BTS Group AB (publ)

Hello,

good morning dear BTS investors. Nice to be with you all. I'm Jessica Scan, CEO of BTS Group. Flew in from San Francisco on Monday of this week, just in time for your beautiful celebration of spring and the cherry blossoms and lovely to be here. So excited to report on our first quarter of 2024. First of all, it feels like we're starting off on a better foot than we were a year ago. BTS is back to growth. We are feeling great about our 23 percent improvement in EBITDA, which is a combination of both our 7 percent overall growth and the efficiency measures that we put in place throughout all of last year, which sets the company up for scale. On our EBITDA margin improving to 9.5 percent from 8.2 percent. So if we do a kind of a double click into the the largest unit for BTS, we have BTS North America. And BTS North America is off to a promising start with double digit growth. Double digit growth is coming primarily from growth in our fast moving consumer goods industries, pharma and biotech, and slowing down a bit in manufacturing. In terms of the overall sense of the market, the client conservativism that we felt mainly last year, I would say that the first quarter felt similar to the fourth quarter in North America, which was an improvement from 2023. And then, but we still had some delays that even our clients across industries actually acted surprised on themselves in terms of they wanted to start in January. Some things got pushed into February, March and April. However, I will also say that towards the end of March and kind of the beginning of the of the second quarter, that sentiment is easing kind of to the next level. And given that tech and software is a high percentage or concentration of BTS North America's revenue, I always tend to give updates on that as well. And the kind of speed of decision making, the speed of initiatives is felt was similar in the first quarter to the fourth quarter. There's been quite a slowdown in terms of the reorgs and all of that that was difficult for us last year. So that's still moving in the right direction. Now, also, there's been an innovation that we've been working on for the last four to five quarters in BTS North America. And it has to do with giving our clients different, basically, partnering models or engagement model choice. And we are calling it BTS Total Access. So I'll share a little bit of more information with you on that since we're talking about BTS North America. Essentially, it's a more modern partnering model for them. It's designed to allow our clients to deliver behavior change, a more modern approach to change management at scale and ongoing throughout the year, which is something they've been asking for for quite a while. It's coming at a really, really interesting time. I've met with over 40 customers in the last four weeks. And a common thing I am hearing is kind of a shift from doing a high level of spend on external consultants for things like strategy or process work and instead focusing not only on new tech and tech implementations, but also equipping their leaders to be able to drive a lot of the changes as opposed to relying on the external firms, which fits beautifully in BTS's sweet spot. And we're also hearing and seeing a lot of kind of rethinking happening right now in terms of what's the best way to do leadership development, to do change and training at scale. And this is designed to fit that need as well. And at the end of the day, BTS Total Access is a shift in our economic or partnering models with our clients that allows them to deliver bigger change at scale. And so it's a combination for our really large clients of a total spend agreement combined with subscription. And it's an innovation of the last year and the revenue is going in the right direction in terms of a positive trend. And it's about 4% of the company's revenues at this moment. If we look across the other geographical areas, you can see BTS Europe is still struggling at negative 4% growth. And they did win some big deals in the first quarter. Their overall win rate is up. It's actually 43% compared to 39% a year ago. But the issue in Europe feels similarly, let's say, to what the market in BTS North America felt like in the third quarter-ish of last year, right? There is still overall client conservativism. 18 out of their 40 projects were delayed in the first quarter. And so while our pipeline metrics are strong and the win rates are going up, that's obviously not big enough to outset the delays. BTS other markets is starting the year off with 8% growth. So overall, continued good demand in several of the markets. In particular, consistent with the fourth quarter, we have faster growth in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And the operational efficiencies that they put in place last year continuing into the first quarter and are supporting overall strong margin improvement from 5.8 to 7.5. And this smaller unit in part of North America, APG, is another kind of bellwether in terms of the sentiment for traditional training and leadership development and client activities picked up for them as well in terms of increasing demand. So overall, growth and profitability improved in the first quarter. Do both to the 7% sales and the efficiency measures that we put in place throughout all of last year. Here you can see kind of a historical look by quarter. So if you just look at the left-hand side of the screen, you have from 2020 to 2024. So now we're set establishing a new bar in terms of the size of the first quarter of the year. And if you look at overall profit before tax by quarter, you see kind of a similar trend. The other thing that we'll continue to give you updates on and have kind of BTS's own learnings in terms of how we are exploring and implementing AI throughout the firm. We've been doing quite a lot here in three different areas. How do we further differentiate our services and add more value to our clients? How much revenue are our clients paying us specifically for AI related change and training services? And then how we're using it to change our internal ways of working and making it easier for our teams. So just to give you some updates on what we've been doing and what we're learning on the service differentiation, I'd say the most poignant aspect there is our practice bots, our coaching bots. We're embedding them both in our simulations as well as more as on an on-demand basis. We are very focused and interested right now in how do you allow teams to prepare and practice all the time versus taking them out of the job to be able to do that? That's what we mean by turning everyday meetings into practice. And the way to do that obviously is through AI and different tools there. In terms of clients asking for help, in terms of there's a lot out there, there's a lot of hype right now. Can you take the mystery and misery out of AI? We've generated, we're just kind of getting started there, but generated about $2.5 million to date. And then in terms of internal productivity gains, you probably remember we opened up and did a lot of training and opened up the tools. And our consultants have even been creating their own AI bots and tools since probably last May, so we're almost a year into that. Examples of the experiments where we are gaining productivity would be report writing, insights generation, content and video generation, translations, how quickly we can generate in dry bots, and then broader digital efficiency. It's still very early days, I will tell you that. The teams that are playing around with this and building new things are estimating if we took it to full scale in 2025 versus on where it's working now. It's about a half a percent savings across the entire company, but it's early days. So we still are figuring out where the biggest wins are, and then we will double down in there. And we'll also decide when we kind of uplevel and get the enterprise wide license on GPT-4. But we will do that when we're convinced of the lift. I think we're doing a lot of experimentation right now. So I think for the long term investors, this is a reminder for you for the new investors listening. We're very proud of BTS. We are a story of long term profitable growth year after year. You can see our history. Our average growth is 12 percent per year, so double digits. Average EBITDA growth of 15 percent per year. It's really fun, I would say, to be a BTSer. We get to take share from both the traditional consulting firms and your traditional training leadership development markets as well. We've always been on the people side of change as opposed to spending all of our attention on the strategy. We actually believe our clients are smart and can figure it out themselves. But through our methodologies and our tools, it's a more effective way to raise the bar on performance and to drive change. And you can see our stable and growing dividends since our IPO, excluding the pandemic year, obviously. Today is the AGM meetings where we will be voting on the proposed dividend of 5.7 kroner per share, distributed in two separate installments of 2.85 each. And with that, our outlook remains consistent, so we expect our EBITDA to be better than 2023. Thank you very much, and we'll see if there's any questions.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments. The next question comes from Rickard Engberg from Carnegie Investment Bank. Please go ahead.

