CombinedX AB (publ)

Välkomna ska ni vara till Combinedex rapport presentation för Q3 2025. Mitt namn är Fredrik Hansson och jag är moderator för dagens sändning. Jag lämnar nu ordet över till Jörgen Quist, vd för Combinedex.

Tack ska du ha och välkomna allihopa till den här presentationen av vårt tredje kvartal. Vi börjar direkt med siffrorna. Vi har en omsättning på 200 miljoner kronor, vilket ger en tillväxt på 2%, organiskt minus 2,5%. Ett rörelsessultat är bita på 17,2 miljoner, vilket ger en bitavarginal på 8,6%. Som ni ser är det här ett steg i rätt riktning, en förbättrad lönsamhet från föregående år. And of course, we are happy about that. In these presentations, I have often returned to the idea that we achieve a stronger profitability, both through operational measures in the company and through strategic measures to focus our resources in the right places. To do more of what we think is good and works, and a little less of what we don't think works as well. All this has given results. We can see the yellow line, adjusted in bits of margin, how it develops over time, running 12 months. You can see that we had, as you who have been with us for a while, a strong 2023 over these 12% that we have as a goal. Och sen så tappade vi beläggning under 2024-2025 men att vi nu har bottnat ur och ser att vi är på väg uppåt igen. Rullande 12 månader så ligger vi nu på 9,4 bitar marginal då och vårt finansiella mål är att vi ska lägst vara på 12%. As for the growth, we have said that the organic growth is going to oversee the growth of the IT consult market. Yes, I would probably say that it does with our 5.6% LTM. Or sorry, the organic growth. We have minus 5.7% and that may be at the level of the market, I would say, without having an exact figure on that. Med förvärv så har vi ambitionen att nå lågst 1 miljard i omsättningen 2025. Det kommer bli tufft i år, kalenderåret 2025. Men med de förvärv som vi har gjort så ser vi nu att vi har en takt kring miljarden. What have we done strategically? I'm talking about the strategic measures. I would say that we have made changes in our companies. For example, we replaced a part of Aspire and reduced our exposure to system development. And then we have made acquisitions within ERP business. Last year, MTCS acquired a part of Elvenight. Earlier this year, we acquired Line Consulting, which is an IFS specialist. And on the 1st of October, we announced that we had acquired ERP Consult, which is the Norwegian branch of Elvenight. This makes Elvenight further strengthen its position as the leading specialist in the business system in Forentic. And yes, there are three acquisitions in a fairly short time that we do within the ERP area. And we do this because we think that this business has a lot of strong character traits. ERP is the digital ecosystem of our customers, where we work with IFS and InfoCloud Suite above all. And there we work with large customers, a lot of data. We have great opportunities to use AI services, but also work with data governance. Overall, we are in the core business where we have to be involved and work with the customer closely in all customer development. De här ERP-systemen är affärskritiska. Vi kan också sälja våra tjänster kring application management, alltså hjälpa kunderna att hålla de här systemen uppdaterade, tillgängliga, dygnet runt årets alla dagar. De har en lång eftermarknad. När vi väl har fått implementerat ERP-system så har vi en... Det är inte så ofta man byter de här systemen. Det skapar också en bra arbetsmarknad för våra konsulter, vilket gör att vi But good news is that it can bring in promising, talented students and give them a good career by making them learn and become good at these ERP systems. So all of this speaks for the ERP-centric development strategy that we have been running, especially now in 2024 and 2025. And it also starts to show up in our results. Like so, we continue our consolidation of companies. With the combination that we could talk about under Q3 of Two and Abslont. Soon it will be six companies with this billion-dollar ratio. And even here we have a clear idea that it is around the ERP system, Microsoft Business Central, that we are going to collect this new company, Two Appsfront. Until then, Appsfront is very good at the whole CRM and customer experience part, and Two comes in with the entire business intelligence part, what is called Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. Så det här, vi ska bli en ledande leverantör i Norden inom Markussons affärsapplikationer och avancerad dataanalys. Det känns väldigt lovande. Vad gäller namnet för det nya bolaget hoppas vi kunna återkomma senare under hösten med det. Så här ser vårt hus ut efter den sammanslagningen med Elvenite, det nya Front2, Align och NetGain som våra ERP- och plattforms-servicebolag. Netav som vårt infrastrukturbolag och Nintex som vårt experiencebolag. So long as it's strategic. Then we have the operational side, and there we see that when it comes to