Bouvet ASA

The first quarter of 2023 in Bove. It's nice that you have taken the trip, you who are coming here. And we also have on stream. Welcome to you. My name is Per-Gunn Tronsli, and I have Trude Hole with me. We are going to tell you what we have been doing this quarter. I will tell you a little about what we have been working on, and Trude will tell you a little more about the numbers. Since we are on stream, we will run the presentation and take questions until the end. We have a mic here, so those who are at home will also get the questions. The first quarter, 2023, we had a good speed when we left 2022. And that speed was good throughout this quarter. So we increased our operating revenues with 134 million to 945 million. And that is an increase of 16.5%. And then we increased the operating results. with 7.2% to 131 million. The operating margin here is 13.9%. Trude will tell you a little more about how this compares to a quarter in the same period last year, but that was also a pandemic quarter, so historically this is very good results for us. But then we are extra happy. We are facing big tasks together with our customers, so we need good people. And the fact that we increase the crew with 70 people from last quarter to this quarter, we are very happy about. When we look at the current 12-month period, we see an increase in the number of employees in BOVE, with a total of 232 people. This is historically high. We have never been at that pace before. We are both happy and proud of that, so I would like to say thank you to all the residents who have contributed to this. It is a good quarter, which we are both proud and happy for, so thank you for the effort. Our vision. This is what we are going to focus on in these presentations. We are going to build a future society. This quarter, has been influenced by high activity. We have been working on interesting things. We work a lot with how to contribute to the fact that Norway is a predictable supplier of energy to Europe. We have worked with that this quarter. We have worked with what is about energy supply in Norway, which is network development, new connections in Norway and across country borders. We have worked with the defence and the entire total defence, so that we will have a safer society. We have worked with health and welfare, Work with transport, so that should be clear for everything that happens with digitalization within the transport sector. And then we have worked with the industry, so we get an even more competitive and sustainable industry in Norway. So it has been a good, giving and interesting quarter. We are in an industry with a thriving development, and this quarter, perhaps more than many other quarters, the technological development we experience has been very much in the media picture. That just underscores a big point, that both for our society, our industry, and us as a business, this with competence development is one of the most important things we do. And that's what we work with every day at Bove. So every day we build and learn new things. This quarter we carry out We call it a little internally. We call it our most beautiful adventure. But that is our big sharing arena in Bove, which we call Bove One. We did that in Vores. 100 plus lectures, where good Bove's learn from other good Bove's. And together we become smarter. And then it is very nice when the good Boveres are raised and recognized. This quarter we have had Cecilie Vian from our Bergen office recognized as one of Norway's 50 leading women in tech. So she has a very clear voice on what is about security and the importance it has for customers and solutions that we build. And then we have Rebecca Omlandseter, who is recognized by the Norwegian organization for artificial intelligence as one of the leading women in AI in Norway. She still has some of the most important skills we build, we build with our customers. Every single day we learn new things. Now we are in our course area. The reason we got this room is that all the other rooms are full. So we had to take care of a little less facilities today. But it has been full speed. The whole first quarter, a very strong quarter for the course business. It is not a large part of our business, but it tells a story. It is a huge surge of competence and a huge need for competence in the market. And they like to come here. And our course business is not like any other course business. It consists of good residents who are out there learning important things from our customers, and take their experiences in and share them here. What can perhaps highlight this quarter in relation to the course business is that there has been a lot of leadership. that go on course. And it's about two things in particular. It's about smooth techniques and smooth development. And then it's about organization development, digital leadership, competence development, change management. So a lot of the topics that are about how we take advantage and get value out of digitization. We have also created our own course, where there is also a lot of demand, and that is innovation and sustainability. So that has been a big step to put a picture on it. For those of you who participated in our fourth quarter presentation, where we summarized the year, we told the story that there have been six and a half thousand people within the entire course business throughout the year. Only this quarter there have been two and a half thousand. So we tell you about a completely new pace in the pursuit of competence. Digitalization is good. That is what we live off of, and that is what we work for. But what we have experienced in the media, especially this quarter, is that digitalization comes with several sides, and that can be very good, but it also has some challenging sides to it. Digital social responsibility is something that IKT Norway has reached its peak for. And this is about the fact that the digital solutions we build should be built in such a way that they provide long-term and sustainable social awareness. Corporate Digital Responsibility is an international framework that is used around the world. IKT Norway is at the forefront of bringing this into Norway, so that we can