VNV Global AB (publ)

All right. Thank you. And welcome to the Global Third Quarter 2024 Report conference call. On the call today, we have Per Briljot, CEO, Dennis Mohamed, who's part of our investment team, and myself, Björn von Sievers, CFO of the company. As per usual, Per will start with a summary of the developments, followed by an overview of the more meaningful portfolio constituents. After that, we will open up for a Q&A. And as a reminder, if you want to ask a question, please use the Q&A function here on Zoom, and we'll try to address those towards the end. With that, I'll hand over to Per to start with the intro.

Thanks, Bjorn. And so, yeah, this quarter, our NAV is down a bit, some 4% in US dollars to $575 million. That downtick is a reflection pretty much only of us writing down, marking down a blah, blah car on the back of... Basically, French politics. And I'll come back to some more details around that when we cover BlaBlaCar. But the rest of the portfolio is pretty much unchanged. So that's the bulk of this 4% downtick in the NAV per share. um and um i mean we invest into tech companies and as we all know um the the tech market has been tough for a couple years and uh but but but really i really sense that there is some some signs of life and i mean i'm humble about that if you look at my share price it doesn't look that way but But when we look inside the portfolio and what we see, there's really some more activity. I mean, I'll come back to it more, but there's a bunch of companies in our portfolio that have raised money successfully, i.e. at our mark or even higher. And then we've taken them up in the NAV, so there's some upticks like that. And that's something that wasn't really present, if you say, a year ago. And also on the sort of similar note, As you know, a lot of the focus of our work over this past year and more really has been to sort of raise cash out of the portfolio. So we did sell that Booksy assets to Verdane for, well, including a small earn up like $55 million. We have signed to sell Get. We expect that to close later this year. I'll come back to that a little bit as well for a total of 83. And as we announced in this report, we've had exits of another $10 million. And those are a couple of smaller names, and I'm not at liberty to go into which ones they are, but... That process continues. So it's just shy of $150 million, which we have and are primarily using to pay down the debt that we have. But it also renders us, upon the closing of GET, into a positive net cash position. which we then can start to sort of use in investing. But pretty much all of these have been done around NAV, some a little bit below, some above. And that's another reflection that I think the market we're in is starting to sort of really sort of function again although one has to be humble when it comes back into full swing importantly to be able to decide your own fate it's important to have staying power and one critical part Guys, I think you need to mute. One critical part of staying power is that the portfolio doesn't crave a lot of cash. And as we've sort of been consistently showing over the course of this year, is that the portfolio is now three quarters of it is EBITDA positive. The reason why we don't highlight Voya is that, yes, it is EBITDA positive, but it really should be EBIT positive. Now, Voya, we'll come back to that, has raised the industry first ever portfolio. public bond, which covers the funding. which is a huge step, both for Voi, but the industry at large as well. So all very good. And so I think that captures sort of a broad overview at this sort of whole coal level and what makes us excited. So with that, I'll hand over back to Björn to talk a little bit about the numbers.

Thank you, Per. And per usual, I thought I'd go through the balance sheet and the key movers during the quarter to start. And looking at the balance sheet from the top, we have investments in financial assets of approximately $650 million or 50 crowns per share. Cash and cash equivalent of $11.9 million as per end of third quarter, giving us a total portfolio of $662 million. Add to that our outstanding debt and other liabilities, we end up at $575 million NAV. or 44 crowns per share. That NAV is, of course, as Per mentioned, down 4.3% during the quarter in dollar terms, and in SEC terms, 9% given the movements in the US SEC movements during the quarter. If we flick to the next slide, I'll just walk through the top names of the portfolio and what's driving the change during the quarter. The main and essentially only significant movement is relating to BlaBlaCar. It's down 20% during the quarter. And as a reminder, and as we note in the report, the bloodlocker valuation is derived from a sum of the parts valuation model that we further find during the quarter that now values the bus marketplace business lines, including Obliette, separate to the CTC ride sharing marketplace and the operated bus business. The family change of the quarter is driven, as Per also notes in the report, by a more conservative short-term outlook on the financial contribution from these energy savings certificates in France, but also lower peer multiples in general. The Blabla composition represents approximately 17.7 crowns per share, or 40% of the NAV as per the end of the third quarter. Get is flat during the quarter, still valued on the ongoing transaction with Pango that we expect to close during the second half of this year. Get represents 6.4 crowns per share as per September 30th. And finally, if we go to the top three void, also flat during the quarter from a valuation perspective, as it's still based on the transaction, the primary transaction that closed during the first quarter of 2024. This adds another 6.2 grams per share as per September 30th. And adding this together, you have a contribution of some 30 grams per share, or just below 70% of the total NAV. Also worth noting, again, that after September 30th, cash-to-cash equivalents amounted to $11.9 million. But after the end of the quarter and the reporting period, we've added another approximately $10 million to that cash balance, following exits in a number of the company's smaller holdings. Another point worth highlighting on this slide is that during the quarter, most of you might have read that we placed a new CEC 850 million bond to refinance the existing bond that were due January 2025. This new bond settled after the end of the quarter. And later this week, we will also close the settlement of the early redemption of the previous 2022-25 bond. I'll stop there and hand it back to Per to go through some of the portfolio holdings in more detail. And then again, later on, we will move to the Q&A.

