Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for attending this conference. Emmanuel and myself are going to drive this presentation. Emmanuel is going to present the 2022 financial statements that we just published few minutes ago. It will last something around 20- 30 minutes. Hopefully, we will close this meeting at 7:00 PM Emmanuel. Thank you, Jean Michel. Try to fly through the slides to leave time for questions, just focusing on the financial results. 2022 has been a very good year for Esker, with 29% increase in operating income reaching EUR 21.4 million. This comes from very good revenue performance of 19%, and costs increasing a little bit less than revenue. That's driving the profitability improvement. We did get some help from currencies, mostly the U.S. dollar. I'll come back to that. The net effect on the operating income was EUR 2.2 million in 2022. Profitability increased from 12.4%- 13.5% of revenue. An average headcount increase at 13%. We did continue to invest for future growth again in 2022, as we'll see in detail. Operations were mainly influenced by, let's say a normal year after COVID. Basically, travel and event costs are up significantly at EUR 1.3 million more than what we had in 2021. That reflects the fact that people are traveling again, events are happening in person. Our salespeople are actually visiting customers in person as well. That's good. You know, it really helps the business and will continue to help the business down the road, but it has a cost, estimated at EUR 1.3 million. Same thing for marketing operations, which are up drastically, 27% compared to 2021. Again, a lot of it was happening online in 21, and the vast majority of our shows and marketing operations were done in person or a lot more in person in 2022. That's an additional cost as well, EUR 1.2 million, we do believe that it's good for future business. That was all increased expenses. We did have a one-off positive impact on this year's or last year's P&L. If you remember, if you were with us last year, you remember that we had an unusual tax accrual on free shares for French employees, because that accrual is calculated based on the Esker stock price on December 31st. The Esker share price on December 31st last year was very high, EUR 360. Of course, it was much lower on December 31, 2022, about EUR 160. The accrual that we booked last year, we reversed this year, and that's a positive of EUR 1.4 million this year on the EBIT. All in all, net income increased by 25%. I'll go in detail through the P&L in a moment. On the booking front, bookings were up 19% in constant currency and 26% in current rates. Very good performance, especially the last two quarters of the year, which gives us a lot of visibility and a lot of optimism, basically for 2023 revenue. Those customers will be put in production, gradually in 2023, generating first professional services revenue and then SaaS revenue in 2023 and beyond. That's a very good sign for 2023 revenue. We did have an acquisition in 2022, a company called Market Dojo, based in the U.K. That's more of a startup, like company, about 21 people when we acquired them. 26, 27 today. We acquired 50.1% of the company. The remainder should be purchased by Esker within four years from the owners. The cost of acquisition was EUR 10.1 million, of which EUR 9.3 was cash. The rest were Esker shares that we used to pay the previous shareholders. Market Dojo is consolidated, has been consolidated in Esker's financials since June 1st. Its contribution so far has been EUR 800,000 on the revenue line and a loss of EUR 700,000, which is normal because we're investing to, you know, sustain and increase the growth of that product line. On the financing front, we did take EUR 17 million in additional loans, long-term loans, at the beginning of last year when the conditions were still very favorable. We're talking way less than 1% fixed rate for five years. That's going to allow us to be more reactive in case of interesting opportunities on the M&A front. You all know that Esker does not necessarily focus on M&A, but we certainly do not want to prevent ourselves from doing it if we find a good candidate like it was the case for Market Dojo. It's good that we have the financial resources to move quickly should the case arise. Again, the conditions were very favorable. That is the summary. I'll go through quickly a few performance indicators. This is the revenue performance which we have announced already. 