Unifiedpost Group SA

XBRU:UPG

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q4

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Good morning, everyone. We'd like to welcome you to the investor call regarding Unifiedpost Group's financial results of 2022. My name is Sarah Heuninck. I am the Investor Relations Manager of the group, and I will be your host for today.

This morning, Unifiedpost Group published its 2022 financial results. In a moment, we will kick off the presentation, starting with our CFO, Laurent Marcelis, discussing the financial results, followed by CEO, Hans Leybaert, concluding on this related to the business of Unified post.

[Operator Instructions]

And I'll now very much like to give the floor to Laurent.

[Laurent Marcelis, executive]

Thank you, Sarah, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our financial results, for the year 2022 which we will present in this meeting, and which we have announced this morning. I will guide you to all our financial KPIs, also part of the nonfinancial KPIs, of course, and I will give some comments on what we realized this year.

Starting, in fact, with an overview of nonfinancial KPIs. As a company and with the business we are in connecting businesses to one another in a full digital way, it's, of course, very important and one of the key metrics of our company is how many customers, how many businesses are connected through our software, through our platform.

We are very ambitious in that. We have the last 3 years, set to the market that we target an organic growth of plus 30%. And for the third consecutive year, we realized that last year 2022, we had an organic growth of the number of customers on our platform of 34.2%, bringing us to now plus 1 million businesses over Europe connected and -- connected to the platform and using our software. We are very proud of reaching the number of 1 million customers. The customers, of course, they are directly connected to our network.

As you might remember, I explained in the past that part of them are directly paying Unifiedpost, part of them are indirectly paying Unifiedpost. On top of that, we have also a network, the network that are companies we can reach in a digital way, but unfortunately for us, today are not yet a customer of Unifiedpost. We hope they become in the near future, of course.

But if we take those into account, companies that we can reach in a digital way, we are already over 2 million companies in Europe that we can reach in a digital way. Just to give you some flavor on that, approximately, there are approximately 25 million companies in Europe. Of course, most of the SMEs are target audience. And of those 25 million, now Unifiedpost can reach 2 million through its platform and through its services.

That brings me to the financial KPIs. These are summary slides. We will go in more detail, of course, in the next slide. Here are the key metric for us. A lot of metrics on this slide. Key metric is what you see in middle the 19.1% year-on-year digital growth, recurring that are really the core services of our platform. That's why we are in this business.

That's what we are focusing on to grow the recurring revenue, and we are very pleased with the 19.1% organic growth we realized last year. Top right corner, 41.9%, let's say, 42% gross margin. If we compare it year-on-year, it is a little bit down. But actually, we can -- one could also state that we maintained the level in a year where we saw inflation peaking like personally, we have never seen before in our lives.

So keeping our gross margin up to 42%, we are pleased with that for last year. And then perhaps another most important or another important is the evolution of our EBITDA earnings before interest, tax depreciation, amortizations, a metric for the profitability of the company, which is used. And you can see there, that is a very positive evolution. Like we indicated, the company and the group has made a lot of investments that made a lot of costs during the last years to expand its business to full addressable market in the 32 countries where we are active.

That period of increased investments and increased costs is behind us. We are working on the profitability, and it is already shown in the H2 EBITDA, which is slightly positive. And then moreover, in the EBITDA of the fourth quarter, which is up EUR 1.8 million. It has been a couple of years since we are investing since a couple of years that we had positive EBITDA, but there is a very positive evolution in that area. And it's further on in the presentation, and we will continue to focus on that, concerning also year 2023, where we want to become cash flow positive in the second half of the year.

This is a summary, more details on every topic of the P&L and the balance sheet in the coming slides. This is the slide on revenue and then focusing, of course, on the digital processing revenue. But let's not forget that we have 2 segments -- 2 revenue segments in the group. We have our digital processing revenue.

