Bouvet ASA

Welcome to the presentation of our fourth quarter results. Nice to see that some of you have taken the trip to hear this in person. It is also very nice that I have some colleagues who have finally started to come here and have had meetings and things and participate. So welcome, especially to you. My name is Per-Gunnar Tromsli, I am the head of BOVE. And with me I have Trude Ole, who is the financial director. So we will do what we always do. I talk a little about what we have been doing, and Trude talks about the numbers. The way we do this now, now we have both physically here, and then we have you at the home office. So we run the presentations, and then we ask questions at the end. The fourth quarter of 2021 was a very good quarter for BOV. It is a result we are very proud of. We have created a lot, and I will tell you more about what we have done, but we are very pleased with the results. In our operating revenues, we increased them from 94 million to 740 million. Right at the bottom is 740 million, and that is a growth in our revenues of 14.6%. We are quite proud of that. Then we increased the operating results by 13.5% to almost 104 million. What this gives is profitability, an EBIT margin. on 14.0 blank, and that is historical for us. Once we have been higher, and that was in a very special quarter a year ago, so then we were marginally higher. So we are very proud of this. The recruitment is rolling on, and we became 1,841 employees this quarter, and if we look at the 12-month rolling, we keep the pace up to 185, which we have grown with in the last 12 months. This creates results, so the Board of Directors has proposed an exchange rate of If these are the numbers, we will talk much more about what we have done this quarter. We have a vision, and you who follow us, you know it. We are going to move forward and build the future society. We do that together with our customers, and this quarter we have We have also strived for this vision, and we have worked a lot within the energy sector with network development and building services in the energy sector. We have helped the companies in the green shift in the energy sector. We have worked with the public sector to develop better services. We have worked with the transport sector, health and education, and we have also worked within the justice and defence sector with even safer and better services. But moving forward and building the future of society is even more than just working with our customers. So we think that one of our tasks is also to contribute to the development of technology in society and the use of new and modern technology. We have a long-term collaboration with Microsoft in the development of AR and VR solutions, and in that connection we have built a development kit that will make it possible to build even better services, faster and simpler, and even more effective services. And then we think that this is what we are going to contribute to. So this quarter we made this open source, fully accessible for all competitors and customers to use. And then we think that this is a good contribution to us further developing the entire market by building exciting new services. For those of you who have followed us, we have had this with us for 20 years. This is our ambition. This is about our ambition to be the most trustworthy consultancy with the most satisfied employees and customers. And as mentioned before, the employees are the most important. The reason why we are raising this now is that every year we go out and ask the customers and then we go out and ask the employees how it is with that ambition. So I'm going to share that with you. We're going to talk a little bit about the customer satisfaction survey and the employee survey. We have always had a solid balance between the public sector and the private sector. And it has been swinging a little, but it has always been 50-50. We have seen through Covid and the pandemic that the public sector has gained quite a lot. And those of you who remember the numbers from 2020, you remember that the public sector grew, and was more than 50%. What we see now is that some of what happens in the public sector, some activity levels, have been adjusted, and then we see a strong growth in the private sector. And that is what distinguishes this development from the previous quarter, that we have seen a fairly significant development in the private sector. Now I will come back and tell you more about what lies behind it. Then we have our sectors. In our three largest sectors, oil and energy are growing. Then there are services, and then we have energy supply. In the public sector, we have seen a reduction in the North, but what is remarkable here is the development we see in energy. Oil and energy, as we have always said, is much more than what is in the concept of oil and energy. Because that's where the big energy companies are on a journey where they will become an energy company with a wide renewable portfolio. So that's what's inside that development. It's traditional oil and energy, and then there's all the renewable stuff. And that's growing rapidly. And that's perhaps one of the main features of this presentation, and the numbers when we sum up the fourth quarter. That's the great development in exactly that segment. Later in the presentation, I will come back to these sectors and talk about the customers who are there and what we are working with. That was the numbers. But we are happy with that. We are happy with good results. We are happy with running a good store. But we are even happier with what we do and what we create. So we want to highlight four, four deliveries, projects that we have delivered and that we are working with now through the fourth quarter. We all know UNICEF. It is, they have a social mission that is, that is close. It is that they will help those who have it much worse than us. To