4C Group AB (publ) (4C) Earnings Call Transcript
July 21, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Okay. I think we are live.
Yes.
So welcome to the Q2 report for the 4C Group. I am Magnus Bergqvist, and I'm the CEO.
And I'm Anders Nordgren, CFO here at 4C. We will be presenting the Q2 figures later on in the presentation. But before we start, Magnus, for everyone, just to highlight, we will end with a Q&A session. So feel free to add or submit your questions in the chat, and we will pick them up when we move into that section.
Yes, good to go. So I would like to start by giving some key highlights of Q2. So as we close the second quarter, we see that the uncertainties in the world continues and the challenge businesses and organizations are experiencing. As predicted in the first quarter, purchasing and procurement process impact us with an increased quarterly volatility. Overall, Q2 has been an important quarter with new contracts and an extensive growth of our pipeline. Overall, though, we were not able to close all the contracts that we anticipated. Our net sales reached SEK 85 million, generating a growth rate of 3%. We have signed and extended several important customers, especially with the Swedish and the British defense and also winning new customers in Asia Pacific. Overall, the International segment performed above expectations in Q2. Worth highlighting, we have signed an extension with the U.K. Ministry of Defense. The customer has extended their continued Exonaut support for the British Army collective training. And the total value of this extension is SEK 89 million over 2 years. As already mentioned, the extended procurement process has had an impact on our net sales figures in the quarter, especially that Anders will talk more about later on in the North America segment in our public and corporate customer verticals. However, we remain confident in our ability to convert expected contracts in the coming quarters and seize new opportunities as our addressable market grows. In the North America segment, the ongoing development projects with the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines have been delivered according to plan and licensed data rights for one of the larger contracts will be handed over to the U.S. Army in H2. We're currently involved in multiple programs and -- in the U.S. defense sector, and we are part of several teams on several bids for new phases. This process has taken longer than planned, and we expect more clarity during Q3 on how these phases and bids will be delivered going forward. Last year, our net sales for our corporate vertical grew by 50% and in public with 30%, and we're not satisfied with the performance over the last 3 quarters in our public and corporate segments. However, we are confident in our solution offering, and we're seeing a significant growth in pipeline as we extend our sales force and invest more in brand awareness. Our full year outlook is to achieve the expected growth in these customer verticals. But before handing over to Anders, I would like to give some more detailed highlights from Q2. I'll start with our Exonaut solution offering. As we announced in our Q1 reporting, we have now launched our new climate resilience solution, a solution based on Exonaut resilience platform. The solution, which will enable organizations tackle the challenges of climate change and manage their environmental impact. In connection to this launch, we have participated in several important sales-related activities. We attended the Responsible Business Europe 2023 exhibition in London, where we launched the new solution. And we have now invested in training our sales force to ensure that we seize these new opportunities and manage the growing interest that we already see, and we see a promising pipeline of future Exonaut customers. When we look at the overall software platform, Exonaut next generation, version 21 is now available to the market, and we're upgrading and implementing this broadly. And we also have our next Exonaut version 22, which includes a totally new back end in ramp-up with several customers. The next generation of Exonaut enables us to launch solutions faster and increase customer adaptation, which enables us to solve customer use cases in an even better way. But it also facilitates the ability to scale the solution for more extensive and global customers. This will, as we move forward, be a game changer for 4C. The other area that I want to mention is the geographical expansion. I have already mentioned that we are now seeing growth in new contracts in Asia Pacific. And during Q2, we have made additional investments into North America market by establishing a new business unit in Washington, D.C., where we will address the nondefense market directly. This means that we will now have a full offering in North America with the training solutions targeting defense customers and resilience solutions targeting the public and corporate sector. With the increased interest we see in these sectors, we see great potential for a successful market penetration. Across the company, we plan to expand our sales force with 10 new resources spread among all segments and sectors during the remaining quarters of '23. And worth highlighting is also that we are establishing operations in more markets within the Nordic region. And by that, I think I will hand over to you, Anders, for more details.