No, I suppose, by every one of you. Beside that, we also have the Postage & Parcel Optimization services up in the Nordic countries. On a whole, we did well in both segments and the 18.8% growth top line of our digital processing revenue, 19.1% in recurring and then even higher growth. If we look at the subscription growth, we are at 35.6%. What is subscription growth? We have 2 models. We have for large companies, we build them on a transaction basis, you do something, you pay for it. In the SME segment, we use subscriptions to play a flat fee every month for the usage of our services.

And of course, we have almost 36% growth there. That means that we are growing very fast in the SME segment, which is a core target of Unifiedpost, and we'll continue to focus on that. Postage & Parcel, EUR 63.6 million last year, EUR 64 million this year, impacted by inflation. Of course, we have also some price indexations. But it's a very good result for us, maintaining our business in a market which is slightly declining.

As physical pieces are going down, of course, compensated by parcel, which is a bit going up. Like you might have noticed in the press release. The fourth quarter, we did a large deal on the French market, a one-off deal like we quote. One-off deal is either a project, either the sale of a license, distribution license, software license.

Important deal was realized on the French markets with total revenue of EUR 3.75 million in the fourth quarter, and it concerns a deal with the French Accountants Federation and their IT part, ECMA where we created an associate joint venture, if I can say so, but it is an associate that both per perpetual distribution license for the French market.

Reason for that is that we are joining ECMA in bringing [indiscernible] to the French market. This is not something you do for a couple of years.

This is you do for well, let's call it, in several years, in a long period, eternity sounds a bit too far, but certainly for a long period, and that is now realized with the joint venture that has also the distribution rights in the French market. Top right corner, if you look at the revenue, you see that fourth quarter was very good, very good financial result by the company.

Not the coincidence, people that follow our financial calls will remember that the fourth quarter is always a strong quarter for the company. And although we are in a recurring business, fourth quarter, there is some seasonality in our business. It's always strong.

On the other hand, third quarter is also shown here. It is a bit down, that is typically it's the quarter, of course, with the summer period in there. The seasonality there is a bit negative on that effect. But in fact, with the result we had in Q3, we are quite pleased with what we realized there. That brings me to the slides on an overview of the revenue.

First thing here is -- and it's in line with the previous communication and the previous KPIs we show. 92.5% of the revenue of the group is recurring, important. That means that the revenue of the next month is already made for 92.5% in this month. What is not included, what is the 7.5% we are missing? That is, of course, our project business or license business, which is [indiscernible].

When you look at bottom left, the EUR 126.9 million that is the revenue that comes from our digital processing, so the platform of your platform of unified post, both for corporates and for SMEs, and we bring it together here. And then in the second bar, you can see the split between the different revenue types. 11% of our digital comes from project business, 66% from transactions and 23% from subscriptions.

Like I mentioned on the previous slide, subscriptions, there is a higher growth. So the part of the subscriptions is increasing year-on-year like we indicated and predicted also in previous calls. So we are following the path we have set forward for us and for company. Unifiedpost as a European player, strategic goal, of course, let's take a step back, why is this important? We know that a large digital market is unlocking in the European space.

I suppose you heard about the communication of the European Union on the eighth of December. That made another announcement of the VAT in the digital age with some goals across border VAT cross-border invoicing by 2028. So it is still the expectation that the full European market will become digital when it concerns to invoicing B2B invoicing by 2028. For us, important that with our global platform, we are everywhere local on the market. Our business remains local, countries have different implementation.

So it's important to have local teams, local solutions with one global platform. And that is, of course, what we have been doing the last couple of years, expand the addressable market of Unifiedpost to the full European platform, to the full European continent and to have a good place to take the business and take the revenue in the coming years and even increase our market. Top 5 countries, you see a bit of a history there. Unifiedpost itself of course, originated from Belgium, where the headquarters is still, that is still the #1 country, followed by Sweden acquisition of 21 grams in the past with important value in the Nordic countries in general and in Sweden, more specifically.