use it in our daily lives, when we work with big, digital and important solutions. And there is something particularly funny. There are two Boveres who have also gone to the top of this together with IKT-Norge to get this translated, understood and implemented here in Norway. They are Pia Jøsendal and Ida Moiche. Good Boveres who contribute to the development of our industry. Let's take a look at what we have been doing. And we are always proud that we have a good balance between what is public business and what is private business. And that has been important for Bovee in all the development we have had in the last two years. As we have seen after the pandemic, the development is still in the private sector, and it continues this quarter. So a few percentage points further over in the private sector. That does not mean that we have a decline in the public sector. It is growth within the private sector that drives that development. I will make one clarification on this, and that is that this distribution within sectors is done on standard industrial codes. Not all our activities fit into that. We have made a small footnote on oil and gas, and in oil and gas is also what we work with renewable. It has its explanation. Equinor is one of our biggest customers. We are engaged in wind power development. And that turnover ends up in oil and gas. What we see this quarter is growth in all the major sectors, both in oil and gas and renewable energy, as well as in transport and services. I like to sum up a bit here, and the point I made last time is that the entire value chain on the energy side accounts for 55% of all our operations in Bobet. Energy is a good place to be. They stand for important lift, so it is long-term important. And then it is the whole sector, from what we create energy, oil and gas renewable, through what happens in the network expansion and what happens in those who deliver energy to us as consumers, such as Elvia, Lyse, Skagerak and so on. Then I would like to introduce some of our important customers and customers we have worked with this quarter. Forsvaret is a customer we have worked with for many years. For the last seven years, we have been a supplier of application development and integration services to Forsvaret. Now the agreement has been renewed, so we were out with a small market report on it throughout this quarter. It is an agreement that goes for a new four years with options and has an economic frame of 650 million kroner. The defence is standing in front of a big wave, so it is joyful. It is an increased political will to invest in the defence. And we will be on that journey. So the agreement we won is as a preferred supplier to the defence on everything that is about applications, i.e. solutions and systems that are used on all defence teams. That is what we are proud of, and we look forward to the years to come when we will continue to build on what we can, and make the defence even stronger with good digital solutions. It is also the case that the customer uses a very broad spectrum, from the technical services at our company to the more process and project related services. Last quarter, we were proud to announce that Stortingets control body, Riksrevisionen, had submitted us the agreement. This quarter, we are equally proud to announce that Stortinget was out to find one strategic partner in digitalisation. And that was us. In pretty sharp competition with all the big companies that have something to say on strategic advice, Stortinget chose to submit that agreement to us. Stortinget is also facing big challenges. We are going to develop a new supplier sourcing strategy. Safety is important for the defence. So we are going to work with identity control in the defence. And we are going to build a solid foundation for all the legal treatment that flows through Stortinget. So that is good for all of us. Effective legal treatment in Stortinget is important, and we are going to work with that. Then we have a customer we have been so lucky to work with for many years in Bergen, and this is Bybanen in Bergen. For several years, we have worked with a data platform. They build a data platform where they collect a lot of information from their business. That trust has been renewed this quarter, and now we are going to work with the collection of sensor data from the urban railway wagons. It's about really taking note of information, Because then Bybanen uses that information to work with more preventive maintenance around the city railways. And that gives more collective transport for money, and it gives better transport services from Bybanen for us who visit Bergen and those who live in Bergen. And then we have a customer, Bani Nord. A customer we are very happy to have worked with since 2005. They are now one of our top five customers in terms of turnover. Here we are working with Bane Nord. In Norway, there are 15 actors who run rail services. All of them use the infrastructure that Bane Nord provides. What we work with are all the transport- and traffic-friendly applications that are used by these actors. We as consumers, we meet travelers, we meet the solutions we work with when we are at the station and see it rolling over the big screens and when the train arrives and when it leaves. These are solutions that Bove works with. The solutions that help the carriers, the ones that transport the trains with control information and traffic information, those solutions are fully digitized, and that is what the Bovet team works with. And what concerns route planning, On the Norwegian rail network, that is what we are working with. We have also created something exciting, which is energy generation for trains. Trains produce a lot of energy when they drive down, and they use it when they drive up. We have created this energy generation together with Banenord. And together with Banenor, we have also exported the solution. So now there are nine European countries that use the energy calculation solution that we manage and develop together with Banenor. So there were four good customers who have big tasks ahead of them. So we are both proud and happy that these commitments are renewed and expanded. Again, just the