Datagroup SE

XETRA:D6H

Earnings Call Analysis

DATAGROUP Reports Strong Growth and Confirms Full-Year Guidance

DATAGROUP has reported strong results for Q3 and the first nine months of fiscal 2023-2024. The company achieved a 7.5% sales growth in Q3 and a 2.9% increase over nine months, driven by new customer ramp-ups and CORBOX service expansion. Despite higher personnel and financing costs, DATAGROUP maintained a solid EBIT margin of 8.4%. The company is confident in meeting its full-year revenue guidance of EUR 510 million to EUR 530 million and EBITDA of EUR 77 million to EUR 81 million. Key to this success are significant investments in AI and cybersecurity, helping secure new contracts and streamline operations.

Company Overview and Service Model

DATAGROUP stands as a leading German IT service provider, primarily focused on serving mid-sized companies and organizations. The company specializes in managing IT operations rather than merely engaging in project or trading business. This strategy allows DATAGROUP to maintain a stable revenue model, even in challenging economic climates, since businesses require ongoing IT support. The company utilizes its CORBOX portfolio, which consists of nine service families encompassing approximately 40 standardized services that can be customized to meet client needs.

Strong Financial Performance

In Q3 of the fiscal year, DATAGROUP reported a sales increase of 7.5% compared to the previous year. Over the first nine months, revenue grew by 2.9%, demonstrating resilience in a challenging economic landscape. The company's ability to achieve this growth amid external pressures reaffirms the efficacy of its organic growth strategy. The increase in sales translates into better gross profitability, with a 10% rise in gross profit, significantly attributable to the high-margin CORBOX services.

Strategic Investments and Future Growth

To fuel further growth, DATAGROUP is making significant investments, particularly in AI, cloud services, and cybersecurity, allocating EUR 6 million this year. The introduction of their proprietary AI technology, HIRO, has begun to automate service desk functions efficiently. Recently, over 7,000 tasks are being automated monthly, illustrating an exponential growth pattern that improves operational efficiency and service capacity without additional personnel costs.

Contract Wins and Revenue Guidance

Throughout the past nine months, DATAGROUP secured new contracts that will generate an additional EUR 23 million in annual revenue from new customers, alongside EUR 18 million from upselling existing clients. This goes beyond their operational targets, which aimed for annual increases of EUR 10-15 million from new customers and similar amounts from existing customers. The company remains optimistic about meeting its revenue guidance for the fiscal year, projecting total revenues between EUR 510 million and EUR 530 million. This range includes a strong fourth quarter finish, driven by ongoing contract transitions.

Financial Health and Stability

The company’s balance sheet shows an increase in goodwill due to recent acquisitions, which included EUR 27 million spent on three companies. DATAGROUP's net financial debt currently stands at twice its EBITDA, indicating a manageable debt level as it continues to invest in its future. Despite rising personnel costs associated with these investments, the EBIT margin remains solid at 8.4%.

Outlook and Preparedness for Market Changes

As economic conditions continue to fluctuate, DATAGROUP's early investments in innovative technologies enable it to adapt swiftly to market demands. The strategic focus on renewing 20% of its CORBOX orders annually provides a consistent pipeline for stable revenue. The company is positioned well to maintain its growth trajectory, supported by investments in forthcoming technologies, thus ensuring a competitive edge in a dynamic market.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Anke Banaschewski, executive]

Hello, everybody, and a warm welcome to today's conference call. Next to Ms. Andreas, our CEO. Hello Andreas.

[Andreas Baresel, executive]

Hello.

[Anke Banaschewski, executive]

Nice to have you with us. This morning, we published our Q3 and 9 months 2023-2024 figures via press release. It can be found on our website. Andreas will now give you an update on the business development and the strategic outlook of DATAGROUP. This will be followed by a Q&A session. We will explain the procedure on how this works in advance.

I now hand over to Andreas. Thank you. Go ahead.

[Andreas Baresel, executive]

Yes. Welcome, everybody, very warm. And at the moment, I mean warm really realistic. We have quite hot temperatures around Stuttgart around our headquarter of DATAGROUP here at the moment. And you see we have a bit casualized our dress code already. And I'm very happy that even this summertime and hot temperatures have a lot of participants, nearly 30 participants I see here in the call also for the English version now in the afternoon.

