Brockhaus Technologies AG
XETRA:BKHT
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Brockhaus Technologies AG
Earnings Call Analysis
Summary
Q1-2024
Brockhaus Technologies achieved €40 million in Q1 2024 revenue, representing 18% organic growth. Adjusted pro forma EBITDA increased by 4% to €11 million, with a margin of 29%. Despite seasonal and operational challenges, especially at IHSE, the company's resilient model is highlighted. With solid order backlogs and strategies, Brockhaus maintains its 2024 forecast of €220-240 million in revenue and €80-90 million in EBITDA. Notably, the acquisition of Probonio supports multiple strategic pillars and enhances corporate customer engagement.
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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to the investor update call of Brockhaus Technologies AG. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to Marco Brockhaus.
Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Brockhaus Technologies earnings call for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2024. Before we begin, I would like to point out that the slides we are presenting will afterwards be published in the Investor Relations section of our website, brockhaus-technologies.com. After our presentation, we will open the call to questions from your side. To be fair to everyone, please limit yourself to one question plus one follow-up. Thank you very much in advance.
Before we present our results, I encourage all listeners to review the legal notice on Page 2 of our presentation, which explains the understanding of forward-looking statements. Additionally, please refer to Note 6 of our annual report 2023 on Page 94 onwards for a discussion on alternative performance measures as well as the reconciliation of non-GAAP figures. For information on risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, we kindly refer you to the section on risks and opportunities in the management report 2023, starting on Page 65.
So flipping over to Page 3 to give you a brief summary of what we have achieved in the first quarter of this year. We want to continue our success story in 2024 and confirm our annual forecast. Due to a return to long-term seasonality at Bikeleasing, with a high proportion of annual business volume in Q2 and Q3 as well as a solid order backlog at IHSE by the end of April, we expect particularly strong growth acceleration in the coming 2 quarters.
Brockhaus Technologies generated revenues of EUR 40 million in Q1 2024, which represents organic growth of 18% compared to Q1 of last year. Adjusted pro forma EBITDA grew by 4% to EUR 11 million, corresponding to an adjusted pro forma EBITDA margin of 29%. Adjusted pro forma EBIT also increased by 3% to EUR 10 million, corresponding to an adjusted EBIT margin of 26%. Before adjustments, EBITDA amounted to EUR 11 million and EBIT to EUR 5 million. EBIT is especially influenced by PPA amortization.
On the back of this strong development, starting into the year, we confirm our group forecast 2024 with revenue between EUR 220 million and EUR 240 million and an adjusted EBITDA between EUR 80 million and EUR 90 million. The operating development in Q1 as well as the growth forecast for the full year clearly underline the resilience of our business model despite ongoing geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainties.
Lastly, we further reduced the leverage ratio within the group to 0.7x, 0.7x adjusted LTM EBITDA. This equips us with significant nondilutive financing capacity for acquisitions and future growth initiatives. But more on this later in the presentation.
Let us jump right into the quarterly revenue analysis on Page 4. As you can see, we had a somehow mixed start into the year. IHSE on the bottom of the page was hampered by overhaul works on the production line at the company's headquarters. This led to a planned production shutdown for 2 weeks, and in combination with tough comparables, resulted in a decrease of revenue by 12.5 percentage.
Bikeleasing on the top of the page outperformed the comparative period nicely by plus 29% in revenue. This was despite a slight decline in the number of new bikes brokered. That number was 27,000 in Q1 2024 compared to 28,000 last year.
The revenue growth that the company achieved despite the decline in the number of new bikes was driven, on the one hand, by the rise in disposal proceeds from leases at the end of the contract. That component of revenue relates mainly to the growth realized 3 years ago and therefore is essentially independent of current developments. On the other hand, over the last year, Bikeleasing has converted most of its corporate customers to a variable leasing factor that flows with the current interest rate environment. That means that all other things equal, the monthly leasing rate for a new bike is now higher when market interest rates are higher and vice versa. As a result, Bikeleasing earned more income per bike in Q1 2024 compared to the year before.
