Welcome to today's event where we have the pleasure to present MapsPeople. Joining us from the company to help us through today's presentation and answer questions is CEO Morten Brøgger and CFO Christian Læsø. Today's event will cover the topic, the Q3 update, the adjustments of the guidance, and a little bit about your acquisition of Point Consulting. As always, you're very welcome to ask questions in the box down below. During the presentation, we will take the main part of the questions in the end. Do feel free to ask them in Danish also. I will try and translate to the best of my abilities. For now, I will hand the call over to you, Morten. Perfect. Thank you so much, Michael. I'll do this. We'll split the presentation a little bit. Let me take you through some of the highlights, or at least some of the events that we have been going through in Q3, which is normally like a low-activity quarter. People go on vacation. But we had a lot going on in our little company during the third quarter. Some good, some less good. So let's walk everyone through this. Normally, we go through this slide. And I would say the top line, if you compare the growth for this year compared to the growth from 2022 to 2023, you see it's a lot less. That is mainly because in 2023, in the beginning of the year, when our revenue on ARR was a lot lower than it is right now, we did the acquisition of Point Insight, that lifted it up. So that's a little bit of an abnormality there. But what I would focus on is really this year and the improvements over the year and the improvements over the quarter. Q3 for us, as I think I said last quarter, is always a low-activity quarter. Like our partners, our customers, and a lot of other people are on vacation. And it has always been a low-activity quarter for us from a sales point of view. And it was again this quarter. And it was probably a little bit lower than what we had hoped for and planned for. So that is some of the things that we worked in. You could see that some of the capital we raised in the quarter. We also intended to invest some of that into getting a little bit more capacity in bringing more top-of-funnel from demand generation and some sales capacity in. We did that. I would say the growth, as we can see, was only 1% quarter over quarter. The actual growth from sale was a little bit bigger. I'll mention that on the following slide. We had what we call the last abnormal planned churn from some of the large old frame agreement that we forced invoice to the customers last year that we knew had low probability of renewing this year. This was kind of like planned. That took it out. It was fundamentally. I would say we actually sold DKK 2.6 million last year. We had that last planned churn of DKK 2 million going out of it. So sales was a little bit bigger than it looks on the surface here, right? I think the good news is that MapsIndoors, our core product, is still growing nicely. And that is fundamentally where all the growth is coming from. You can see that had like a 4% growth in the quarter. And on a year-to-date basis, it's also growing very nicely. Recognized revenue is tracking as it's supposed to do. And we see like the planned growth in this one. And the EBITDA is also improving a little bit quarter over quarter. And it's now down to a negative of 6.4, which is fundamentally half of a negative EBITDA compared to where it was a year ago. So clearly, the cost initiatives and the growth that we have achieved over the last year is showing its results on the EBITDA. I should probably say that in terms of the recognized revenue, we do have for around DKK 2 million of one-off, I will not repeat, payments that we have received. That is included in this number on a year-to-date basis as well. So that has been helping us on a year-to-date basis. Clearly, going forward, we work very hard on managing our cost. And you all know this, and I think we do it. I will not say that there's more. The gentleman next to me is very good at controlling our cost. Let's just say that one. He's amazing at that. But the fundamental improvements from here on, it has to come from the growth of the top line. That's where we need to see the continued growth in the EBITDA so that we get closer and closer to zero every quarter from now on. Just a few of the highlights. We did, as I hope most know, complete the capital increase in September. That was good. A good chunk of that was to have like a war chest to do some smaller tuck-in M&A acquisitions. We've already managed to do one, and we actually completed it yesterday. As I said on the previous slide, the new ARR bookings was actually a little bit bigger than what you could see. But that's because we had that, I would say, planned churn of these old contracts going out. We do not have any more of those plans. So now we're back to like a normal level. Recognized revenue is up 38% compared to the same quarter last year, just 2% since last quarter because the growth on the AR was not high, but as I also mentioned, the year-to-date revenue of MapsIndoors is 79% higher compared to the same period last year, so it's still the growth driver, and we're executing overall well on that strategy despite a slow Q3, and EBITDA is also 49% better than it was in the same period last year, right? Just going through this