So what will we do for the next half, the next hour? We will, of course, give you again like all the other calls a short update about how the business is running, what we are doing within DATAGROUP running our CORBOX business. but then, of course, also commenting our Q3 figures and the 9 months figures, what, like Anke said, which we have published this morning.

For those who might be the first time in the call, I again and still would also give a short introduction to DATAGROUP to better understand our business model and what we are doing. DATAGROUP, we are the leading German IT full service provider. We are focused on mid-sized German companies and organizations. And for them, our focus is running the IT. So not the first step doing project business, doing trading business, our focus is really run the IT. And the good message about this is even in challenging economic times as we have them now. Running IT is a quite stable, very solid business as companies have to keep on running their IT, of course, nevertheless, how the business is going at that time.

We are doing this using our CORBOX portfolio. CORBOX is a full service setup of IT services. You see here on the right side, set up from 9 service families, which more or less are all service families and behind them about 40 single services, which you can combine them modularized to run your IT. And these services in our CORBOX services have a quite high level of standardization, so they are very standardized. So good to produce for us on a high level of quality for the customer, but also to an attractive price for the customer. And that's something where we have developed DATAGROUP quite successful the last years. And at the moment, for example, we are working on as of the seventh generation of the CORBOX portfolio. So we are all the time also renewing this portfolio following the latest technological trends like things using artificial intelligence or security technologies, which we are this year building into the CORBOX at the moment, but also always updating the state-of-the-art cloud technologies.

And with this business, we have a quite stable long-term business as for our customers, we are typically running long-term contracts. A typical CORBOX contract has a duration of 2 to 3 to 5 years, depending on the customer. And these 3- to 5-year contracts, of course, makes a business very plannable, very stable. Besides this run business, we are also doing the projects for our customers. So these services always give us a good potential in cross and upselling additional IT services, IT projects to our customers.

With this business, we are actually doing about more than EUR 500 million in revenues. We are coming to the actual figures later. And we have about 3,500 employees more or less in Germany, DATAGROUP is following a kind of a Made in Germany IT service strategy. So about 95% of these people are working in Germany for our customers. So that's our positioning, that's our business model for DATAGROUP, and that's the basis for the development and also our success.

We think also our Q3 is really showing. So we are overall very satisfied with the latest numbers because, in our opinion, they are showing how good also in challenging times this business model is working.

What are the highlights about the Q3 figures in the last 9 months? Looking on the figures, we have a sales growth in Q3 compared to the Q3 of last fiscal year of 7.5%. And I think this growth is especially in times like this, not self-understanding, not typical, still having a growing business in a market like Germany. If we compare the 9 months, we have a growth of 2.9% also on this long term and even having a quite special Q1 in the last fiscal years with some special effects also seeing this growth of the 9-month period, I think it's a good and satisfying result, which shows that our new strategy with focus on more organic growth is working quite well. And we also are quite confident about the strategy in the future because when we look at our order entry, we have good results in the last 9 months. We have about EUR 23 million in new business with new customers and around EUR 80 million in cross and upselling. And these numbers are always annual based. So the EUR 23 million means EUR 23 million additional annual contract volume for new customers and also the 18 additional services of EUR 18 million per year in the future.

So that are quite good news in our opinion for these 9 months at the moment. And if we compare this also to our operational targets, we are following already for the last years. And it shows we have still a very good running business and a good performance in our market, because our targets are something like year-on-year EUR 10 million to EUR 15 million annual additional revenues from new customers, another EUR 10 million to EUR 15 million annual revenue from cross and upselling, and the numbers on the left side, you see here, we managed to overcome all or both of these targets with this EUR 18 million and EUR 23 million already up to now. And we have a record year compared to the last years. And with this overall EUR 41 million additional business we put on top of our existing revenues in the next months as that's an absolute record for our DATAGROUP. And that shows IT service business is quite different from project and trade business in the area. In these areas, we also see some weakness. But for the services, it's running quite good. And I think the reason for this is that outsourcing IT services to a provider like DATAGROUP especially in times like this is also a good measure to handle the challenge as these times are bringing with it. And that means we have a development of our business, which is not this typical for the pure or overall economic trends.