The Netherlands historic country are digital identity solution is very known on the Dutch market, and we generate quite some revenue on that market with, amongst others, the digital identity. Serbia and with extension, the whole Balkan region always also an important domain and region for Unifiedpost followed by the United Kingdom. Employees by region follows a bit the revenue, of course, Rest of World, 4% or 60 full-time equivalents we operate in the rest of the world is you might remember. We focus on Europe with our business, but we have a development center in Vietnam, and those are indicated here under dose 60 FTEs.

Stepping down in the P&L and we follow a bit the structure of the P&L. So that is clear to everyone what our financial results are. Gross profit, gross margins, let's not forget that it was 2022, very strange year. So if you look now at the top line, gross margin, 31.6% in '21 to 31.5%. So the same level which is okay for a difficult year. It's even good for difficulty like 2022 with prices going up.

And like indicated in the H1 call, our indexation in most of the contracts is done on the first of January. We did an intermediate indication during 2022, because circumstances were so abnormal, I would say, unusual, that we did an intermediate indexation where possible.

But typically, we index our prices on the first of January, and we were able to maintain our gross margin at the same level. The contribution to that gross margin, digital processing business went down with 1.8 points compared to last year, and Postage & Parcel also slightly down, but also only slightly.

Top right, quarter-by-quarter, it follows, of course, revenue of the last quarter was very good. It is also shown in the gross profit and gross margin of the last quarter, bringing it even to 46.2% on the quarter. So we ended the year in a very strong way. The cost development. Costs, I always comment on 3 operational costs, the R&D, the G&A and then selling and marketing expenses. R&D calling it operational costs is a bit too short, our R&D in total, EUR 36.2 million we invested in R&D, that sold a large amount.

We do that to have the state-of-the-art platform that all businesses in Europe can use during this period and the coming years for all of their communication and the e-invoicing specifically. We are still investing a lot. We wanted to be a high-performing platform that everyone can rely on. R&D in total, if you compare it to our digital revenue, we -- in the past, we always had 30% of our digital revenue that was invested in total in R&D. It is a bit down already in 2022 as the [ prior ] investment phase is now behind us. So we can lower our R&D cost. We already lowered a bit our R&D cost in H2 2022. And that evolution will continue in the future. Most of the R&D was capitalized. That is really under IFRS new products that are being developed.

I think 61% of the R&D is capitalized. And all other costs of R&D, those are enhancements of existing product, they are taken immediately into cost and into our results. The G&A, you can see that there is increase and the peak comes primarily from cost of expansion of our business.

It's not only if we want to expand our business, it's not only the R&D but also some operational costs we have to develop a good team and a good organization in all countries where we are active. And also an increase in selling and marketing expenses as we want to have a presence on every local market.

EBITDA, I mentioned already in the highlights and specifically for H2 and Q4. It's shown on this slide where you see the numbers coming back. Of course, the full year still negative by 6.4%, but with a very positive evolution throughout the year and specifically in the first quarter.

And for me, important here to repeat the goal for 2023, this company, this group, we have set the goal to become cash flow positive by H2 2023, the full semester. And as a management team, we are working on that, and we are confident that we can reach that goal by H2 2023. And as partly shown here, the company is well on the way to achieve that.

Balance sheet, for people wanting to get more in details. The numbers are shown here, presentation will be online. Typical for a company like Unifiedpost software, SaaS company that did some acquisitions, if you look at the asset side, the goodwill and other intangible assets are a prominent part of our assets.

The cash position, of course, over 2022 improved, we are now at a cash position of EUR 40 million or we were at the end of the year, EUR 40 million. With close to EUR 80 million of undrawn financing, we can rely on and where we feel comfortable that there is enough cash for the coming period until the period where Unifiedpost becomes cash flow positive, the second half of 2023. If you look at the equity side, yes, some explanation here. We started the year with the EUR 196 million equity, issuance of share, point 2, is on 2 occasions, we issued shares during 2022.