complete, to deliver on that social mission, they depend on gifts and donations. And what we have helped UNICEF with is to deliver on exactly this. And this was a solution we built up towards the Christmas campaign for UNICEF. And it became a historic Christmas campaign. It became the third best Christmas campaign UNICEF has ever run. We delivered on the entire ABOV board here as well. It is about building bridges between marketing through advertising and the trade solution, where you can give gifts and donations. When we talk about such solutions, we often talk about such conversion rates. That's a nice word. Then we talk about how many are the people who are in the ads and who actually give. That's a funny number. And that was very successful here. We're talking about customers who come back. And then we talk about customers who buy more. Everything was very strong in this solution, but perhaps the most moving thing was what this created. There were hundreds of thousands of covid vaccinations that were made around the world on the basis of this. And there were many, like this one, birthday packages and support for children who have lost their parents who benefited greatly from this. So this was a motivating solution for us to work with. High on the agenda for all our customers is information security. And perhaps more so for many of our customers, because they deliver important social services. This example is something we work with at HelseVest IKT. HVIK's social mission is to provide good services to us in all phases of life. They have a number of critical systems. They have imaging diagnostics for cancer treatment. They have calculations and dosing of cancer cells for cancer treatment. These are quite serious things. And these systems should be as safe as possible. And what we do with Health West IKT is to take all these solutions with us. And then we sit down and map What kind of data is it? How are they used? What are the limits? And then we set up a team of creative IT consultants, friendly like that, with our own tools and some commercial tools, and then we find these vulnerabilities. And then we work in the background to cover those vulnerabilities together with the customer. This gives safer solutions. We do this for several customers. Health, Medicines in Sweden. The social mission there is two words. It is folk health and animal health. And very timely now actually. This is about side effects of medicines. And this solution we are building for Medicines in Sweden, it does exactly that. Then health personnel and you and me in and register the side effects we experience. And then it goes into systems where people in the Ministry of Health collect, analyze and put together and make conclusions about what is happening here. And then it is connected to EU systems for exactly the same. What this delivery is a bit special about, it actually proves something that we have experienced through COVID, and that is much more interregional deliveries. And here we deliver across the country borders. So here is a team of our Swedish colleagues, and then there is a team of Norwegian colleagues who are sitting here, who are developing this solution. So in that way, COVID has changed us for the better. Then we have something that you may have gotten in the media, and that is for those of you who have four-wheelers with diesel or gasoline, then it is so that you have secured, or you will soon receive a letter in the mail, or maybe you do, a letter in the mail that says that the Defence Force wants to be able to dispose of your vehicles in a crisis or war situation. This is a solution that we have made, and the Defence Force has access to, and this is a law that has been in Norway since the early 50s, but then it happened in a slightly different way. Now the Defence Force personnel have access to all resource databases throughout Norway, They negotiate with the mayor, because things can be recovered for civilian purposes. And when they agree on who should have it, they send a letter via Altinn, and then it hits our mailbox. And then we are informed that the defence in a crisis situation can recover the vehicle. This is social economy. This is about our total defence and the relationship between military and civilian readiness. The extension of this is actually a trend, and we will talk about it in Outlook when we look forward. For many years, there has been a lot of talk about global deliveries. What we experience with our customers is that they are very concerned about local deliveries. We have hundreds of consultants who are trained in defence. This training problem is relevant for many of our customers. It is relevant in power supply, it is relevant in health, and in politics and justice, of course. And as we work now, for example, a project that is 110 emergency centers for all of Norway, then this with clarification status and national deliveries is crucial. So we feel that this megatrend, if we call it that, that we become more aware of information security, it plays right into the strategy we have always based these companies on. Those were the four that we wanted to bring forward. But we have many more customers we work with, and I was in the sectors, and here you can see the enormous growth we experience in energy, oil and energy. And it is clear that Equinor, we saw it at the results presentation to Equinor, historically high, it is a huge activity, and they have an enormous ambition to transform that company. And that transformation is largely about digitization. So the effect we see of it, you can see very much in the development we have in that sector. Public, I said it, some are toned down, but it is a high activity, it stands for over 20% of our activity, so that is not insignificant. And there is the activity we have in front of large public customers, employment advice, environmental directorate, tax, it rolls on. Energy. There we have