Zaptec ASA (ZAP) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, and welcome to Zaptec's presentation of the first quarter results. My name is Kurt Ostrem, I'm the CEO. And together with me this morning, I have Eirik Haerem, our CFO. First, we want to look at the highlights for the first quarter. And now I need some help here going to change the slide here. Zaptec is now the clear market leader in the Nordics, and we are the third largest in Europe. In the first quarter, we had a robust order intake, revenue growth and increased gross margin in a very challenging market. And all our core markets have a decline in EV sales in the first quarter. And then we managed to have revenue growth that shows that we are gaining market share. And I don't know any of our competitors who can say the same. We have also succeeded to optimize the production levels to facilitate the path towards inventory normalization. And as planned, we will get the peak in our inventory in this quarter. And from the third quarter, you will see a decline in inventory. And we have, of course, the financial flexibility to handle this inventory. From the last quarter, you have -- we also see we have a substantial OpEx reduction with ongoing commitment to cost efficiency. I'm sorry for this technical issue. I repeat at your last sentence, we have upcoming product launches aimed at fueling mass growth across Europe on track, and we will have new launches in the near future. So the outlook for Zaptec is that we will sustain the leadership in the Nordics, and we will have expansion in Europe. Now we will dive into the financial and the figures for the first quarter, and I leave that for our CFO, Eirik.

Thank you, Kurt. I'll take you through the highlights here briefly before diving into some of these in more detail in the coming slides. So we delivered NOK 300 million of revenue in the first quarter. This is extremely strong considering that our core markets had a weak EV sales performance. So we're happy with growing in a challenging market. The order intake was above NOK 300 million, it came in at NOK 306 million. This is higher than the revenue. You see that it's a decline from the first quarter last year, and that can be explained by the extraordinary situation in Sweden in the first quarter last year with the market control, leading to sales ban for a competitor. We still have a healthy backlog. We have over NOK 450 million in order backlog. This is for deliveries later in 2024 and provides visibility for future revenue. We're also happy to report a strong gross margin of 38%, somewhat lower than Q1 last year, but up from 37% in the fourth quarter last year. When it comes to costs, we have been highly successful in reducing our OpEx level. It's a 27% decline since the last quarter. And this is due to strict cost focus, and we now believe that we are rightsized to keep OpEx at around this level going forward. On the EBITDA, it came in negative at around 1%, similar to last year in the first quarter. It's important to note that Q1 is the low point in terms of revenue on a quarterly basis, and we expect EBITDA to increase as we go forward. Now into the details a bit more. On the revenue side, we did increase quarterly revenue with 14%. We think this is a strong performance considering that in Norway, EV sales was down 20%. And in Sweden, EV sales was down significantly as well in the first quarter. These have historically been our biggest markets. We also see that we have gained momentum in several new markets, including the Netherlands. The Netherlands was 9% of our revenue in the first quarter, and we have confidence in increased market penetration in the new markets as we move forward. We also strongly believe that the Nordics will rebound. We see signs of that already. The April figures for sales is better already and the combination of increased sales in our core markets and better market access in new markets means that we are very confident of an increased revenue moving forward. You can also see that Q1 is the low point in quarterly revenue, both in '22 and '23, and this is what we expect also this year. On the order intake, as I mentioned in the highlights, the illustration here shows what happened in the first quarter last year with the extraordinary situation in Sweden. We more than doubled the order intake compared to the previous quarter, which makes the decline from 23% to 24%, quite high in terms of percentage terms. But again, this is extraordinary. So zooming out, the long-term trend is intact. We believe that order intake will continue to increase as we move forward. And more importantly, we also have a healthy order backlog of over NOK 450 million. So if we combine the EUR 300 million in revenue, which we achieved in Q1, with the order backlog of NOK 452 million, we are at NOK 752 million in revenue secured for 2024, only after 1 quarter. And this is over 50% of our full year revenue from last year. Happy to report that gross margin is still at a strong level. We managed to increase the gross margin from the previous quarter to 38%. This showcases that we have quality products at the right price. We have managed to increase the margin as we're starting to realizing impact of lower production costs last year. This effect is still not fully reflected in our margin due to accounting principles. We've also managed to reduce production further in the second quarter, which means we will look at the strong gross margin going forward. Also very exciting to highlight that we have new products coming in the market later in 2024. These products have premium features, which we strongly believe will achieve higher gross margin on the product side for these when they enter the market. So in sum, this gives us high confidence in the continued strong gross margin. So the EBITDA level came in at the same level as last year. We are now, of course, in a situation where we project further growth and combined with the cost control and continued strong gross margin, the EBITDA level is actually increased. We have high operational leverage now in the business. So once we start delivering revenue growth and keep the costs, we will improve. So this slide shows you a bit of the working capital dynamics in our company. And I want to take you through a quick history recap of what has happened and what we're now positioning for. So going all the way back to '22, we had challenges to produce enough chargers. We had the aftermath of the COVID with component shortages, and we were trying to ramp up. We also -- we're planning to add production capacity outside Norway with our second partner in Germany, Sanmina. In early 2023, when the extraordinary situation in Sweden hit, we had a massive order intake increase. We had long delivery times, and everything pointed to us, we need to increase production significantly. We did order new production. That doesn't happen overnight. It needs 6-plus months to be able to deliver a ramp-up. We did deliver that ramp up according to plan. But at the same time, towards the end of '23, the market for EV and EV charging softened, meaning that we had an over production. So we built inventory. And now we have a clear plan for how to manage that situation. So we have already reduced production for both Zaptec Go and Zaptec Pro, both with Sanmina and Westcontrol. The full effect of this decline is expected from Q2 onwards and the combination of a continued order intake and deliveries of order backlog with a lower production level will mean that these graphs will cross again in 2024, and we will start to reduce inventory to a normalized level. So this is something that we are very confident that we will deliver on. So with that, I will leave the word over to you, geo to talk about the market.