Francisco Partners deal, where there was the issuance of share and then after the summer, there was the earn-out of crossings that was settled on the crossings acquisition in Germany, which we did 2 years ago, [indiscernible] was still an earnout. That was settled with shares to make sure that there would be no cash impact in the future.

Point for changes in fair value of put options, we have some joint venture. Most important one is the Balkan, Serbia where we have a joint venture and in the joint ventures, the minority shareholders. Always have good options, which we need to value. And here, it's about changes in the fair value. If you combine all those impacts on our equity, we ended the year with EUR 158 million.

On the right-hand side, what I mentioned on the slide before, we started the year with EUR 17 million cash. We reinforced our cash position with Francisco Partners, making sure that this company has enough cash, has enough fuel to bridge the period until we become cash flow positive. And with the EUR 40 million, the management is still confident that there is enough cash.

That brings me to the summary slide for my part, key messages: strong growth, as mentioned, specifically in Q4, but actually throughout the year. 18.8% for the digital recurring, 19.1% for the recurring part, 18.8% was for the full digital. And then when we look at the subscription even higher with a strong Q4 with almost 25% growth. Revenue of the group now EUR 190.9 million.

We see a customer acceleration of 30% on a yearly basis was, of course, in absolute numbers, the number of customers onboarding are accelerating. And we hope that this continues, and we're convinced that this continues also with the digital age in Europe finally in communication between businesses and the invoicing that will become full digital over the coming years.

As indicated in my presentation, focusing on the profitability, focusing on the cash flow positive, shown already in the first step with a positive EBITDA for H2 and Q4 of last year. That was my part of the presentation. I give the floor now to Hans, that will give you his thoughts and views on the business of Unifiedpost. Hans?

[Hans Leybaert, executive]

Okay. Thank you, Laurent. Hello, everybody. Also welcome from my side and for your -- and thank you for your interest in the results of Unifiedpost Group.

So let's start with presentation. On the business update, I always want to refer to what I say, the 4 components of our company: Financials, Market, Product and the Team. Of course, Laurent already give you the full insight in our financial information.

From my side, one -- a few remarks here. So first of all, our performance of our stock price last year was very difficult. That's what we can see at least. So it was, on one hand, we -- the world changed completely with the war, the energy crisis and the inflation, which made that companies like ours who had a focus on growth, had a strong need to flip towards cash flow breakeven situation.

And that's what we have launched last year as a strategy to reach now in semester 2 of this year. Secondly, we had our financial instrument that we concluded with Francisco Partners, which was not really appreciated by the market. However, when I take a bit to full look since our IPO, where we raised EUR 175 million capital and where we did an extensive acquisition track on to become that pan-European player.

We needed to make a next step towards a full integration and actually prepare us for that digital age in Europe. And that's why it all clicks in each other, and we needed that financing to arrive where we are today.

As a conclusion and given the fact that the European Commission launched that proposal for a pan-European, let's say, the VAT platform or based on e-invoicing, it really fits now with the strategy that we deployed over the past 2 years. So we are the pan-European company. We have that anchoring in the local SME market through our acquisitions.

And actually, we are really integrating this as one company and make that we are ready for this upcoming evolution. So on the market level, of course, we have our e-invoicing market, which is evolving, which will strongly evolve in the coming 5 years. I will zoom in, in a minute on the European Commission proposal. But e-invoicing is really our fundamental for further growth. Last year, we have also extended our payment capabilities with our own payments network that we can roll out, and we have today already the approval for rolling out proper payment accounts in 19 countries. So that's a real asset where we can build up in next level of services on top of it.

And then we come in the range of refinancing, which is also a strong growing market foreseen for the coming years, where we have finished our first partnership with Izola Bank, a Belgium bank who gives financing to our customers. And we already also announced a partnership with Munich Re which is the biggest reinsurance company of the world, who wants to finance our customers based on the transaction that they do on our platform.

