Crayon Group Hldg As

Good morning and welcome to Crayons Q1 presentation. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen and I'm the Head of Investor Relations. With me today presenting the results for the quarter, we have our CEO Melissa Mulholland and our CFO Brede Huser. After the presentation, there will be a live audio Q&A session. I will now hand it over to Melissa.

In Q1, our gross profit growth ended at 5%. I'm pleased that we continue to deliver solid international growth. However, I'm disappointed that we underperformed in the Nordics, which consequently impacted our overall results. In addition, we saw the market dynamics Q4 relating to Microsoft Enterprise Agreements to CSP transition spilling over into January. This put negative pressure on our Q1 gross margin. However, we see that the shift is gradually stabilizing as gross margin improved later this quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA ended at 12.1%, down 1.8 percentage points from the previous year. The margin development reflects ongoing investments for future growth. During the quarter, we made significant headcount increases, and due to market demand, we hired approximately 200 new employees this quarter. I will go into further details about the gross profit and adjusted EBITDA development in the next slides. Finally, our net working capital ended at minus 1.4 billion, which is our best ever and an improvement of 401 million compared to Q1 2024. I am very pleased to see that we continue to successfully manage working capital and deliver sustainable improvements. As already mentioned, we continue to see solid growth in our international markets. Growth in Europe ended at 19%, and I would like to highlight the exceptional 71% growth in our consulting business. We are also seeing a steady positive development in APAC and MIA, which grew 12%, including a 16% growth in the channel business. Growth in the U.S. ended at 15%, with strong performance across both our direct and channel businesses. The investments made in 2024 continue to pave the way forward for continued acceleration in the U.S. market. In the Nordics, we unfortunately saw a slower pace than expected and growth ended at 7%. The performance in our direct business was disappointing with a growth of only 3%. In addition, our Nordic consulting business ended at 5% growth. As a reminder, in the Nordics, the consulting business represents approximately 45% of the overall gross profit. The results in the Nordics is not at the desired level. We have therefore implemented changes in the management team. Alan Jakobsen, previously the GM in Denmark, who's had a successful track record, both in Crayon and outside of Crayon, has taken over as a regional manager for the Nordics. With the current changes, we expect a clear acceleration in performance for H2 in the Nordics. The group's gross profit was furthermore impacted by the development in our HQ line. The EA incentives and other transactional incentives are booked directly in the markets and businesses, while global strategic incentives from multiple vendors and hyperscalers are booked as gross profit in HQ. The year-over-year comparison is impacted by an exceptionally high incentive payout in Q1 of 24, mainly in the form of marketing support in connection with the launch of Copilot of approximately 60 million NOC. Strategic incentives are complex, inherently volatile, and not tied directly to our business performance for the current quarter. We expect to see a steady growth in the strategic incentives from all vendors, but the timing of payout will vary. Looking at our business areas, Direct grew gross profit 7%. As already mentioned, this was negatively impacted by the performance in the Nordics. In addition, the Q4-24 dynamics spilled over into January as the market adapted to the EA to CSP transition. As you may remember, we saw a negative development in gross margin in Q4-24 due to the change in the market dynamics as Microsoft restructured their incentives to drive the change from EA to CSP. This led to unclear rules of engagement and sales execution issues. Microsoft has publicly confirmed there were challenges and have taken corrective actions by restructuring account ownership and segmentation of customers, as well as instituting sales incentives. We did see some of the same dynamics in January, but during the quarter, the development in our gross margin was positive. To clarify, despite the reduction in the EA incentives, we were able to offset this with growth in CSP and services incentives. Our channel business is showing steady performance growing 12% and delivering a 68% adjusted EBITDA margin, which is at the same level as last year. Our two service businesses, Software and Cloud Economics and Consulting, are also improving, growing gross profit with 8% and 16% respectively, and also improving their profitability. I am pleased to see the improvement in the consulting margin, despite the underperformance in the Nordics as increasing profitability has been a focus area during 2024. With the recent macroeconomic turmoil and the ongoing debate over US tariffs in mind, I think it is important to highlight that we still see a robust and resilient demand environment. The underlying demand drives are strong in both our businesses and our global presence gives our customers great flexibility within their procurement setup. Overall, our software and cloud business grew 13% on an LTM basis and with a strong margin improvement from 50% to 57%. Our service businesses grew 11% and also saw a strong profit improvement. As part of Microsoft's broader go-to-market transformation, they are rationalizing the CSP partner ecosystem. Microsoft is increasingly focused on working with fewer, higher-performing partners, those who can combine cloud resale with deep technical capabilities, managed services, and customer success outcomes. Smaller transactional CSPs are finding it difficult to keep pace with Microsoft's evolving requirements, including the complexity of the new commerce experience and tighter incentive structures. Crayon is very well positioned in this environment. We have the scale, the technical certifications, and the service depth that Microsoft is prioritizing, particularly in the areas like FinOps, AI adoption, and software asset management. As the partner landscape consolidates, we see a meaningful opportunity to expand our market share, deepening our strategic relationship with Microsoft and onboarding new customers who are looking for a trusted, value-added CSP partner. Furthermore, as part of this transformation, customers are also reassessing their licensing agreements due to the EA to CSP transition. AI is rapidly evolving and drives growth in consumption and new licensing demand tailored for new customer needs. Crayon's service business benefits from increasing efforts to optimize cloud spend, preparing for AI adoption, and continuous projects relating to digital transformation and cloud migration. Regulatory complexity increases, driving demand for security, compliance, and government advisory. Now turning to a very interesting customer case. Crayon worked together with a media conglomerate in Singapore to automate media classification and store metadata for its content. The company has built extensive, massive media archives since the 1970s. 5 million images, 150,000 hours of video, 16,000 hours of audio, and millions of text documents. Manual editing is slow, error-prone, and unscalable. It's a perfect solution for AI. They needed data enrichment to enable personalization with content recommendations for better targeting and to grow audience share. Together, Crayon helped build a cloud-based AI and GenAI solution to automatically classify media content, generate and store metadata for all its content. Development to be completed within 18 months to deliver a knowledge graph and platform integration with all the media companies' internal software apps that will enable it to better target its users, staff, and advertisers. This is an exciting illustration of our AI capability, which we expect to continuously grow in the market ahead. Now, with that, I'll transition it over to Breda to take us through the financial section of our Q1 presentation.