the market situation, I don't dare to say that we assess the market situation differently than a year ago, but we can state that at the end of this quarter, we had good pressure in our deliveries, especially in Albinite, which completed many delivery projects. So that we have had a slightly higher inflation in September, but in total Q3 to Q3 the inflation rate has been quite the same. We feel, however, that we have a little bit of wind, and we dare to show this quite for us, that we have recruited 19 new trainees. And that is partly because we feel that we have a bit of a downturn, but also because we have been able to choose among many talents this year. So it has been a big search engine and we have been able to pick out and offer 19 very talented new students the opportunity to enter the CombinedX company and become consultants. We are very happy with that. Vi är också väldigt glada över den årliga kundundersökningen som vi precis avslutat med ett MPS på 63. Och vi har ett medarbetarnöjdhet med ett EMPS på 53. Och det här är ju jätteviktigt i ett IT-konsultbolag som oss, att vi har nöjda kunder och nöjda medarbetare. Jag tror att det här står sig väl också i jämförelse med branschlegorna. Det är vi stolta och glada över. If we go back to our figures and dig a little deeper today, and connect this to the number of employees, the reason we have had a lower organic growth is that we entered Q3 with significantly fewer employees than we did a year ago. We entered Q3 with 559 employees compared to 595 employees. En del av den här minskningen var ju avyttringen av Spice på den egna verksamheten. Men överlag så vågade vi inte netto rekrytera så mycket under 2024. Men nu när vi tittar på Q3 i år så går vi ut med 23 personer fler, 582, att jämföra med 593, då hade vi minus netto två personer under Q3 i år, plus 23 personer. In addition, we will hire an ERP consultant on the 1st of October. There will be another 17 consultants, which means that in October we will have almost 600 employees. And that's six people more than we were in 2024. So now, for the first time in a long time, we have bended in terms of employees to be able to have organic growth in the coming quarter. Det hoppas vi på. Tittar vi på våra intäkter, LTM per FTE, så ökar de med 4,2 %. Personalkostnaderna har ökat lite mer. And I think the challenge here is rather that the income, that the staff costs have increased. It is quite natural due to the ERP-centric acquisition strategy that we have introduced. ERP consultants have, in a classic way, relatively high wage levels, but they also have a higher price point than, for example, regular system developers. Så det vi hoppas att se, och vi tror kommer att se, är att vi kommer att kunna fortsätta lyfta den här intäktsnivån per FTE framåt. Om vi fortsätter på personalkostnader och så vidare, och byter ner våra stora kostnadsposter och jämför dem i relation till nettomsättningen, då ser vi just att den här gråa linjen visar att personalkostnaderna har i relation till in the previous year increased by 0.8%. But then we have taken it again at direct costs, mainly because we have had a smaller share during consultations this quarter. So here we have had better resource utilization. We have used our own staff to a greater extent than we did a year ago. So that's where we get that. Och i övrigt så är det lite kostnader som går upp och ner men som ligger ganska stabilt. Över externa kostnader ligger runt 9% och de här direkta kostnaderna kommer till att minska lite grann i relation till förra året. Intäktsutveckling kvartal fick kvartal. Vi har redan berättat om att vi gjorde 200 miljoner med 2% tillväxt. Det var samma antal arbetsdagar, 66 stycken som föregående år, så vi har ingen kalendersjustering. And when it comes to EBITDA, we do not have any adjustment in the period, since we use these adjustment posts for acquisitions. And in Q3, we did not do any acquisition, but we did it in Align in Q2. And now we will land in Q4, the costs for the ERP concept. If we look at the cash flow, we went in with 75.2 million in the cash flow. And we had, from a running business, we got another 15 million. Then we made an unusually large amount of moving capital in relation to how we looked a year ago. So here we have made 15.4 million more, especially in customer feedings. And it is clear that... Hade det berott på att kunderna var sämre uppe att betala och så vidare hade det varit ett problem. Men nu handlar det helt enkelt om att vi har ett bra tryck i verksamheten i framförallt september. Så jag tycker inte att vi behöver vara så oroliga över detta. Vi går ut med en betryggande kassa på 58 miljoner vid kvartalets utgång. And if we look at our net debt, it is one times bigger now. Then we will see that IFRS 16 is about half of the net debt. So if we remove IFRS 16, i.e. leasing and rental contracts and so on, we are at about 0.5 times the EBITDA. So even that feels, I think, on a reassuring level. And with that, I think we'll hand it over to Frågaard.