13% constant currency, 19% current currency. The SaaS line was the line that was increasing the most 17%, again, constant currency. Implementation services a bit slower, especially towards the beginning of the year. Legacy products are on the trend. I won't comment any further. The performance in terms of bookings, and you remember that for bookings, we take only the subscription revenue or the average annual subscription revenue that's included in our contracts. That performance increased 19% in constant currency during the year, showing a very nice increase quarter after quarter, which you can see at the bottom, especially in H2. Q3 and Q4 have been the two strongest quarter ever, basically, in terms of booking for Esker. Once again, giving us, you know, a lot of confidence in terms of revenue for H1 and H2 2023. By region, it's interesting to take a look at how the various regions are performing in terms of bookings. You can clearly see that America is definitely leading the regions in terms of growth of booking with consistent growth over three years, +23%, again, constant currency, in 2022. After a very good 2021 and 2020, actually. Europe is different. Europe was a lot more affected by COVID from a booking standpoint, the rebound in 2021 was very strong, as you can see on the chart. It sort of flattened in 2022 with a lot of conservatism, I would say, in our customers that are very interested in our solutions. The pipeline is actually up significantly, but the decision-making process does take longer, and that is causing the bookings to be a little bit flat plus, let's say, in Europe, particularly in France, which is obviously a big country for us. Asia-Pacific, 46% increase, where there, the COVID effect really continued into 2021 significantly with the lockdown measures continuing in Australia and Singapore, etc. The rebound was very nice, +46% in 2022. Overall, 19% constant currency increase of booking, which again, is very good, considering the situation. We grew, we increased profitability, but we also invested. You can see here the breakdown of our employees at the end of the year, which by the way, is not June, but it should say December. Sorry for the typo. The increase of staff is 16% December to December, and this is FTE, full-time equivalent, which is 16% growth. The average, though, for the year is 13% increase of FTE. You can see where in which department we invested. Once again, in terms of numbers, consulting is leading the group with 25 new people, representing 12% increase in the resources. Sales at 18% is significant as well. We did beef up certain regions in terms of in terms of sales. Certainly, the Americas given the performance. Also, other countries in Europe, especially Northern Europe, where, you know, we're trying to generate more growth to possibly compensate the fact that France is a little bit slow at the moment. Then R&D, 16 people, 10%, etc. You can read all the numbers. I will point out the effort that we're making in the customer experience group. It's a smaller group, but it's 18% growth in resources. Esker has always believed very much in customer satisfaction. This is the foundation for growth, basically. We did make an effort in this direction in 2022. The number of people joining Esker in H2 have been slightly higher than the people joining Esker in H1, which made the P&L in H2 a little bit heavier. One final word, I mean, sorry. There is one thing that, you know, is making Esker a little bit unique, actually, is the business model that combines profitability and growth together, which means investment to generate the future growth. We always try to be within the 12%-15% profitability, you know, region, consistently over the years. Once again, in 2022, this is the case at 13.5% and 19% growth. You can read the history over there. That's basically the big KPIs that I wanted to talk about. Now we're gonna quickly review the financial statements, starting with foreign exchange impact. As you know, we do a lot of business in the U.S. That's more than 40% of our revenue, actually 42% for 2022. This means that the U.S. dollar and other currencies have an impact on our financial performance. In this case, the impact on sales is favorable, EUR 9 million, and on EBIT favorable as well, EUR 2.2 million, of which EUR 1.8 million comes directly from the U.S. dollar. All the other currencies just EUR 400,000. I'm gonna focus on just the U.S. dollar. This is a table showing you what our revenue or how our revenue and EBIT would have been impacted at various exchange rates of the U.S. dollar versus the Euro. The way you read this is at 1.05, which is the average rate for 2022. Of course, no impact on the revenue or EBIT because this is what we are communicating today. But if the exchange rate had been 1.1, for example, this would have meant 2% less revenue for us and 4% less margin or less EBIT for us. Conversely, if it had been 0.9, then we would have had 6% more revenue and 15% more EBIT. That gives you this chart here showing the sensitivity of our revenue line and EBIT line to the U.S. dollar. Having said that, which is important because a lot of the fluctuations that we are going to review in the P&L and the balance sheet, actually, that generally on every line, the biggest reason why there is an increase of every category generally is the exchange rate. We need to keep that in mind. That's the detailed P&L. We have two ways of presenting our income statement. This one is more the international version by function. I'll show you quickly the French version after that. We