one, NRR, which is something that we are focusing a lot on, and the number here is not like super impressive. It was 101% in the quarter based on all the same reasons I just mentioned, so it feels a little bit like I'm repeating myself, but we have managed to grow a lot of the customers fairly well. We did that also last year where we had a lot of our larger renewals in this period, and those we could not grow again. We had some of these planned customers go out. Normalizing for this, it would have been 106% NRR, which is below. I would say our target and our objective is unchanged to have, I would say, an average net revenue retention rate of 110% or above that. That is still our target. We do expect to get back on track with that one. The other key element that we're looking at is our customer acquisition payback period. You see that the rolling 12 months, it went up one month during the quarter. Now it's 16 months, which is a direct result of a low sales activity quarter in the Q3. It is still within the targeted range of 12 to 18 months, and that targeted range will not change and will continue to optimize that going forward. Despite that, we have decided in Q3 to start investing a little bit more money into our demand generation and our sales activity because some of the planned productivity increases from when we reduced it was difficult to reach, and that felt that we were missing some market opportunities. But that will not change this objective that the CAC payback period should be somewhere between 12 and 18 months, and we agree with everyone out there saying 12 is better than 18. That is true, but we're managing it within that framework. Now, these things, and since we are towards the end of the year, we have updated our guidance also yesterday when we went through all this stuff on two of the three guidance. The first one is our annual recurring revenue, which we have changed from a guidance from 72-80 to now a range of 59-63. It's still a growth in the range of 14%-21%, but not as much as we planned. I'll come back to that a little bit later. We will keep our revenue guidance unchanged between 58-63, which still corresponds to a growth of 43%-55% compared to 2023. But we have downgraded our EBITDA guidance from negative 20-25 to negative 26-30. It still constitutes an improvement with this one of more than 50% on the deficit that we made last year. So we're still like tracking very well in the right direction. Let me give you a little bit more details about this one. ARR, we took that down to 59-63. We mentioned that some of the planned productivity increases in our demand generation and sales were struggling, and we reinvested here during Q3. And we do actually already now see a lot of our sales pipeline is growing again. The issue is signing up a new smart building partner for us normally takes somewhere between 6 and 12 months. So that is fundamentally going to help us in 2025 and not help us here in the second half of the year. And despite that, we were very quick. And clearly, we had a pipeline for these tuck-in M&A acquisitions, and we closed the Point Maps acquisition. We'll talk about that a little bit later. We do not expect that there will be any further M&A conclusions in 2024. And as I said before, in the revenue numbers, we had some year-to-date, one-off payments of around DKK 2 million going into that one as well. And that has also helped us a little bit on not having to change the revenue guidance. But it doesn't count in the ARR, right? It doesn't count. That's not included in the ARR. That's one-off. So that's why the ARR is down, but revenue is fundamentally not. On the EBITDA from -20 to -25, so now it's between -26 and -30. The good question is, why are we keeping our revenue unchanged and we are reducing on the EBITDA? There's only one explanation. We are spending a little bit more money than we planned, and this is mainly because of these additional sales and marketing activities we talked about. That's about DKK 1.5 million in the second half of this year. We actually did upgrade a lot of our customers and partners from the old 2D maps into the new 3D high-definition maps, which has another quality. In that, we actually do have a little bit higher cost of sales. That is actually increasing our cost of sales with DKK 1.2 million, not in Q2, in the second half. That is a typo here. Yeah. We think this is actually a really good thing because we can see that growth from our partners who are on the 3D high-definition maps is higher than those who are still on the 2D, and we can see that the retention and thereby is higher and thereby also the lower churn, so this is something that we absolutely think is going to help us on both growth and retention next year, and then we also had to take some losses regarding to some of these old framework agreements, which we forced invoice them last year at this one, so we had to take some of the losses because we can no longer expect to collect them, so these are the things that fundamentally is extra cost that we did not plan to have and why we had to downgrade our EBITDA. But it still is, I would say, okay improvement compared to last year that it's going to end up being at least 50%-57% better than what we achieved last year. Maybe if we could take some question here and maybe talk