Lime Technologies AB (publ)

STO:LIME

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Nils Olsson, executive]

So good morning, and -- good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 update. My name is Nils Olsson, been at Lime since 2006 and took over as CEO in 2021.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Hi. I'm Maria Wester. I joined Lime in November '22. Feel free to write any questions in the chat, and we will answer them in the end of the session.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Perfect. Thanks for that, Maria.And as always, before we jump into more details about Q1, let's give a brief overview of us as a company. And we have always been running Lime with a very long-term perspective. And I think that has left us with a fantastic footprint, as you can see. In more than 20 years now, we have grown in average 19% per year with an EBITA margin of 25% in average per year. And then I think that's something to be really, really proud of.Looking into our why statement, I would say that no matter how big we've been, how our numbers turned out, our goal has always been the same. And that is to help companies to become really, really strong in sales and customer care so they can help their customers in a really good way. And as a supplier, we are strongest when we can combine really great expertise with spot-on software. And it's also about solving mission-critical problems and become a natural part of our customers' core processes. We have done this for many years now. We have scaled our business into 7 countries.And looking at the last years here, in 2020, we entered Netherlands; in 2021, Germany. We opened up our office in Poland in Krakow our development hub. And we have also, since 2021, welcomed Userlike and SportAdmin as a part of the Lime Group. So today, we are present in 7 markets. We have 11 offices, and we are around a little bit more than 450 employees.And looking into some of the key success factors, as we said, we start with the long-term profitable growth, running Lime with a long-term perspective. Something that is very important for us is our recurring revenue. And today, that stands for 62% of the total revenue. We have a very sticky customer base. Looking into that, we are not depending on 1, 2, or 5 big customers. We are doing deals with many customers every year and something that, of course, builds up Lime from the foundation is a very strong corporate culture.So let's look in here and do a sum up of Q1 before we go into a little bit more details of the numbers. So starting with some numbers here. We have -- we continue to deliver, I would say, a good quarter with profitable growth in a quite tough market. We amount a revenue growth of 17% and EBITA margin of 26% and a strong ARR growth of 31%. So to do -- to start the sum up here and looking into a little bit of the market conditions, I would say that we see a similar market as previous quarters. And what do we mean by that? It's that it is a little bit longer sales processes. They take a little bit longer time. And we also see more decision-makers in the prospects.Despite that, I would say that the order intake from new customers remains good in the quarter and also that we have managed to build up a good pipeline going forward. Second, Expert Services. Growth in Expert Services was a little bit lower in the quarter compared to the first quarter last year. And as you all know, it was also a little bit affected by fewer working days due to the Easter and also that we delivered really strong numbers last year in the first quarter. From a business perspective, we see that it's also been a little bit tougher on the Expert Services side, especially if we look into the existing customer side.Something that I feel very glad about is that we have a good mindset and we are using the time to focus on activities that really add value such as proactive customer work. We are working with cost-reducing projects, we are helping our sales team to -- with presales so we can really strengthen our offering and win more deals.Looking into the ARR, 31%. I think that's a really strong ARR growth in the quarter. And what I'm happy about is that we see a stable organic growth, but -- and of course, when we add SportAdmin on top, we see a positive effect on the total ARR growth. And talking about SportAdmin, our latest acquisition, it has a nice growth, and I would say a really good-looking ARR profile as well as strong products with great potential for the future.And now when we have had a chance to work a little bit closer with SportAdmin team in the last couple of months, I feel very optimistic about that because they have a really proactive and customer-focused culture and also when it comes to the product, it really feels that we are delivering great value to all of our customers and members. I hope you see that we have a little bit new UX on our presentation today. And as our company grows, we are taking important steps to make the Lime brand stronger, which had led to our brand refresh.Now we are also introducing Lime Connect, which is previously Userlike, and we are adding Lime Sportadmin as part of our Lime brand. And of course, it includes the Lime CRM and Lime Go. And the goal by this is by using one brand for all of our products instead of promoting them separately, I think that we can make our brand much, much stronger, both locally and when we are expanding internationally.So long-term focus. We started the year with the usual onboarding with new employees in Lund, and it's always a really nice start of the year where we welcome 20 new Limers into our company. If we look into the candidate market, it remains strong, and we continue to recruit in all our markets. Now so we are also prepared for the big onboarding session in August. Looking into the recruitment, we can see that also that the turnover -- employee turnover remains very low. And I would say it's a combination, much thanks to the investments that we have made in our employees, our culture, and leadership over the last years. That has been a focus area.But we also know that the employee turnover is a little bit lower in tougher market climates and usually then goes up when the market improves. So, therefore, it is really important to continue to recruit and continue to invest in employees to strengthen us in the long term.So the agenda for today, we will talk about the order intake and look into some of