clarification about oil and gas. That includes renewable energy. I will tell you a little about the customers we work with. The biggest customer, without a doubt, in renewable oil and gas is of course Equinor. The customer relationship, and we have built that relationship for over 20 years, and that is only in strong and positive development, so we are increasingly working together with Equinor on interesting tasks. and very socially critical in relation to energy supply. Aker is also a customer in oil and gas. In the public sector, the biggest customer we work with is Forsvaret, and I mentioned how we have gained new trust for many years. The customers who are facing the biggest development in the public sector in this quarter are customers like Statens Veivesen, Enkom, which I presented here last quarter, and Kystverket, which stands for all the systems that handle traffic along our coast. and the environmental directorate, which manages everything that has to do with coal basins and so on. So these are the customers where we have seen the greatest development this quarter. Energy supply. Again, the biggest customer is Statnet. They are working on the network development. Other customers, where we have seen positive developments this quarter, are Elvia, which delivers energy to us as consumers here in the Oslo and Østlands regions and inland, and in addition also Skagrak Energi and Lyse. And then we have Tjenest. Services, there it is especially what we work with within the emergency number 110, both for fire and emergency services, and also what we do for Viking rescue services. So positive development in all sectors actually. And even more positive, the customers we have, they act more. So now we have rounded up 60 percent turnover on the 10 largest, and 70 percent on the 20 largest. So it tells a little about when we say that we are happy that we get new employees in, then it is needed. And it is needed for our customers. And the customers I have talked about here now, they are in great demand. There are a lot to be done. For us, this has always been important, to grow together with our customers. We have gone from having less tasks, to being at the core of their business. That means that we know a lot about the business, and we can contribute even more. And that lays the foundation for this being long-term and good customer relations. Sometimes you would also wish for a lot of new customers, but this is a world with limited resources, and the people in Bovee work mostly on the customers we have had for a long time. This quarter we compare with the same period last year, the first quarter of 2022. The customers that have arrived since then are customers that I have participated in earlier and talked about. But that is particularly the case for Boliden, which is a smelter in Odda, where we work with both digitalization and organization development on the huge modernization project for the smelter, to build the world's most sustainable, environmentally friendly smelter. So it's a really cool project that has been going on for a little over a year. And then we work with Mote. We are building a online store for voice. So that is also a new customer from the previous period. We would like to have more new customers, but then we need even more people. So we have to work with what we can. Then we have the fact that we are growing, and this quarter we are very proud and happy that we are growing in all regions. If I were to point out something here, then it is of course the enormous and large growth we have in Rogaland. And that is a growth that is largely driven by the tasks we are doing together with Equinor. But it is very exciting to see that Bergen, Region Sør, and also Sweden, are developing very positively this quarter in terms of keeping and attracting new colleagues. But overall, as I mentioned at the beginning, there are quite a lot of new people that we are growing with this quarter. And then we are on that topic. For us, the most important thing we do to continue the development we have had in Bove, is that we keep and attract good people. And the key is that we work with exciting things, and that we have a working environment that is based on a good culture, so people enjoy it and think it's good to be in Bove. And the most important thing is that we learn. So this quarter we got a net of 70 new ones. And that's a historically high speed, the last 12 months with 232. And the key to this, and it deserves an honor to all those who work with it, is everyone who works in BOV who recommends others to come here. And then there is the leader in BOV. We do not have one central HR department that does this recruitment work. There are 160 leaders in the entire organization who work with this. And then the results of things. So we are very proud of this.

Now, let's get into the numbers.

When you compare it with the oil crisis of 2014-2015, there is a very important point, and that is that we worked with completely different customers within the oil industry. We worked a lot in the supplier industry. That has changed a lot, so what we are working on with Equinor now, especially Equinor, is completely business-critical. For example, the movement they have towards renewable energy, And, for example, what we see in gas. So, we believe that what we work with for Equinor, and together with Equinor, is strategically much more important than the period you compared earlier. We also make some assessments of that, and the calculation that Equinor is involved in, we think is long-term. We got some signals on that when the pandemic hit. When many other businesses adjusted their activity, Equinor did nothing of it. We consider that Equinor is predictable and long-term. It is also difficult, as we have become an important partner for Equinor, not to support and be part of what is actually one of the most important things, when Equinor is going to be a broad company in energy, and they are going to be the leaders in digitalization. We have a role to play, and we play that role. So when it comes to the distribution, I usually say to the board that we should rather work with the fact that we can attract even more, and then we have to grow outside Equinor.