Thank you, Magnus. So if we take a more detailed look at our financial performance during the second quarter, we delivered SEK 85 million in net sales. This equals a 3% growth compared to the same period last year where we delivered SEK 83 million. As mentioned in the report, we were impacted by extended or delayed procurement processes during the second quarter, something that impacted all revenue streams and that I would get back upon on next slide, when we will look at our segments and customer verticals. For the first half year of 2023, the growth rate is 10%. And after closing the second quarter, the CAGR, meaning the average annual growth rate for the period '19 to Q2 2023 is 21%. Service sales for the quarter amounts to SEK 29 million, down 9% compared to Q2 last year. In H1, however, the growth in our service business is 4%. Software sales for the quarter amounts to SEK 56 million, equaling 66% of total sales, up 4% compared to last year and also up 4% compared to Q1 this year. On a rolling 12-month basis, software sales now amount to SEK 225 million, equaling 65% in relation to total net sales, an improvement and a positive trend towards our financial targets where we want to see this relation to be 70%. So if we take a closer look at our segments, and that's to the left on this slide, we can see both positive and negative development during the second quarter. If we take them from the top, we have North America delivering SEK 9 million in net sales, a significant decline towards the last year. And the reason to the lower revenue in North America is an effect of our 2 major projects with U.S. Army and U.S. Marines are ending and new phases are being negotiated at the moment. Moving to International. This segment continued the positive trend we saw in Q1 and delivered a strong sales figure of SEK 50 million, almost doubling the amount that they delivered last year and where the pipeline of new opportunities are promising for the coming quarter. Looking at Nordics, this segment delivered SEK 26 million in Q2, a decrease compared to last year, where the main reason was large software contracts signed in Q2 2022 and not enough contracts being converted this year. We have experienced a decrease in our expert service business, and this should be seen as a result of lower sales and delayed decision, and we are monitoring this closely and expect improvements during H2. Moving over to the right part of the slide. We have our customer verticals. And here, Magnus already touched upon our performance within our nondefense verticals. The performance within these sectors are below expectations, where we had expected to convert more contracts during the second quarter. The defense vertical is growing despite the volatility between the segments. Looking at profitability. We reached 1% in the EBIT margin for the second quarter, drop in profitability compared to last year, and this is primarily driven by lack of growth of sales in Q2, something that has direct impact on our profitability. I just want to take the opportunity to also comment on the cost development, looking at this slide. First of all, we are continuing our investment in growth, but extracting IPO-related costs or items affecting comparability from last year's quarter, our operational costs are almost SEK 15 million higher now in Q2 2023 compared to last year. And the largest driver to this increase is found within personnel costs equaling SEK 7 million to SEK 8 million, where our investment in the R&D organization, the Exonaut platform and offering drives SEK 3 million of that increase. The other driver within personnel costs are investments in our global sales force, which also amounts to SEK 3 million. Within external costs, you also see an increase around SEK 7 million, and this is driven by cost of being a public company or a listed company, its investments into new infrastructure and growth, but primarily the increases related to sales and brand awareness. And as the CFO, I'm closely evaluating and monitoring the return of the investments that we are doing. On the other side, we need to not underinvest to achieve aspired future growth.
Thank you, Anders.
Thanks, but I have this one. So...
Yes, you're correct. Sorry for that.
No worries. So just summarizing and taking a look at some KPIs. We can see that we continue to have a strong financial position, something that gives us strength or confidence moving forward. We can see that the net working capital figure increased slightly -- or increased compared to previous quarter, now showing SEK 69 million. The increase is driven by the timing of large software deals and the timing of when they are realized, invoiced and paid. And in Q2, the increase in net working capital is primarily connected to the strong Q2 performance in International. Another KPI that I would like to mention is the annual recurring revenue, a KPI that continues to have a positive trend. It amounts to SEK 110 million at the end of this quarter, a KPI that continues to increase, driven by the increased amount of new software deals that we signed during the second quarter. We just wanted to highlight annual recurring revenue as well. So that, I believe, concludes my part of the presentation.
Yes. So thank you, Anders. So I just want to summarize before we move into questions, and I see there are questions now coming in. And hopefully, we will be able to answer all of them. So if I first summarize Q2, Q2 has been important, especially with key extensions, but we have mentioned too many contracts were not converted according to plan, and I'll come back to that. We are focusing a lot on our -- a lot of our attention on really acceleration in Asia Pacific and starting up the nondefense business in North America. And like Anders said, we are investing in growth to meet our financial targets. If we look and break down our financial targets, it's to achieve 20% year-on-year growth midterm. We have historically delivered this and are investing to keep the growth trajectory. H1, as once again Anders alluded to, we achieved 10% growth. And our full year ambition is to improve this. As mentioned earlier, there are some major contracts, and how they will be structured and signed will have a large impact on the full year net sales. The growth in our nondefense pipeline globally is very encouraging. And we're also in several sales processes with new defense nations. And this will be very important for our future growth trajectory. And by that, I think we will move over to questions.
Yes. Let's see. All right. Yes. Can you give more details on why you see delays in corporate and public contracts? Do you lose to competitors in most cases?