Thank you so much, Jörgen. We have received a number of questions here from Fredrik on Redeye. He writes, subconsulting, commercial goods and other direct costs decrease from year to year. Are there fewer subconsulting in the market with lower demand?

Ja, vi har kunnat använda våra egna medarbetare i större utsträckning för att nå den här omsättningen än vad vi gjorde för ett år sedan. Det är väl en kombination av saker som gör det. So you can partially see it when you have very high pressure and do not have time, then you need to use sub-consultants. We do not have such high pressure in the business, so the supply is still at about the same level as this year. But we have still been able to make these deliveries with our own staff.

He asks further, the margin is clearly increasing year by year and you refer to assemblies and Align. Are you talking about the fact that the margin should be on a good level even in the coming quarter, given that the market is not further weakened?

Yes, exactly. I indicate that in what we have done, that I think we see the effects of the collaborations we have made. I think they will be forward as well. And Align has come in, and when we talked about Align, they did it with a good margin. There was no reason to believe that the margin should decrease. Both of these things are strengthening the margin, and of course, it doesn't have to be anything strange on the market, but at least we have the market we have today. So that can speak for a continued improvement of the movement margin. It is our clear goal to come back to these 12% that we have as our financial goal. So I hope so, and I believe so too.

Thank you. Can you give some examples of small AI projects and when do you think larger projects can start to take off?

We have sometimes in these reports told about things that have been done with AI. Today, as an ERP consultant, we see what our systems are working with. Where do they start and where do they end? Where can we inject AI to get extra leverage on the data that the customers have? This work takes place a little bit everywhere in our customer projects. without it having to be a large individual AI project. So we use this technology where we can, both internally and for our customers.

Thank you very much. Tax cuts and lower interest rates will benefit consumers during 2026. Do you think this will have a positive effect on demand for your customers?

What you should understand is that we mainly work business-to-business, so our customers are mainly business-to-business customers. But it's clear that it's going down, the demand on the consumer side is stronger. led to a better market for our business-to-business customers. But the direct connection to consumer behavior is not very strong for us in the short term, but in the long term it is, of course.

Thank you. You mentioned in the report a negative operating cash flow. How do you see the cash flow development in the future?

We... That's one of the good things about a consulting business. We don't bind. Besides our acquisitions, we don't bind capital to talk about. It's just in customer feeding, when you have large deliveries and so on, you bind a little capital. But otherwise, we bind a lot of capital. We will continue to have a positive cash flow from the business, which we always have.

Kommer några frågor här om förvärven då. Kan ni utveckla vilka effekter sammanslagningen och förvärven har haft på lönsamheten hittills?

Ja, det har haft en lönsamhetsförbättrande effekt. När vi gör de här sammanslagningarna så tittar man mycket på den friska kärnan och vad är det som vi kan göra mer av och vad kan vi göra mindre av. Och ibland så finns det också lite synergier på overhead och så vidare. Sammantaget så ser vi att vi får en positiv effekt av de här sammanslagningarna.

Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm.

Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm.

The last question for today. Can you comment on the marginal goal and what other measures are needed to achieve it?

That is the paved road. We will focus more on what we see as high margins. We have talked a lot about ERP today. och vi ska fortsätta att jobba jättevårt för att öka vår beläggning och det handlar ju mest om försäljning så att det är ju huvudsakligen det vi pratar om i gruppen hur kan vi sälja mer, hur kan vi hjälpa varandra att öppna dörrar och hur kan vi öka beläggningen så att det är här och nu vid sidan av de här strategiska åtgärderna som vi har pratat om så är det sälja det vi har helt enkelt

Då tackar jag så mycket Jörgen för dagens presentation och önskar dig lycka till. Tack ska du ha.

Tack ska du ha för att du har lyssnat.