a little bit about what is one-off and what we would see coming. Of course, the one-off, the DKK 2 million, that's actually a one-off, right? That we will not see again, correct? Correct. Good. And then there's actually a question. Will the conversion of 2D maps increase costs going forward? Is this a new normal that you haven't converted all customers and you want to convert all customers to get the stickiness and so on? So it's also something we should expect. And of course, I guess the marketing spend, of course, is permanently something we should look into also being repeated in 2025. But on the 3D map upgrade there, is that something we should also expect? Yes, it is. And it's a good investment. It doesn't change the fact that our gross margin for a software as a company or platform as a service, right, is still going to be in the high 80s. Yeah. Right? But this is the necessary investment we had to do into the quality. We are still like a visualization layer in all these smart building applications. And it's important that we look better than anything else, right? And that's why we made that investment. And that comes with a bit of cost of sales. And I think the reason why it's DKK 1.2 million more in the second half than we planned is not because it's a surprise that the gross margin is dropping a tiny bit from this one. It's actually because we are ahead of the plan in upgrading some of our customers and partners into this. There's no upselling in this. Is that correctly understood? This is simply being the category leader or what you might say, the best visualization and the best tools out there. That is your investment into that. Yeah, but we are 100% convinced that this is helping us sign more partners and increase our win rates. And it helps our partners win more customers and retain more customers so that they will grow and retain their customers at a better rate. And that will impact our growth as well. And then the last question here, maybe a little bit out of these numbers, but are you then ahead of competition or catching up? I don't know whether it's. That's always never. Yeah, yeah. We're doing well compared to the competition on this side, I think. And we would, without blinking, look in our competition in the eyes and say that we are leading when it comes to like these level of maps. And we know that the SDKs and the capabilities we have from using the software is actually where we have at least a time advantage to our customer, if not a permanent advantage, right? Because we have a very close partnership with that provider. Perfect. All right. Good. I wanted to say a few words. No, actually, I don't want to say more words. I want to hand it over to Christian to go through the financial because he's actually really good at this. Yeah, thanks, Morten. So yeah, let's dig a little more into the Q3 actuals. And actually, I'd like to start out with that these are actually the best numbers that MapsPeople has reported since the IPO back in 2021. Revenue has not ever been higher, and EBITDA has never been less lower. It's the most positive, least negative EBITDA we've showed since Q3 2021. So that's proving we're on the right track despite the downgrade of the guidance. So our Q3 numbers show the same improvements as previous quarters. Revenue is fairly steady quarter over quarter, but still up 38% year over year. So the Q3 revenue is affected by DKK 700,000 of the DKK 2 million Morten mentioned in one-off payments. A really high share of this is recurring revenue, but not all of it. Explaining why the guidance on ARR and revenue are so close is that in the revenue number, there is some one-off that doesn't count in the other one. Again, as Morten also said, under these numbers, our MapsIndoors revenue stream is growing 79% year-to-date compared to the same period last year. Still a very healthy underlying growth from that area. Just want to highlight one thing on the cost of sales. We talked about the 3D investment we've made in the Q3 numbers. When you compare to the Q3 numbers in 2023, it's not all an upgrade that you see here. There was actually a mistake in the reporting in Q3 2023, so in the comparison figures. That was corrected in Q4, but that shows there's actually an even bigger improvement on EBITDA level when you adjust for the missing approximately DKK 1 million in the Q3 2023 numbers. But we will see that in Q4. We'll see that in Q4. We'll go the other way around. It's phasing, yes. It's just a phasing, yeah. But that's nice. And as you can see, staff costs are down 25% year over year. And now we have all the effects of the restructuring we did in 2023 and early in the year. So we now kind of have the full year. We're probably also on a little bit lower level because we cut a little too deep as we commented on last quarter. So we will add up. And we have to remember that Q3 is a vacation quarter, so our staff costs are traditionally a little lower. So Q4 staff costs will be higher level than what we're seeing here. But year over year, it is comparable, the DKK 21 million versus the just below DKK 16 million we're showing there. That adds up to the record EBITDA of DKK -6.4 compared to DKK 12.7 last year, which should probably have been DKK 13.7 or something like that. EBITDA for Q3 is DKK 1.8 million better than Q2 numbers. So