And I guess this slide just is an illustration of what Björn just said. So I'll flick on. And yeah, the portfolio looks like this. It's very similar to what you've seen for a while now. And we'll go into a little bit more detail into the larger holdings. But in general, as I alluded to before, this good activity uh you know overall um so boy did this bond i will come back to that uh uh which is the first industry uh uh public market bonus and sort of so which i mean all around positive for that but but something that wasn't possible a year ago hungry panda which yeah does show up here so two percent of the portfolio raised 55 million dollars from mars Flow, which is also in our portfolio, the world's largest period tracker, has raised 200 million dollars from General Atlantic at a billion dollar valuation so big transaction that and leaving a lot of upside and very interesting to follow that company it doesn't show up among the largest ones here but we think it has the potential to in the future no traffic the Israeli company that's sort of in traffic light sort of product that they sell in the U S, uh, is, um, did around, I was, I think like double from where we had previously marked. And, um, so, so also a good sort of, um, good uptick. So in general, that, that kind of activity is very, very strong. But, um, if we go into the, uh, to, uh, to touch upon some of the larger constituents, um, first and foremost, blah, blah car. So, uh, here to try to give you a little bit more detail around this French politics and how that affects this company. So the downgrade is, as Bjorn said, mostly at least due to uncertainty around this income stream that they have, which is related to energy saving certificates. And these energy saving certificates is broadly something that if you can prove up that you're four in the car instead of one, and that's a sort of a cumbersome, you have to sort of fill in documents, et cetera, then you're issued energy saving certificates that you can then sell in a market. It's a big market. And blah, blah, car is a small player in that market. And then that sort of becomes revenue and earnings for them. But also they share some of that with the passengers. and to incentivize them to go through the motions of filling these forms. I mean, some of you, I'm sure, have used this in France, and so it's a well-known sort of broad product. And this sort of concept is an EU broad thing, but in terms of transportation, it's only really active in France today. And But despite being an EU broad product, it is based on a French law. And that law is in the process of being renewed. But in order for the new law to come into force, you need a signature by government. And of course, I'm sure you've followed that policy. After these EU elections that we had in the summer, the French president called for new parliamentary elections, and that parliamentary election gave no one really sort of majority. So it's been really, taken a really tough, long time and a tough time to form a new government in France. Now, without a new government, you can't sort of, you can't, for example, sign laws. And quite recently, as I'm, Maybe you follow. We do. There's been a new government. A new government has been appointed. And that very young government with a with a frail sort of support in the parliament. First and very important sort of task is to is to get a budget for 2025 passed. And after that, I assume things to start to go back to normal. Now, I'm not an expert on this, but that's our assumption. And with that, then this law will come back into practice. This new law will be passed and signed and we can move into sort of getting these energy saving certificates going again. But without the law, there is no income from these sort of energy saving certificates. And that has a dent on 2024. And so... So essentially that's what's sort of becoming an effect on our valuation. We expected to come back. It's a very popular product. It's popular across all the political camps. So it's just very unfortunate and unlucky, really, that these elections and that it took so long to sort of put together a new government. But we don't expect it to be an issue. So we... for it to come back. So popular among voters and hence popular among all political parties. And we've modeled it to return in 2025. We've modeled it to return at a slightly lower level than we saw in 2023. 2024 has become a very strange year. 2023 was an exceptionally sort of strong year. And so we've modeled it to come back a little bit lower. And we've also put a big discount on this to sort of reflect the uncertainty that's still present. And that's what you see in this downgrade. So I think everyone around the table doesn't... isn't really worried that it won't come back. And I think it's fairly accurate that things will start to go back to normal once the new government has passed this budget for 2025, which obviously we're in the end of 24, needs to happen now, will happen now, and then things are back to normal. So I'm sure there's, you know, you're all wondering there's loads of details around this, so we're not at liberty to share everything. But I think that should give you sort of at least a broad Sort of description of what's been going on here. Outside of that, at BlaBlaCar, things are doing well. I mean, things are, Europe is fine. And its presence in emerging markets is killing it. So there we have growth of hundreds of percent. And the company is also getting ready to monetize many of these emerging markets, which, of course, is the big driver of future sort of revenue here that new markets are getting monetized. And beyond that, of course, new products that are being launched, etc. the other big event of recent days is that they have... So they announced earlier that they had acquired the Turkish bus marketplace called Obilet. Now they have approval. They were waiting for approval from the antitrust in Turkey on that. That's been received. So we expect that to close imminently and we're very excited about that deal. Turkey has... You follow Turkey, you've seen the company sort of shift really strongly from quite odd economic policies, if one may, to now very conservative ones. And hence the currency has come back and the stock market has come back, etc. So the place is in a much better economic sense. And this... again without being able to go into sort of full details we feel that this acquisition has been it's very value accretive as a standalone acquisition but also synergetic bus marketplaces provide a lot of synergies with blabla cars existing car businesses something that we've seen in other emerging markets so so we're very enthusiastic about that the company has used cash to buy it, so it's not dilutive. It's dilutive a little bit, but mostly cash. And so this adds a lot of value to the company. We're very excited. And yes, on these energy savings certificates, I think I did mention, but in case I didn't, I'll repeat it, that this is now, I mean, we expect it to come back in France, but we also expect it to be launched in other European countries. And hence, if it's like a one country thing, it's difficult maybe for financial analysts to put a lot of value on it. But my view is that once we see it now being launched in several other markets, then it becomes like a product or a business line. So we're very excited about that too. And that's completely new revenues that will benefit the company. So, sorry, long winding sort of discussion here around BlaBlaCar. We can come back to it if you have any more questions later on. But if we continue to the others, get... So company-wise, if we handle that first, this company is doing well. It's been for a while now back to levels which we saw before October 7th, 2023, so pre-war. And it's performing along to where we're expecting it to perform, which is obviously profitable, cash generative, etc., and we're waiting for the Israeli antitrust to give their approval. We have been in discussions with them, and they don't give any sort of reason for concern that this transaction won't be approved. This is Pango, which is the acquirer. It's a parking app. there's a parking app buying an uber ride healing kind of business model in get and so not to i mean two different businesses so hence not affecting competition in one or the other which is which is what they're to decide upon but they're two large brands in in in the country with lots of customers so they have asked for and received a lot of data and this data is being analyzed And so it's been taking longer than we expected, partly also due to the fact that the antitrust department has a large part of their staff, which has been drafted to the army. So they're behind on staffing and hence everything takes a little bit longer. We still expect this to close during the second half of 2024. And as the country comes out of their holiday period now, we expect things to speed up. But it's not certain. We're not certain of the exact timeline, but that's our expectation. Now, as Björn mentioned, we have... refinanced the bond with a new bond that that has we really see as a bridge to this exit and and that it has sort of for bond markets unusual sort of attributes in that we can we can call it immediately upon receiving the proceeds from the get transaction so so it gives us more flexibility it should just drag on a little bit more and we're happy with that so that so that we won't come under stress. With that, I'd like to hand over to Dennis, my colleague Dennis, to update us on VOI. Thank you, Per.