So that makes that we really have established this total proposition of e-invoicing, e-payments, e-financing and even the step towards in e-procurement. So let's so many on the famous announcement of the European Commission, where they have created a framework where all invoices intra-country and need to be reported to the Central European instance. I -- to make it very -- to realize that these invoices are in almost real-time verified on the tax level.

Just to avoid that VAT fraud or VAT collection is missing. So this is regulation that works for invoices between countries, but it's also a regulation that needs to be implemented within a country.

If that country wants to implement e-invoicing, they have to implement mandatory also that e-reporting. And e-reporting for the public, and it means that each invoice which is sent or/and received must be reported at least within days to public instances.

That means that each transaction that happens in Europe will need to be reported to the government. And there, it will be verified. And if there is an issue, this invoice is not valid. So that will make that there will be a drastic shift towards digital.

So first of all, it's nearly instant communication. It's transaction-based. It's data instead of a PDF. Of course, the government wants to be able to verify the data. So we need -- it must be reported in data format and not an PDF format. So a lot of parameters that change on the way of communicating, the way of reporting to government, it changed that drastically. And it accounts for, on one hand e-reporting, e-invoicing within a country, and it also accounts for cross-border invoicing. One of the countries that's really proactive in this is France, which will go live on the first of July 24 with his legal e-invoicing, including e-reporting, the way that they the European Commission proposal is quite strict.

So it requires a serious -- it asked a lot of requirements to the platform. One of these requirements, for instance, is that all data for French companies need to be stored in France and must be signed with French keys.

So France keys, I mean keys belonging to a French company. So all fortes, let's say, data protection reasons. The European Commission has created this strict regulation. And actually, every country is now evaluating how to implement this.

The goal is that every country should be live by the first of January '28. So that's -- which is, of course, only 5 years from now, less than 5 years from now. So this is absolutely a tight agenda for every European country to migrate to this way of working.

And it impacts actually around 25 million companies and 25 million independent workers. So this is really the catalyst to move to a fully digital society where every company is connected to each other. And that's right, and that's exactly what we have developed over the past years and where we have invested in and where we have made our platform ready for it.

So for us now, it's important that we follow the agenda of the implementation of these regulations in the different countries and focus our sales efforts and our sales machine according to the rollout in Europe of this evolution.

This is not only an evolution that we see in Europe. Also on a global level, the way towards full digital communication with e-invoicing combined with e-reporting is a trend that's really a trend on a global scale, just to control all the flows. Of course, every communication, every invoice will result in a payment. So the related payments are -- can't be separated from this total digital flows. And again, it was a good choice from Unifiedpost to invest a lot in payments and to actually create a full digital flow, including payments functionalities.

So if we roll out such a network, it's important that we cover all stakeholders. So -- and all stakeholders means that we can work for the larger companies, the corporates, large and midsized companies. There, we have our e-invoicing products channel and collect channel on the outbound side, collect on the inbound side.

And we have collect solutions on the government side where the government receives invoices from businesses and needs to be processed too.

Of course, a very important stakeholder and our let's say, core market since Unifiedpost launched is the SME market. And now even more, we also touched the private persons because every -- a lot of businesses have also private persons as customers. And we may not forget that this reporting obligations and in the [indiscernible] framework is also valid for our mandatory for B2C invoices also.

Business who send invoices to consumers need to report need to report all these invoices to the government. Of course, on the reception side, the early businesses are -- have a VAT obligation, private person, not they can't recuperate VAT. But so on the collect side, there is only a reporting obligation on the business side.

But we even see there already trends that reportings on the private person side become -- are taken in scope in some countries. So it's our role, and our scope must be that we cover all the stakeholders within this digital communication.

So an important evolution in this is that parties who are seeing as, let's say, "competitors," we all have to work together, and we have to migrate a sort of a complementary proposition where partner -- that the competitors of the past can become the partners of tomorrow. And that's software companies, e-commerce companies, payment companies, they are all confronted to meet this have strong regulation on communication, VAT collection and corresponding e-reporting, which affects actually other types of industries. And that means that cooperation between different industries will be the key word here in the coming years.