To the next chart, we presented in our earnings call already 6 weeks ago in a quite similar version. We repeated here as we wanted to give you an update on the basis of actual Q1. As mentioned before, the number of new bikes brokered by Bikeleasing was slightly lower than a year ago. On the first thought, this, of course, does not sound good. However, this development did not come as a surprise to us, and it does not mean harm to Bikeleasing's growth perspective.
The reason for the slight decline was an extraordinary distribution of seasonality in the past year 2023. As you know, Bikeleasing's business has a very pronounced seasonality with a lot of volume in the warm quarters 2 and 3 and with low volumes in the cold quarters 1 and 4. This, however, was somewhat flattened out throughout 2023 and especially in Q1 2023.
For the first reason, the month of January and February last year were very dry. So less rain lets more people go out and get a new bike. The second reason is that back in the beginning of 2023, there was still supply shortage in the new -- in the bike stores in the aftermath of COVID-19. In anticipation of difficult supply, many Bikeleasing users did not wait for the first sunny weeks to go out and get their new bike but simply ordered their bikes earlier.
This also evened out a significant part of the seasonality in Q1. This also explains the growth trajectory during the last year of 2023 compared to 2022, where growth in Q1 and Q4 exceeded 50%. In contrast, growth in the summer quarters 2 and 3 was significantly lower. As a result, the share of Q1 2023 came out at 18.7% of the year's total volume. This is an extraordinarily high figure compared to the years before. The long-term average over receivable part was only 13.1%.
Recently, the supply situation has improved substantially with many bike stores holding large inventories. As a result, Bikeleasing management expects customers to return to their historical purchasing behavior. Therefore, we expect the business seasonality in 2024 to be even more pronounced than in 2023. That is why in Q1 of this year, we did not expect substantial growth at Bikeleasing compared to Q1 of 2023. But we do expect, especially in the second and third quarters, to overcompensate for this effect accordingly. As we also disclosed in our quarterly statement, the April volume of new bikes already outperformed last year's April by 30%. On this basis, we see the long-term seasonality assumption confirmed.
I would now proceed to the next page for the regional sales split. First, Bikeleasing. No surprise here. The company does business in Germany and Austria and growth in revenue was 29%. IHSE had a very positive development in EMEA, where revenue grew by 41%. In the U.S., however, top line was down 61%. This was mainly caused by the delivery of a larger order in last year's Q1 and could not be overcompensated in light of the production overall at the German production site that I already mentioned. The APAC region business remains on a very low level, mainly due to China's decoupling from the West.
Turning to the segment profit and loss table. In the first 2 columns, we see that Bikeleasing's gross profit margin was rock solid at more than 65%. EBITDA and EBIT margins were a bit reduced. This is due to the lower new business volume of the quarter due to the effects explained before. The company plans with continued strong growth and needs to expand capacities accordingly.
Please bear in mind that the 2023 figures that we present here are pro forma. Throughout last year, we acquired 4 sales agencies of Bikeleasing in order to internalize sales activities and to get rid of substantial provision payments to them. For better comparability, the figures shown here for Q1 2023 present the company as if those sales agencies were already acquired as per beginning of last year.
Proceeding to the next 2 columns to the right. At IHFE, the gross profit margin was some 3 points below last year, but such deviations between quarters, and nothing out of the ordinary for the company. What is not positive was the margin development at EBITDA level, where IHSE was down to 7%. This was caused naturally by the low top line level in conjunction with the fixed cost base in personnel and other operating expenses. Also, this effect was intensified additionally by the quarter's lower gross profit margin.
Moving to further columns to the right in the central functions. Expenses were a bit lower than the year before. In conclusion and summing up on the consolidated group level, revenue was close to EUR 40 million, showing a strong increase of 18.5%. Gross margin was at 67%, and adjusted EBITDA margin was at 29%, bringing our group adjusted EBITDA of EUR 11.4 million. The group's adjusted EBIT of EUR 10 million corresponds to a margin of 26%. Last but not least, our cash balance as per the end of March amounted to EUR 56 million.