we are showing the steady improvement on EBITDA as we have promised and as we are going forward. So that brings me over to my favorite slide. I think I call it that every time we switch to this one. So looking at the last four quarters, adding them up to a full year total, I call it the rolling graph. You can see how the numbers are quite small, I can see here, but you can see how now that with the last four quarters, we're now at DKK 54 million in revenue. And if we took the same time last year, we were at DKK 38 million. So this shows this healthy 38% increase in our top line. And then down in the purple-ish line down in the bottom, EBITDA was at its lowest in Q2 last year, but Q3 was minus 63. And right now, the last four quarters is minus 37. And the lines, as we've said, you of course can't just put a ruler on them and continue them, but they do show a very nice trend that we are continuing and that fits well with our guidance update as well. Yeah. So switching over, just giving a few words on our recent acquisition. So on October 23rd, we were able to announce that we had done our first investment after the capital increase. We have bought the mapping business out of the company called Point Consulting. So we haven't bought the full business, but we've taken out the assets that we believe fit to our business. And that's, of course, the mapping customers and then also the part of the technology that we need to transition the customers over to our MapsIndoors platform. And that's kind of the plan here, as Morten calls it, tuck-in investments. I actually have a note to look up if that's a real word or something we've invented. But we're already here. We have the technology. We have the team. We have the support. We have the presence. We're just adding the customers in and upgrading them with our very nice-looking visual maps and capabilities. And that's definitely a playbook that we find very interesting on the M&A side. We thought we were buying DKK 2.1 million in ARR, but from signing to closing yesterday, our partner, Point Consulting, managed to close an additional DKK 300,000 in ARR. So the deal has ended up being a little bit higher. Point Consulting will continue to be a partner going forward. They've entered into a reseller agreement with us. We're looking very much forward to that. It's a very interesting customer base they already have. They're strong on airports that we also are strong on. And it seems like a very good match. And based in Singapore, they actually are well placed to support our own sales efforts, etc. But the fact that we are taking over the customers and not the team, etc., leaves us with an EBITDA margin of over 75%, which helps our numbers nicely for the period to come. We've paid 3.8 times ARR for this acquisition. Taking into account the very nice EBITDA margin, we're very happy with that and look forward to working more with the Point Consulting team going forward. Yes. Just to add to that, Ron, it's worth the conversation you and I had when we announced the signing of it, right? It is like an EBITDA margin of around 5 if we get to the 75, a multiple of around 5. And if we get higher than 75, then a little bit less than 5. And as Christian alluded to, yeah, we managed to grow the customer base with adding new buildings and functionalities. So Point Consulting did that. That was great. We do expect that there are opportunities both with the existing customer base, but actually also through this reseller agreement that we have with Point Inside Consulting going forward, that they will continue to sell and deploy solutions like that just directly on our MapsIndoors product line. So we're very optimistic that this will help and contribute to our growth in 2025 and going forward as well. Perfect. The words from us, Michael? Perfect. Yeah, I like the word tuck-in because it's not a bolt-on, right? It is this one where you simply buy some business into your maps creating machine and thereby high margin. So maybe we need to invent a new word for it. Yeah, yeah. But perfect. Yeah, let's jump to the questions. Looking at your new NRR guidance, it seems that you have almost reached the bottom end of the guidance range. If we take the end of Q3 at the 2.4 from Point Consulting activities, yeah, that's kind of a statement. Do you expect any extraordinary churn, something like that, or is it a conservative look at the rest of the year looking at you should have one of the better quarters activity-wise normally by year-end closing? So it's a little bit. Is there something that you already know, known churn or something like that that is behind your guidance? Good question. As we mentioned a little bit earlier, we do not expect in Q4 any abnormal churn. There's no extraordinary planned churn. So we expect that Q4 will have a normal churn rate, which is around six, seven, eight% is what we have in our plan. And then that also leads to, I would say, the other question. We find it very low risk that we will not reach our guidance. It's probably my best political way of articulating that. Yeah, well, I think we will stop there. Then there's a little bit of a bookkeeping question. Is Point Insight churn excluded in the NRR of 101%? No. So if we took that out, that would be included in the bridge to the 106 that Morten mentioned here. So