Columbus A/S

CSE:COLUM

Earnings Call Transcript

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Columbus Financial Report Q1 2020 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Soren Krogh Knudsen. Please go ahead, sir.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

Thank you very much. Sharon, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for taking the time to join this webcast. My name is Soren Krogh Knudsen, and I'm the CEO and President of Columbus. I'm accompanied by Nicole Bluhme, our Head of Global Finance Operations, who is standing in for Hans Henrik Thrane, as he is away on business travel.

Let's start with going through the agenda and that is on Slide 4. So at today's call, we will start by looking at the milestones and financial highlights of Q1 of 2022. Nicole will then share the financial review of Q1 2022. We will end the presentation with an outlook for 2022 and long-term guidance followed by a Q&A session.

So let's go to Slide 5 to begin the actual presentation. So in Columbus, we had a very intense start to the year. It was a first quarter that was marked by the necessary decision to close and we'll divest our activities in Russia, but also a quarter with very good activity in our core business. As Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, we relatively quickly realized that we could not reconcile doing business in Russia any longer. We, therefore, started to investigate the options to exit the Russian market.

On March 16, we handed over the ownership of the business to the management team in Russia for a purchase price of DKK 2 million. We have a small number of employees and affiliated consultants in Ukraine, and we have taken the necessary actions to ensure the safety of both them and their families. And we will continue to care for them as best as we can. Some of them are actually supporting projects outside of the Ukraine now.

In Q1, we saw good progress in all areas of the business with the majority of our business units delivering top line growth. Our Norwegian business continued their strong momentum from last year with 13% growth, closely followed by Columbus, Sweden growing by 10%. Our strategic business areas, data and analytics, customer experience, digital commerce and Columbus Care delivered double-digit growth numbers.

In addition, we start to see a stabilization of our U.S. business with a growth of 5% in Q1 2022. So the high demand for talent put some pressure on salaries and causes high attrition in the technology consulting sector in general. Columbus is like the rest of the industry currently facing these issues. Given these conditions, we have still been able to increase our average number of FTEs by 70 in Q1 2022 compared to the first quarter of last year. And this has mainly been possible due to our employer branding activities and, of course, very, very dedicated efforts from our HR departments and staff in general to help bring on board new colleagues.

During Q1, we also continued a strong focus on getting a leaner One Columbus and to strengthen our culture and ways of working. The focus implied investment in activities such as leadership principles program, harmonizing of our global incentive schemes and increasing the number of Columbus Academy training courses for our employees.

In March, we appointed our new Chief People Officer, Per Fredriksson, to further strengthen our focus on attracting and retaining talent in Columbus. All in all, the first quarter of the year has been heavily focused on building a strong organization to fuel for future growth.

In Columbus, we are focused on building solutions to help our customers accelerate their sustainability ambitions. As an example, we recently launched a pilot project in India for efficient management of renewable energy for a major energy distribution company in New Delhi. We did this in cooperation with the Danish Embassy and Nordic innovation. I'm proud to see how our employees are taking leadership to move Columbus forward in the sustainability agenda.

Looking at the financial highlights. Revenue grew by 7% to DKK 393 million. Likewise, service revenue increased by 7%, amounting to DKK 343 million. EBITDA for Q1 amounts to DKK 30 million, corresponding to a decline of 23% compared to Q1 of 2021. And Q1 2021 was a very extraordinarily strong quarter. The EBITDA margin is 7.5% compared to 10% in Q1 of 2021. However, the EBITDA margin has increased from 6% to 7.5% if we compare it against the full year of 2021. In terms of efficiency for Q1 2022, we were at 62% for the group. This is an improvement compared to Q4 2021, which was at 59%. We still see significant opportunities for improvement in efficiency going forward.

And I would say, given that we dipped both onboard 114 new people, and we have reclassified some of our managers to have an efficiency target as well and as such if you will, increasing the denominator, we are very pleased that we have been able to improve this ratio compared to last quarter with 3 percentage points.

I will now hand over the presentation to Nicole, who will present the financial review. Next slide, please.

[Nicole Bluhme, executive]

Thank you, Soren. I will now briefly cover our income statement. Revenue grew organically by 7%, as stated earlier. Service revenue increased equally by 7%. Our staff costs increased by 9% to DKK 269 million. The increase is primarily related to the increase in average number of FTEs by 70 in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 last year. Our external cost increased by 19% to DKK 32 million. The increase is primarily related to travel costs and costs related to social activities, which were low last year due to the COVID-19 restrictions.

Columbus realized a profit before tax of DKK 17 million, which is a decline of DKK 14 million compared to Q1 last year. The decrease is mainly driven by the decline in EBITDA. Profit after tax from discontinued operation amounts to minus DKK 25 million in Q1 2022. The result is related to the realized loss from the sale of Russia in March 2022.

Next slide, please. We are now on the Service Business development. Service revenue increased by 7% to DKK 343 million. In this chart, you can see that the service revenue split on our global business line. So our Cloud ERP declined by 5% to DKK 180 million, covering both the Dynamics 365 and M3 business. This is not considered satisfactory and this remains a focus for us.

