Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to Basware's half-year financial report 2022 results webcast and conference call. My name is Katariina Kataja, and I'm an investor relations manager at Basware. Today, joining with us in the Espoo headquarters in Finland, we have CEO Klaus Andersen and CFO Martti Nurminen. Please note that we have a Q&A session in the end of this presentation where you have the possibility to ask questions through the conference call lines. Please note that we don't have the chat functionality for questions this time. Please remember that this webcast will be recorded and will be found on the investor relations sites later today. With these introduction words, we are ready to start the half-year presentation. I will now hand over to Klaus. Klaus, the stage is yours. Thank you very much, Katariina. Good afternoon also from me, and thank you very much everybody for participating here today. The overall takeaway from our second quarter is very much that everything is progressing as expected, both when it comes to our financial performance, as well as the activities and milestones related to the tender offer. Top line up 5% as reported, cloud revenues up 11% as reported, and our adjusted EBIT was up 2% year-over-year. Order intake was EUR 5.2 million of new annual recurring revenue, and we continue to see many new customers signing up for our cloud services, and our existing customers continue to expand their services with us. During the quarter, we saw indications of slight change in the business environment caused by ongoing war in Ukraine, the high inflation, and general cost pressures. The impact was not broad-based, and many regions and countries were not or only moderately impacted, whereas the impact was more visible in countries like Germany. The voluntary public tender offer was successfully completed on the fifteenth of July. The investment consortium consisting of Accel-KKR, Long Path Partners, and Briarwood Chase Management have now successfully acquired more than 95% of all Basware shares. Let's dig a little bit more into the order intake for this quarter. Total order intake was, as said, EUR 5.2 million. Our order intake was again well-distributed across countries and regions, except for Australia, where the business activity in Q2 was a little bit low. North America continued the good momentum we saw in Q1 and contributed the most to the total order intake, closely followed by France, who once again had a really great quarter. Finland, Scandinavia, U.K., Benelux, and Germany all performed well in Q2, even though, as said, we saw slight indications of a change in the business environment, and especially in Germany. In total, we welcomed more than 30 new customers during the quarter, nicely distributed across countries and verticals, and we did not have any very large deals this time as we did in the same quarter last year. 18 new customers signed up for our networked accounts payable services, of which four opted in for our procurement services as well. Six new customers signed up for our SMB product, Invoice Ready, and eight new customers signed up for our network services only. 43% of the order intake was coming from new customers, and more than 100 of our existing customers expanded their business with us this quarter, and 57% of the total order intake was business with existing customers. Customer satisfaction is a key focus area for us, and it was very nice to see that our customers now are appreciating our efforts and are giving us really good feedback on the Gartner's Peer Insights customer review site, one of the most visible customer feedback ratings available in our space. The progress we have made in the Gartner's Peer Insights customer feedback rating is significant. Basware's rating has improved from a 4.0 to a 4.6 out of a maximum of 5 over the last 18 months. Basware is the only vendor to see double digit, and to be more precise, 12% improvements year-over-year. Basware's ranking is now all-time high on Gartner's Peer Insights. This is truly great feedback from our customers. That was a short update on the business, and now I would like to hand over to our CFO, Martti Nurminen, to take us through the detailed financials. Over to you. Thank you, Klaus. Good afternoon also on my behalf. The usual overview related to Basware's financial performance for the second quarter of 2022. First, the key takeaways related to the financial performance. As Klaus mentioned, our order intake, a solid result in a changing business environment. EUR 5.2 million for the quarter, and even though down year-over-year. When we consider that in the second quarter of 2021 we had a significant large deal in the U.S., when we adjust for that phenomenon, we can see underlying growth for the quarter. Performance was broad-based, most of the regions contributing well, especially in terms of the number of deals we executed during the quarter. Net sales and adjusted operating profit very much in line with our expectations. I will comment a bit more about the operating profit performance, including transaction-related one-time charges as we get to talk more about the profitability for the quarter. Finally, in terms of our cash position, almost EUR 29 million of cash at hand at the end of the quarter, even though a significant reduction compared to the second quarter of 2021, that is a very good cash position entering the second half of a year, and that year-to-year reduction reflects the refinancing transaction which we executed in the third quarter of 2021, where we used our cash