Turning to the next page. I would like to run you briefly through our financial leverage structure. End of March, the debt from loans amounted to EUR 86 million. Therefore, when subtracting cash of EUR 56 million, we are left with a net debt from loans of EUR 30 million. Furthermore, adding EUR 17.7 million from other financial liabilities and deducting EUR 4 million of net cash from lease refinancing brings us to EUR 44 million in total net debt. If you compare that to EBITDA, this corresponds to leverage of 0.65x. This is a clear reduction compared to the beginning of the year when leverage was 0.87x. As our limit for this KPI is some 2.5x, we consider our current financial position as more than conservative.
This concludes the financial update, and I'll now hand over to Paul, who is in charge of our acquisition team.
Yes. Thank you, Marco, and also welcome, everyone, from my side. As usual, let me start with a brief operational deep dive with a look at Bikeleasing. Even though we keep repeating ourselves, the first quarter of '24 was another record quarter for Bikeleasing in terms of revenue and EBITDA.
In addition, Bikeleasing was able to further continue the growth of its pool of corporate customers that are onboarded to the digital platform. The number of corporates now stands at around 62,000 with around 3.4 million employees behind them. Keep in mind that when we signed the purchase agreement for Bikeleasing in summer '21, the platform stood at around 25,000 connected corporates. So in less than 3 years, we have grown the client base by around 2.5x.
The number of facilitated bikes as the key driver for our brokerage income, however, was slightly below the previous year's level, with around 27,000, as Marco mentioned before. This was due to a normalization of the already strong seasonality at Bikeleasing. The number of leasing contracts brokered in Q1 last year stood at around 90% of the annual number, while the long-term 6-year average only stands at around 13% for Q1. So you see a significant deviation in here.
The reason for this was twofold: A, unusually mild start into the year; and B, an unusual high order backlog as consumers were still fearful of the long order times observable during COVID and hence ordered their bikes earlier than is usually the case. The development in Q1 was fully within plan for us and as expected, which is why we early on hinted towards that volume shift already in our full year earnings call, as you might remember a couple of weeks ago.
However, to give you a bit more flavor beyond Q1, April '24 was already plus 30% again as compared to previous year's April, bringing the number of facilitated bicycles as per April year-to-date, so all 4 months, to a plus of 7% in terms of contracts brokered. This, again, was fully within our expectations. So we are very optimistic about the remaining quarters to come.
Turning over to the next page, 10. After having already accretively acquired 4 sales agencies of Bikeleasing last year, we once again have been active on the M&A front with the acquisition of a company called Probonio, which you can see here. Probonio is a software-as-a-service provider for the management of a wide range of employee benefits. Through their own proprietary platform and native app, employers can offer the employees more than 10 different benefits. Benefits for example such as nonmonetary benefits, meaning vouchers, meal subsidies, corporate fitness offerings, even the integration of providers of bicycle leasing like Bikeleasing or occupational pension schemes.
So you see a very diverse set of benefits that are available. An example of the user app as well as the HR cockpit for the employer or the HR department, you can see here on the right-hand side of the page. But you're all happy to check it out on Probonio's website as well, which gives you an even better demo of the product.
As you might remember, from the moment when we signed the SPA for Bikeleasing in mid of '21, we always followed 4 very simple strategic pillars with Bikeleasing. Let me remind you about them. First, onboarding as many corporate customers to the platform as possible. Secondly, once we have the corporates on the platform, increasing the take-up rates within the employee base of those already on corporates. Third, adding further non-bike benefits to our platform in existing client base. And fourth, internationalizing the business beyond Germany and Austria.
The acquisition of Probonio not only supports the third pillar, so adding non-bike benefits, which is quite obvious, but actually, all 4 of the pillars we have pointed out. Firstly, being able to offer nearly all benefits out of one hand will be a key differentiator for Bikeleasing in winning new corporate customers. For example, if you think about tenders, there is no competitor that's able to offer a similar comprehensive portfolio of benefits out of one hand.