Thank you, Melissa. I look forward to taking all of you through the financial section of our Q1 presentation. Networking capital ended at minus 1.5 billion. Solid improvement of 401 million compared to the same quarter last year. I'm very happy with the results we have achieved in Crayon over the last year and a half. We have successfully turned it around and have now delivered strong networking capital performance six quarters in a row. And I would characterize that as a sustainable improvement. In percent of GP, net working capital came in at minus 16.5%, which is slightly better than our 2025 outlook. Included in the performance is also a significant reduction in the use of factoring. The underlying improvement in net working capital compared to last year when adjusting for the reduction in factoring is 526 million. The focus on networking capital is a continuous effort and it remains one of the top priorities going forward. Gross sales ended at 17.3 billion in Q1, reflecting a growth of 25%. A reported EBITDA is 170 million, a small decrease of 8 million compared to the same quarter prior year. Adjustments in the quarter consist of share-based compensation of 2 million, 9 million in M&A costs and 6 million related to the close of the call center operations in the Philippines. Interest expenses is 63 million, a reduction from 71 million in Q124, driven by lower interest on the bond and RCF, somewhat offset by increased cash flow interest as a result of utilizing the currency accounts in the cash flow to mitigate FX risk on the balance sheet. As a result of positive FX movements, other financial impact ended at plus 28, up from minus 10 in Q124. Net profit ended at 43 million, an improvement of 33 million compared to Q1-24. Moving over to the balance sheet, the highlights worth mentioning are that both the RCF and the overdraft was undrawn by quarter end. And as already mentioned, compared to Q1 last year, factoring was reduced from 247 million to 122 million. If we look at our cash flow, we see that our operating cash flow for Q1 ended at 87 million. Our cash position and available liquidity reserve remains solid at 3.3 billion. Our leverage ratio, measured as net debt over EBITDA, ended at 0.4 compared to 1.2 in Q1 last year. All in all, we remain in a very robust financial position. Our outlook for the full year of 2025 is unchanged with a GDP growth of 15-20%, an adjusted EBITDA margin of 19-22% and networking capital as a share of GDP of 15%. I will now hand it over to Melissa for her closing statements.