Update Envoy is that the company is doing really great. Looking at Q3, the company has generated over $13.5 million in adjusted EBITDA year-to-date. That's adjusted for non-cash and some one-offs. And we expect the company to generate positive EBIT for the first full year in 2025. In Q3, the company also won an additional tender in Le Havre, in France. This is a four-year contract, and Voi will be the exclusive operator of both e-scooters and e-bikes in the city. And we're very happy about this, and this confirms the general trends that we are seeing, both that Voi is continuing to win tenders, but also that that the contract lengths are increasing, which creates more certainty for companies such as Voi. After a quarter close, as Paris already mentioned, Voi announced that it had also secured a 50 million euro bond. It's a four-year duration paper with a 6.75% spread on Euribor. As Paris really mentioned, this funding is first of its kind and is very good news for Voi. Not only is it part of a broader 125 million euro framework, It also means they can fund future CapEx investments with debt rather than equity for several years out. And this is truly going to be a game changer in the industry, we believe. I also thought I'd show you the next slide, if you will, Per, which shows the VoIP financial performance and probably one of the enablers of the bond for the last couple of years. If you start on the leftmost graph, we can see that even though the fleet size, which is the blue line, is flat or even down, actually, you can see that the fleet was roughly 93,000 vehicles in 2022. Year-to-date, now it's 92,000 vehicles. Revenue has continued to increase. And this, I think, is a good indication of same-store sales being up. So there's ample demand for the service. So despite having a smaller fleet, Voi has managed to continue growing on top line. If we then look at the vehicle profit margins, so the mid-most graph, this is essentially a proxy for gross profits. This has increased from a roughly 30%, 31% margin in 2020 to a 57% margin year to date September 2024. This is an impressive improvement driven both by better operations, but also better vehicles as the vehicles have improved from generation to generation. And all of this combined with the reduced overheads on the central level has rendered the company EBITDA profitable, which is the rightmost graph to the order of 12% margin year to date in 2024. And as I said, we expect the company to be EBIT profitable for the full year next year. The company has been EBIT profitable for several months in 2024. But coming into 2025, we believe with both the added growth through the vehicle CapEx, which will now be funded through the bond, but also continued improved margins, the company is set up to be fully profitable. I think that's all I had on Voi. Thank you.

