Lime Technologies AB (publ) (LIME) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q2 update. I hope you're having a great morning. My name is Nils Olsson, been working at Lime since 2006 and been running as a CEO since 2021. And today, I have Alexander with me that will help out with the questions afterwards.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Alexander, and I work in communications since 2023. And if you have any questions, please write them in the chat, and we will address them after the presentation.

Thanks for that, Alex. Great start of this call. So let's start off here giving you a little bit of short introduction to Lime before we dig into the Q2 numbers. And as you know, we've always been running Lime with a very long-term perspective, and that has left us with this nice footprint, as you can see in the bottom of the page. In more than 20 years now, we've been growing in average 19% per year with an EBITA margin of 25% per year and that's something that I feel really, really proud about. But no matter how big we've been, how many customers we had, we more or less have had the same mission and vision, and that is to help our customers to become really, really strong in sales, in customer care, so they can help their customers in a good way. And we do that by combining really, really strong software and expertise. If we look at our customer base today, we have over 1 million users of our software, and we have 7,500 customers. Over the years, we've been scaling the company. So today, we have 11 offices in 7 countries. We opened up in 2020, entered the Netherlands. And in 2021, we entered Germany, where we also welcomed Lime Connect as a part of the Lime Group. And now in the beginning of the year, we also welcomed Lime SportAdmin in Malmo. So today, as I said, present in 7 markets, 11 offices and almost 500 employees. And looking at some of our key success factors over the years, that we start off with a combination that we've always been working with long-term profitable growth, combining strong growth with great profitability. We have a sticky business model. And you can see that today, 63% of revenue is recurring revenue, which gives a good predictability going forward. We have a sticky customer base, low customer concentration and something that is more or less the foundation of Lime and still a very important ingredient is a very strong corporate culture. Looking and sum up in Q2, we can see that we deliver another quarter with profitable growth, still, I would say, in a quite tough market. Revenue growth amounts 21%, EBITA margin 24% and a really strong ARR growth of 28%. So starting a little bit with the first bullet point, improved growth. And last quarter, I wasn't that happy with the growth in Lime CRM and especially in Expert Services. I talked then about the actions that we were focusing on, and I'm glad to see that our hard and proactive work is actually paying off. And we can see growth that's actually accelerating this quarter from 17% up to 21%. And during the quarter, we have continued to recruit. So we are building for the future. And even if I, in a short while, look forward to some vacation after this report, I really look forward to welcoming over 30 new employees in August. That's one of the best times every year when you have all these new employees coming to Lund for a great onboarding. We still see a low employee turnover. And I would say that's good because it means that we keep competence and knowledge in-house. But as I said before, we also know that in this kind of like business climate, the turnover often goes down a bit and then up again when the market is opening up. And therefore, you cannot really see this as a short term in this question. Instead, we need to continue to recruit for the future. Let's look into some of our business units, and let's start with Lime CRM. And in the quarter, we see better growth in Expert Services, which I'm very happy about and that are actions actually to come closer to our customers and working more proactive is paying off. And in general, we are performing better this quarter in Lime CRM. Something from the product perspective. We launched our new customer service offering, where we see a combination of Lime CRM and Lime Connect. This offer, I would say, really makes it easy for our customers to handle both really quick and complex cases. And we are creating more value by bringing all these customer interactions into 1 platform. And I really believe that this will help us to close more deals going forward, both to new and existing customers. And it's also an important product launch when it comes to the transformation, moving customers into our new platform. This is also from a Lime Connect perspective, strengthening the offering. We have a situation where we have the all-in-one solutions that we are in competition with and that will help us to create a better offering from a Lime Connect perspective with this customer service offering. And talking about Lime Connect. Connect has shown good development so far this year and also if we look into the quarter. We have a solid growth, and we continue to see a high demand for our AI offering, which I would say is helping out both to help our existing customers but also to drive new sales. If we look at something that is a little bit different compared to a couple of quarters back is that we have actually increased volume in the amount of deals that we are doing and I would say that it comes from a really effective lead generation. If we jump into Lime Go, we continue to work with developing our offering when it comes to reaching a target group with a little bit more users. The order intake value has increased more and more during the year, which I would say gives us a good opportunity to keep up the strong growth that we are now showing in the quarter. And last, but not least, Lime SportAdmin. And the closing here, the first 6 months, that's a very intense period for SportAdmin, where many new clubs are actually making their decisions. And we can see that several large clubs are joining us to improve their membership offering. Also from a product perspective, we've added new great functionality in our product. And with that improved offering, we can see that we add a training planner, we helped team -- with team cash management and also that we are strengthening sales channels for the different teams. We are handling more and more of the clubs and the team's needs. And of course, that can help them to create more revenue and improve the member experience. So a little bit last bullet point, solid foundation. Even if we do a little bit of sum up here, the first -- both the quarter and the first 6 months, and I think the first half year show that our strength as a company, we see strong growth, we see good profitability and also an increased share of recurring revenue, which is important for us as a software company. And our solid foundation is built on the strong culture, as I mentioned before. We have a good geographical spread, and we are always striving to become better. And I would say that this generates a constant movement for us and a good progress as a company. One of the most common questions that I get is how will the market be going forward? How will the market