Thank you. On May 6, SoftwareOne announced that it had achieved over 90% acceptance from the Crayon shareholders. Pending regulatory approvals, the transaction will close during June. I am very grateful for the support from our shareholders and would like to thank you for believing in Crayon and our next chapter together with SoftwareOne. And the next chapter will indeed be exciting as we build a leading global company to the benefit of all our stakeholders. It will further enable us to capitalize on our mutual strengths Not least are hyperscaler partnerships, including AWS, Google, and Microsoft. And speaking of Microsoft, I met with its leadership team in the U.S. last week, and they underlined the benefits of Crayon and SoftwareOne joining forces to create the world's largest Microsoft partner. So what happens next in the combination of our two companies? To the extent we have been allowed to at this stage, we've already started preparing and planning for the closing and subsequent activities. We are prepared and management from both sides are committed to ensure a disciplined execution and smooth integration to deliver on the synergies we have promised. However, it is important to highlight that we remain focused on our customers. Our customers will experience the same level of quality in the services we provide and together with Software One, a broader service offering. Most importantly is securing, attracting, and retaining our talent. This is the foundation for future success and will be a key priority for me going forward. With that, we can now transition over to Q&A.

Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press 5 star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing 5 star again. We will have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question, I believe, is from Christopher from D&B Markets. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Good morning, guys. I just want to try to understand better the headwind from incentives in the quarter. I think you noted that there was an exceptional tailwind in Q1 last year, 16 million Norwegian kroners. Can you maybe unpack a bit how the incentive changes on enterprise agreements hit you in Q1 and then when it comes to that exceptional tabling cube on last year. Is there anything of the sort also in the remaining three quarters of 2024 and potential headwinds from that for the rest of the year? And just for modeling purposes, that would be helpful. Thank you.

Thank you, Christopher. It's a great question. So just to clarify, because I know it's complex, our EA CSP and service incentives are booked locally in market.

For the EA incentive reduction, we actually made up for that with CSP and services as we planned and communicated and expected in Q4. So I'm actually quite pleased with the results that we've been able to deliver as an organization in leading the transition from EA to CSP globally on behalf of the Microsoft business. When it comes to the HQ line, you're correct. So in Q4, sorry, excuse me, in Q1 of last year, of 24, we had a one-time effect of a marketing incentive related to the launch of Copilot. As you may recall, Copilot launch was for CSP as well as EA. And so there was a marketing incentive pushed forward to drive the launch of that. So clearly that, as we remember, the EA, or sorry, not the EA, the HQ line is a bit lumpy, and that was specific to that. Any other comments, Breda, from your side?

Nope, no comments from me.

And to your point around going forward into the rest of the year, we're quite confident. So the momentum that we saw from the work delivering on overperformance in CSP and services will carry forward into the rest of the year.

And that's also, as we mentioned, we have a backend loaded back half of the year.

Yeah, because I think if you look at the growth in the GEOs without the HQ line, you're still pretty below the guidance for the full-year growth and growth profits. Can you maybe take us through some of the key building blocks for getting that from the low teens to 15% to 20%?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So internationally speaking, we delivered solid growth. And clearly, as I mentioned in the call, Nordics is where we were, let's say, disappointing in terms of growth. So Nordics alone delivering back to, let's say, regular seasonality will get us to normal rates. And I fully expect with the plans that we've put in place and also the sales execution I see, specifically in Norway that we will be on track for the remainder of the year.

And finally, just quickly, like in terms of the mix between like historically between EA and CSPs, it's fair to assume that it's tilted more towards EA and the Nordics and your kind of original whole markets and more towards CSP outside of the Nordics or is that too simplistic of a generalization?

Yeah, no, I think it's a bit too simplistic. I would say in the Nordics, we have a very good balance of EA to CSP. So it's, you know, as we've stated before, we're one of the largest CSP providers in the world and are growing CSP at a very healthy rate. So I don't see that makeshift to be necessarily the impact. This is just about making sure we have sales execution in place.

And I think we have all the right aspects in place for the rest of the year.

Right, great, thanks.

And let me remind you, if you wish to ask a question, please press five star on your telephone keypad now. It does not seem like we have any further questions from the telephone line, so I'll hand it back to the speakers.

I want to thank you all for attending our call. We are confident in our ability to deliver based off of the headcount growth that we've put in for the Q1. It is very much a growth-focused company, which we're committed to delivering, and also the improvement around consulting and the business all up. I'm confident that we're going to have a great 2025, and together with SoftwareOne, look forward to the combination of the two companies. Thank you all, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.