Thanks, Dennis. Very exciting voice development now. And as I alluded to in the intro to the report, I really think there's upside to the mark we're carrying at the last transaction, which I think is quickly going stale with these developments and also the funding security that they have assured themselves. um housing runner is just the next in line in terms of size there's not so much to update you on here the company is growing um hand on the heart i would sort of feel it should grow a little bit more um there are so that's one thing and that's being addressed uh and uh and the other thing is that there's some consolidation happening in this amongst the amongst the players in europe here which which is uh housing anywhere is the largest they have been in part of the consolidation especially buying their competition in in holland and camera net but also their biggest competitor in france called pseudopark but and and so housing anywhere well equipped to sort of be the consolidator of the sector going forward which is which will be very exciting um and newman's back to you dennis you worked on newman

Thank you. Yes. So just as a reminder, Newman is an online health clinic focusing on men's health issues. That has primarily been around erectile dysfunction, hair loss. But in the last probably 12 to 24 months, focus has also been on weight loss. The company is doing very well, currently growing well over 100 percent year over year. whilst being EBITDA profitable. They will close the year EBITDA profitable this year. And a lot of that is driven by the weight loss vertical performing very strongly. We're carrying it flat over this quarter in terms of valuation. Behind this, we saw that the peers traded down somewhat, but the revenue projections for Newman's were up looking at 24. And we also expect quite significant growth in the coming 12 months for this company.

Thanks. Next up is Breadfast. Björn, do you want to take us through Breadfast?

Yes. As a reminder, Breadfast is Egypt's leading online grocery brand that delivers under 60 minutes. The company offers more than 5,000 SKUs and delivers some 500,000 orders to over 150K users on a monthly basis. As you see on the graph here, the gross revenue development has been very, very good over the last couple of years, growing very, very fast. Of course, you need to have in mind that the Egyptian pound has devalued a lot during the same period. Same period, but even in dollar terms, the growth is very, very healthy. The company closed the new founding round earlier this year in Q2. And as per end of September, V&V values its 8% ownership based on this transaction. If we move to the next company and the last, which we thought we'd go through, BokaDirect. I'll just say a few words as well. So BokaDirect is Sweden's leading health and beauty platform for merchants and consumers. They have... 13,000 merchants or so connected and 2 million monthly active users. So very, very dominant. This company has been around for a long time. Similar to Hemnet, the product suite has... not been up to speed since a few years ago but since we've invested a few years before that the company is doing a lot of improvements in the product suite and their entire offering and I guess complexity of its platform so the company has continued to grow well and it's also profitable. VNV owns some 15% of the company and values this on EV revenue multiple orders. And with that, I thought that I hand over back to Per before we go into the Q&A.

