividend corresponding to 55% of the net profit in 2022.

So let's head over here for some Q&A. Do we have any questions in the chat?

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes, we have. First question, you have talked about longer sales processes previous quarters. Has this changed for the worse, better or unchanged?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No, but I think, in general, we can see more or less the same pattern as before. I think in some senses, in some markets it has been improved and in some, has been a little bit worse. So if we would talk on a high level, in general, I would say more or less on the same as previous period.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes. Next question. Is there any temporary boost in Expert Services segment? Any one-off quarters?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No. No one-off quarters in Expert Services. So I would say that we have continuously had quite good growth in Expert Services throughout 2022. And we have done a lot of improvements when it comes to how we work within Expert Services, the amount of people that we have onboarded throughout 2022. So I think that's a gradually improvement throughout the year and it continues also here in Q1.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes. What kind of visibility do you have in Expert Services now?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

What we know and what we talked about before and what we measured for a very long time is that, okay, how much Expert Services do we sell to new customer versus existing customers? And that balance has always been to more or less existing customers, it's been between 60% to 70% per month; and new, say, 30% to 40%. And that ratio has been more or less the same over a very long time period. So I think that's something that we look into. It's also when it's a little bit tougher market, in one sense, you need to be on your toes all the time to -- try to be a little bit more proactive when it comes to filling up all the consultants.

We learned a lot from the COVID situation when we saw a big drop in new sales, then we had to be much more proactive in our Expert Services department. If we look at gradually improvement that we've seen in '22 in the new sales, of course, we haven't needed to be as proactive as before. But I think we have that now, that knowledge that we all the time need to be on our toes to fill up Expert Services because we cannot sit away for the orders to just pull down at us.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes. What demand level do you currently see now?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No, but I think that we are in -- I mean, in Q1, we have had strong -- we have had really strong demand in Expert Services. And it's really hard to say. I mean, since the market is a little bit turbulent, then we can see the effect of also a bit longer sales process. So what the future has to offer, it's really hard to say 3 or 5 months ahead. I mean, we're looking to this on a weekly level. We measure the pace on a daily basis, more or less. So this is something that we need to work with all the time every day. It's hard to say, "Okay, we fill up and staff or Expert Services department 6 months ahead." That's not how we -- and never been working, more or less.

[Maria Wester, executive]

On the growth in Q1 '23, how much is driven by new customers and how much is driven by existing ones?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

It's more or less the same balance as before. So you have around 50-50, you can say.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes. Good. What level of recruitment in percent do you expect this year? And in 2024, what do you expect in terms of wage inflation?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

I mean, I think if we look on the start with the recruitment side, I think we will continue to recruit. And as I said, we onboarded 26 new now in January, and we continue to recruit, yes, throughout the coming period to fill up our trainee program in August. How many will of, course, be determined about the demand in the market.

But also, as I mentioned, we see that we have a decreasing trend here in -- a declining trend in our employee churn, which I think is very, very positive. That's something that we've been working with. And we come from Q1 '22 where we had an employee churn of, I think it was rolling 12 months, at that time, 12%. So the different areas that we tried to improve throughout 2022 has paid off. But I also think it's an effect of how the market -- that it's a little bit more turbulent market. And then we've seen that in other market situations, then the decrease in employee churn goes down.

So it's a balance here to always try to look into, okay, where do we want to be in 2024, how many do we need to recruit, but at the same time, give everybody a good chance to fill up their time and be out visiting our customers. So I don't have an exact percentage that I say that, okay, this is the amount I will -- this is more or less changing all the time depending on the situation. I still meet everyone in the recruitment process. So we have a quite good possibility to both increase the amount of candidates coming in as long as we work with a good pipeline in general, but also to slow down the pace of the amount of recruitments that we will do.

[Maria Wester, executive]

How large can you be? What is the end goal or long-term goal? How is this backed up with M&A in Europe?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

I mean, our long-term goal is to become a more international company. And one thing that I wish for is that we should have at least more than 50% of our revenue coming from the markets outside of Sweden. We have our financial targets, which, of course, then you can calculate going forward how big we can be. I think that we have a track record of growing in this space for many years. So -- but at the same time, we have the possibility to add M&A on top. And at the moment, I think the M&A market has harmonized a bit with the valuations and so on. But I don't really see us stress doing an acquisition at the moment because I think that we -- we really believe in organic growth.