be next quarter? How will the market be during the fall? And I more or less always answer the same that nobody really knows what the market will look like in the future. All I can say is that all of us at Lime will continue to work really, really hard for the good of our customers. That is actually what has brought us to where we are today and that is giving us at Lime with a long history of profitable growth. So let's jump in and look at the agenda for today. We start a little bit with the order intake. And looking to the revenue, we take a look at the profit and then sum up with our financial targets. And of course, if there is any questions popping up, then write them in the chat. So starting with the order intake. And we continue to have a low customer concentration. Today, our top 10 customer stands for 7.2%, and our biggest customer stands for 1% of the revenue. And I come back to this that in a tougher business climate, this is good. We are not depending on 1 or 2 or 5 big customers. We do many deals every month, every quarter, every year. So we have 7,500 customers in total, spread in different geographies and industries. In general, I would say that the market remains similar to previous quarters. We still see long sales processes. We see more decision-makers involved. I would say, in general, tougher competitions in the processes where more vendors giving quotes, and in general, a little bit less investments, both from new and existing customers. But despite this, which I'm happy about is that our order intake is solid with many nice deals across all business areas. And if we start a little bit looking on the right-hand side, we can look into Lime CRM. And during this quarter, we continued to welcome new utility companies like Oxelö Energi, Elmea. Wholesale companies, we have Göthes Industribeslag up in Falun. We also have Cary Group, which are working with car glass repair and replacements, and they are now aligning their customer journey in Lime CRM, starting with the B2B unit. An important deal on the Danish market is Dansk Socialrådgivarförening. We are -- I'm happy to see that we are both continue to do deals in the membership segment, which we added earlier this year, but also that it's a Danish deal. I was talking about transformation, and we can see Filtrena also been customers of ours since 2002, so for 22 years now, and now they are moving into the Lime CRM platform. And something that I cannot really show as a logo, but also that we closed a new large German defense company in the quarter. Lime Go, for me that loves ice hockey, I think it's nice to welcome Södertälje as a new customer in Lime Go. And also the same thing if we go from Lime SportAdmin, where we can see that we add Huddinge Hockey as a new customer, fostered a lot of great NHL players in history. And also from a Lime Go perspective, we see that we add more customers that we are transforming customers from our old platforms Lime Intenz into Lime Go with Ornfrakt and also with that, we have great deals on the Lime Connect side with Avitea. So yes, moving on. We can look at the revenue here. And starting with ARR. And as a product company, of course, the ARR development is important. And our subscription alone is now growing 32% compared to Q2 '23. If we look at the service agreements, we can still see a decrease of 22% and I would say that is in line with our strategy. We are converting customers from the old upfront agreements into new subscription agreements, and that's an ongoing project that we are working with. But in total, it builds up to a strong ARR growth of 28%. So looking at our different revenue streams, and this shows the revenue streams development since 2018. And we can see that our subscriptions steadily growing 32% in Q2 and 29% last 12 months. And today, it stands for 59% of the revenue. Service agreements, a small part nowadays, 4%. And as I said, we continue to transform those customers into -- from service agreements into subscriptions. Up-front is the same amount as the quarter before, today, less than 1%; and Expert Services, as I talked about, we see an improvement in Expert Services in the quarter and Expert Services is growing 9% now and today stands for 36% of the revenue. And it will continue to grow but in the long run, decrease as a part of the total net sales. So looking at the revenue side and the growth, we reached 21% in Q2, and the last 12 months, we are at 18%. If we look at the split between the segments. Sweden grows by 22% and the rest of Europe 17%. Last 12 months, 17% in Sweden and 20% in the rest of Europe. And as I said before, it's important that the market outside of Sweden is growing faster. And over time, we want to build a more international company, so strengthen our market outside of Sweden is a continuously big focus for us. Looking at the profit. And we have the EBITA for the second quarter reached 24% compared to 25.6% for the same quarter last year. Looking at the last 12 months is 25.2% compared to 25.5%, so in line with our financial targets. On the right-hand side, we have the last 12 months EBITA development. And as you can see, we still have a couple of quarters left from the pandemic, where we reached around 29%. And yes, going back the previous quarters, we are back to a more normal and a lasting level to support our further growth. We are investing in sales. We are investing in marketing. We have done the acquisition of SportAdmin and so on. And of course, we continue to invest in our products, as I mentioned, with new product offerings. The last 12 months in Q2, we have reached an EBITA of 25%, which is then in line with our target, and we will continue to prioritize growth over profitability. If we look at the OpEx development, on the left-hand side, we have our personnel expenses, and that is, as you know, the largest expense in our profit and loss. And looking at the personnel expenses in relation to net sales last 12 months, in Q2, it's 58% compared to 57% in Q2 '23. The 19% increase in our personnel expenses for the last 12 months is, I would say, partly explained by our acquisition of SportAdmin in January 2024, but also that we continue to invest in our culture, in invest in our employee activities, which is also reflects in a very low employee turnover, which is really good because it means that we keep the competence and become better. On the right-hand side, we have our operating expenses. As you can see, our other operating expenses increased by 14% in the last 12 months. And also here, the increase is partly due to the acquisition of SportAdmin, but also that we are investing in more future growth by marketing, different type of physical sales events, fairs and so on and also in product development. So I sum up with the financial targets. And as you can see, we reached a growth of 18% over the last 12 months compared to the target of 18%. We have the EBITA margin of 25% over the last 12 months, which is corresponding to the goal of 25%. If we look at the capital structure, we are having a net debt in relation to EBITA should be less than 2.5, and we are today at 1.3. And if we look at the dividend policy, the dividend should correspond to at least 50% of the net profit, and it's -- for '23, it was 56%. So let's see if we have any questions in the chat.