a very broad footprint, all the way from Statnet to power companies like Statkraft, and to the companies that deliver services to us. And that's Havslund, Lyse, BKK, and so on. Here we see high activity and growth. We buy more. with services that are to be built. And then we have the service delivery industry, and it has made a solid leap. It is mainly about a few customers, but we are building... We are building a professional association for professional associations and for members, we are building a lot. And then we also have what I mentioned about 110 emergency centers. And that is a large supply that we work with on a national basis. And we also work with it interregionally. So that's our sectors and development. Customer mix. We have always believed that it is important to grow with our customers. We have, through the pandemic, been very aware that our customers are the most important. They are the ones we prioritize. We prioritize our big customers. And what we see is that it has continued. Our customers, we are very happy about it, they are in the middle of the wave of digitalization. And we work hard to try to keep up with that. So that means that we that our customer concentration increases. So we see a small flattening now. We don't know if it's a trend or what it is, but we'll see. But this is a good picture for us. That is to say, some people look at this and think of numbers. We look at this and think of tasks. The more important we are to the customer, the better we understand the customer, the more trust we get and the more responsibility we can take. So that's the value for us. More interesting tasks for our residents. I said it. We are not a company that always comes up with new customers and new segments. We prioritize the existing ones. Here we have the growth of the new ones. I would perhaps emphasize that the new ones are particularly the joint services of the state administrator, i.e. the former district council members, on a national basis. And then we have what I talked about at 110 Nødcentral. They are major drivers of the new development. Both fit perfectly into the customer portfolio we are going to develop and deliver. Customer satisfaction, I said, our ambition is to have the most satisfied employees, and we believe that this gives the most satisfied customers. We have mobilized strongly to prioritize customers throughout the pandemic, and the feedback we have received is very positive, so we have never had such high customer satisfaction. What I just want to say, we can dig into this for a long time, The most important thing with these measurements is not how good we think we are. It is what we are going to strive for. And of course, what the customers say to us is that they appreciate the industry competence that BoV consultants have. And what they might want even more of, and that we strive for, is after this pandemic that we have been through, then it is clear that here it has become Here we have not been able to work as closely as we can with our customers. And that's what the customers say. We would like you to be closer now. And that's what we're going to deliver. That's really what we're here for. So we're just looking forward to that. So that's a nice takeaway from the customer satisfaction. It's good, but we have things to work with. Exciting and engaging things. Then we have our business again. Closeness to customers is fundamental in BOE. That's how this business is built, and that's how we attract people, and that's how we deliver. And when we deliver, we use the power of the whole organization to deliver to customers locally. From the same quarter a year ago, we have had solid growth. And that is especially if we are to draw some regions here, Rogaland has grown a lot. And then we have both the east and the northern region, which is Trondheim, and Bergen as well. Fantastic development. We have become big organizations in all these regions. Especially those with the greatest growth, as I mentioned. I would like to draw your attention to the bottom illustration, which tells a large part of the history we have been through in the last two years. It was the pandemic, some slowdowns, and then In the middle of the pandemic, or very early in the pandemic, we saw that we were going to be able to handle this well. So then we pushed the gas and gave full gas to recruitment. And then we got the big wheel started. And that has delivered. Some might say that growing up to eight people in the fourth quarter was not so impressive. We think it is completely in line with how it has always been. We have great recruitment in the third quarter, and the fourth quarter is normally not a strong recruitment, where it is strongly focused. But we are happy with the 12-month rolling. It shows that we are up on the pace we need. And we really need that recruiting pace, because we struggle to deliver on everything. But we are pleased with this. Now I'm talking about the most important thing, and I'm getting close to the end. I said that we have an ambition, and that is to be the most valuable consultant company, with the most satisfied employees and customers. Every year we carry out this employee survey, and this year it is perhaps a small paradox that in the last two years we have never done better in employee research. And that is probably because they have at least tried to work in a way that seeks to take care of people, and seeks to take care of the community. Nevertheless, the most important thing about this is We see that people are happy, but it is also what we are going to strive for. We come out of two years with a pandemic, and if we think about competence development, learning and development, it is incredibly important for people who work in BOV. It is in many ways the reason that people work in this industry and with us. So the fact that we have a small take-away, that it must be prioritized to continue the