And I think that we have possibilities to do better organic growth outside of Sweden without only doing M&A. But of course, if we find a great opportunity, then we are ready to strike more or less because we have a good cash flow in general. We have a strong financial situation, low net debt. So in those circumstances, we can do an M&A. But at the moment, I feel that we have plenty to do in our new markets, Netherlands, Germany is a fantastic potential, also to grow Userlike more going forward. So I believe that we have strong possibilities to be -- to double the size of Lime going forward.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Sounds great. How will you protect your margins in your normal business and when you are going?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No, but I think it's on a daily basis that everyone needs to take responsibility for not only owning the growth but also take a responsibility from a profit side. We know that -- how hard you have to work for bringing in new revenue, then you also need to have respect when you are spending money. So it's a balance all the time to invest in things that you really believe that can create growth going forward. So if we do the growth, we have a great business model with subscription that creates an underlying pressure. And if we do that in a good way, we can continue to invest in activities and employees and so on so we can continue to be an attractive employer, but at the same time, be also a very competitive company in the market.

[Maria Wester, executive]

How much cost pressure do you have in wage inflation?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No, but I think we had an increase in general around in between 4% and 5% in 2023. And that was in line what we had thought of when we went into the year. So of course, you feel a little bit that you are pressured in some sense from the market in general when it comes to our offices and so on. I mean, everything cost more today than it did 12 months ago. And of course, that gives a little bit negative effect on the profit side.

But at the same time, I think that as long as we continue to grow, we took a decision to not do many like one-off price increases, which maybe would have been possible due to many -- that many other companies did it. Instead, we picked the long-term path here to get an increase in our subscription revenues yearly with maybe a little bit lower amount in 2023. So that was a decision that we took because we mainly think that, that would have cost us more and maybe lost the pace that we had in new sales in 2022.

[Maria Wester, executive]

You mentioned 26 new employees. Is this figure net of churn? If not, how many employees net, reaching how many employees previously?

Personnel expenses increase is driven by recruitment or inflation in reaches. I think net in December, we were 399. And now, we are 400. So we have gained 26 new employees, and then we also have some churn in our figures.

Any interesting acquisition candidates?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No. But at the moment, I mean, we have -- we are working with the M&A pipeline all the time. And in that sense, we are meeting a lot of companies. But at the moment, we don't really have any like hot deals going on.

[Maria Wester, executive]

How much room is it to make M&A in your balance sheet? I think you answered that a bit previously that we are ready to make an M&A if the right target fits our profile.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Yes. Exactly, exactly.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Any new challenges you see in the EU market compared to the market in Sweden? And how do you face them?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No. I mean, I wouldn't say that there are any new challenges. I mean, what we've seen in Germany the last quarters, I think that in Q1 we see a little bit better traction in Userlike compared to previous quarters, which I'm very happy about. If we look from the Lime CRM perspective, which we also sell in Germany, I think that we are -- I don't know if it's a trend, it's maybe too early to say. But in general, there are bigger deals in Germany which also takes a little bit longer time since it involves more employees from the customer side and it's also a bigger investment. I mean, we've not been there for so long so I wouldn't say 100% that's the fact. But that's how it's been now for the first year, more or less.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Will you focus on markets outside Sweden, Germany and Netherlands this year? Or is there any other geographies that you are looking as part of the 50% revenue outside Sweden long-term goal?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

As for now, I think that we have plenty to do. We have -- I mean, we have a big market and we have so much to do in all of our existing markets. I mean, I think that we've started to get good size in Norway and so on. But I mean, still, we have many deals to close in that area as well even if we've been there for many years. So that's the same feeling that we have Denmark, we have Netherlands, Germany, also quite new started from a Lime perspective, which means that my main focus is now to strengthen those markets.

And I think, more or less, if we open up a new office outside of those will come through an M&A if that company maybe has an office in another area. But then we can take that decision and say, okay, would we -- should we launch Lime or not in that country? So for now, I think keep focus -- continue to focus on organic growth and to build a stronger business in those countries that we are actually already are established in.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Perfect. Thank you, Nils. That was the last question.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Thanks, and thanks a lot for great questions. If you have anything other on your mind, don't hesitate to reach out to me, Maria or Jennie. You can just give us a call. So thanks a lot for today.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Thank you.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Bye-bye.