most of the Point Insight churn happened before Q3 was reported. But the 106 for me is apples to apples to last quarter, so where we reported 110. Perfect. And then a question. When will you publish your guidance for 2025? Some comes in December, some comes by the full year-end report. It's more like what should we expect? Yeah. I think normally it would be late December or it will be early January because the normal sequence is that we're trying to get a budget approved by our board during December. But the clear element of doing this in a run rate business like ours is to be able to very accurately predict where do we end the year? And clearly, the closer we get to December 31st, the more clarity we have about that one, right? And you will have known this Q4 is normally our best sales quarter, and we have a lot of deals. I said the pipeline looked great. We are very happy. It's down the middle of what we are really, really good at. So it's the right type of customers that we know will grow and help us grow. But they are big deals, and they are complicated, and they take time, and they're sometimes difficult to predict. I wish it was much easier to predict, but signing up a new smart building partner, they need to plan that into the roadmap and all that stuff. So ideally, the guidance for 2025 should come during the second half of December. Perfect. And then a little bit of a general question. How is the overall market sentiment for your business? What are you feeling out there? Is the downgrade a view of the market or the potential out there, or is it a postponement, if you might say that? It just takes a long time. These are big decisions for our partners. We're trying to sign up new partners that are just down the middle, like smart building partner who uses our platform, and then they have a sales force to sell it. And a lot of the interesting ones are the ones who are successful, and a lot of them have built this platform by themselves, and they've now reached a size where they feel that it's difficult and it's tricky. But it's a big decision for them to basically take something they built and replace with a best-of-breed platform, right? And this takes time, and this is one of the things that we've been working a lot with in both our strategy process for next year, but every day on both our product and our go-to-market consideration. How can we make it easier for them to make that decision? They actually all want to do it. It's just when is the right time for them? So we need to continue working with them so that we can fundamentally bring those deal cycles down and increase the predictability of them, right? But it is difficult. That being said, new reports are out from Gartner. That is very comforting or reassuring regarding these markets here. They start calling it spatial mapping and advanced location-based services. These are the markets that our customers are in, right? And these are high growth. It's really big markets and high growth in the next 10 years, right? So yeah, we absolutely think that the industry is growing up, and we can see that some of the large marquee enterprises that fundamentally, like a couple of years ago, built their own solutions for this because there was nothing on the market, and then they bought a map from us. They are now shifting to solutions like employee experience solutions or conferencing solutions or fan experience solutions that is now available on the market. So the market is absolutely growing up, and that will also help us grow in the future. So maybe if I ask in a little different way, the downgraded NRR guidance, have you lost something that you expected to win, or is it more postponement, meaning it's a potential pickup? Let's not take it into the books before it's there, but there's a difference, right, where you have some expected wins in your pipeline. You didn't win them or lose them to someone else, or it's postponement of the decision process from the customer. So which one is the reason for it? One of them, and then there's a third one. So we're not really losing. It just takes a lot longer for them to make a decision, as I tried to allude to before, right? So that's the postponement part. And the other part is that with the cost reductions we did, as we said, we probably cut too deep, and we couldn't fast enough get the increased productivity in demand generation. So our pipeline wasn't big enough. We didn't spend the necessary amount of effort to put new stuff into the pipeline. That's what we concluded during Q3, and that's what we communicated there. So we rectified this, and as I said earlier, we start seeing the results in our pipeline, but it is something that in all likelihood will not benefit us until 2025. Perfect, and a question. I don't know what you want to speculate on. It's about the share price. There's some sales pressure. In general, it's been a little bit soft for the software sector. It's starting to pick up a little bit the sentiment against it with the Trump win and so on. Are you seeing any extraordinary selling pressure from something besides the results? I know you have a little bit better insight sometimes to the trading books and so on. Is there something pressuring you there? I think we suffer on low trade volume on First North, right? I think that's us and everyone