Kruk SA

WSE:KRU

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Michal Zasepa, executive]

[Audio Gap] Michal Zasepa. And then this is a meeting in which I will comment on the 9 months results of KRUK Group. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your interest in listening to this commentary. I hope you can see the presentation that I'm sharing. This presentation is available on our website.

And so let me go through the highlights of what has happened of the third quarter. And during the presentation and after that, please do ask questions through the questions section here on this Teams' interface.

So let's start. So I'm happy to say this is the best 9 months in our history. We have earned PLN 959 million of profit, very close to the PLN 1 billion net profit threshold. So it's quite likely we will have a record year in terms of net profit beating PLN 1 billion, of course. This is based on very good performance of the back-book. Recoveries from that purchase grew 14% year-on-year. Cash EBITDA grew slower at 9%, reflecting the more long-term nature of the business and the fact that once we have bought much portfolios, we are investing in legal process, legal fees, court fees, bailiff fees, and some more results from those investments will come later.

We have invested PLN 1.6 billion so far, but we maintain that we will invest at least PLN 2.5 billion this year. If you look at net profit, that year-to-year growth was much higher at 27%. But here, a very good performance on the back-book and significant positive revaluation, especially in Q3 that I will comment on, resulted in a much faster growth of net profit than EBITDA or cash EBITDA.

We continue to be very highly profitable on return on equity. We're closing to PLN 10 billion in terms of net debt purchased assets, and we maintain a moderate leverage at 2.5. If you look at the split of recoveries, you can see that Poland contributed 42%. And across those geographies, we were very happy with how recoveries -- what the recoveries were. In all of the countries, we beat the accounting forecast.

In 3 of the countries, we met our operating -- ambitious operating goals, namely Poland, Romania and Italy. In Spain, we had a decent quarter, but we were below the operating targets that we budgeted at the beginning of this year, but still beating the accounting forecast, as I said.

You can see the split of investments more or less even between the 3 main countries, Poland, Spain and Italy, and some smaller investments in Romania. That reflects the supply. In all 4 main markets, as far as we know, we should be the market leader in buying consumer finance unsecured portfolios from banks and big consumer finance companies. And we expect to add quite significant amount of new portfolios in the next 3 months, seeing a lot of potential in Poland this year, but also some on the other markets.

You could notice we continue -- the costs have gone up. Operating costs have gone up significantly, 21% year-on-year. That was expected. Or actually, we have -- in our budget, we have expected somewhat lower -- somewhat -- I'm sorry, somewhat higher value of operating costs. The increase comes mostly from the increase in scale of business, and there is a significant increase in legal fees, legal and bailiff fees, as expected. And that should continue for the next couple of quarters. Specifically, we have good visibility for that for Q4.

Also, we have raised the salaries year-to-year by a few percentage points, probably about 7%, maximum 8%, following the labor market changes, and that also affects us. But on the other hand, we are doing the work with less people. If you look at cash -- per FTE, this level of efficiency is increasing and should increase in the following quarters and years.

Our financing costs, of course, also grew following the investments as we financed the new purchases mostly from incremental debt. Please take a note that most of our indebtedness is secured, is in fixed term instruments. And we do take advantage of the fact that we hedged some of the Polish zloty debt and transferred that into the euro-denominated debt, fixed rate debt. And we have some cost savings on that, which we also point out here at the bottom of the slide.

So the effect of the interest rate decreases which should be expected will not be 1:1. It would be less because we already have most of our position fixed on the currently available -- current -- the debt that we have currently on the balance sheet.

So overall, this is a very good situation where we look forward to continue to invest, where we look forward to concentrate on technology transformation, digital transformation, which once again will be about increasing or accelerating lead time, doing things quicker, and as a result, getting cash faster, automation, personalization. And that should be -- that all should positively impact our profitability in the mid to longer term.

If you look at the segment analysis, we -- as I said, we are expecting at least PLN 2.5 billion of total investments looking at where we are today. So it's a slight improvement versus the expectations of about PLN 2.5 billion we had so far. There is a few large transactions now coming up in Poland. We'll see how we'll do on that. So there is a relatively still broad range of possible outcome of the investments until the end of the year. But there is good supply of portfolios. But we keep on discipline on those portfolios that we think are at the right price, of course, as always.

Recoveries, as I said, we are very happy with Poland, Romania, Italy as well. And we had not had a negative surprise in Q3 from Spain, but also no positive surprise after disappointing results. So overall, we are below the budget, but at least we are making the accounting forecast targets for Q3.

And profitability follows this portfolio. Excellent profitability in Poland, Romania and Italy, and okay performance in Spain. And if you look at these levels, then we are beating our own budget assumptions for those 3 countries, whereas we have not done the budget for Spain for those last 3 quarters of this year. So overall, this result is very good. It's better than we expected at the beginning of the year, and we're very happy with that.