And because of the -- let's say, the modular approach of Unifiedpost, but also the complementary services that we have created, we are really open and available to work together with a lot of parties to complement their services with capabilities that we have.

On the R&D side, it is clear that Unifiedpost is in a phase of focus, focus, focus. Focus on what is the future, where we evolved to, and that plays on 2 levels.

First of all, we have -- we come from, let's say, a hybrid world, a hybrid world where we had, what I always said in the past, Unifiedpost, this Unified messaging plus post, we bring the customer from papers to [indiscernible].

And now the focus for further investments and further evolution of our platform, is -- flips more and more to that, let's say, digital-only approach, because the regulation makes that paper is drastically reduced, which means that it's all focused on data and on digital communication instantly. So that means that we also have to solve that or organize ourselves that we -- that both parts are that hybrid part and the digital part are managed in an appropriate way, because there's actually 2 markets. I'm sure it's clear that paper is not that at all. Not that there is future in the paper world.

But it's over volumes, it's -- there is -- there will be more outsourcing because companies, even the small ones want to outsource all of it, not only invoices or a lot of other types of documents who need to be processed, less structured, and there's still potential but it must be -- the focus must be there. The specific focus must be there on both levels. Secondly is -- second part here is that Unifiedpost is building that network and really connecting parties within the network with each other. So software partners are Software companies are our natural partners because they manage the data of the customer and data needs to be exchanged. So that's logical that these 2 worlds are combined with each other.

It also means that our -- that we should stick to the focus of extending the network and actually create partnerships or collaborations, connectivities with all types of software. So this is -- in that perspective, it's focus on our business to the essence what we do is a part of our strategy to make our company towards that 10 breakeven point. And then we have the team. Of course, the team reaches which is very important to build all these solutions.

There, we also need to be flexible in all parts of what we do. It's -- we are confronted in the coming years with big moments. If a country goes live or it becomes -- there is a due date when e-invoicing becomes mandatory, then we get a peak of workload. On the other hand, we have -- we need to invest in what's core for our company.

So variabilizing and our way of working and bring our costs in line with our business evolution is, of course, a crucial one because alignment of costs, given the coming years, is very important, is the key item in our way to breakeven.

And that's what we have launched last year that we see the first results in Q4 on, let's say, rationalize our costs in combination with our growth that we realized. And we will further elaborate this in the coming -- we do it today, tomorrow, just to be able to break up to reach that breakeven point. Because it's -- on one hand, we are in a market with a tremendous potential for the coming 5 years.

On the other hand, it is -- it can be -- there is still some, let's say, timings. There is some uncertainty in this short-term rollouts. And that's why it's important that we are flexible, that we are a company who has -- who is not cash burning, so that we can adapt ourselves to the evolution of the market and actually where that flexibility which will come -- which will be the effect in our markets in the coming years.

So thank you for your attention, and back to Sarah.

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Thank you, Hans and Laurent, for your presentation. And we will now start with the Q&A session.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions]

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Thank you, Sandra. Okay. Let's start with the first question. How confident are you to reach the goal to become cash flow breakeven in H2?

[Laurent Marcelis, executive]

To my opinion, the management is confident that we can reach that. We made the decision last summer. We are working on that with the management team and in fact, with everyone in the company, aligning revenue costs, focusing on the result. High investment phase is behind us, and it's the key metric that we put forward.

We follow it up on a monthly basis, not everything is predictable. But we have enough options to reach that.

We did not -- we will never be explicit about the budget we have for this year, but I would say that we are confident that with everything that is in the pipeline with our business that is constantly growing. And with the management of costs, we will reach that.

So we can as a company benefits from the trend of digitalization on the full market, increasing revenue, increasing gross margin for the company and with the good cost management, we will achieve what we have put forward. Hans, would you like to comment from business side?