Secondly, while Bikeleasing on average reaches somewhere between 15% to 20% of employees within the firm, and what is quite interesting, smaller companies have a higher take-up rate in the employees than larger companies because just communication works better, this is nothing compared to Probonio who usually reaches 90% plus of the employees once a corporate is onboarded. This means for us that we can now reach those customers or those employees within a firm that were previously non-reachable or non-targetable for Bikeleasing. And we can target them with a Bikeleasing offer specifically.
And thirdly, whenever we were evaluating internationalization potential, we were so far limited by the availability of a similar corporate bicycle leasing framework as in Germany. It doesn't need to be the same one, but it needs to be somehow similar. But now with a variety of benefits at hand, we can very much more flexibly look at geographies and if they are generally interesting enough to expand to. And then we can start ramping up a team and win customers with whatever kind of benefit works best locally. And once bicycle leasing becomes possible, we are already set up and have a client base on the ground. So to summarize, the acquisition of Probonio pays into all our strategic goals with Bikeleasing at once, which will accelerate our strategic growth map significantly.
Turning over to the next page to round it up. Let me briefly explain to you how we structured the acquisition of Probonio because that will obviously be a question. So just to remind you, the acquirer of Probonio was the operational Bikeleasing group, and it acquired 100% of the shares from the founders of Probonio. The purchase price was around EUR 4.1 million, so it's still quite a small company, which was split into EUR 2.1 million in cash and EUR 2 million as a contribution in kind into Bikeleasing in exchange for new shares in Bikeleasing. So a capital increase in kind or a share swap, if you might want to call it like this.
This means that the founders of Probonio, who are also still the managing directors of the company, have now become by Bikeleasing shareholders as well. And the interest of all parties of Bikeleasing, Probonio management and us are perfectly aligned following the acquisition, namely to quickly integrate the offering and start upselling the Probonio products to our client base.
This concludes the update on Bikeleasing from my side and moving over to a similar update on IHSE, but for that, handing over to Yannick, who heads our operations team.
Good afternoon, everyone. After a strong first quarter of the previous year, IHSE revenue dropped by 12.5% in the first 3 months of 2024. This level is still higher than the comparable first quarters of 2021 and 2022, while at the same time, IHSE had a scheduled and planned downtime for facility upgrade. We still see an unchanged demand for IHSE as a global technology leader in KVM technology, and the growth tailwinds in its market remained intact with a continuing rebound.
As seen earlier by the regional split presented by Marco, this year started with a very strong development of orders received and products sold within EMEA. While the APAC region, especially driven by China, remains more difficult given the continuous decoupling tendencies from the West, the region Americas had a slower start than the comparable Q1 in 2023. Keep in mind that this region had exceptional growth in 2023, including a solitary project contributing more than EUR 1 million in revenue in the first quarter of last year.
Overall, the order backlog increased to a very healthy EUR 8.2 million as of end of April 2024, providing the foundation for further growth over the next quarters. This trend is driven in particular by projects that IHSE was able to win as a result of the compliance with standards for highly security-critical applications.
Moving on to the next page for a quick overview of the facility improvement we executed together with the IHSE management. In March, we successfully completed our scheduled facility upgrade and installation of new equipment with increased automization in our production facility in Oberteuringen, giving us not only additional capacity for continuous growth but also increasing the quality level of our products by reducing our production cost per piece.
While the total target over the course of 2024 and 2025 is actually 50% higher potential output in our facility, the first step already gives us around 30% increase as of today. Additionally, by the changes made to manual transfer steps towards an in-line system, we will significantly decrease SMD rework by an estimated 60%, which also translates to an even higher level of product quality.
With this, handing back over to Marco for the outlook.
Yes. Flipping over to the last 2 pages of today's presentation, our forecast for the fiscal year 2024 as well as medium outlook for 2025. As already briefly mentioned in my opening remarks, we confirm our group forecast for 2024 on the back of the positive development observable in Q1 this year. We plan for revenue between EUR 220 million to EUR 240 million and an adjusted EBITDA between EUR 80 million to EUR 90 million in the fiscal year 2024, which corresponds to a growth corridor of 18% to 28% compared to the EUR 187 million in revenue achieved in 2023. Our medium outlook for 2025 remains unchanged. We continue to expect revenues between EUR 290 million to EUR 320 million and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%.
