Cancom SE

XETRA:COK

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Operator]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CANCOM SE earnings call regarding the results of the first quarter of 2022. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Mr. Bucher. Please go ahead.

[Sebastian Bucher, executive]

Hello, everybody, to CANCOM's earnings call for the first quarter 2022. My name is Sebastian Bucher, Manager, Investor Relations at CANCOM. And with me is our CFO, Tom Stark. I hope everybody well known to him, and he will comment on the most recent events in the first quarter.

And without further ado, Tom, please go ahead.

[Thomas Stark, executive]

Thank you, Sebastian, and welcome to today's earnings call. It's a pleasure for me having you in the call, and I'm looking forward to spending the next 45 minutes to an hour with you to talk about the results and the specifics of the industry basically that are affecting this year tremendously.

First of all, let's take a look at on the results before we comment on the general specific situation in the industry. Group EBITDA -- from a group level, EBITDA grew nicely. We have seen an increase of profitability compared with the first quarter 2021 despite of supply chain bottlenecks. Service and As a Service business have been the main drivers for this positive trend.

Cloud Solutions outperformance, we have seen very dynamic growth rates in revenue and EBITDA. The recurring revenue development was pretty much in line with this development and showed a strong performance as well.

IT Solutions suffered basically from supply chain shortages. So we have clearly been affected in this area. However, 2 points are important to point out. In the summary, order backlog is still at record level and demand in the market clearly has not changed. We have still a very high demand for solutions for digitization and for all things that might be relevant for our customers to assure having the right IT infrastructure management in place.

To get into details, first of all, group at a glance. With regard to profitability, we generated growth against a strong Q1 of 2021. The drivers have been services and the generation of As a Service contracts with good margin profiles. The first quarter actually showed the highest level of services delivered to customers ever in the Q1 and even the second best in the company's history ever.

We were pretty much aware of the constraints in Q1 and Q2. Consequently, the EBITDA growth that we have seen in the first quarter is a good result. Revenue declined, some explanations on this.

First of all, we always commented on the restrictions that we have seen in the first and second quarter. Usually, spillover effects from the end of the prior year, with orders to be delivered in the first quarter's helped revenues between January and March. However, due to supply chain shortages, those spillover effects have not materialized in the first quarter 2022. Therefore, the backlog at the end of the first quarter is still at record level.

What have you seen else? Software licenses are not affected from supply chain effects as clearly as intangibles, they can be delivered at any time. Nevertheless, due to IFRS accounting, they are not accounted for revenues. They are not recognized as revenues.

And thirdly, on top of this, we have seen some major financing true sales effects that have topped the volume of approximately EUR 10 million. That are now shown in other income. So we can find a high position of other income, but they have not been recognized for revenues as being not so-called true sales. And that's the reason for having to account only the margin, basically only the margin in the other income. So this is important to know.

So revenue recognition was affected from supply chain shortages as well as from the true sale IFRS effects and the missing spillover effects. In total, an increased level of EBITDA topping a good Q1 2021.

Taking a closer look at the Cloud Solutions segment. We had a very strong start to the year. Customer demand generally was fine and well in line with what we have seen the first quarter could bring. Some catch-up effects were to be seen as well.

We had a very good first quarter with some major As a Service contracts, which we were able to start in the first quarter, actually resulting in the strong performance increase. However, just to make sure the segment can also be affected by hardware shortages going forward, there are projects which we cannot start as long we are missing certain components.

IT Solutions' delivery was more severely affected from the supply chain constraints. However, we still see an unchanged high level of demand in the pipeline. We will talk about the general supply situation later on when we talk about the macroeconomic effects of the industry.

What about the transformation process that we are undergoing just as our customers do, to the ARR is KPI for our journey growth in As a Service hybrid world of IT. ARR kept on growing year-over-year with more than 23%, such a development is fully in line with our targets.

This is corresponding with the already mentioned major projects we have contracted in the first quarter. Thereby, we have already taken a major step for the planned growth underlining the good progress in this area.

The EBITDA chart on the bottom part of the slide points out the ongoing success of our investments in Managed Services and As a Service contracts.

Financial performance indicators are, well, unchanged compared with the last year. They are not the most important thing that we are acting on at the moment. Business first could also be the headline of the working capital slide from my point of view.

I would just like to start with the Handelsblatt report that was issued as of 8th of May, indicating that as a strategy of mitigating the supply chain risks, all businesses increased their inventories. Credit facility utilization is a significantly increasing topic.

Well, starting with the growth, I think everybody is pretty much aware that we have plenty of cash at hand, and this is not our topic. But we have to actively manage the situation, and that's what we always commented on with business first, we use the money that we have in order to assure we have the right products and the right topics or to mitigate the topics of the supply chain restrictions that we are seeing.

Consequently, inventories are at record level, EUR 96 million, in effect is more than EUR 32 million higher than what we have seen at the same time in the previous year and contributing with a EUR 24 million negatively to the working capital effect in the first quarter.

What are the reasons therefore? First of all, we are actively procuring goods to keep our capabilities to deliver high. Secondly, well, you have to make sure what projects comprised of. Projects usually comprised of a variety of products. Meaning if any component is missing, we still have products on inventory, and we cannot deliver. And this is contributing to our backlog and consequently to our entries as well. This is the second reason for the high level of inventories.

And last but not least, customers want us to keep goods for them. We usually try to get money for storing that for the customers or on behalf of the customers, but we can then make sure that we are the partner of choice for our customers and that they are selecting and choosing us to get their projects done and to assure a long-term visibility of their products that they need in order to renew whatever project they have ongoing in there on the customer side.