[Hans Leybaert, executive]

It's -- you need what you say and also following that valuable evolution of the deployment of our business, where we must be flexible on costs, and that's the crucial element to reach it and focus on the essence of our business. And that's what we -- that's now our total focus goes to that to align our business to these guidelines.

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Okay. Thank you. Next question coming in. Are you reading additional cost containment -- sorry, I'm just reading the question here. Are you looking at additional cost containment actions, or is this presently not yet a topic to achieve the guidance?

[Hans Leybaert, executive]

Can you repeat the question?

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Are we looking at additional cost containment actions, or is this presently not yet a topic to achieve the guidance?

[Hans Leybaert, executive]

We are now in, let's say, a constant exercise of cost of line. So that started last year and that continues to reach our goal. So that -- it's an absolute must to reach that breakeven position in the second half of this year.

So it's -- we need to execute all the necessary measures. So it's a constant exercise, which we started, which we do today, and we will continue until our goal is reached.

[Laurent Marcelis, executive]

It's where we are today, I think all decisions have been taken by management to reach at guidance. It's more about execution.

And the second thing to mention is a bit like we said, it's if 2022 has learned us something is that the future can be unpredictable. No one had predicted a year 2022 as it was the case. So we are also prudent about 2023, and that's what we say. We have taken all the measures. We are in full execution. We do a monthly follow-up. If there should be a deviation from the plan we had, we will take the necessary decisions.

We will take necessary amount of measures to reach our goals.

And we have enough possibilities remaining to adjust that even if something unpredicted would happened in the market in 2023 that we can still reach the go to being cash flow positive from period H2 2020.

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Okay. That's clear. Thank you.

Then the last question. What is the concrete impact you expect regarding used VAT in a digital ag program on your business? And when do you expect it?

[Hans Leybaert, executive]

Well, first of all, it is -- it's a 5-year period. So the proposal states that first of January '28, every country must have implemented it, which is a very tight framework. Although we can say it will be postponed and so on and so on.

But we see that European Commission is very strict and also actually, they already forced several countries to go through e-invoicing, and they link it towards the subsidies or loans that they get from the European Commission.

Some countries already get penalties from European Commission by not getting subsidies, not getting loans, because their governance of VAT collection is not working properly. So that means that this implementation is not one big shot for whole Europe, but it's actually focusing on the countries where the VAT problem is [indiscernible].

And that's -- and so that makes that we will be -- we will come, we will arrive in -- yes, let's say, ongoing program of countries that implemented and are forced to implement it. So given the fact that there is so much money involved being EUR 165 billion a year, which is lost in Europe on VAT collection.

So yes, time is money here. And so we believe that this will be -- timelines will be implemented very strictly, which makes for us that it's -- we need to use that momentum in each market, because each market goes through let's say, sort of a market distribution stage, where every company or every independent must choose or provided, and no option in most. So sales effort goes to our focusing -- are following these momentums and all with the goal to take as much as possible market share because afterwards, it becomes a replacement market.

And so it's that momentum that makes that we can take important market share. And of course, because of the history that we have and the effort that we have already done in countries, we are anchored in these countries. We are building up customer base, and we have more than 1 million customers already, which is a very good starting base for -- to leverage on.

And we are operational, and that's the -- so we have a full product. We have that presence by local themes and the propositions for the smallest companies and to the largest companies. So we are very well placed to grab that momentum and/or different momentums in the coming years and become a very dominant player in this market.

[Sarah Heuninck, executive]

Okay. Thank you, Hans, for that answer. The Q&A session has now come to an end. We would like to thank you all for attending this call and joining us today and for your interest in Unifiedpost Group. I'd like to remind you of the fact that all slides and a replay of this webcast is available on our website.

If you should have any more questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. And I wish you a very nice day, and we hope to see you again next time. Thank you and goodbye.