So we will look into the market in the first quarter and also what we think about the market going forward. This first quarter was really challenging with low vehicle sales in our core markets. If you look at the plug-in vehicle sales in the first quarter versus first quarter last year, we see that we had a decline in EV sales in Norway by 20%. It was minus 9% in Sweden and so only 2% increase in Switzerland, while Denmark had 7% increase. These 4 countries stood for more than 80% of our revenue in the first quarter, that shows how strong the revenue was for Zaptec in this market condition in the first quarter. In our new market, it was a better situation with 25% increase in EV sales in the Benelux, and 17%, both in U.K. and France. In EU, as a whole, we had 5% increase in EV sales. And you can see that in the largest car market in Europe, Germany, there was a decline from 5% in the first quarter. So it's really a tough quarter this first quarter in 2024. When we look at the European vehicle sales in perspective, still, we are 20% below pre-COVID normal. As you can see, we had 15.8 million car registration in 2019, while last year was 12.8 million car registration. But what's mattered for Zaptec is the registration of EV. And as you can see on the orange graph, the EV sales have increased every single year from 2019, and that's what's matter for Zaptec and the sales of EV charging. I also want to look at the mobility in a larger perspective because even if we, in Norway, have more than 90% of new car sales EV, we have only reached 29% EV share of the total vehicle fleet. And for the Nordics, it's only 14%. In Europe, only 4% versus globally 3%. So that shows that we have just started the EV transition in Europe, and there is a huge market ahead of us. And I also want to point out that when you think about EV charging, you cannot think about the charging station as a stand-alone product. You have to develop product who can connect into the energy grid system in Europe. You have to be able to connect with other equipments to other system to deal with other partners who are running and control the charging station. And that's what Zaptec are doing when we develop and produce our smart chargers. We will also get a stricter EU regulation from next year, and this will drive the EV sales. Today, we have required average CO2 emission for 119 grams per kilometers for the new vehicle fleets. Next year, these requirements will drop with 15%, and that will lead to more EV sales to fulfill these requirements. And as you can see, we get even stricter regulation from 2030, and from 2035, we expect that 100% of new car sales should be electric. And this lead to an extremely high growth in EV sales from 2025 and the next 10 years. I also want to mention that it's the affordable vehicles who dominate in Europe. 75% of vehicles sold in Europe are affordable, smaller vehicles. This is vehicles like Fiat 500, Volkswagen Polo and Volkswagen Golf. And up to now, there have been few current EV alternatives in this segment. But now a rising number of EV models is entering this market. And as you can see on the right-hand side, car producers in Italy, France, Germany, Asia, they are all coming in with new models in this more affordable car market. And as long as this segment stands for 75% of the total car sales in Europe, this will lead to a high increase of EV sales and then also high sales of EV chargers. So why buy an EV? You should buy an EV because it's a rational economic choice. It shows now that from 2022, the total cost of ownership by owning an EV is lower than an internal combustion engine car. And now from 2024, also the more premium long-range EV have a cheaper and lower total cost of ownership compared to internal combustion engine car. So you should use an EV in the future. And what does this mean for the AC charging market? It means that it's expected to be multiplied by 4 within 2030. Today, we have just about 2.1 million new car sales in 2023. And if we look at 2030, we expect it to be nearby 8 million cars a year in Europe. And this is an annual growth for more than 20% each year, the next 6 years. So now we look into what's uptake, I think about the strategy and the outlook for our sales for EV charging. To achieve the goal of zero emission in 2035, it expected that it needs investment in the EU grid, and it's estimated to be EUR 41 billion who is about EUR 900 per EV. So if you make smart charging like Zaptec you can help reduce this cost so we can make this EV transition easier. So Zaptec's value proposition is that we will serve both the EV drivers and also the businesses investing in electrification. We have industry defining smart charging technology. We see that other competitors look to Zaptec and try to do the same thing. We have really high focus on safety. We have high-quality products with long warranty. And we have been -- had award-winning design. We are very cost efficient, and we have a solution who is scalable both for Zaptec