position to execute the transaction to a certain extent. Few more words about cloud order intake, EUR 5.2 million for the quarter. As we can see in the first quarter, we grew on a year-to-year basis as well as in the fourth quarter of last year at EUR 6 million relative to EUR 5.9, the year before. Now again, in the second quarter of this year, adjusted for the large deal that we had in the second quarter, we saw underlying growth and again, very broad-based performance. Clearly, as we look underneath the covers, we can see a slight change in the business environment, but as Klaus mentioned, that was at least not yet broad-based, relatively concentrated in Central Europe. As such, as we look to the rest of the year, we are confident that we can continue the order intake growth trajectory which we had in the first quarter. Considering our net sales performance, very much in line with our expectations. First of all, about cloud growth at 8% at organic constant currency following the growth trend, what we also had in the first quarter of 2022 as well as in the fourth quarter of 2021. Our consulting services related revenues at EUR 6.8 million for the quarter, down 7% adjusted for currency. Same driver there as in the two previous quarters. Our implementation partner strategy execution in North America impacting our total reported headline consulting revenue growth. Again, that strategic approach in the North America market very much aligned with our plans coming into the year and as such, expected. Finally, in terms of the maintenance-related revenues, EUR 0.8 million for the quarter, down almost EUR 1 million year-over-year, very much in line with the trends that we've seen in the prior quarters. As we can see from the absolute values quarter by quarter, clearly the impact of the maintenance reduction continues to become smaller and smaller as we step through the remaining on-prem transformations and the wind down of the related revenue streams. Related to our profitability, a strong underlying execution also in the second quarter. First of all, our cloud gross margins at 69.4%, up 1.5 points on a year-to-year basis, and as such, exactly at the midpoint of the 1-2 points of cloud gross margin expansion target what we have been communicating. We have a clear increase in our sales and marketing spending this quarter of almost 13%, again, fully in line with our strategy execution on sustainable, profitable growth. R&D expenses up on a year-over-year basis, driven by previously completed development projects, where now the amortization of these projects is hitting the PNL. Finally, G&A expense growth very much driven by an expense accounting adjustment related to second quarter of 2021. When we look at our adjusted EBIT for the quarter, that is almost EUR 2 million compared with EUR 1.9 million last year. That is net of the transaction-related expenses for approximately EUR 10.7 million, which are attributable to the tender offer transaction. Related to the EUR 10.7 million, approximately EUR 11 million that is made up of two things, approximately EUR 7 million related to advisory-related charges, mainly attributable to legal and investment banking expenses, and we have approximately EUR 3 million charge within the 10.7 consisting mainly of incentives related to executing on the transaction, as well as winding down Basware's long-term incentive program as a result of the transaction. Finally, on Basware's journey in terms of bottom line performance related to our current strategy period, 2020 to 2022. For the quarter, we are delivering again now a black number in terms of adjusted profit, again excluding the transaction-related expenses. What we can see from the PNL is that we are able to fund our sales and marketing investments with our own organic profit performance. As such, that was one of the main goals of the three-year strategy period, and we are pleased that second quarter of 2022 from a PNL perspective clearly demonstrates that we are on track to execute just on that. Finally, on cash position, as I already mentioned, EUR 29, almost EUR 29 million at hand at the end of the second quarter. Strong cash position pretty much flat on a quarter-to-quarter basis. We are significantly down on a year-to-year basis based on the debt transaction-related payments which we made in the third quarter of 2021. Again, ample liquidity at hand to execute our strategy on a continued basis as we head into the second half of the year. With that, I would like to turn it back to Klaus for an outlook-related comment. Thank you, Martti Nurminen. Now to the outlook. Q2 was another solid quarter for us, with performance in line with expectations, and we foresee that to continue for the remainder of the year. Which means that we will keep our full year guidance as is. To remind you, our full year guidance is that the order intake will grow between 15% and 35%. Net sales will grow between 3% and 6%. EBIT, which is now corrected to adjusted EBIT, so EBIT net of transaction costs, will be between EUR 7 million and EUR 10 million. This concludes the normal part of our Q2 results presentation. Before we move on to the Q&A, I would like to just briefly update you on the tender offer. On the fourteenth of April, Basware announced the combination agreement with an investment consortium consisting of Accel-KKR, Long Path Partners, and Briarwood Chase Management regarding a voluntary recommended public cash tender offer for all the issued and outstanding shares in Basware. On the fifteenth of July, the consortium's ownership increased to 96.4%. As a result, the change of control of Basware Corporation was transferred to the consortium. Yesterday, on the twentieth of July, the consortium commenced the compulsory redemption proceedings to acquire the remaining shares in Basware, with the intent to delist Basware from Nasdaq Helsinki as soon as permitted. All of this information is available on our website and out there, so nothing new here. It was just sort of a recap of where we are in the process. With that, I would like to hand over again to Katariina to guide us through the Q&A session. Thank you very much. Yes, we're now in the end of this presentation, and we are ready and open for your questions, and thus I will ask to open the conference call lines, please. Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. There'll just be a brief pause while any questions are being registered. It seems that there are no questions at this time in the line, so we can take the questions from the room and Antti Luoto from Inderes. Please go ahead. Thank you. Antti Luiro from Inderes. A question about your sense of the market and where your target market is going right now. There are lots of dark clouds on the economy, and you mentioned that there has been some signals also within your customers, how this has been affecting their demand. If you look at Basware overall, if there was a recession, how do you see Basware perform in such a situation? How recession-proof would you say Basware's business is overall? Do you want to start? Yeah. I can start on that, Antti. I think one of the things to look at that is actually not that long ago when we entered the COVID period. I think extremely important to understand couple of fundamentals in our business model. First of all, if we think about the in-year performance, the next 12-15 months, even 18 months, our short-term dependency in terms of our cloud business to new revenue streams is relatively modest. We have a healthy ramp-up for couple of next quarters in terms of contracts that we have already signed with our customers, and we are in a ramp-up period. As we then, from a profitability perspective, look at our ability to make the right decisions relative to short term as opposed to long term, I believe our track record also from the COVID time demonstrates that Basware's, not only the business models but Baswareans are capable of managing through demand changes in the driven by changes in the external environment. Naturally, on the other side of that coin, we, for example, do have as our pay-as-you-go network business, which clearly also when we go back to second quarter of 2020, third quarter of 2020, clearly we looked at a big decline in those revenue streams, which clearly then also had an impact to an extent to profitability. net-net, I would say that given the industry we are in, given the current financial strength of our company with almost EUR 30 million cash at hand, and then the nature of the recurring business model, which by and large is the majority of our business, our capability to deal with recession, if you like, is quite good. Another dimension I would still add is actually our offering in a downturn situation. Being a CFO myself, having had the opportunity over the last two, three quarters to spend even more time with fellow CFOs in different industries, especially our network AP offering from time to value perspective is extremely good. Our ability to take our customers to that overall networked B2B transformation journey, starting with a relevant kind of a quick time to value, big ROI kind of offering is extremely good. I would further say that our relative positioning at times of economic hardship and tough market conditions relative to many other enterprise software companies, given our fast time to value, is something that from a solutions perspective, we just need to continue to improve our capability to take that message out there even during tough times. I believe we would come out at the other end of a potential downturn, very well-positioned. Great. Thanks a lot. That's helpful. Another question. Now, obviously, there is a big change coming to Basware in terms of ownership. If you look at Basware right now and how the company is doing right now as this change is happening, how would you describe the situation Basware is in right now? How should I put words on that? I would say, first of all, this is a ownership change, right? This is not a change in our strategy or in the way we do business, and what we're focusing on and what we're not focusing on. This is an ownership change. Of course, with the aim of accelerating the growth that we have in front of us. I think from a Basware and employees perspective and so on, this is very much a business as usual, but we have the opportunity now to do some things maybe a little bit sooner than we would otherwise have had. We can speed up some things and do some things slightly differently than we would have done otherwise. Otherwise, I would say the perception of this change is in general very, very positive, also inside the company. Good. Thanks. That's all for now. Are there any other questions from the lines, please? There are no questions on the phone so far. It seems that there are no questions from the lines, and that means that we are now in the end of this, Basware's historically last half-year, financial report webcast and conference call. We were very happy for you joining us today, and we wish you a nice rest of the day and a wonderful summertime. Thank you. Thank you.
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