All right. All All right. Hello, everybody on the line, and welcome to the Heeros Q4 2023 Results Briefing here from Helsinki on the 1st of February, 2024. To start, we have the safe harbor statement, which is quite usual for everybody. Nothing new here to state. Speaking today is me, Niklas Lahti, the CEO of Heeros, as well as the CFO of Heeros, Juho Pakkanen, who will be presenting the numbers today. For the content of today, as usual, we walk you through the numbers and financials of the quarter. Then I'll have a short commentary on what actually happened. As expected, profitability went up, and we finish off with an outlook for 2024, as well as our updated financial guidance for the year. So Juho, take it away. Thank you, Niklas. As usual, if you have any questions, you can type them in, and we will go through them at the end of this presentation. On my behalf, welcome to the Result Briefing Webcast. Thrilled to have you here again. It's always a big thing to close the books for the year and move forward for the following year. I'll start with the Rule of 40, our most important metric. Adjusted Rule of 40, which is the combined revenue growth and the EBITDA percentage of revenue. In 2023, the result was 25%. It should be noted that the difference between the years 2022 and 2023 is quite big, as in 2023, we focused more on the profitability side of the company than a year ago. In 2022, our revenue growth was 20%, and the adjusted EBITDA margin was 19%, and in 2023 period, our revenue growth was 2%, and adjusted EBITDA was 23%. Worse than expected sales during both Q3 and Q4 contributed to lower than expected one-off revenues, which resulted in declining total revenues during the fourth quarter. It should also be noted that the comparable Q4 figures for 2022 were excellent due to mostly due to one larger customer implementation happening then. Contract revenue, major metric for us grew by 9% throughout the year, say, 9% in the last quarter and the last half of the year, as well as the whole year of the year. Looking at the adjusted EBITDA, significant profitability improvement of over 20%, 23% to be precise on the last quarter, and 29% for the whole year. The improvement comes from cost-saving measures we enacted during April, May of last year, and full year profit for the company was EUR 177,000 positive. It turned positive compared to the previous year. Let's look at the revenue and profitability development trends. In all the graphs, we have three full years, and then H2 versus the previous year's H2 period. Cumulative revenue growth, 2%, and contract revenue growth by 9%, as stated, is the same for the whole year as well as for the H2. The profitability was focused on the year 2023, and it can be seen also in EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA. And as also already mentioned, during the second half of the year, we saw the effects of the cost savings coming through. Cost base, in terms of headcount and operating expenses, is smaller. The average headcount we had in the company for 2023 was 88, compared to 95 in the previous years. And as we stated in the report released today, we didn't see any notable change in operations or in turn for the customers. And Heeros still continues to invest in product development and sales. In some key SaaS metrics, the net revenue retention was 106%, compared to 109% previous year. Especially strong in direct customers, both in financial cloud and ERP cloud... There's a steady customer base and that is valid even though with the current market situation we are having and had last year. The average revenue per account with progress continues as expected. The number of so-called paper customers has decreased due to the packetizing changes. In these packetizing changes, we are aiming to increase the level of digitalization among our customers, especially in the accounting office side. Order intake and our recurring revenue in the second half of the year was lower than a year ago at EUR 220,000. And this affected, of course, with the, with the one-off revenue quite negatively in the, in the last quarter of the year. Transaction revenues, which is about 20% of our monthly recurring revenues, was little less negatively impacted in fourth quarter than the third quarter. Fourth quarter revenue, transaction revenue decline was 13%, and third quarter was 19%, correct, 15%. Although the volumes do not translate into revenue directly to the packetized transactions we have made, and shown as contract revenue, there is still a strong correlation between the volumes and the transaction revenues. The slowdown in the economic activity is evident in the volume chart you are seeing here in front of you. The turnaround in these volumes can be seen during the fall of 2022, when the year-over-year change shifted from positive to negative. Last year, the Q4 and Q3, we see about 8% decline in the transaction volumes. So the market conditions were not favorable during 2023 for us. At this point, I'll hand the microphone to Niklas, and he'll go through with the key message for the Q4. Thank you, Juho. In general, as noted, the quarter was a steady one with not that many surprises. Throughout the quarter, we maintained our primary focus on enhancing profitability, an objective where we succeeded very well. EBITDA grew by 23%, and contract revenue grew as well. As we don't report churn numbers, the best way to actually balance churn is by overviewing increases in our contract revenue. How actually do we improve profitability constantly? For instance, we aim to insource functions where we believe that we do a better job internally. For example, during the quarter, our search engine and social media advertising was taken over by our internal marketing team, who have done a great job at it. At the same time, we aim to outsource products and functions where it doesn't make sense for us to do everything on our own. In general, in 2024 and beyond, we aim not to have consultants in mostly operative functions, such as search, search engine marketing. Headcount-wise, we did make a few new hires during the quarter. For example, we got a new head of software architecture, Simon Björklund, who started at the