You may have noticed that there was a quite significant positive revaluation that we accounted for in Poland and Romania in this third quarter. And let me comment on that. I'll go down to Slide #5, where you see this deviation of recoveries. And there is a technical changeover of approach that we implemented in Q3, and we will continue with it in the future. Namely, we got commentaries from both our auditors and also from risk managers, from our asset manager, who is a licensed regulated entity who oversees how we buy portfolios in Poland. And both those commentaries were saying us, "You have a history of double-digit positive deviations from recoveries" -- as you see here on the total group, it was between 12% to 20% -- "also on those of your assets that you consider yourself stable and highly predictable in the short term. This is too high of a deviation. This is too much conservatism."

We take that commentary, that feedback. And therefore, in Q3 and in the future, we will try on those assets that we think are stable and highly predictable, which today means Polish and Romanian retail assets' back-book in the near term, which means between 3 to 6 months, plan in accounting -- forecast targets which are quite close to the ambitious operating plan that we have.

This means that in the future likely you will see a lower deviation between actual and projected recoveries. It still likely will be positive, but it should not be 12% or 20%. It should be much less, possibly a few percentage points. What this change does is that it means that we have recognized a higher positive revaluation and higher revenues in Q3 from Polish and Romanian back-books. And there will be less of deviation, so less revenues in Q4 from the same group of assets. So it's an acceleration of revenue recognition, but in order to have higher precision in accounting curves planning.

So this is technical for the 2, 3, 4 quarters. It doesn't change anything. It has nothing to do with the cash flow performance. And the cash flow performance has been very stable. But it's a change that we were asked to do, and we do this starting from Q3.

Moving on, let's go now through the country slides. So Poland very stable recovery performance. One remark here. You see that the actual recoveries in Q3 were lower than in Q2. That is as expected. And the reasons for that is that in Q2 already for probably 3 years, we have a seasonal positive effect of tax returns that bailiffs in the Polish system are recovering. So there is a spike of recoveries in Poland starting sometime in March and lasting until usually June that we expected and it was fully realized. And Q3 results as such are satisfactory or according to our ambitious operating plan. And there is nothing here to worry about.

In terms of new investments, as you see here, we deployed already over PLN 500 million in Polish portfolios. That gives us #1 position from what we understand. And there is more coming in Poland. And hopefully, that will be a very good investment year for the Polish business. But there is a fair degree of competition. So we'll see when we win. Overall, profitability on that business is also very stable. You can see here a relatively high number, a high percentage of 37% for Q3.

Romania, again, very good performance on recoveries another quarter, and also highest profitability in the group. If you look at the bottom of this table, we invested only PLN 170 million. We wished -- we hoped we could invest less, but there is less supply than we anticipated. Some expected deals we know already will not come to the market. They will be postponed for the future. So likely, we will not invest as much as we wanted in Romania this year, which is okay because there is a good supply on other markets.

Italy, very good recoveries and another quarter where we were able to recognize positive revaluation. So we are meeting our yearly or 9 months targets, operating targets every month, exceeding the accounting forecast. We are investing a lot in legal process. Therefore, the cash EBITDA is somewhat subdued and should be stronger in the future. That, of course, depends on how much new portfolios and when we add.

But on this back-book that we have, we are in investment period. We are incurring significant operating costs in order to sustain stable and long-term recoveries in the future. On the new portfolios deployment, we're also quite happy with this PLN 380 million that we invested so far. And probably there will be more coming up. But that should also give us a very strong market position. And we keep on investment discipline, expecting good returns on those investments.

And Spain, a market where we were disappointed with the level of recoveries. And as I said, Q3 was good. Good, but still below operating plan, but above accounting forecast. Q4 we expect, given what we bought historically, the recoveries to go up. So there is some risk whether we'll realize this plan or not. September was very good. October I don't know yet. But hopefully, things will be good here. But from the assets that we have, Spain is a relatively higher risk territory. Although this is, again, we believe, if anything, a temporary problem.

If we look at the assets that we have, if we look at long-term profitability, we feel comfortable that we've done good investments. Maybe some of them will have somewhat different curve. Some money will come later than earlier than we anticipated. But we believe those will be very profitable deals when we look back at them in perspective of 2, 3, 4 or more years after purchase.

And what we've done in Spain over the past 2, 3 years is a big step ahead in establishing our benchmarks, our operations and building a strong business. We also added quite substantial amount of investments, as you see here, almost PLN 0.5 billion, also expecting that those will be good profitable deals.

And as in Italy, we are adding a lot of legal costs. So this is the time also that cash EBITDA suffers temporarily. When we send cases to the legal process, that situation should improve. And we also, yes, expect in the mid to longer term much better profitability than currently you see here in the past couple of quarters.