journey of being the world's best workplace, that is for sure. So that is a focus for the coming year. And then I would like to, and we have in the room here, we have put out some, we have created a new thing, and that is called the employee's annual report, and that Now I look at investors, analysts and so on. It's actually a chemical free speech. It's about the real values in Bove, if I may say so. It's about the people in Bove. It's about what creates everything I've talked about now. It's about those who create the community, sit on the competence, create the solutions, build the social benefits. That annual report is about those people. And then it's about the stories about those people. It's about the community we have. It's about the projects people are in. It's about what people are concerned about in their spare time and what they believe in, what they do with ideal business. Everything that is the diversity of people in Bove. And we thought we would do some extra work on that, so we made the employee's annual report, which is actually the content created by all employees. And then we thought it was a nice Christmas story that we sent home to everyone at the post office. So, analysts and investors, if you want to understand what's going on on the inside of BoV, that's the place to go. That was what I was going to say about what we have done with this quarter. And then I will give the floor to Trude, who will tell you everything I have created of numbers and results.

Thank you very much. Now I will dive into the figures. I will first look at the key figures and then at the operating revenues. Then I will look at the operating results before I look at the changes in revenues and how they have affected the results. Then I will go back to the beginning to look at the outlook. If you look at the key figures, last quarter the operating revenues were 739.6 million kroner, which is an increase of 14.6%. The operating profit increased by 13.5% to 103.9 million, and we have reached the same margin as last year. Year over year, we had an increase in revenue of 12.2%, from 2.4 billion to 2.7 billion. Let's take a closer look at the quarter. If we then look at the operating revenues, they increased by 14.6%. The most important part of the revenues comes from our own consultants. There we had an increase of 16.5% to 635.3 million kroner. They stand for about 85.9% of our total turnover. Our salary was 11% and the increase was 7.3% to 81.3 million kroner. The total revenue, which is a little less, was 23 million kroner. As mentioned, the most important income comes from our own consultants. Here we had an increase of 16.5%. If you look at it in comparison with the general increase in income of 14.6%, it is very nice to see that the growth comes mostly from our own consultants. A positive factor is an increase in the hourly rate of 2%. Another positive factor is that we have a historically high rate of taxation, where it has had an increase of 3.1 percent. In addition, we have had one day extra working day in this quarter compared to last year. If we take a closer look at the changes in the operating income, we see that since we have had an increase in the number of farmers at 11.4%, it has increased to 63.7 million kroner. The fact that we have had an increase in the amount of invoicing has increased to 21.6 million kroner. And we also had an increase of 2% in the hourly rate, which has given an increase of 11.2 million. And Dagen Ekstra has given an increase of 8.8 million in the hourly rate, in difference. There has been quite a lot of infection in society, so we have also had an increase in sick leave compared to last year at 1.4 percentage points. And that has then affected the negative results with 7.3 million. Let's take a closer look at the operating revenues. The operating revenues were 103.9 million, which was an increase of 13.5%. That gave the EBIT margin of 14%, which was a decline from last year, of 14.2%. That is the next highest margin we have had in Q4. The operating costs increased by 14.7%. And we have had a general increase in wages by 1.9%. And if you look at it in comparison with the price adjustment at 2%, then they are quite the same. It has still been a quarter affected by the pandemic, so I will go a little closer to the increase in operating costs. So, by looking at how the operating costs have developed in the quarter, other operating costs have had an increase of 41%. That would have been for travel, courses, recruitment and social arrangements. It is primarily social arrangements that have increased. We have had the opportunity to be back at the office, so more have arranged at VV1 as sharing arenas. In addition, we have had an increase in the number of employees, so there has been a lot of focus on recruitment. And we also see that it is important with continuous competence development, so there has also been an increase in the number of courses. Travelers have been a smaller share. In terms of other costs, they have been up to 32.9 million. If we then look at how the changes or revenues have affected the operating results, we see that the number of employees, which increased by 11.4%, has had a positive impact of 19.0 million. The fact that we had an increase of 3.1 percentage points in the rate of invoicing has had a positive effect of 15.1 million. The increase in the 2% per hour price has given a positive effect of 7.8 million. And that one day has given a positive effect of 6.2 million. When we look at the health weather, this has been negatively affected, with 3.7 million. Finally, we will look at the cash flow from the current. The third quarter is the quarter where we have the best cash flow. was 201.6 million, in line with last year, which was 198.7 million. This year, 2021, the flow rate from operation is 294.3 million. 294.1 million is correct. I'll hand over to Gunnar, who will talk more about insights.