Columbus Care delivered a growth of 15% to DKK 72 million. The revenue increase is primarily caused by growth in Sweden, Norway and U.K. Digital commerce increased by 16% to DKK 46 million, which is coming from Denmark and Sweden. Data & Analytics increased by 200% to DKK 15 million. The revenue increase was driven by Denmark and Norway.

Customer experience and engagement grew by 23% to DKK 12 million. The revenue increase is coming from Norway and U.K. We are satisfied with the organic revenue growth in Q1 2022, and we expect an increased growth during the remaining quarter of the year.

Next slide, please. So now to the recurring revenue. Recurring revenue increased by 1% to DKK 70 million. The recurring revenue now constitute 18% of the total revenue for Q1 2022, which is a decline of 1 percentage point from Q1 2021. Year-to-date, the development in recurring revenue shows overall good profits. Cloud product grew by 75%. However, our Columbus Care contract declined by 13% and subscriptions declined by 10% due to the expected cloud conversion.

Next slide, please. Our previously customer work KPI was measured on customer work delivered out of the total available hours for the company, including all our employees. We have assessed that measuring efficiency as customer work delivered divided by available customer hours is a more appropriate key performance indicator.

For the same reason, our former KPI customer work will not be used going forward. Our efficiency for Q1 2022 was 62% for the group. This is an improvement compared for 2021, which was 59%. The management will continue to focus on increasing the efficiency during the coming quarters by -- this is supported by our new organization and operating model.

Next slide, please. I will now hand over the presentation to Soren, who will present our market units and our outlook. Next slide, please.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

Super. Thank you. So all our major markets delivered revenue growth in Q1 2022. The Norwegian market showed a strong development with an increase of 13%, closely followed by Sweden with an increase of 10%. The growth in Columbus Norway is mainly driven by our business lines, Cloud ERP, Columbus Care and the Data & Analytics unit. In Sweden, the growth is mainly driven by Cloud ERP, Columbus Care and then its digital commerce.

In the U.S., we start to see the results of increased focus on our core customer segment, so larger customers. And we're seeing a growth of 5% compared to Q1 of 2021. Overall, EBITDA has declined by DKK 9 million. The decrease is primarily caused by the decline in Sweden, Denmark and U.K.

And let's go to the next slide, please. And I will now cover the outlook and the guidance for 2022. Overall, Columbus experienced a continued increase in demand for our service and digital solutions. Q1 was a good start to 2022. We're making good progress towards the target for the full year of 2022. Columbus ambitious -- Columbus' ambition during the current strategy period is to gradually increase profitable growth to a minimum of 10% annually by 2023, and we are now starting to see that we're landing in that range performance-wise.

So based on our financial performance in Q1 2022, the current order book and our pipeline, our full year guidance for 2022 will remain unchanged as follows. Revenue is expected to be in the range of DKK 1.525 billion to DKK 1.625 billion, corresponding to an organic growth of 8% to 15%, respectively. The EBITDA is expected to be in the range of DKK 120 million to DKK 145 million corresponding to a growth of 34% to 62%, respectively.

So I will now hand over the conference call to the operator for your questions, please. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] There are currently no phone questions. I will hand the call back to you for any web questions.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

Great. So let's -- we're just monitoring the incoming. We're just going to give it 30 seconds, in case somebody is typing. Okay. You are right. So we have a question here from Mikael. A question regarding current market conditions, perhaps you can provide a bit more color on the market conditions? Is the request for new projects higher or lower than 3 months ago? And are there certain subsegments where you, in particular, have experienced changes in demand.

Thank you for the questions, Mikael. So -- and I think if I can just read something additional into your question, I think you might be referring to things such as inflation, the war in Ukraine and the interest rate increases, whether that has an effect on market conditions.

And I'd really have to go with a fairly short notice -- a short question to say that we're not seeing any big changes. I mean, we did say that market conditions were favorable to us last quarter, and we still see good demand. So in terms of further pickup of efficiency, it's more about optimizing our ways of working as opposed to that the market is making it better or worse for us. I think it's a favorable market to work in, but I'll go with that it's unchanged to your question. Thank you.

So sorry, there was a -- and are there any subsegments where you, in particular, have experienced. No, I wouldn't even say on a subsegment level in the industry verticals where we are working. I do understand the question. So I think we're all seeing whether -- and this was similar to during COVID. We were all waiting to see if people would cut down on their budgets. But I think everybody is seeing that this digital transformation is simply integral to running businesses in the future.

So we are not experiencing any cost cutting in our part of the world. We have commented on one specific customer, which is very exposed to the Russian and Ukrainian markets, and that has led to a decline for us, but it's one customer across all of Columbus. So I don't think it's -- there is no trend in that as such. Thank you.

If there's anything else. All right. If not, I would like to thank you for your time. Thank you for listening into our results. We continue the transformation that we have started. We continue to pursue the strategy that we have laid out for ourselves, and we will keep you updated on the progress as we go. Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.