So yes. As I said, we are experiencing some delays in our ability to convert contracts, especially during Q2. At the start of Q2, I anticipated us to close approximately 20 more contracts before closing the contract -- the quarter. Yes, and we are analyzing this in detail. I think the positive and the important message here is that the majority of these contracts are not lost to competitors. But we are seeing 2 scenarios. One is that the contracts that are being procured by the security and resilience organizations within our customer group are being stuck in their IT procurement processes. We're working hard to speed up that process as much as possible. The other area is, of course, that several customers are moving decisions forward based on uncertainties with investments and budgets. But on the other side, we are seeing a very, very strong growth in our pipeline as a result of increased sales effort and the positive feedback on the Exonaut platform. And I think what should be highlighted is that this pipeline growth is global from North America to Asia Pacific, and that's such an important part of our growth strategy.
Yes. All right. Next question. Your net sales in North America in Q2 is very low. Was this expected?
I think we have touched upon this to some extent. We informed in our Q1 brief that we saw an uncertainty in the timing of several extensions. As mentioned, we are in the process of extending several contracts into new phases, and we're part of new bids for new projects, right? So we were hoping, of course, that some of them would have been finalized to impact our Q2 results. How these contracts are structured and when they are finalized is still somewhat unclear. We are, however, very optimistic with the feedback we are receiving of our Exonaut software and also the new opportunities coming out of our North America defense vertical.
All right. How large part of British Army revenue resides in the Q2 results? I hope I can take that one.
Yes.
Not allowed to discuss all details in the contract, but I can confirm that the software licenses or software component is included in the Q2 figures. And in total, that is less than 25% of the total value. The rest of the contract is over a 2-year period.
Yes.
And that's it.
And then I'll take -- I'll start, we have a question that has many questions in it. Given the 4% organic growth in the first 6 months, how confident are you to meet your financial growth targets of 2023? Well, in the question before and in my summary I said we have a midterm target of 20% growth. That's also what we have always delivered in previous years. How confident, we're not going to give full year projections, but I said that we are going to improve based on the 10% we have when we do our full year outlook. We are very confident when we see the increase in our pipeline and the new potential customers coming in, and that gives us a healthy feeling when it comes to future acceleration of this company. Could you provide -- there is also -- are you able to provide some guidance on your plans for the second half in terms of expected headcount?
In marketing activities.
Yes. Well, I mentioned that we are on top of the already done recruitments. We are extending our sales force with approximately 10 new FTEs during H2. That's our biggest investment when it comes to personnel. And marketing activities, we have never, in the history of 4C, been involved in so much brand awareness and marketing. We are participating on a daily basis in events around the world, promoting our solutions. So -- but it's also a balance of how much we can do to be able to get the return on investment on all this, but it's on a totally different level than we have ever had in the past. So could you provide any color on how climate solutions have been received by the customers so far? So very, very positive, I would say. We started showing the solution for the first time in June that has to be said when we launched this, as I mentioned previously, in London. The feedback we are receiving is very positive. They feel that it's covering a lot of areas. And without going into details, we're actually already in negotiations with some customers to get them into the product as ramp-up customers. So climate resilience is very important because it's an important complement to the existing solution we have. And my ambition is that we will, this year, convert a number of customers into this very important solution for the future. What climate resilience solution has shown us also is our ability to rapidly take a new solution to the market, which is very important.
All right. Can you comment on what you have or are doing in order to improve your performance in the corporate vertical?
Yes, we are doing a lot as we have already said. We are participating in events across the world. We are recruiting personnel in all regions because one thing is to do brand awareness and get the leads in there, but you need to also have a sales staff to manage them. And that was the main intention also when we went public last year to be able to do these investments. And as I said, we are so encouraged when we now see especially the global international pipeline increasing in this area. I would say also very, very interesting with the financial sector where there is more and more customers coming on board. So brand awareness, getting the word out there, participating in events and also making sure we expand our sales force, and we see already the results of that in a growing pipeline. And hopefully, we can show you in the future quarters that we convert these opportunities to contracts.
And we have a follow-up question on that one. What is the competitive landscape like? And how do you position yourself versus larger established players?
That's a very broad question. And for those who invested into 4C during the IPO last year, there is a massive assessment in the prospectus on our positioning in the landscape. How we position ourselves is, first of all, we are an easy-to-use end-to-end software if we talk about the resilience spectrum, where you have crisis management, risk management, business continuity, but also very important, our base, training and exercise management. That combination of software, we are unique in that field. That's also how we are positioning ourselves. But of course, as a smaller, midsized entity, we need to make sure we get the global reach to compete with other companies that have resources in all nations. Yes.
All right.
Was that the last one?
I think it was the last question.
Okay. So we say thank you for attending and reach out to us.
And if you have any questions, we will see some of you later on today.
Yes. So thank you all.
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