recognize the sales revenue line increasing 19% and the operating income 29% growth at EUR 21.4. The net income increasing by 25%. The first thing that we're going to review is the gross margin. Gross margin is net sales revenue minus cost of goods sold, which basically includes two main categories, professional services and SaaS. Professional services gross margin is around 9%. It was 9.4% in 2021. It's 8.8% in 2022. Slight decrease of the margin there with an increase of the headcount as we just saw. That revenue line is obviously not something that Esker is necessarily focusing on. For us, sometimes it's more of a necessary evil. We do need consultants to help our customers go live with our products so that they can generate the SaaS revenue, which is basically where we make our margin. That's why, you know, going forward long term, we wanna, relatively speaking, decrease or de-emphasize this revenue line by the use of partners, and you can see why. It's basically a low margin, you know, revenue line. The SaaS line, much bigger or much larger margins, 83.3%, actually increasing slightly from the year before. That's obviously where we make our money. The cost for the SaaS line basically represent the cost of the platform, whether we're talking equipment, we're talking services, we're talking people, building the platform, monitoring the platform, making sure that it's all working 24/7 for our customers worldwide. It's also the cost of the material that we use when, for example, we print invoices for our customers in France. That all together generates 83.3% margin in 2022. The two cumulated make the gross margin for Esker go up 25%. If we go a little bit down after this, I won't comment on R&D now. I'll do this a little bit later. I'll focus on the on selling expenses, which is basically our largest expense, as you can see here, EUR 35.6 million, growing 26%. The reason for this increase is one, translation, which is a big part of it, but also headcount. I mentioned the fact that we grew the sales force by 18%. That has a cost, obviously, which you can see here. It also includes Market Dojo, which had a few salespeople that were added to our sales population. As I mentioned, salespeople are back on the road visiting customers and meeting as well amongst themselves, and that generates an additional cost for about EUR 800,000 on that cost. That is for the salespeople. Another thing that we are increasing is sales engineers. Sales engineers are helping in the pre-sales phase, assisting salespeople with areas in which they are experts. It could be a technical area or it could be a functional area. As our solutions get more and more sophisticated, the salespeople need experts basically to help them in the sales process. This is something that we have invested in in 2022, and we'll probably continue to invest and focus on in the years to come. Altogether, that is the reason why you see this increase of selling expenses. Going further down, I talked about customer experience being a focus, and that's up again, along with currency as usual. Marketing increases as well by 32%, which is large. Headcount is 15% of that, and operations, 27%. Again, as I mentioned before, EUR 1.2 million. This is also linked to a lot more on-site marketing activities. Shows are back on-site and it does cost more to do that. Again, we're back to normal in that respect. Finally, SG&A expenses are more or less in line with headcount. As you're hiring people, you need more and more HR people to recruit them, train them, and just manage them. IS is the same, admin is the same, it's more or less in line with the, with the revenue. If we go below EBIT, what we call financial income is really a currency exchange gain. It's not translation this time, it's an actual gain with the currency transactions of EUR 300,000. Further down is what we call exceptional income, in this case, exceptional loss. This is the loss that we incurred in 2022 with our liquidity contract on the market. We have a contract with BNP, where they provide liquidity on the market every day, selling and buying Esker shares every day. Of course, since the average share price has been going down in 2022, that creates a loss for us which is accounted for on this line. The joint venture that we have with Quadient was very successful in terms of profitability in 2022, increasing our share of the profit by nearly 50%, that adds EUR 1.5 million of profit to our bottom line. When, you know, all said and done, that creates a net income for us of EUR 17.9 million compared to EUR 14.3 million, or an increase of 25%. This is the French version of the income statement, which obviously shows the same numbers, I'm gonna focus on a few lines first. R&D, we do capitalize R&D, and you can see on this chart that we capitalized a bit more than EUR 10 million worth of R&D expenses in 2022, which is 18% more than what we did in 2021. Again, a bit of a translation effect here, but less because most of R&D is in France. It basically depends on what R&D is working