Please note that this forecast assumes that there will be no further change in the scope of consolidation within Brockhaus Technologies. The reason for this approach is the difficulty in predicting the nature and scope of future acquisitions. We do not believe that any estimates in this respect are sufficiently reliable even though we are constantly working towards finding the next hidden gem in the market.
That concludes our presentation, and we are now happy to answer your questions. For that, I would like to hand over to the operator. Thank you.
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Stefan Augustin of Warburg Research.
I have one question, and it comes actually together with the Probonio acquisition. So as you outlined, there will be many strategic impacts from Probonio, and I'm sure you're evaluating this. And then this could also have an impact on what you think in the midterm, what a possible growth could look like. When could we expect some news here? Because I think that certain positive effects are not yet included in your medium-term forecast.
Yes. Thank you, Mr. Augustin. I'm taking this question. Absolutely right. I mean as we always point out in our forecast slides, we don't assume any new M&A in the numbers we give out. So you're absolutely right. With the Probonio acquisition, we would need to provide some additional color on what we expect from it. The reason we have not done this yet is because we want to have a, let's say, fundament for doing a very thorough projection of what we can expect or want to achieve over the next couple of years.
Why is that? Because if you, and that's a simple math, go on the Probonio website and look at their pricing, I mean, it's mostly a SaaS revenue mix. So you have monthly fees per employee that is onboarded to the platform. And you take those times 3.4 million Bikeleasing users that we have currently on the platform, that leads you to tremendous numbers that would, let's say -- that everything explored, is that realistic? No, absolutely not because we will not upsell 100% of our clients.
The question is how many clients will we upsell. And we could just take a number out of thin air and apply this to a projection and give out the numbers. However, that's not how we work. So before doing this, we want to, let's say, back check a realistic number, which we do currently with a customer survey, and let's say, going into deep dives with potential pilot customers within our client base. And once we see their feedback and their reaction to the, let's say, upselling offer, then we use this, let's say, conversion that we see to also fine-tune our analysis. And once we have that, you can expect from us an update to the market what we expect to achieve with Probonio in the next years.
Thank you very much for these explanations. Then a bit on the technical side. What would be the road map to, let's say, make the Probonio software systems and the Bikeleasing platform comparable?
Sorry, what do you mean with making them comparable?
Or let's say integrated.
The integration work, yes. I mean you could quite easily integrate it by just saying we have a new offer. You can onboard to the offer. But what do you want to achieve in such an upselling exercise? A potential -- or the highest conversion rate possible, right? Because conversion leads to revenue for us. So what we want to do before launching, let's say, the upselling exercise is reduce the friction for our clients as much as possible.
I mean we are offering not only a bicycle leasing solution to employees or corporates and their employees, but we are offering a, let's say, customer experience. And we have very good feedback from our customers regarding our product, regarding the scalability of our solutions or automation of our solution.
So we want to ideally not have any friction whenever a customer wants to change from, let's say, the Bikeleasing world through to Probonio world. And to do this, you need to, of course, technically integrate both platforms so that you can change from one to the other as smoothly as possible. And yes, this is some really IT work to be done basically. And that's what we mean with technical integration.
And how long or when do you think this could be finished?
We, of course, have an incentive to do this as soon as possible. But I think we can say that our aim is to launch, let's say, an integrated offering in the second half of this year.
Thanks a lot. At the moment, there are no further questions. [Operator Instructions] Next question comes from Lasse Stueben of Berenberg.
Just another follow-up on the Probonio deal. I might have missed this in the presentation, so apologies. But is there any potential, I guess, in the reverse rather than upselling your Bikeleasing customers? Are there any Probonio customers already existing that you can plug Bikeleasing into? So from that angle, is there any other potential for that kind of cross-sell opportunity?