end of the quarter. But in general, headcount continued to decline, highlighted by us completing an outsourcing project to Posti. As mentioned by Juho, and in the report as well, the quarter was a challenging one for new sales. New sales development, as measured in order intake, ARR, continued to decline because of several items. Decision-making was pushed from 2023 to 2024 by a large chunk of our sort of ideal customer profile, ideal customer base. It wasn't an easy year for mid-market companies. That being said, a key driver of the revenue decrease of 2% was the fact that the implementation-based or one-off revenue was a lot lower in Q4 2023 than in the comparable Q4 2022. At the same time, as mentioned by Juho, transactional revenue continued to decline. We did see a small uptick at the end of the year, so we are hopeful that the declines in transactional revenue are over. There have been multiple changes implemented in the way we sell, and I do expect to see improvements in the future. On the R&D side, things moved on rather smoothly, with especially positive developments in our new Sales Invoices product. I will address this more, on the outlook slide. Overall, 2023 has been a year of big changes for Heeros. We got new owners, we got a new CEO, we implemented many new ways of working. We had change negotiations, a lot of cost reductions during the year, a lot of focus on the core of what the company is. That being said, overall, I am super happy with the team and how we have performed throughout the year amidst all these changes, and I am looking very much forward to 2024. Moving to Outlook 2024, committed to profitable growth. As mentioned in the report, our commitment to profitable growth continues. Traditionally, the first quarter, which is ongoing or coming up reports-wise, is typically the lowest quarter. We expect that profitability will increase gradually during 2024, and are targeting to increase both revenue and profitability in 2024 at large. For a more financial-focused outlook, I wanted to note that even though we constantly talk in these result briefings about implementing cost cuts, we are still investing strongly in forward-looking research and development with around EUR 2 million of investments projected in 2024. When I talk about investments here, I do not mean what it actually takes to run the company and maintain the company and give customer support, but what we actually do for the future. The key focus on the investments will be on Heeros Sales Invoices and Heeros Purchase Invoices, our products for accounts payable and accounts receivable automation. The expectation is that we activate around 2/3 of these investments, or from EUR 1.1 million - EUR 1.4 million during 2024, and I wanted to note that overall activations in 2024 will be lower than those in 2022 or 2023. The investments are primarily made by our own R&D and products personnel, not via outside consultants. Finally, for a more strategic outlook, commenting a bit product-wise to our future. We believe that the changing mid-market ERP space presents a growing opportunity for Heeros. What we see in the market is that many mid-segment companies, our ideal customer profile, are faced with a dilemma, as their older generation ERPs pose obstacles to business transformation. But full-fledged ERP upgrades can take years to do and have high risks associated with the pro-. I've personally seen many of these kinds of projects myself, having worked at Digia to actually acquire consultancies focused on ERP. It's very rare to see an ERP project go super well or get its budget done. Heeros solutions enable companies to achieve similar results quickly and cost-effectively through standard integrations. This can give many years to the current ERP's life cycle by augmenting the capabilities of the ERP, while enabling a less risk to transfer to a newer one with Heeros solutions on top. So this is a key part of our outlook and strategy for 2024. It's a focus on our core capabilities, it's about gaining new clients in the mid-market ERP space with our recently renewed solutions, and it's a focus on Finland and sales efforts in Finland, as well as Finnish headquarter companies throughout 2024. That's about shooting for the moon, but more about doing what we're really good at. I'm personally very excited about 2024, and I do hope that the macro environment gives us a bit of leeway as well, becoming easier. We are seeing signs that are more positive than last year, but let's see what the future brings. Finally, our updated financial outlook for 2024. It is a rather simple or less complex one this year. We expect that both revenue and EBITDA for 2024 financial period to improve from the 2023 financial period. All right, that is the end of the prepared part of this presentation, and now I open up the floor for any questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. So should you have any questions, you can ask them, and we will go through those questions and give you the answers to those. One question I had about the ERPs and the kind of ideal customer profile, what kind of companies are there? And is it mainly for the CFO buyer persona that we are aiming towards? Yes, we are looking at the CFO buyer persona, where the vast majority of our best-performing products, so to say. It's about automating processes, it's about eliminating paper, it's about making things simpler, especially for companies which have their headquarters here, but have subsidiaries, for instance, in Germany, in Netherlands, with just a few people working these. It's companies where the processes are actually really hard to do. Absolutely. We might know with our own, let's say, small office- Yeah. ... in the Netherlands. Yeah, the visibility between the companies and, for example, accounts receivables, it is a manual work, more or less. So we can help with that to get more realistic and real-time feedback for the accounts receivables, something that we see as a key thing for us. Indeed. All right, as we see no questions, we will be ending for today. Thank you everyone for joining on the line, and have a great 2024. Thank you. See you soon!
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