Yeah, Q&A is what we'd like to do now. And yes, Björn said before, I think you punch in, you type in your questions into the questions and answer function there in Zoom. And then Björn will moderate and we'll all chip in to sort of try to help answer your questions.

And also we received a few questions on BlaBlaCar, not surprisingly. So one question, or I guess two questions in one here. So first question, is the company still EBITDA positive despite the volatility in the stock? energy savings certificate in France and on that new French law do we think that it will be the same as the previous one or are we expecting differences and if so what kind of differences?

Yeah, so yes, it's still going to be a bit positive. And even in 2024, when this sort of revenue stream has been absent for a large chunk of the year, really. So the underlying profitability is still sort of strong um and uh the law um we we we expect it so so so the um there's been some volatility in this sort of income stream over the years so um 2023 was a real bumper year uh part to due to a lot of technicalities that gave sort of an extra boost. 2024, when we started the year, was lower than 2023. And the way we've modeled it is that we expect 2025 to be lower than 2024 or how we expected 2024 to look like. but obviously better than 2024 compared to how it turned out. And importantly, we also feel that a new law being put in place is going to provide much more stability and also an element of being present for the long term, which is good, I think, if there's no date. But if this company is to go public, we think that a recently tested revenue streams through a law that was taken down and put back on, I think it's a benefit. Furthermore, I think also that other countries in the EU sort of starting to use the same sort of mechanism for transport and it's also going to sort of make this sort of revenue stream from one country good thing into sort of more general sort of business line as you see it present in other countries too. So yeah, I hope that answers that question.

Thank you. And then another question here around potential buybacks and what we do if and when NIF get closest. So the question goes like, will you call the entire bond before pursuing buybacks? Seems like buybacks will be limited if the entire bond is called, if only get this sold and no further exits are completed.

Yeah, so... So buybacks is close to heart, as you know, having bought back like $750 million over the past sort of 10 years. And we need to be beyond the current state of indebtedness, at least, for buybacks to sort of resume because of covenant levels and such, just a limitation of us distributing cash back to shareholders, which is essentially what these buybacks are. um but um i think the the very simple sort of description is yeah they'll get pay back the bond and uh then be ready for new investments and very difficult to find any new investments that's better than buying back our own stock when it when it trades like it does and of course we'll have to see where it trades and lots of things that lots of things um uh at play here um but uh Yeah, we're eager to sort of get back into sort of making use of investing into our own stock price as we have over the years. And the size of that, yeah, I mean, we can't buy back all the shares. We don't have money for that. And so there is a limitation, of course. What I should say, though, is that, as you saw, we're continuing to sort of exit stuff in the portfolio that we think is – not to exit just to sort of exit, but exit things that are natural for us to exit. So not selling at any price and not selling any asset, but sort of refining the portfolio and selling stuff that's around NAV. And these last exits were higher than where we had them booked in the last quarter. so so good in that way uh and uh and there's still some um processes ongoing around exits so that will raise our that you know should those be executed that will raise our capacity to to uh to do new investments including buying back our own stock so it's difficult to say it's difficult to say yeah it'll be 10 million bucks or it'll be 20 or it'll be five um but um That's sort of a broad description of the thinking, which is what I think the way it has to be approached at this stage.

Thank you. And then I'll take two small questions here. One is regarding the small assets you sold post end of the quarter. Can you confirm that they were sold at approximately NAV? And yes, I can confirm that it's sold at approximately NAV as per the third quarter. So those exits are essentially NAV neutral compared to the Q3 report. The other question on a similar note is that, have you updated your estimated value on the Flow Palta investment in your portfolio after the $200 million funding round in Flow? And on that, I can also confirm that we have. The effect is shown in the note package, note three, if you want to go into those tables. And following up from them, perhaps a question related to VOI here. Dennis, perhaps you can take this. Could you elaborate and put some color a little bit on how capital intensive VOI is as a business and what kind of return on capital we see over time or in a steady state kind of environment?

