BTS Group AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to this presentation of BTS Group results for the third quarter 2024. With me here today, I have our CEO, Jessica Skaun, to present the report. But just as a reminder before she starts presenting, please, if you have any questions, call in or send the questions through the group chat. Jessica, please.

Thank you, Michael. Hello, dear BTS investors. Welcome to our Q3 report. Look, the third quarter is particularly hallmarked by the recovery of BTS Europe in terms of returning to growth. And so overall, at the group level, our revenue grew 8%, group profit EBITDA up 13%, and we had margin improvement from 8.4% to 9.2%. I think another highlight for us in the third quarter is we continue to see proof points that our overall strategy, global strategy of focusing on strategic accounts continues to generate bigger deals and do it at the global level across all three operating units. If we double click into BTS Europe, we have basically significant profit improvement because of their turnaround. And what's behind the turnaround? As we mentioned, in the first and second quarter, BTS Europe was struggling with a lot of projects that were, one, being delayed into the second half, and they were able to work on other projects in the third quarter. Also, I think the sales initiatives we've been doing over the last year, year and a half, are also taking shape in terms of increased number of meetings, number of client conversations, number of proposals the team is writing, having the senior people in the field, and so forth. So overall, BTS Europe, after a really tough first half, grew their revenue 5%. And as a result, their EBITDA tripled from 2.9% to 9.2%. If we look at BTS Europe, they have a strong pipeline moving forward. We focus on our biggest unit, BTS North America. General sentiment of the market is the team is winning really cool work, really large strategic projects, the fast-moving projects as well. And I would still say that the sentiment in North America is that margins and profit improvement is still top of mind. And we still have many different company-client examples across industries where cost control is on the CEO's agenda. In the energy industry in particular, we started to sense a more conservative approach. And pharma and biotech industries continue to have strong growth for BTS North America. Not only do we help them solve more and more problems, but there seems to be a lot of interest in BTS partnering with them on their new product launches and their growth initiatives, in particular using our AI bots. In the third quarter, a lot of the conversations you can imagine across companies was kind of a wait and see, a general conservatism waiting for the election to be over. If we look at BTS other markets, the SEAC acquisition, the company that we acquired in Thailand, who's the leader of the market there, the integration is going really well. It's going according to plan. It gives us a stronger footprint in Southeast Asia, which is one of our target growth markets. And overall, thanks to the SEAC acquisition in particular, the net sales increased 16%, and that 8% growth outside of the acquired revenue. Overall, if you look at the entire BTS Other Markets portfolio, where they operate in 16 different countries, it was a mixed quarter. Some markets doing extraordinarily well with the Southeast Asia region and the Middle East, while others, including Southern Europe, in particular Italy and Spain, were affected with project delays, longer deal times to close. And it felt in Italy and Spain similar to the market realities that the rest of BTS Europe were experiencing in the first half of the year. So if you look overall, we're happy that we've had another quarter of revenue and profit improvement. BTS North America, our biggest market, growing 6%. The margin has exceeded last year's margin every quarter so far this year, and this particular quarter by just a little bit, 8.9% to 9%. BTS Europe's big improvement. I mean, first we have to recognize that last year at this time was not great. But the cost controls that Europe put in place over the last five quarters are in the system. Plus the fact that the project launches are moving forward and the growth now is contributing big time to the margin improvement. BTS other markets, however, even though they have the growth, the margin is dropping from 11.6 to 10.6%. And this is based on two big reasons. Reason number one is the company that we acquired in Thailand has lower margins than BTS average, which we know. And there's plenty of ideas we have to increase that over time. The other reason is the poor performance of BTS Italy and Spain. If they had actually had the revenue targets, then the margins would have improved. BTS APG, which is a very small part of the business, in general they sell smaller projects and they're continuing to be affected by client delays and lower demand. So what else happened in the third quarter? We launched a lot more AI tools. I would say I'm really excited by the pace with which BTSers are bringing our AI bots to the market and co-innovating together with clients. So the Wonderway acquisition we made the quarter before is really progressing nicely. We've gone live now in clients in every single unit, so North America, Europe, and most of the world. We have real-time, just to remind you what the Verity product does, is for the first time that I know of, we are able to plug into Zoom and Teams and provide real-time performance, analytics, coaching, and assessments back to the people who are doing the work, having the client meetings or having the preparatory meetings and so forth. It gives real-time coaching and advice, but against the specific unique strategies and sales plays of our clients. We also have a lot of our clients asking for our standard bots and building custom bots with us very quickly. So we are rapidly building out an architecture and bot platform so that over time we can make them faster and faster, and clients will also be able to build them themselves. But the number of clients doubled from Q2 to Q3 in terms of the clients using our bots were upwards. I think we had 13 or so in the last quarter. We're at about 26, 27 now in the third quarter. And you can see the overall performance over time in terms of the Q1, Q2, Q3 quarterly performance over the years. And profit before tax. And we continue to focus on being a long-term successful company where we have growth and profitable growth every year. You can see our average growth has been 12% year-over-year CAGR for revenue and average EBITDA growth is 15% per year. Stable and growing dividends since IPO, excluding the pandemic year. This strategy remains and will continue. And our outlook for 2024 remains unchanged. So we expect our EBITDA result to be better than 2023. Okay, thank you very much and open it up for questions.