Well, we can start with how is the acquisition strategy looking going forward. What is Lime looking for? Or do you prioritize organic growth?

Of course, I think the organic growth is really, really important. That's why it was important to see that we had an increase in the organic growth in Q2 compared to Q1. So organic growth is very important for us. But still, of course, we have the M&A strategy. And I think that we updated our M&A strategy at the end of last year a little bit, which I think gives us a great opportunity looking forward. And we could also see that when we added SportAdmin to Lime Group. We can both look into acquisitions on a horizontal level, meaning that we could look for softwares that actually can really support all our business units but we could also look into specific acquisitions where we're pinpointing 1 or 2 business units. So I think that it's been a quite a good update of the M&A strategy, and we can see that it's more actually activity on the M&A market today compared with a year ago.

Thank you. And could you give some flavor to the different countries, how the different countries are performing in the rest of Europe?

I think if we look at Germany, I'm very happy with the development of Germany, both from Lime Connect and also in Lime CRM perspective. Looking at Lime Connect, we -- as you know, we had a quite tough 2022. We initiated a couple of changes, and that has been playing out well. We have seen an improved growth in '23 and also now the first half year in '24, which has been important for us. And I also think from a Lime CRM perspective, we see that we get more leads coming in. We also work proactively towards the utility sector. And of course, that's long sales processes. So it's important to creating the network and the brand within that area, but also that we then see that we are -- we have a strong offering, in general, which I think is really proven now when we have added really nice big German companies and also now with the German defense company here in Q2. I think still, there are some markets that I expect more from and that we are doing, we are staffing up, we are looking into our offering and our different verticals. So therefore, I've been saying about Denmark, and I think that we have better progress in Denmark today compared to last year, which I'm very happy about, but we also have other countries where we actually expect more from. Perfect. That was all for today. And with that, I would like to say thanks a lot for listening in and have a really, really nice summer. Thank you.