Sure, happy to. As you saw in the previous picture that I showed you, the fleet size has obviously fluctuated quite a lot, especially compared 2020 to 2024. So the CapEx investments have been, we haven't been on a steady trajectory there. But if you look a bit more at steady state, I think this is a business that will need in the range roughly between $15 and $25 million on an annual basis in capex. And with the 125 million euro framework of the bond, we think that is well covered there. And I think, did that answer the question or was there more questions there?

Yeah, I think that's a good answer. And then there's another question on blah blah and energy savings certificates outside of France. Do we have visibility on other markets that's potentially adding this? If so, which ones?

So Spain will probably be the next one, or very, very likely the next one, and then be a good contributor to that sort of revenue stream. Not to the level of France first year, but a good contributor. And then, so these energy saving certificates is the way, the most natural way to sort of put a sustainability incentive on transportation. in Europe, but we also see some emerging markets wanting to sort of encourage people to sort of share a car by these sort of mechanisms, but then using sort of carbon credits systems to do this. So we expect this concept, although not technically the same, to be rolled out in their more sort of non-European markets as well.

Thanks. And then another question here. Could you give some color on this energy savings certificate business line of blah, blah, and how significant contributor is that if you look out in the medium term? Yeah.

So it's, I think, a rough and ready way to think about it is that it's sort of 2025, it's sort of a 10% of revenue kind of level. But then that level sort of goes down from there as monetization of new markets and new products sort of come into effect. So it's... Whilst France is the mature market and also sort of the high income market for BlaBlaCar, it has an impact. But going forward, that impact gets reduced depending on how it's rolled out in other markets. But I think that's sort of a broadly right way to think about it.

Thank you. And then perhaps finally, Dennis, if you could add some color on Voi and their debt funding there and how that works into their working capital cycle.

Sure, happy to. Generally speaking, this is a business where you have the CapEx window throughout the fall, T-1, so the year before that you're actually investing into. It's essentially around the end of Q3, beginning of Q4, around this time of year that you make CapEx investments and place the orders. Those payment terms vary a bit, but parts of the funding goes out during the fall and then The remainder typically goes out to the vehicle producers around the time when the vehicles arrive to Europe, which is in Q1 typically or early Q2. From that point onwards, the vehicles hit the streets. The payback period is less than a year on average. So they are sort of be paid back within before end of high season and high season starts in Q2. So the primary funding need here is during the fourth quarter and the first quarter of every given year because of that CapEx window being in the fall. And so in, say, Q3, Voi has, on average, an ample cash balance that is generated from the high season. But with the bond, you have the possibility to have the liquidity needed to make those CapEx investments and invest. And there's also some flexibility, obviously, in terms of potentially buying back the bond, et cetera. I'm not saying that they will, but that's an option that they have should they have too much liquidity. But they could also obviously make investments into CapEx other times of year. But over the past kind of five, six years that this industry has been around, that has been the general trend that we've seen.

Thank you. And with that, I think we've gone through most of the questions or all questions we've received so far. If we missed one, please reach out offline. We're happy to share some more color. And with that, I'll leave it back to Per to finish this off. Thank you everyone for joining.

What I would encourage you to do, which I wrote in the report, and this is back to this asset that we have called Flow. So the CEO of Flow, I was going to say the founder, but he is the founder together with his brother. but Dima Gursky is the current CEO. And, uh, he did an interview, uh, on this podcast by Harry Stebbings. Is that his name? 20 VC. We have a link on it in, in our report. And, uh, I really encourage you to look at it. Even if you're not interested in flow, it's, uh, some very, some very thoughtful sort of, um, discussions there, which, um, It's good, but it also makes you very bullish on flow. So interesting one. Anyway, I'll stop blabbering and hope you have a good end of year. And we'll talk to you early next year in this format. Please feel free to reach out in the meantime, if there's anything we've missed to sort of answer in terms of questions or if you're anything else. Thank you.