We have some questions that have come in through the chat. Okay. And the first one that came in was actually from a Philip. He was wondering about what happened in Netmind. He's saying, could you clarify the reversal of the earn out? Is it a result of poor performance or simply a reflection of expected performance in the acquired entity?

Okay, sure, and I'm happy to talk about Netmind in Spain. Yeah, the vast majority of the acquisitions of BTS does, we create an earn-out, and typically it works extraordinarily well. And the first two years of Netmind's business, actually, they performed, they were profitable and so forth, but this last year has been quite tough, and so they actually are profit neutral. And so if you look at the performance of the three years of profit, it's clear to us that they will not hit their earn out. And look, when we acquire companies, we hold founders accountable to the targets that we set together. And so that's the story. And we continue to work with them and we'll help them bring their services to market and get them back to growth.

Yeah, so it seems to be a problem with the conference call. So we'll take the questions in the chat here instead. We have a question from Carl. North America and the margin there. I mean, Q3 last year was pretty soft and now it's roughly flat despite organic growth. Are you happy with the performance or what can you say regarding the margin in North America?

Yeah, I think BTS North America has to have higher organic growth.

That's it, yes. Daniel, he's asking... Net recruitment per region flat, negative or up? And what's the plan ahead?

Yeah, I would say I can start with BTS other markets because they have some parts of their portfolio that are growing really rapidly, like the Middle East, where I just was a couple of weeks ago, and Southeast Asia. So in the markets that are growing fast, we will recruit and we'll continue to move talent into those markets. I would say BTS North America, the biggest market, has stayed conservative this year. right we are we are winning work the win weights are up and we're still kind of feeling out the the cycle time for our demand and projects and keep in mind that we can also do a lot of the work with an external resource or external workforce so we're constantly balancing how to have that right mix. And I think as we get more and more confident that we will be back to double-digit growth, then we will start to ramp up the full-time hires. BTS Year Up has had very clear cost control, right? For the last six quarters, they moved out a bunch of underperformers over the last year, year and a half. Given the strong pipeline demand that we're seeing, we will increase the recruitment plan early next year, most likely. So we'll be fine-tuning this all in the next month as we are putting together the plan for next year. I will say one more thing on recruitment, though. We have hired strategic hires, revenue generators, partners from other firms that we believe will help us drive growth.

Yeah, and to follow up here from Daniel, a regional developing into 2025, Accenture is talking about better Europe while weaker North America. Does that rhyme with your thoughts as well?

You know, I understand the sentiment as a really like snapshot in time, right? I would say we probably feel similar in terms of a snapshot, a moment in time. However, I mean, BTS North America is a huge market. It's a growing economy. BTS has a small amount of share. And yes, we still sense that cost control is number one. There continues to be rumors of more rifts and layoffs and organizational structure stuff in North America. And there are tons of pockets of innovation and growth and successful companies to go after.

Yeah, and I missed that question from Rickard here. Given the launch of Verity and bots, will the license share of revenue over time increase?

Yes. Yes. And I think as we're experimenting and launching new things and understanding what customers want for which moments over the course of the year, my sense is that the bots are just becoming another version of simulations for us in a way. So they may differentiate us further on the really kind of micro versions of the simulations but for sure from what we saw in the third quarter it's going to grow very quickly.

