Dustin Group AB (publ)

Good morning everyone and welcome to this Q1 presentation from Dustin Group. As you heard, my name is Johan Karlsson, I'm the CEO and with me in the room is also Julia Lagerqvist, CFO and also Fredrik Setterström, Head of IR. But let's kick it off and move to slide two and Dustin at a glance. So Dustin is an IT reseller with its base in IT hardware and software products. And as you can see in the graph up to the left, 82% of sales is IT hardware and 18% is software and services. Software and services in the last years become a larger share of total sales and hence increasing in importance. Our assortment is primarily sold online and 60% of sales go through the online platform. The share in the Nordics is about 80% and in the Benelux the share is lower. However, as you know, we have recently launched our online sales model and the new IT platform in the Benelux. And the aim is that we move to similar share as in the Nordics in the coming years. We're present in six markets in Europe with our main markets being the Netherlands and Sweden. And as you can see, our key customer focus is business to business representing 98% of our sales. With that short introduction to Dustin, let's move to the quarter on slide three. As in the last quarter, sales was affected by a weak market with continued general cautiousness by the customers in many of our customer groups. Further to that, the implementation of a new IT platform in the Benelux affected sales in the quarter. Sales in the quarter was 4,782,000,000 or 17.5% below last year. In SMB, organic growth was negative 8.2, while LCP was down by 19.5%. LCP was mainly affected by restrictions in public sector budgets in some of our markets and by the implementation of the new IT platform in Benelux. Gross profit at 683 was down by 205 million or 24%, while gross margin ended at 14.3, down from last year's 15.3, but up from Q4's 12.9. A shift in the product mix in LCP and new public contracts in LCP had negative effects on gross margin while the gross margin in SMB remained stable. Adjusted EBITDA at 21 million compared to last year's 192 with an EBITDA margin down from last year's 3.3 to 0.4 mainly as a result of the lower volumes in both SMB and LCP. Items affecting comparability was at 10 million compared to last year's 17 million and was mainly related to the changes in the organization. EBIT was at negative 52 million compared to last year's 129. Cash flow from operating activities ended at negative 42 million compared to last year's 250, mainly coming from low business result and higher working capital. Leverage ended at 5.4 compared to last year's 4.0, with the main effect being the lower business result. Some of the highlights from the quarter were that we introduced changes in the organization to realign cost and create efficiency. And the work there has carried on in line with what we have planned for to give a saving of 150 to 200 million. And that the other item from the quarter would be the implementation of the shared IT platform in the bandlags that will generate efficiency gains going forward. Move to slide four and look at sales performance, broken down a little bit more in detail. So we can see that the continued cuts in public spending, primarily in Finland, and lower demand among our larger companies due to postponed investment decisions impacted sales within LCP by roughly 400 million. Challenges in the implementation of the new IT platform impacted sales with roughly the same amount or 400 million for the quarter. The negative effect of the new IT platform decreased throughout the quarter, as you can see in the graph, and sales picked up at the end when a large part of the backlog was shipped and invoiced. The challenges experienced have been addressed and no significant operational impact is expected in the second quarter. In SMB, we saw continued cautious market where investment decisions were impacted by cost-cutting measures and thus delaying investment decisions. Now we will have a look at the result effect coming from these sales in the quarter. Julia, we'll take you through that.