Hello, good morning.

So my question is regarding Europe. Can you put some flavor on what industries are lagging in Europe when it comes to your clients? So that's my first question.

Yeah, sure. In particular, professional services. We've had some lagging in manufacturing. Those are the two main ones.

And if we take the same question of a US market, so to say, but in opposite, what industries are leading right now?

Yeah, fast-moving consumer goods and pharma bio in particular, financial services and manufacturing dropped in the first quarter.

And also, we have discussed on these calls the tech and software industry. How have they been performing during Q1?

Yeah, improved from first quarter a year ago, similar to the fourth quarter. And I would say even more movement, deal fluidity and speed happening towards the end of the first quarter.

Great. And also, one question. Can you please discuss the earner that you are, not to say paying that is affecting your EPS and results positively this quarter? What is it related to and what terms it could have been paid out on?

Yeah, sure. That's related to the rapid learning acquisition that we did in January of 2020. And rapid learning gave us a library of leader-led micro simulations and content and tools that are designed for leaders to do with their teams. So from our perspective, rapid learning has been an excellent acquisition. It's delivered positive contributions to EBITDA every year. We just did the adjustment this quarter because the total value is slightly less than we had anticipated. So we ended up paying less overall for the acquisition, but it's been a positive contributor both to the bottom line and actually partially to the access pass partnering model I just talked about.

Okay, great. And one last question for me. If you look at the recruiting market, how does that feel right now compared to competitiveness and finding people if you're trying to find people in certain areas?