Yeah and then we have a follow-up from Carl. Do you think it's reasonable to assume an EBITDA result in line with Q4 last year in Q4 this year or how should one think given the very strong performance in Q4 last year?

Yes, I don't have the actual EBITDA right in front of me of Q4 last year. I mean, look, the EBITDA has been growing all year and we're keeping our guidance in line with the previous year, right? Yeah.

Another follow-up from Carl. Other markets, the margins are down year on year, but quite small impact from the acquisition since it was contributing 13%. 13 months to sales. Was there any specific acquisition-driven cost in the quarter?

Yes, our acquisition costs are up in the third quarter. That's really astute from a year ago. So you're right on the money with that one, plus the decline in the Spain and Italy markets, which are a nicely sized part of most of the world's businesses, a big contributor to the lower margin.

And another one from Carl, who is on the ball here today. You sound a bit cautious on North America for Q4, given the election. Do you expect growth to be similar to Q3 or higher or lower?

Yeah, I mean, we typically don't give that level of detail for the next quarter. But I think that the the conservatism in the third quarter in North America impacts the fourth quarter revenue, right? Because we either win or the projects take longer to close. And so, yeah.

Yeah, and a follow-up from Daniel. Reaching your target of 20% growth per year requires either better organic growth or more larger M&A. What is most likely to happen of these in 2025 to meet that?

I mean, the... the thing we have to do is increase the organic growth, full stop. And I think we're looking at acquisitions that on average are bigger in size than they have been in the past.

Yes, so apologies again for the non-functioning conference call. But if you have any further questions through the chat, please go ahead. If no further questions, well, thank you from us.

Yeah, thank you very much. For those of you I'll see later today, looking forward to it.

Wait, here's a question. Okay. Revenue contribution from Wonderway, still very limited, I guess, but would it be interesting to hear?

Yes, it's still very limited. I mean, it was very tiny when we bought them in terms of a startup with a very early product. But what's interesting about it is the product, as I mentioned, went live. It went live in two different ways. First, we embedded it into our simulations and that almost acts as a way of marketing for what it actually is, right? And in those cases, we put it in sales kickoffs and sales simulations and sales executive team working sessions. In all cases, it's leading to actual demand for that product in the way it was intended. Also, what we're realizing is once customers have a sense of it, they're saying, wait a minute, like we have one client in PharmaBio in North America that said, we have 35 unique sales plays per our unique accounts where we have been trying to codify and capture the wisdom, what does great look like? What does high performance look like for each of these sales plays that are critical to our strategy? Can we want a specific custom bot for each one? And can you guys create that for us? We just want to deal in Coca-Cola for I think 375 grand for one custom bot. When the clients are getting access to this, it's not only are they excited about what it can do the way it was intended, but it is making them quickly dream up and ask for custom bots that we can also build on the same platform. So that's basically what happened in the third quarter, which is just really interesting.

Yeah. Thank you. Oh, wait, here's another one. Daniel, come back. What's a reasonable time frame to reach the 17% EBITDA margin target, given that year-to-date margin is 11.4 and markets do not immediately see to pick up significantly?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, when we established the 15 to 17 one, right, which was about four, no, probably three years ago now, The idea was that we look over, you know, three, five, six, seven years type of thing and we strive for a half a percent, 0.8 percent of margin improvement a year, something like that. Now, if there's a big investment we want to make or we make an acquisition with a smaller margin or something, then that's strategic. But in general, it drives the focus and the discipline on the things that we can do to increase the margin, which are overall good for the business, right? So increasing pricing discipline, efficiencies at scale, obviously organic growth. and so forth. And on the operational efficiency side, there is a part of the business that is highly manual, I would say, at the moment. And we're getting clearer and clearer with a bunch of different work and spending time on the problem of how we can automate it more specifically. So if we're able to crack that code in the next, let's say, six months or something, that would alleviate quite a lot of costs. So we're thinking about more of those kind of breakthrough automation-related initiatives on the internal ops side.

Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't have a conference call next time. There's more questions coming in this way. That's cool. It's all good. There seems to be a bit of a delay. Do we have any more questions? If not, you can always send them to us and we'll try and answer by email. So once again, thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Super. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.