Thank you, Johan. Yes, building on the volume update we saw, we look at page 5, what is driving this weak adjusted EBITDA development in the quarter compared to last year. Last year, we had an adjusted EBITDA of 192 million SEK. As Johan said, SMB has still been affected by a cautious market with lower volumes, and this impacted the result by minus 28 million SEK compared to last year. But the biggest impact comes from the lower LCP volumes, minus 107 million SEK due to the large drop in sales versus last year, as Johan talked about. The challenges from the IT platform implementation accounted for roughly half of the drop, while market challenges with monetary cuts and postponed investments accounted for the other half. We also saw a negative gross margin development in LCP due to larger share of sales with new framework agreements with initially lower margin, as we saw in the previous quarter, and also an unfavorable product mix, which had a negative impact on industry data. This was somewhat offset by overall SG&A declining slightly, with cost savings more than compensated for cost inflation and temporary costs related to the IT platform implementation. All in all, this led to a total drop of 171 million SEC in adjusted EBITDA versus last year, down to 21 million SEC in Q1. The work with implementing the new organization and further efficiency measures is, as Johan said, going according to plan. It's expected to have some positive impact in Q2 and then further impact in Q3 in the coming quarters. Majority of the estimated cost associated with the reorganization is expected to be taken in Q2. We then move to the overview of the SMB segment on page six, where sales landed at 1.5 billion SEK, minus 1.2% versus last year. The organic growth was minus 8.2%. As already mentioned, the continued economic uncertainty is still affecting demand in all markets. As in previous quarters, we saw low demand for computer and mobile phones, while the share of software and services sales increased somewhat due to positive trend for contracted recurring services in the Nordics. Gross margin was stable in the quarter, supported by continued price discipline. However, the lower sales volume led to lower segment result, even though it was somewhat protected by slightly lower cost base, which also supported segment margin. All in all, the segment margin ended at 3.2% compared to 3.6% last year. The total segment result was at 50 million compared to last year's 61 million. This is still an improvement versus the previous quarter, both on result and margin. Going to page seven, we look at the LCP segment. The sales in LCP was 3.2 billion SEK in the quarter, down 20.9% year-on-year, and organic growth was minus 19.5%. As already shared, the sales was impacted by continued budgetary cuts affecting public customers. This impacted mainly Finland. Postponed investment decisions affecting demand and challenges with the implementation of the IT platform impacted mainly the Benelux. On the opposite, we saw positive sales performance in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And overall, we still see a large volatility in sales between quarters. The low volumes obviously had a large impact on gross profits. And in addition, gross margin dropped, driven by, as said, a high share of new framework agreements with initially lower margin and a negative product mix that had a very negative impact on the result. We also had some increased costs related to the implementation of the new IT platform, but overall total cost declined somewhat due to already implemented efficiency measures. We continue to see an increase in take-back, which had a positive impact on margin and EBITDA. Johan will come back to this later in the presentation. Overall, this led to a segment result of 11 million SEK versus 162 million SEK last year, and margin ended at 0.3% compared to 4.0% last year. Moving on to the cash flow in CapEx on slide eight, we see that the cash flow for the period was minus 104 million SEK. Looking at details, we see that the cash flow from operating activities before change in working capital was plus 20 million SEK compared to last year's 108 million SEK. The difference is mainly driven by the lower operational results. Cash flow from change in net working capital was minus 62 million SEK compared to last year's plus 142 million SEK. mainly affected by lower than expected sales and the timing of sales. We'll look more at networked capital on the next slide. In total, operating cash flow was minus 42 million for the quarter. Cash flow from investing activities was minus 45 million compared to minus 70 million last year. More on this in just a few seconds. And the cash flow from financing activities was minus 62 million compared to minus 51 million last year. Moving to CapEx, the total investment in the quarter was 73 million, of which 45 then affected cash flow. This was lower than the previous year. The majority of the 45 million in CapEx was related to IT development, mainly the new common platform. However, lower in this quarter than previous quarters as we've now gone live with the first part. Investment in tangible and intangible assets was 29 million this year, of which only 16 million affected cash flow. The non-cash items are mainly lease contracts. Investments related to services were 16 million compared to 24 million last year, mainly linked to harmonization of data centers, none of it affecting cash flow. If we go to page nine, we looked at the network and capital developments. Network and capital landed at 267 million SEK, which was higher than both last year at minus 261 million and also an increase versus the previous quarter, which was 170 million. This is far above our targeted level and mainly driven by two things. We had higher inventory levels due to lower sales than expected in the Benelux. We do expect inventory to come down to a more balanced and normalized level in the coming quarter, still able to deliver on our service levels. Account receivables increased mainly due to a high level of sales at the end of the quarter. Account payable was fairly flat, while other payables increased due to goods received but not invoiced yet from it. Overall, we had high net working capital, driven then to a large extent by the implementation of the new IT platform in Benelux. And we do expect it to come down in the coming quarter. I said before, we always have some timing effects in the new quarters, but our long-term target for net working capital remains to be around minus 100 million. If you look at our leverage, we landed at high 5.4 in the quarter, driven mainly by the poor EBITDA development, but also the high net working capital. Had we been at our target level for net running capital, leverage would have been at around 4.8. We have a continued ongoing good dialogue with our banks. And during the quarter, we adjusted the financial terms of the bank agreement to reflect the current market conditions. And with that, I hand back the word to you, Juan.