Yeah, it feels great. It feels a lot different than it did in 2021, 2022, obviously. And so we actually are having really great talent, some senior talent joining the firm, some at the partner levels coming in. We always take advantage of a little bit softer times. People want to have maybe a better home. And so for us right now, we are getting some great talent in the door.

Okay, great. And also, do you have a plan to expand the headcount for your own video or is it a case by case basis?

We're being quite thoughtful, of course, on this. I mean, we went into the year understanding our analytics showing us that we had about 5% capacity still in the system. So on the one hand, we will not really open up the floodgates and hiring until we're sure that everybody is as billable as they need to be to have great careers and for the operating model. And at the same time, we are still moving out low performers or people are quitting. And so we're bringing in talent like the recruiting process is moving. In terms of net ads, we are being very thoughtful about that, right? I think one of the improvements we made over the last 18 months is a more fluid movement of resources across the geographies. And so that continues and we have the 5% capacity. And of course, we're looking at how quickly we may be growing in the coming quarters.

Okay, great. Thank you. That was all for me.

Okay. The next question comes from Carl Norn from SEB. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hello. Good morning. I had some troubles listening into the call in the beginning, so I maybe missed something. But my first question is just on North America. I mean, you had really, really strong fourth quarter there on the margin side. And now Q1 margin, I would say it's not weak, but it's not similar to the best quarter ever we have seen. I was wondering a little bit what has changed or what has happened from the fourth quarter into the first quarter on the margin side in North America. Thank you.

The only kind of material shift is, there was a lot of North American consultants who went to Vienna in January for our directors conference, right? So that cost was bigger than it was the quarter before a year ago. That's the main thing.

Okay. So you feel that it is a relatively normal quarter for North American first of the margin if we take away that extra cost maybe?

Yeah. I mean, the only other thing that happens is when we get back to good growth numbers, then the commission costs expand, the bonus pool expands for all the employees, and a year ago they were shrinking, right? So the bonus accrual associated with the performance of the company in the first quarter was significantly less than this quarter when they're having a better quarter. So that's the other kind of difference.

Yeah. Understood. And then on just the general demand situation, I mean, you wrote in a report here that you expect or you feel like the demand has been better throughout the quarter, I guess, North America and some parts of other markets. If you look at BTS as a group, would you say that you feel better right now versus three months ago or how do you feel on the demand side?

Yeah, I feel for BTS North America and BTS other markets, I feel better than three months ago. And for BTS Europe, I feel similar.

Okay, that's good. And then I just have one more question on the European development here. I mean, you still have relatively, I would say, solid margins despite weaker sales. Would you say that you have fully implemented the cost savings program or is that a full savings here in Q1 or it's more savings in the coming quarters?

I mean, the vast majority is in Q1 with a bit more to be expected in the second quarter.

Okay, sounds good. And maybe just one more if I may. I mean, I'll calculate organic growth. I tried to take away the acquisition impact and I get to around 2% here in Q1. I mean, given that you're facing a little bit easier comparables right now, do you think we should expect improved organic growth rate here in the coming quarters?

Yeah, improved.

Yeah.

And our math is a little bit better than that, but yes.

Yeah, no, but that's good. It's close. Lot of reports today, so it's quite busy, but you look to have a good output. So I stop there and thank you. Thank you.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

Yes. Hi, Michael Wallen here, Head of Investor Relations. We have a question that's come in by email. Can you elaborate a little on new sales and growth drivers? Are you seeing growth coming from new accounts or sales to existing customers?

Yeah. I mean, historically, we get about 90% of our revenues from existing customers and about 10 from new clients. And we haven't seen a material shift in that ratio for quite some time. I mean, I think the focus for us has been just increasing our pipeline generation much more than the past, just given the overall client conservatism in the consulting market for the last five quarters. But it hasn't been a dramatic shift to more new clients from existing, especially in the first quarter. I think we probably had a higher percentage in the middle of last year because some of the existing clients were slowing down spend. So then you have to make for it, especially when the tech industry really slowed down and we had to find new clients in other industries. That was probably when it was the most exaggerated to new client revenue. But the first quarter is probably similar, very close to 90-10.

Okay, we don't have any more email questions. So if that's it, this is the end of the call. I would like to say also that we don't often get that many questions emailed to us. So please for the next coming calls, don't hesitate to send questions by email. We're happy to answer. So thank you from us.

Super. Thank you.