on. There are capitalization rules that are being applied project by project, and just means that R&D has been working on a lot of new features and functionalities which are capitalizable versus what has been done in 2021. Taking into account, amortization, which obviously increases as well, the net effect of capitalization slash amortization of R&D expense has been EUR 3.2 million, which is up by EUR 750K compared to 2021. We, as I said, capitalize a bit more R&D expenses this year compared to last year, 65- 61. Again, that's just linked to what R&D is working on during this time period. Other comments, other income are really the tax credit that we get for, again, R&D in France, that's fairly stable, almost flat. That line that's called purchase and external expenses is up significantly 32%. Reasons are currency, volume growth. The platform is growing, you know, we're growing, so we just use more external resources. Travel expense and marketing operations would be classified under this as well, and that would be EUR 2.5 million additional expenses. Down below, personnel and related taxes up again. As you can see, this is the bulk of our cost. That's up 12%. A few things here at play, currency obviously, headcount plus 13%, but that's offset by what I was talking about earlier, that tax accrual on free shares, which is EUR 1.4 million, that goes the other way. The 12% increase here that is posted would have been a bit more if that wasn't there. The average cost per employee is actually stable if you compare 2021- 2022 outside of translation again. If we look at the balance sheet now, the first thing that we notice is the increase of intangible assets, from EUR 33.6 million- EUR 47.7 million. That's obviously linked to two things, capitalization of R&D expense and the goodwill for Market Dojo, which is almost EUR 10 million, which has been added in 2022. The other thing is the increase in long-term financial assets, we call them. Well, actually not a big increase, but the big number. That's basically made of one investments that we have in affiliate companies, the biggest one being a company called LSQ in the U.S., which is our partner to do supply chain finance basically on the U.S. market. We did invest nearly EUR 5 million, EUR 4.7 million in them. We also have classified on this line long-term financial investments, which is basically almost cash that we can use if we need to. Which right now, we have the intent to leave invested on this line. That's why it's not classified as cash. That's EUR 4.7 million as well. In current assets, receivables are up significantly from EUR 28.9 million to EUR 37.2 million. This is mostly due to revenue growth, 19%, especially towards the end of the year. A DSO increase, about 7% increase in terms of days, mostly due to our partner, Quadient, which decided that it was gonna become a slow payer in the course of 2022, that definitely has an effect at year-end. There's obviously also a translation effect. On the liability side, the biggest fluctuation is on the financial debt, which is caused by the new loans that I was talking about earlier. The rest of the lines are fairly consistent. Finally, let's take a look at the statement of cash flows. We increased our cash position by EUR 7.9 million in 2022, and this is made with strong cash flow generated by operations, more than EUR 20 million positive cash flow from operations. That's less than what we did last year, though. We did EUR 26 million, and this is entirely due to the variance in AP and AR, actually just AR, linked to the increase that I just talked about. Again, Quadient, almost EUR 5 million impact just by themselves. Social taxes are up EUR 1 million, other receivables are up EUR 1 million. That explains the increase in that variance, and that explains the decrease in cash flow for the year. We expect that to be stable or positive next year because we're gonna have a chat with Quadient. For investing activities, obviously this represents the acquisition of Market Dojo for more than EUR 9 million, additional research and development costs capitalized, and just EUR 1.7 million of other tangible assets, meaning that we invested EUR 21 million, EUR 21.4 million in new fixed assets compared to EUR 17 million last year. I mean, the vast majority of the variance is coming from the acquisition of Market Dojo. In terms of financing activities, again, the big one is the new loan, EUR 17 million, offset partially by some loans that we paid back during the period, and also dividends that we paid that reflect the increased performance over the years at Esker. We did have a negative currency impact on the cash, which basically means that we started the year at EUR 35 million of cash and ended at EUR 43 million with the variations that I detailed on this charts. That fundamentally is what I wanted to go over quickly. If you have any questions? Okay. Thanks for your time and your attention. Have a great evening, everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Loading workspace