Of course, continuing this growth model also means renewing contracts. Our target there is to renew 20% of the CORBOX orders annually. At the moment, we are with 38, not totally in line with the full year target already. But of course, that's a figure which is also not totally up to us because it's depending in which period, which contracts are ending. You can't just renew whenever you want, you have to renew it 1 year to several months before the contract ends. So that's a figure we are also totally satisfied with at the moment as we renewed this year all contracts we wanted to.

The second, but at the moment, not this dominating our important growth column, is the inorganic growth. So the acquisition of companies. In the past, it was much more important to also add additional revenues by acquiring companies. And now where we are stronger focusing on the organic growth, the inorganic growth, the acquisition of companies is more focused in finding special targets, which will help us to grow faster in the future. So we have a much more focused acquisition strategy with special profiles like getting into additional regions we are not present at the moment or acquiring additional technologies we are not capable up to now. So with this more specific acquisition strategy, we are also totally sure with the acquisition of 3 companies at the moment, iT Total AG, CONPLUS, and ISC, we have 3, and we see our targets for this year fulfilled with these 3 companies.

To give you a bit more of an insight what means this organic growth track and the acquisition or the winning of additional customers. I have here a short overview about 7 new contracts or prolongation and upsellings we have just made in the recent months. And you see a lot of contracts have to do with the investment areas we are working at the moment. For example, the [ wood and wholesale ] company, or the chemistry companies, they have both ordered cloud services at DATAGROUP with more than EUR 2 million annual contract revenues, which will come up there and both are paying on or resulting from our cloud investment strategy also because they are also using our new cloud technologies we've set up in the recent months within our investments.

Another example is the cybersecurity win we have here from the universities. I will explain this one a little more later, but we also see SAP or [ BAPEC ] applications, so also application services we have, which is more and more becoming important within digitization, also running digital applications, digital processes for the customers. So this field is also growing quite good at DATAGROUP. And if you are asking what means these additional contracts in additional revenues, when will this growth show in the top line as a revenue growth? Then you have to keep in mind that in the IT service business, it's always the first step to ramp up these services after winning a contract before they will come into revenue, especially when we are following like we do IFRS standards, the complete transition period is not ending up in the revenues as they are kept or put on the total contract period, these revenues. And so the first moment of getting the revenue from a contract is something like 9 months after signing it. So the contracts we have just reported about now, and you see it here in this red area in the figures, they will just now start to be boarded and then come within the next month into the contract.

So if we go, for example, on the June column, you see at the moment, we are somewhere in between EUR 3 million, EUR 3.5 million, EUR 3.7 million when we are looking on the order entries from the last 2 years and the actual fiscal year, something like EUR 3.5 million, EUR 3.7 million. That's what within the numbers at the moment. And when we are following the next months, you see it will rise with the existing order entries, it will rise to nearly EUR 5 million. So we have another something like EUR 1 million about to come in monthly contract revenues. And that means our quarterly growth track will continue also the next upcoming quarters. That's what this figure is showing.

And that's important to know that the result in revenues is following with a certain delay, the winning of the contracts. So we are quite confident about fulfilling our targets within the upcoming months and the last quarter of the fiscal year. And with the light red area, you see we have still 2 months to go. And with these 2 months, we are still aiming on winning some more contracts. We have still something in the pipeline to really end up with a record order entry year which we have already now. But our target is to get even more. So we have a good backlog of new contracts coming up within the next months and paying on our organic growth.

Of course, we still also have and we have reported this in some of the last calls, also our headwinds. We have this year, EUR 16 million headwinds from transformation revenues, which are going out of the revenues compared to the last fiscal year. But if you compare it with this chart and also with other good business development we have in the non-CORBOX areas, we have overall growth as we can very good compensate this EUR 16 million on an annual basis, if you see where we've started here in October '23 and where we will end up in September '24 for this year on a monthly contract level.

So our business is at the moment running quite good. And as I said, especially for the actual environment, the all over economic environment, I think that's quite remarkable. But to be sure that we can continue also this for the last years, we have also reported that we are investing in special technology fields this year quite heavily. And that means we are investing this year, EUR 6 million in future technologies, especially AI, cybersec and cloud services. And with these investments, we want to pay on the future accelerated growth and also on a successful development of DATAGROUP overall as in the IT services, you always have to keep track with the new and the latest technologies. And you saw on the win chart I have shown before, a lot of these services are results from our cloud investments as they are using the latest cloud technologies. We've set up with these investments.