Yes, and then let's move to slide 10 and have a look at the circularity offering in take back. Our offering in circularity continues to deliver strong growth. and we're currently on approximately 1.2 million units of take-back on a yearly basis. Our two take-back centers in Sweden and Netherlands operate with better and better efficiency as the volumes are increasing. We see strong demand from customers and the offerings give us advantages primarily in public tenders. The high volumes have also resulted in better efficiency and positive operating margin in recent quarters. Next steps will be to sell refurbished products online and add more value-added offerings around circularity. In this development, we see LCP customers leading the way with their own sustainability agendas and therefore strong demands. And we believe that Dustin is well-equipped to take care of the larger customer's demand in this area. With that said, we're moving to slide 11 and the summary of the quarter. In summary, Q1 was a challenging quarter where declining sales coming from a continued cautious market and the implementation of a new IT platform affected the result. Gross margins were down from 15.3 to 14.3, mainly due to the product mix in LCP and high share of new frame agreements. In SMB, gross margins remained at last year's levels. EBITDA margin of 0.4 was down from last year's 3.3, mainly as a result of the low sales volumes in both SMB and LCP and the weaker gross margin in LCP. Some of the highlights from the quarter were the organization changes and efficiency measures are developing in line with plan and expected to reduce cost by 150 to 200 million annually and make Dustin stronger to meet future market recovery. The implementation of the shared IT platform in Benelux will lead us to improved efficiency and customer experience. After some initial challenges, no significant operational impact is expected in the second quarter. Despite the tough market currently, we, together with leading market institutes, believe that the market in 2025 will come back to growth, fueled by the underlying demand factors such as AIPCs, post-pandemic replacement cycles and the phasing out of Windows 10. And with that, we conclude the formal part of the presentation and open up for Q&A.

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. The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.

Hello, Johan. Hello, Julia. Good morning. Good morning. Two questions from me, if I may. Hi. So I was wondering around the implication on your business from Microsoft changes in the incentives program from January 1st 2025 where it looks like they will do a cut back on commissions for traditional enterprise license agreements to promote sort of more cloud and security solutions so on your roughly 20% sales from software and services how do you think this will impact your business and will this be a potential drag on the margins this year

We don't believe that it will be a drag on the margin. It will, however, require change in how we address customers, which we have known for a long time and has actually initiated these changes along the way. So we don't believe it has any significant impact on the ability to make margin. And it's definitely in line with what we are already doing.

All right, thank you. And on the build-up in inventory levels here, mainly in Netherlands, should we expect a large outflow here in Q2, or how should we think of the working capital in near term?

I mean, as I said, we do expect it to return to a more normalized level already in Q2. This was a bit of a hiccup in this current quarter, also with inventory levels as Obviously, we buy inventory a little bit ahead of time, and then the sales didn't come in as expected.

All right. And then just a last one from me on the refurbished online sales. That is the next step. You said, what kind of margin do you have on this refurbished sales? for example, PC sales, and will you pre-install them with Windows 11 before it's shipped, or what's the demand for refurbished PCs, you think?

I think we do that business in kind of different, you can do it in different ways. So we do part of it, we buy it back and we sell it through brokers, basically just sell it, and we just clean them up and refurbish them a little bit to get a better price. And then we have other customers where we are doing a more continuous, let's say, prolonging the lifetime of a PC together with one customer. And then the fleet of the PCs are staying with that customer, but for a longer time. And then we address that with, let's say, either we change parts within the PC in order to make lifetime longer, or we We take them back and clean them and give them to a new user in the same company. So it's a little bit different how in the different formats. And in general, I would say the margin in percent is significantly higher than on a PC. But of course, the value of the PC is much lower. So the earning per PC, I would say, is about the same as if you would do a new one. And that's our aim, actually, to be there.

All right. Thank you very much for that. I'll jump back in line. Thank you.

The next question comes from Mikael Lassin from Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Okay. Good morning. Hi. Can you explain first of all what went wrong with the ERP implementation and what actions have been taken to resolve these issues and where do you expect to recover some of the lost sales during Q2?

Yeah, I think we have to start by saying that replacing the full ERP platform in a major country is quite a complex project. And I don't think you will, nothing has to go totally wrong in order to see impact from that. But if you look at some things that we could have done I think in a better way, it would be to do more training of the users, because what is actually happening is that the system as such works relatively well, but all the ways of working have changed for all our employees. And there we had some initial challenges. This has been addressed during the quarter, and it was good to see, and as you could see in the presentation, that November numbers were significantly better than October, for example. we are quite positive on on the development of of how the employees are able to use the system going forward and therefore we we say that we don't see any significant impact coming from the implementation of platform going forward now the question of how much of the volume that we let's say dropped in Q1 will move to Q2? That's a very difficult question and we don't really have a good answer to that. We will of course try to pick up as much as possible of that, but to give you a number on that is really hard.