So 3 reasons that conclude to the following. I think we can absolutely afford and we can fully support the business with the cash we have, prioritizing business enablement over KPIs. And that's the core message.

So this is not the reason to worry. This is a competitive advantage that we see that we are actively playing to make sure we are outperforming the market, and they're growing faster than the markets.

Some comments on the accounts payables. EUR 63 million has been the contribution, thereof about EUR 44 million from vendor management. Clearly, swift payments of vendors assure deliveries are helpful at least. And that's one of the reasons for development for the accounts payable.

And finally, with regards to the accounts receivables, we are still no write-offs. There is no need visible to adjust anything in the market. The write-off effects in the first quarter have been less than EUR 30,000.

CapEx. We can see a CapEx ratio that is about the previous year's level. 2.7% is the CapEx-to-sales ratio last 12 months. The ratio clearly is structurally higher because of the IFRS revenue recognition of licenses. This has to be pointed out first.

And secondly, clearly, we are about on plan or on track to reduce the spendings in the second half of year. And we have reduced CapEx for intangible as planned and as communicated already in the Capital Markets Day.

PPA-based amortization and EPS effects are basically unchanged. There has been no acquisition in this year, but let me comment on the M&A and valuation industry topics before coming to the individual specific macro economic situation.

The valuations in the M&A market, as we can see, we are not pointing out or we are not addressing the names of potential peers. But nevertheless, I think everybody is pretty much aware, and you are the professionals and know the market pretty well.

We see tech sector rotation, and this is happening to the market. What's our view on this? Clearly, we think tech is about tech system integration, and Managed Service businesses is a sustainable industry. The underlying business is profitable and highly cash generating and will remain being so.

We think it's clearly characterized by long-term customer relationships, and we see high demand and huge need for digitalization in this industry. The Gartner study as of April 21, 2022, sees high growth prospects and IT spendings at record levels with 8.4%, for instance, growth rate for Services in 2022.

And as an important quote, the good prospects for industry are not only for 1 or 2 years, but systemic and long term. This is pretty much reflecting what we are talking about when we talk about the industry and the prospects that we see and is underlined by an official study that was just released end of April.

The only unusual issue and the unusual restrictions are supply chain topics that impact business and that have to be resolved, except for, well, talent or the war for talents, for instance.

So when we talk about second topic and intention on this slide is, clearly, we have sold our U.K. business at the valuation peak or about the valuation peak and generated a EUR 400 million cash inflow. Assuming the same valuation development, this is potentially a significantly higher value that we have generated than we would generate today.

And in the contrary, in case we succeed in M&A [ resections ] at lower levels, we have actually -- or we would have acted absolutely perfectly with now funds at hand and opportunities just as planned. That's the basic message of the slide.

Let's go to the forecast 2022. First and foremost, what has changed and what triggered the adjustment of the forecast? As seen, a demand side is absolutely intact. Customer requirements and spending remain unchanged at a very good level. Order intake of industry in the first 4 months, including April, which is, by the way, 1 day less than in previous years, is still very significantly above previous year's level.

As we communicated, we expected bottlenecks in the supply chain in the first and second quarter. And we clearly talked about the underlying assumption of an improvement in the supply chain in the second half of the year for our forecast as of end of March.

However, vendor situations have not improved. It was quite a contrary. Gradually, postponements and lead times were either unchanged at high level or prolongated vendor by vendor.

The main reason, therefore, clearly are the lockdowns mainly in China that started end of March. Lockdown started with a short-term perspective for tough anti-COVID measures. However, in the course of April, we got clear that we were not only talking about a few days, we were talking about weeks and with uncertainty to what duration this could actually be expanded.

Capacity limits of shipping of goods vendor needs for raw materials to produce and so on are adding to the total effect. That means we are facing basically 2 developments. First of all, general postponements and lead times of several months with no clear view of improvement slowly started affecting Q3 and Q4 '22.

Second, the public sector reducing orders on framework contracts, which is not unusual. However, due to the new government and the spending of the new government, well, EUR 100 billion, I think everybody is aware of that, this is slightly more restrictive than usual.

What is to say that is special to this topic, more importantly, the public sector with high demand and they have a high demand, but they are just not entitled to start addressing and giving the orders. Starting this in the second half of the year will meet this very specific and absolutely unique and unusual supply chain situation that might affect a capability of delivery of goods and services in '22.

So let me end with this, significant growth, what we -- was basically what we have done as a change of the forecast is still a very good development. We wanted to indicate with today's knowledge of the unforeseen worsening of macroeconomic and IT-related indicators to the earliest time, that possibly more than Q1 and Q2 might be affected.

The revised wording significant should balance the ongoing and unchanged high level of demand in our growing markets and the situation we see with the constraints from supply side that we actually cannot influence by ourselves. For given reasons, the uncertainty level of macroeconomic developments, inflation, development of interest rates, [ crying ] crisis, shortages in all industries and so on is unprecedented and therefore, uncertainties higher than usual.

Consequently, we changed our forecast to significant growth in revenue, gross profit, EBITDA and EBITA on group level. We changed our forecast for the [ Cloud ] segment to significant growth in revenue and EBITDA. We kept very significant growth in annual recurring revenue. As we have seen, we have already contracted quite a lot of new contracts, and the AR is in a good development. And we have reduced our forecast for the IT Solutions segment to significant growth in revenue and EBITDA. Hopefully, this clarifies on how we exit and what we had liked to indicate to the market at the earliest time possible.

Finally, let me end with the financial calendar. Let's just point out one important event which is, of course, the Annual General Meeting, which will happen in Munich as an online event on 28th of June.

And that said, I would like to thank you for your interest, and I would like to hand over back to Sebastian.

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