and for our customers. And last but not least, we optimize charging in strained with so we can avoid this heavily investment in grid infrastructure. So our clear strategic road map for value creation is that we will build up on strong momentum in our core markets as we have shown. We will now finalize the product market fit. So we are proud on market fit in all of Europe with all our products, and then we will continue the expansion in the major markets. And we are already among the largest AC provider in Europe. If you look at the leading AC charging manufacturers last year and look at the EV charging revenue, we are in a month with EUR 124 million in 2023. And we are still growing. I'm not sure that the other on this graph have the same speed when it comes to growing as Zaptec. We are, as mentioned, a clear market leader in the Nordics. We have about 50% market share in the Pro segment in both Norway and Sweden. We have -- we have 30% markets. We have more than 40% market share in Denmark, and almost 40% market share in Switzerland on the Pro segment. When we look at the Go segment, the home segment, we have about 60% market share in Norway now, really strong market share. And we have about 50% market share in Sweden, and we are getting close to 35% market share in Denmark. In Switzerland, we have still a small market share when it comes to home charging. This is due to that we don't have the right compliance who is needed to have the mass market in Switzerland. But this is coming in really near future, and we then expect to grow the market share in the home market also in Switzerland. When we look at the position, I mean, acquisition across European market. And if you look at the top 20 European vehicle markets, you see that we are present in 18 of these top 20 European markets. It's only in Romania and in the Czech Republic that we are not present with any resellers contract yet. If you look at all the green countries here, this is a country where we have our own subsidiary office and people on the ground. And all the purple color countries is country where we have resellers in place. And you see the 3 largest markets in Europe, car markets, Germany, France and United Kingdom. They are also the biggest in actual number of EVs in Europe. And we are present with our own subsidiaries in all these 3 countries. Also #4 and 5 on the list, Italy and Spain, it's a huge car market, but you see that the EV share is much smaller there today. As mentioned, we will finalizing our European product market fit. We have already, in this quarter, complete the U.K. compliance for Zaptec Pro, the security requirements. We have also completed in this quarter, the French version of the Zaptec Pro. And we have completed recently in the first quarter, the OCPP native for Zaptec Go. That means that we are almost compliance in all markets in Europe. We are still missing something on the Go for some markets, but this is in the very near future, we will have a launch, and we will then have an upcoming product we've held this European mass market. So we are on track when it comes to compliance and product market fit. So as you look at some of our new markets. In the Netherlands, we have a really high growth. We have almost NOK 30 million in revenue in the first quarter. We have signed more than 450 installers and clients. We are building relationship because we expect acceleration in growth when we come with our new products really soon. In U.K., we also have a really high growth. It's a smaller number, but we grow very nice. We have a strong pipeline and have got traction with wholesalers and homebuilders. And they have even got a Housebuilder award this year from U.K. In France, we start the delivery of the Zaptec Pro in February, and we are now marketing targeted the key decision maker in the French market. And the key win so far include 1,000 unit orders from a wholesaler called Amara Net Zero. So it's really looking good also for the French market, and we will also launch the Go product for the French market later this year. So to summarize, Zaptec is a dominant player in the Nordics, and we are now #3 in Europe. We have done a really strong performance in the challenging market in the first quarter. And we have succeeded to adapted production for the inventory normalization going forward. And as we have shown you, we have cost focus, and we will continue to have really strong cost focus. And we will defend and building a strong position in our core markets, and you will now see that we will expand in new markets in Europe. And the upcoming European product launches is on track. So the outlook from our side is that we will sustain our leadership in our core markets, and you will see that we will continue our European expansion. So that was the quick run-through to the presentation this morning, and we will now open up for questions.

Could you comment on the drawdown on the credit facility, is this likely to continue? Maybe you should answer that, Eirik?