And our other assets, which is a combination of Czech, Slovak, German and French assets, are performing very well. If you look at profitability, the only investments we're making are French or in France. And we are in this passive management approach in Czech, Slovakia and Germany, and we are actively looking for some new portfolios in France. So things are good, but no significant news here.

And last but not least, our lending -- cash lending business. It had -- Wonga and Novum had a good quarter, with Wonga having record high EBITDA due to some provision release as well. But the operating business was doing fine as well. So overall, things are good and we see potential to grow that business in Poland in the coming years.

So overall, very good performance with some more risk on Spain, but we believe it's temporary, with this change of approach to revaluation in Poland and Romania that we were asked for to factor in. Very good access to debt funding. You may have read that recently we closed an issue of bonds to Polish retail investors, which was 4x oversubscribed, and where we reduced our margin from 4% previously to 3% over 3 months WIBOR. And we may also decide to tap on that market again, but decisions have not been made yet.

So overall, we're prepared for a very busy period of Q4 and concentrating also on planning details of our digital transformation that will kick off also in the coming months. On regulatory front, nothing extraordinary with NPL directive is happening. It's being implemented now in some other countries, namely Italy, Spain and Poland. It was implemented in Romania already.

One opinion I'd like to share with you regards the GloBE Pillar 2 taxation, which we mentioned for the first time in Q2, where we said there is this big tax initiatives coming from OECD countries that says that big companies who have more than EUR 750 million of consolidated revenue for at least 2 years will be subject to additional taxation as long as they do not have less than 15% of effective tax rate.

And we think we may be subject to the taxations because our effective taxations often was below this 15% threshold, which is temporary, but that was the fact. But we didn't know exactly how and when this law will affect us. We still don't have certainty because this law in Poland has not been yet passed. It is being now -- it's going through the legislation process and some changes are made to it. But if we look at the current draft of this legislation, it's likely that this law will start to affect us already from 2027. Assuming that our revenue will grow and will exceed EUR 750 million of revenues in 2025 and 2026, then the first year where this law will affect us is 2027.

However, the tax will be due to be paid sometime in 2029 with some delay. I have no certainty that this is the final word on that. I don't know exactly how much of this tax will be paid. But I would advise investors and analysts to factor in what this legislation says, which is 15% effective tax rate for now. When this law is passed and we have more concrete information how it will affect us, we'll make it public through a report.

Other than that, there is no regulatory initiatives that were to worry us at this point. The NPL directive in our view will positively impact the industry and our business. We are preparing to update and make public our strategy for the next couple of years. We will probably make it public at the end of the year or beginning of the next year, so somewhere between December and February, somewhere between this time frame. In that time, we will also try to talk -- we'll also want to update our dividend policy. We'll also propose shareholders a new option plan, which is a very important element of the remuneration in KRUK as we do not have bonuses. We don't pay bonuses to managers, to Board or to our top management. So this program is the only goal-related program. So please wait until we are ready to disclose these plans.

This is my summary. Thank you very much for listening, and I will now take your questions.

[Michal Zasepa, executive]

On the strategy, I already commented on that. With this strategy, we'll also tell you our -- more concretely our plans for France. But please assume nothing extraordinary happens. We continue to develop in France, but we will not make a big jump suddenly there. We'll still operate as an investor. We try to buy some new portfolios. We recruit some people. But we today are investor who relies on third-party servicers. This is a good productive cooperation. But it will take us a few years before we develop a meaningful sizable business there. But this remains to be our plan.

I'm now reading the questions, and I'll answer them. How do you see NPL supply in Q4 and the upcoming 2025?

The supply is strong. There's definitely more portfolios that we can buy. So we will, of course, keep our investment discipline and select the highest return portfolios. I think there will be more portfolios that we'll buy that will come from Poland, some from Romania, somewhat less from Italy and Spain. And 2025, we rather expect stable supply compared to 2024. But let us confirm that when we meet in 2025, beginning of 2025. But we don't see reasons why supply should significantly change either positively or negatively today.

Although -- I'm talking now about the primary market. So the markets that we mostly target on, which is new stocks coming from banks and consumer finance companies. But maybe there will be more supply from secondary transactions, especially financial players who have bought over the past 10 years a lot of portfolios. And there will be a time when they'll sell some of it because the horizon of their investments will be ending. And this is something which we know there exists. It should be a significant supply. But we don't know when that will come. But likely in the next couple of years.

You are asking also if we plan to issue bonds in Polish zloty to euro in the near future.

We may. But looking at today's options that we have, again, our strategy is bank funding first because it's still the cheapest for us. And then whatever comes as cheapest source of funding, likely that will be Polish zloty bond for retail investors as we did last time. But we haven't yet made a decision when and if to come back to the market.

I'll wait now to see if there are any other questions. I don't see any other. If there are no more questions, then thank you very much for your time. And if there is a need, please contact me or the IR team. We'll be very happy to talk to you and answer your questions. Have a good day. Goodbye.