our deals. We will look into the revenue side. And we'll also look into the profit and then at the end, the summary.So starting here with the order intake. And as we have communicated before, our customer concentration is low. Today, our top 10 customers stands for 7.2%, and the biggest customer only stands for 1.1% of our revenue. And I come back to this. In a tougher market conditions, it is very good for us that we are not depending on a few big customers, but making deals with many customers in different geographies, with our different products, and in different industries.And if we look into some of our deals here, we continue to do really good deals in our industry verticals in Lime CRM. During the quarter, we welcomed many new customers. And if we take one real estate company, Gavlegårdarna, a really nice real estate company that we won in competition with many others suppliers. We have utility companies, Vestall and Gudbrandsdal. Also glad today that we see that our offering works really well in the utility vertical in the Norwegian market. We have the wholesale companies, Kinnan and Atleve Nordic, and also our newest vertical membership, we see that we closed a nice deal in Germany with Hessen Trade & Invest and also the Swedish company, Säkerhets and försvarsföretagen.Going into -- looking into a little bit online goal. And I would say that we've had a focus to attract larger companies since we broke that out to a separate business unit. And we see that it has been successful, which has resulted in a better average deal size. And this puts us in a better position to continue our growth going forward. Looking into the quarter, several new customers and to mention some of them, we can say Maskinab, LB Lux, Swelift, Colly and Inspekt to our company and welcome them as new customers in the quarter.From Lime Connect perspective, previously Userlike then, we also, I would say, see good progress throughout the quarter. And some really strong brands that we add to our customer list with Deutsche Telekom and also Malteser as new companies here in the quarter. And last but not least, we have SportAdmin, which also, I would say, had a good start of the year, where we welcomed the new customers, including then the Swedish bandy champions, Villa Lidköping, and also, as you can see, AIK Innebandy. Two really nice teams, and we are excited here to help them with the daily work and keeping their members engaged going forward.So revenue and starting off with the ARR side. And as you know, as a product company, it's important to look into the ARR growth. And starting with the subscription alone, we are growing 37% compared to Q1 2023. Looking into our other part of that is the service agreement, and you can see that, that's a decrease of 26%. And this is something that I have been communicated for a long time that this is in line with our strategy. We are continuously working with converting customers with old upfront agreements into our subscription agreements.And that's a project that will be ongoing going forward. But as you can see then, it really builds up to a strong ARR growth of 31%, which is a combination of a stable and good organic growth in that with a combination of SportAdmin.Looking into our different revenue streams. And you can see in this slide the development since 2018, we started the transformation of our business 2015, going from upfront to subscription. And you can see here how each revenue stream has developed. And looking into the subscription part, it's really growing steadily, 35% in Q1 and 25% last 12 months. And today, it stands for 57% of our revenue. Service agreements, you can see that we have a little bit declining there. So it's 5% of the revenue. And as I said, we continue to transform that customer base in -- from service agreements into subscriptions.Upfront, the green part is more or less invisible in this page here now, so it's less than 1%. And if we look into the black color there with Expert Services, today, it stands for 37% of our revenue. And as I said in the start of this call, we see a little bit slower growth in Q1 compared to the last years, and there are reasons for that. Of course, we are working to improve that going forward. But if you -- if we zoom out a bit and look on the overall level, it will continue to grow. That's important for us, but in the long run decrease as a part of the total net sales.So revenue-wise, we see that in the quarter, we reached a 17% growth in Q1 and last 12 months, also 17%. If we look at the split between our segments, Sweden is growing 17% and the rest of Europe also 17%. Last 12 months, we see Sweden 15% and the rest of Europe, 21%. And the focus is still the same. We want to build a more international company to strengthen the markets outside of Sweden, and we continue to do investments, both on the marketing side and the employee side to build up those countries over time.So Maria, over to you and talk a little bit about profit.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes. EBITA in the first quarter reached 25.6% compared with 25.5% for the same quarter as the year before. Looking at the latest 12 months, Q1 is at 25.7% compared to 25.5%, in line with last quarter's margin and our financial targets. On the right-hand side, we have the latest 12 months EBITA development. As you can see, we reached a higher EBITA margin of around 29% during the pandemic. Now we are back to a normal and lasting level to support our future growth, investing in sales, marketing, staff, our products, and so forth.The last 12 months, in Q1 '24, 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 growth over profitability. And looking at 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 for the latest 12 months in Q1 '24, it is at 57% compared with 56% in Q1 '23.The 19% increase in our personnel expenses for the latest 12 months is partially explained by our acquisition of SportAdmin and also that we have invested in more employee activities, staffing, compensation, and benefits. The investment in our employees is contributing to a lower churn. On the right-hand side, we have operating expenses. As you can see, our operating expense increased by 14% in the quarter and 6% in the latest 12 months. The increase during the latest 12 months is also partially due to the acquisition of SportAdmin and also that we're investing a bit more in future growth by marketing, physical sales, and product development.