Thank you, Trude. The outlook for us at BOV is good. The energy transformation is driven by digitization. To sum up the numbers, we see that within the energy sector, 50% of our activity is connected to that complex. We don't see any reason for that, and we don't see any sign of any reduction. On the contrary, we have questions that we work hard to deliver on. So that is a big driver for the development of IboV for the time being, and we see that it is positive. Then I mentioned the local deliveries. The whole spectrum we work within is very much social-critical infrastructure, and we see a clear trend that customers in that sector want more and more national deliveries. It's about people who have good, where there is transparency, who come from companies that are close to the customer, and a high degree of of clarifying and security clarifying. We see that this is a driver for many of the questions after our services. Then we actually have a big question mark on everything. But there are two specific ones, as I mentioned. And of course, we operate in a market where the fight for talent, the smart heads, the good people, is very tough. So we just have to... We just have to work very hard to be the workplace that has the most exciting projects and the most promising competence development, so people come to us. But that's a plus in everything we do. And then we expand geographically. There is a metropolis in the north called Tromsø, and there we are now. We have been there for quite a long time. We have quite good customers there. We have Helsing Nord, we have Baren Svarts, we have the University of Tromsø. And some more. So there we have been, and the customers have always asked us when we were thinking of going there. And we have said that now, so now we are recruiting in Tromsø. It is also an interesting market, because there is also access to competence there. Clever heads in the north, we want them to start with us. So it is, per now, we are fully there. So that was what we were going to share in relation to the fourth quarter figures and what we have been doing. So then, if there are any questions, we'll take them. I just have to ask my dear colleagues to be nice. But if anyone has any questions, we'll take them.

Is there a specific sector that stands out?

Yes, on technology and services. It's actually all of them. But of course, all the competences needed to build good solutions are the big question mark. And that means everything from what we call user experiences, interaction design, design of solutions, and into system development. It's a big area that drives a lot of our activity. But I would like to point out another thing as well, which is the question that the customers ask for good advice. We are strong in technology, but we have large professional environments that we want to grow even more on advice. And advice is a lot. It is the design of business processes, it is more strategic advice, it is strategy in terms of moving out and using sky technology. Everything that is about advice that is not so closely linked to the pure technology, we want to deliver even more on, and that is the big question. So it is clear that all our customers have an IT strategy in a large company today, have all the elements of sky. So especially advice in relation to sky, and also this to make use of the possibilities in a technical way. But with that, we have security. Security, as I described from HelseVest IKT, this is high on the agenda for all our customers. So that's what the question is about. But with that, I have almost summarized everything we do.

It is also reflected in the fact that it is necessary to take new measures. Yes.

On the technical side, it's tough. It's another way of looking at it. In Norway today, there have never been so many people switching jobs. So our task is to make sure that we are the most attractive place to come. If the labour market was tough before, the possibilities are so great today. It is a challenge we feel quite well equipped to face, so we have to work hard every day for it. Yes. More questions? Then I think we say thank you to all of you in the room, and thank you to you at the home office, and maybe we'll see you here in the room next time.