else. It's super frustrating to look at, and we try not to look at it every day, but it's difficult, right? That's one thing. I don't really know how to fix that right now. Is there anything extraordinary, like a fairly qualified guess from my side would be that the lock-up period from the Point Insight acquisition is over. Since we knew that the investors behind Point Insight was like 200-plus dentists in Florida, maybe they're trying to sell their shares now. And that's why also usually a bit more cash going forward. And then on the general terms, you're scaling up your sales effort a little bit. We have before alluded on you using the partnering model where you take one partner in, and then you get potential, a much bigger pipeline. So is the scaling up in the sales cost, is that you going more after bigger contracts yourself, or is it the partnering effort that you are trying to help them? It's really the partnering effort, right? Again, there are direct customers coming to us, but it's getting easier and easier to focus on the partners because, like I said, the industry is growing up. Two years ago, these applications were not really available, so the large companies did it themselves. That's why I was direct customers. Now these applications are there, and they're actually shifting. They're like, for instance, employee engagements apps or something that is built in-house to something that's delivered by a partner that is then our customers. So we see all the trends that we tried to predict about this particular go-to-market model is absolutely playing out very well for us. And then, in general, you've been at the helm. I can't remember, a year, a little bit over a year, one and a half, sorry. I can't remember, two, sorry. Are you seeing any movement in this industry? Is it going somewhere else than maybe when this company was moving in the direction of the digital maps and all this? Is there some new movement? Are you seeing something technology changes? I'm thinking digital twins and so on, everything coming there. Are you seeing it moving in another direction, and is that a good or bad direction for you if I may ask you like that? Yeah, no, fundamentally, we believe it's a good direction. As we said, we see more and more of these applications going out. It's getting a lot about experiences like fan experience, guest experience, employee experience, shopping experience, airline traveler experience. It's a lot about these experiences, and we see these applications going out because all of us are using this for everything. I wouldn't even know how to call a taxi in Aalborg, but I can order it on my app, right? So all that stuff is changing how we act also when we're at work and when we travel and we do other things. So all the providers of these solutions are out there, and it's growing and growing and growing. So this mainly indicates to me that this market is growing up. We see other things in here in Gartner markets. I've been in telco myself, and for telcos to really work, there was a lot of industry standardization so that they could actually talk to each other. We start seeing the same kind of standardization coming in. One of the things that is driving now is something called IMDF, Indoor Mapping Data Format, which the large ones are standardizing. I would say it's probably like version 0.8 because they still interpret it slightly different. But you see all these early things about an industry growing up that you get the standardization in there. There is a demand, but the demand is shifting from early movers doing stuff themselves to more mainstream solutions that are available in the marketplace. So these are all signs to me that this industry is growing up, and that's also why we said it's important for us to make sure that we help our growth with some of these M&A acquisitions, but also that we reinvest a little bit more in our own capability to generate new leads and close that business, right? That's to make sure that we don't lose the opportunity that is ahead of us. And if I should, last question, and then I'll let you go. So if I should understand it, the industry is actually moving, and where you want to move in is go in and be the standardization tools for mapping. I know it's a little bit maybe a bad word, but in case you want to move in and pressure out all their own solutions, that is really your take on going in here, doing it cheaper, doing it better, doing it faster, having their best tools will help them use also it's their solution that is getting used by your customers. Is that how I should understand where your focus is? 100%. And so in IT, you will know no one really develops their own database right now. They actually buy a database. No one develops their own search engine. They buy a search platform, right? No one really develops their own business intelligence platform. They buy a BI platform that they integrate in the solution. And our prediction is that in the future, it makes zero sense to build your own mapping platform. You will buy the best-of-breed platform and integrate it into your solution, and that's who we want to be. Perfect. I think I will leave you both there with this ending. Thank you for sure telling us about the result and answering questions, and may everybody have a nice day.
Loading workspace