Yes, absolutely, there is. But it's rather neglectable, to be honest. The company is still very young. It just hit, let's say, 2 years of existence. So I think they are at around 500 corporate customers, which is a good traction in the first years after founding a business and coding the platform. But it's -- for Bikeleasing, it's rather neglectable because I mean, in the summer weeks, we have historically onboarded more than 500 customers per week. So it's -- yes, absolutely right. There is also a twofold upselling, but it's neglectable for us.
Okay. And just one more follow-up, if I may. The -- you've given out the IHSE backlog of about 8 million. Just as a reminder, that's fully addressable or expected to be fully converted this year into revenues. Is that correct?
Yes, that understanding is correct.
Next question comes from Matthias Riechert of P&R.
I have 2 questions, if I may. The first one is, again, with regard to the Probonio deal. I might have missed it on the slide, but the shares that you gave away from Bikeleasing, what implied valuation did you use there for the deal? And then I have a second one.
EUR 795 million.
Sorry, the -- for me to understand that correctly, so the half of the purchase price that was in shares, what kind of implied price do you use for that? Or you can tell me also the percentage that you gave away from Bikeleasing.
Yes, certainly. This is Harald. You will find that on the quarterly report. I'm just looking at the page. But what we gave in Bikeleasing was valued EUR 2 million. And what's the percentage, so of the Bikeleasing holding company that owns the Bikeleasing group, the percentage was 0.255.
All right. Excellent. The second question I have is with regard to upselling. I think that might be a question for Paul. I mean first of all, it's phenomenal to see a company that is growing so much and has, at the same time, incredibly high margin. So that is amazing. The second part of your strategy to increase the take-up rate within the signed up corporates. So you've signed up 62,000 corporates. Can you explain a little bit how this upsell works? Because my understanding is that you do not have the individual employee data, right, except for the ones that haven't done deals, but you want to reach the other ones that haven't yet done a deal. So how does it actually work from a tactical point of view? How do you target those customers?
Yes, very, very right and very important because as you said, we don't know the majority of employees that are actually connected to us because they have never ordered a bicycle yet. And so unless they have ordered a bicycle, we cannot target them. And that's why we're so excited about Probonio. Because you -- 2 things to mention here. Who is our customer? Our customer is always the corporate.
So when we talk about upselling, we don't need to worry about upselling a, let's say, for example, meal voucher solution to Mr. or Mrs. Muller within corporate XYZ and if they accept it or not. That's not the decision-maker. The decision maker is the same decision-maker as for Bikeleasing, which is the corporate customer, be it the managing director of a smaller company or in larger companies the responsible HR person, for example. So we need to convince them, and we know them. We need to convince them to implement further benefits for their employees.
And then the nice thing is, as I mentioned in my slide, Probonio regularly reaches 90% plus of the employees. Now you might wonder, why is that? Because not using Probonio if it's being implemented by your corporate, by your employer, is simply done because you -- while Bikeleasing is something that you as an employee pay for, right, you can decide to lease a bicycle and you save a lot of money as compared to a cash purchase, but you don't gain anything from that. It's for people that are interested in getting a bicycle. But if you are not into bicycles, why should you do it? You just lose a bit of your monthly salary. And that's why you will never reach a 90% penetration in our employee base.
However, at Probonio, if we come back to the example of meal voucher, not signing up to Probonio and to the app and not using the meal voucher options at your lunch, you're simply missing out on free cash that your employer is providing to you. And that's why they quickly get those high take-up rates for their app, and those high take-up rates can then be used by us to do marketing for the Bikeleasing product as well. I hope this clarifies a little bit.
It sounds like a big task. With 62,000 corporates, you have a lot to do then.
Absolutely, yes. We are busy.
Thank you very much. As there are no more questions in the queue for now, I'm handing the floor back over to the hosts.
Okay. All right. Thank you all very much for attending today's earnings call for Brockhaus Technologies. I'd like to use this stage in a moment, as always, to thank our employees for outstanding work and performance as well as our shareholders for their continued trust and support. Goodbye, and have a great day. Thank you.