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Perfect. Thanks for that, Maria.Then to make a little bit of a summary then, looking into our financial targets. And as you can see, we reached a growth of 17% in the last 12 months compared to our target that is -- that we should be above 18% in medium term. We have an EBITA margin of 26% compared to the goal of being above 25% in the medium term. If we look at the net debt in relation to EBITDA, it's 1.3 compared to the goal there that it should be less than 2.5. And also if we look into the dividend policy that the dividend should correspond to at least 50% of the net profit.And in 2023, the Board has proposed an increased dividend amounting to SEK 46.5 million, and that corresponds to 56% of the net profit. And just some final words here. I think that we did a lot of good things in the quarter and that we should be really, really proud about. And as a growth company, there will always be room for both progress and things to get better all the time. We continue to invest in recruitment. We continue to invest in our internationalization and something that can really help us going forward is maybe the thing that I really value the most, and that's the attitude that we show and that productivity that gives us actually the possibility to perform over time.So with that said, thanks a lot for listening in, and let's see if there is any questions in the chat.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Yes, we have some questions. How do you see growth outside of Sweden developing? And what is the development in Germany?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

It's a little bit -- of course, as always, it's a little bit different depending on each market. If we go into Germany specific, I think that we are in a positive trend. We have a focus on utility companies in the German market. We know that that takes a long time to build up. We have that experience both from the Swedish market, from the Norwegian market. Now we've been more or less attending as visitors a fair for -- since we went into the German market. But this year, we did more or less go all in on that fair and had a really, really nice stand, and we could really build up a brand within the utility industry.Something that I'm positive about that is that the effect of that is that we see that we have built a much stronger pipeline. And now I don't -- it's important to say that those deals in the utility segment with Skatteverket takes a long time. But it's a good start, and we feel that we are meeting the right type of companies, the decision makers and also that we have an offering that suits the market.So with that said, I also have a parallel track in -- on the German market from a Lime CRM perspective, and that is also, of course, we get other leads in and we meet other companies. So we have a much better pipeline today compared to a year ago when it also comes to deals outside of the utility vertical.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Thank you, Nils. Do you expect the growth within Expert Services will accelerate or remain the same during the year?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

No. But of course, I don't want to be on this kind of growth level. It's nothing that we have on our agenda. So we are working to improve that, of course. I'm really glad to see that the whole Expert Services department are really taking actions to improve going forward. That's the mindset that I was talking about. So I expect higher growth going forward in the Expert Services department. And it's important to understand that that's the stability of Lime. Now it's 1 quarter. We need to see it from a much broader perspective.I mean we have countries, we have verticals, we have products, we have different revenue stream. And as always, it goes up and down. But I think that the mindset that we are having in the Expert Services department will help us to grow faster going forward.

[Maria Wester, executive]

How do you feel the business climate is right now?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

But as I said, it's more or less the same situation, I think. There is more decision makers. It takes longer time. And of course, we need to live with that because that's the situation on the market right now. So the important is to focus on the things that we can actually do better. And I think what I'm glad to see in the quarter is that we do many activities; we create new business opportunities; we know how to treat the deals that we are in and what kind of sales process that we need to run. So it's a situation that we've been living with now for such a long time.So I would say that we do it -- yes, we need to focus on the things that we can affect more or less.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Could you give some flavor to how the different verticals is performing?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Yes. No but I think that the newest one membership, I mentioned 2 nice deals here in the quarter. And I think that we have a good offering, and it's really -- you can really see that in the deals that we are closing. It helps out. When we start to build up the references, it's easier to both contact new ones and also to get more leads in.Looking into utility, especially, I would say I'm happy to see the Norwegian market in the utility. We are doing a good job there. On the Swedish market, it's always like that when you -- it's a lot of public tendering processes. So it's a little bit -- it's not that it's, yes, the same flow of deals every quarter. And I think that we are steadily in contact with many companies and have a quite good pipeline in the utility.Real estate, also Gavlegårdarna, an important deal for us to win and also to see that we have a strong offering both to the public and the private sector in the real estate segment. One segment that I'm not -- that I don't really see that kind of traction in is more on the consultant side. So there, we need to do better more or less compared to what we are doing in this quarter.

[Maria Wester, executive]

How is the acquisition strategy looking going forward?

[Nils Olsson, executive]

We are -- as always, we are meeting a lot of companies all the time. I've said this before, but it's like building up a sales pipeline. So you need to meet many companies to see if there is a good match and also have that pipeline over time. We are looking into many companies and also looking into our different products to see, okay, is there any acquisitions that could suit our different -- if it's Lime CRM, Lime Go, Lime Connect, or Lime Sportadmin.So we are working on multiple fronts here. And -- but it's nothing that we have very -- like now, we did SportAdmin in the 9th of January. So it's nothing close nearby.

[Maria Wester, executive]

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

[Nils Olsson, executive]

Thank you, and thanks for listening in. If you have any other questions, never hesitate to just give us a call. So thanks for today. Bye-bye.

[Maria Wester, executive]

Thanks. Bye.