And for the other 2, AI and cybersecurity, I now want to give you another short insight how these investments are paying back already in a smaller portion, and what gives us this confidence that we are totally on the right track with these investments. The first step, I have here a small chart coming from our AI program, and it's showing how the number of tasks automated with our HIRO technology has developed. HIRO is the DATQAGROUP own AI technology, our own AI model, which we have acquired mid of last year. You might remember in August '23, we have acquired HIRO with the idea to use it as our own AI Ops technology, it is called as a specific word as our AI Ops technology to automate our IT service production. And of course, it takes some months to get everything up and running in our IT landscape, in our production landscape. But since January '24, we've started to automate tasks. And we have started this especially in the service desk in the first-level support area. And after some months with quite small numbers, we see now a quite very exponential growth in the numbers. So in July, we have now over 7,000 tasks automated on a monthly basis. So these 7,000 that are more or less like tickets, which are done automatically, the red ones or at least semi-automatically or the gray ones on the setup. And that's really helping us to deliver more capacity, more services with the same team.

So when we are growing with new additional customers with new IT services, AI technology in the future and already now helps us to really deliver these new contracts and not being or being in the situation that we have to hire all the people before being able to deliver. And that's what makes this automation so important. And we have not made a kind of a forecasting what will happen there in the next months. But what we see already now we are still on a very good track in training the AI technology with additional tasks every week. And these additional tasks will continue having exponential potential growth because you can imagine every task is added to the already existing knowledge of the model and helps us to have more and more tickets being handled automatically. And there, we still see a very big potential of additional automization rates. For an overall idea, we are handling every year, 700,000 tickets, means something like 6,000 or something like that per month. And so you see here, we are already over 10% of the tickets, which we are handling using AI. And there is another potential of nearly 90% additional automization we can address with the technology. And in our opinion, we are on good track there and we are working on this every week also for the upcoming months.

Another insight from our investment strategy is cybersecurity. And as announced, I now would like to give you a short insight in the contract with the North Rhine-Westphalia universities. It's a combination of 24 universities from North Rhine-Westphalia. And they have set together and said, we want one provider, which is helping us with our cybersecurity to have a critical mass of workload, which is worth to choose a professional provider. And this contract means EUR 1.4 million on an annual revenue base for the next 3 years. And DATAGROUP, we have won these contracts because of our investments in cybersecurity. A lot of these services, which are included here, were not on the level which is now necessary for this number of users and assets. And we had to set up this with our investment in advance in the last year. And we did this, and one of the results is winning such contracts. Of course, we have also some more of this type of security contracts in the pipeline as we have set up these capabilities now following our investments. And that's also showing quite good how if we have set here on the right technologies, how contracts and new business is following. And we are, as I said already, also very confident that there were more customers following a lot of cybersecurity demand is in the pipeline at the moment.

Okay. So some slides bringing you some insights into our business, how this has run, including the last 3 quarters. And as I said, overall, we are very satisfied with this period, especially if we are looking around us in the overall economic situation. It makes us happy to have a business model which is based on such a stable demand there that's of course not the situation for every company. So we are quite happy to be in this situation. And we are also very confident for the upcoming months, also if you follow this ramp-up rate we have shown on one of the slides before.

When we look on the pure numbers, which are reflecting this is on the first line now the Q3 numbers compared with last year's Q3, we have the sales growth due to these new customer ramp-ups and a growth of 7.5% is quite good in these times, I think. And what you also see is that the trade portion is rising a bit higher than the rest. And that's something I would like to explain a bit. It's not because we are rising trade business again, pure trade business. This trade part that are sales which are related to rollouts of new CORBOX customers. So if we set up a new CORBOX customer, we're often are also bringing out additional client hardware, additional network hardware at the customer sites. And that in our books are shown as trade revenues, and that's the reason for this. And that is quite high-margin business related to the CORBOX business. You also see, if you are looking on the gross profit line, we have increased this by 10% even more than the top line and that's showing that's not coming from pure low-margin trade business instead that are releasing the new quite profitable CORBOX customer estimates, which are driving this development.