Yeah, of course. So the underlying growth in the LCP side, that's more 10%, minus 10% roughly. And you don't see any...

major changes or no i i think that's that that's a good i think exactly that is my thinking as well is that the 10 is more in in what we have seen the volatility between the quarters previously coming coming and going uh and i i see the similar situation now so no big change in that actually compare except for implementation of erp okay

And in terms of market share in the LCP space, how do you see that developing in Q1 and going forward? Have you lost any market share and so on?

I think if you take Q1 alone, yes, we would have lost market share. If you would take it, which is almost impossible to take just one quarter. So if you would take it on a more rolling 12 month, I think we have... In the last 12 months, probably lost a little bit, but over the last two years, not. I think we are on a pretty stable base at the moment, with a bit of losing some public contracts, but also gaining quite a few in the last year, as you know.

Yeah, okay. Got it. And also, I'm curious about the cost allocation between LCP and the SMB segments. if you can clarify that, how that works, and also how we should think about central functions cost ahead, which was quite high in Q1.

If you start with the central cost, this is quite high because we took some of the implementation costs for ERP here, and there was also some adjustments in the historic numbers there. Allocation between SMB and LCP of central cost in general is based on the keys depending on how we see that they are driving the business, basically. I don't know if you want to add anything you want.

Okay, so that could actually change on a quarterly basis, or is it exactly the same every quarter?

It depends on what kind of cost we talk about, because most of the costs are direct, so should not have any, let's say, if SMB is using marketing, they are taking that marketing cost and nothing will go to LCP. And the same goes with people they are to a very high extent dedicated to one of the segments. So there will be no, let's say, volatility on that. But there are a few where we are using a common, let's say, back office where we share cost. And there the cost will change a little bit between the quarters depending how the business develops. But shouldn't have no significant impact.

Okay. Okay. And the margin on the SMB side of around 3%, I think. Is that a fair assumption going forward, given the mix you had? Or was it anything unusually positive or negative in the mix or other things in this quarter?

I think we had a little bit less marketing in this quarter in SMB than we would have had in a normal situation. But apart from that, I think SMB, you know, the SMB margins, we can generate better margin than that, of course, if the volumes are more at where we want them to be.

And the long term target for SMB is obviously to be at the second bottom six and a half. So we do think that there is further possibility to improve.

OK, thank you.

Thanks.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Thomas Nilsson from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Thomas Nilsson, Nordea University Okay, thank you for taking my question. With NETSTEP to EBITDA now at 5.4 times, how do you plan to reduce leverage and what timeline do you foresee for achieving the target range of two to three times leverage?

I think you can look at the work that we're doing to reduce leverage in two dimensions. The first one being the working capital, where we are addressing that as we speak, and we believe much of it will actually come back during Q2 at the latest in Q3, but I would say relatively short term. If it takes the business result, there we are doing... You could say we're doing two things there in the sense that first we are reducing the cost base because that's what we can do until the market actually returns. We can also prepare ourselves for being ready for the increased demand in the market by introducing the IT platform in the Benelux by changing the organization to be better equipped for rebound of the market. So we're doing cost cuts in waiting for, let's say, the market to come back. But we're also preparing for a better demand coming later on this year.

Okay. And do you have any timeline for achieving a target range of two to three times leverage?

I mean, it is quite hard to predict that, but obviously it will not be in the next quarter. So you would have to look at it more from a kind of a four to six quarters going.

Four to six quarters?

Yeah, I would make an estimate that that would be the range to look at.

Okay. You said you also adjusted the covenants with the banks. Could you talk about what the banks are saying with leverage being high and in my model probably remaining high for a few more quarters and what the covenants look like and will you be needing more capital from shareholders?

I mean, what we can do, we have a constant dialogue with all our banks and that's something that happens all the time and obviously also now. And what we discussed with them is, of course, to continue to improve, to get the chance to improve the result, because we believe that there is a great potential in industry and we can do much better results than what we're doing at the moment. Again, back to what we can do on that is that we are now reducing cost base and make ourselves ready for a better demand situation. And these two things will be the ones that are actually resolving the debt situation or the leverage situation.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

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

Okay. Thank you very much for listening to the Dustin Quarterly Report, and we wish you a really great day. Thank you very much.