When we are looking on the 9 months period, we are also seeing this trend, as I already said, with EUR 380 million, we have a 2.9% growth on the top line. What you also see on this chart is the growth in personnel expenses. And that's exactly the place where you can see our investments. The experts we have hired for AI, for cloud, for security to set up the new services on the one hand and automating our IT service production on the other hand, they are on this line. And you see that, of course, has also an impact on our result, on our EBIT, but even with this growth, in personnel expenses, we still have a quite good EBIT margin level of 8.4%, not as good as in the last year and also in absolute figures, a little bit lower, but that's the area where you see that these investments are also having a result on.

What you also see on this chart are the rising financing costs due to higher interest rates. They have fully hit in the Q3 now as we have renewed most of our financings with new contracts and also, of course, then dealing with the latest interest rates at the moment. And for this situation, we are much more in detail managing the necessary financing volume as the cost has on a relative level has grown much more compared to the last years.

When we come to the balance sheet, we see, of course, another step of a rising goodwill compared to end of last fiscal year. This increase is coming from the acquisitions in this fiscal year. And I've named them, CONPLUS, iT Total and ISC. We also see an increase in financial liabilities due to these new acquisitions, but also with a temporary effect of decline factoring volume. We are just renewing the factoring process, the factoring approach. So we will see a small decline in this area again. That's ending up in a net financial debt compared to the EBITDA of a factor of 2.0. Maybe we'll see in the next month a small step back when we are rising factoring. Again, it will depend on some other factors of course also.

Okay. And the last slide, watching the 9-month period in terms of cash flow. We have a quite still a solid operating cash flow, and it's carrying this decline in factoring volume, which is something about EUR 4 million. So if you would add them, it would be a very comparable cash flow from operating to the last 9 months period. When we go to cash flow from investing activities, you on the one hand, see, of course, the payout for the acquisitions, the 3 companies, with EUR 27 million and another EUR 12 million invest in CapEx, which is especially linked to new contracts and the rollout these new contracts are bringing up. We will also see an additional increase from these investment cash flows linked to rollouts in the next quarter, but that's a bit special for this fiscal year. I think that will come back again to a bit of a lower level again in the next fiscal year.

The financing cash flow shows the inflow from our financial activities in these 9 months, I think that should be clear.

And if we combine all these figures and look into the next and already started last quarter, also when I'm looking on July, which we have closed within the last few days, we are quite confident that we'll fulfill our guidance for this year, So the revenue guidance from EUR 510 million to EUR 530 million overall. And if you're calculating this combined with the EUR 380 million we have year-to-date, you see we need another growth for the last Q4, which will be fulfilled from the further upcoming contracts we have just shown, and we see also this, of course, will depend on how fast the transitions will now go and that's the reason why we can't exactly say where we will end up closer to EUR 510 million or closer to EUR 530 million. So that will also be part of the progress of these transitions, how far they will come until end of September.

For EBITDA and EBIT, we also see a good fulfillment of our guidance from this EUR 77 million to EUR 81 million in EBITDA and EUR 43 million to EUR 46 million in EBIT. So I think that's in these days, a very good message to be able to confirm this guidance for the full year.

So that's our update up to now. And as I said, I'm very confident for the last quarter, and we are working hard to give good results also on the full year then somewhere in November this year, where we will bring up the full figures. And up to then, I would be happy to meet some of you on one of the conferences we will still have in September and November, which are shown here or at least then hear you in our November update call after closing the full fiscal year.

So thank you up to now for here. And I think we go to the Q&A now.

[Anke Banaschewski, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Andreas. Thank you all for your attention so far. So we'll now start the Q&A session and explain the procedure of this in advance. Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you so much for your presentation and dive into your figures. So we will now move over to our Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] And having said this, Ms. Banaschewski, I hand back to you.

[Anke Banaschewski, executive]

So I can see no questions on line so far. Please go ahead to ask the questions. We can follow to answer them. Any questions with regards to our figures of the business update. Please let us know now. But now it seems everything has been answered in the call so far already.

[Andreas Baresel, executive]

Happy about this.

[Anke Banaschewski, executive]

Happy about this as well. So thank you all for your attention. Thanks for joining and see you again in fall. In the meantime, you know where to find us. Just send me an email, I'd be happy to assist and hope to see you at one of the conferences or at one of the next events. Have a good rest of the summer. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

[Andreas Baresel, executive]

Thank you very much. Have a good day. Thanks. Bye-bye.