Det vigtigste i min hverdag i samarbejde med ECIT er, at jeg har en tryghed i, at lønnen kommer til tiden. Jeg siger altid til nye varechefer, at der er 2 ting, de skal have styr på. Det er arbejdsplaner og løn til medarbejderne. Jeg hedder Mads Teig, og jeg er CEO og HR-chef i Power. Jeg har i dagligdagen ansvar for HR, drift og løn. Power startede i 2015 som en onlinebutik. I dag har vi 23 butikker og har 20 mere på vej. Vi gik fra 0 til 1,000 medarbejdere på kort tid og er en virksomhed, der buldrer derudad. Vi har valgt at outsource vores lønadministration, da Power er en kæde med stor vækst, og derfor har vi behov for at bruge vores kræfter på det, vi er gode til, og det er at drive butikker. Vi har kigget på en lønløsning, der kan skaleres, og hvor vi har god IT-support. I det her samarbejde har vi fået kvalitet i processerne. Vi har fået et kvalitetslønsystem, og så får vi en super rådgivning i hverdagen. Det er jeg rigtig glad for. Det særlige ved ECIT er, at de har deres eget lønsystem, Intect. Det har givet os nogle store fordele, da alt foregår in-house. Det vil sige, at kompetence omkring IT og løn er samme sted. Det er meget unikt, og det har givet en masse fordele. Blandt andet når der har været nogle få ændringer, der skulle laves, er det sket meget hurtigt og effektivt. Et konkret eksempel på, hvor smart deres Intect-system er, så har de en app til medarbejderne, og i den her app kan den forklare, hvad skat er, hvad arbejdsmarkedsbidrag er og lignende. Det er en fantastisk funktion. Det, der gjorde vores onboarding rigtig god med ECIT, var, at de forstod vores behov og satte sig ind i, hvilke mennesker de havde med at gøre, så det ikke kun var Power, men hvilke mennesker de skulle arbejde sammen med. Det har gjort, at processen har været gnidningsfri, og vi har hele tiden kunnet tilpasse processen til det tempo, der har været passende for Power. Vi ledte efter en samarbejdspartner, ikke en leverandør, og vi har fået en helt fantastisk samarbejdspartner. The Power case is a good example of how ECIT create a unique delivery for our customers, where scalable solutions ensure them better conditions to grow their business. Power in Denmark has outsourced their payroll to ECIT, and there are more than 1,000 employees that receives a payslip every month in ECIT's own developed payroll system. In other words, Power gets both accounting, payroll and IT knowledge through one supplier as one service and with a single point of contact. That's why we believe ECIT is a strong partner now and in the future. With these words, we will now present CEO Peter Lauring and CFO Mads Skovgaard that will present the results for Annual Report 2022. Hello and welcome to ECIT Annual Report 2022. Agenda of today. First a little about ECIT and key financials for full- year 2022. Division performance, acquisitions in 2022, a little bit more deep dive in our financial figures, ending by an overall assessment from ECIT a question- and- answer session, hopefully. First, a little about ECIT. Delivering IT and accounting services backed by ECIT software managed by entrepreneurs coming from an acquisition model where we acquire a majority of our subsidiaries, but let the entrepreneurs keep a minority share, paying also with ECIT shares. We call the principle dual ownership, meaning that the entrepreneurs who are building ECIT, building their local company, as well as building ECIT. We buy companies and we gradually integrate them. Coming from the Services area, we are gradually becoming a tech driven services provider. Highlights from our figures NOK 2.8 billion in revenue, organic growth 10% for the full- year, EBITDA NOK 418 million with a margin of 14.8%, a little lift to 0.2% compared to last year. As we consider growth very important, we have a three years growth development below 28% compounded annual growth rate in the revenue and 36% growth on our EBITDA looking three years back. Short about ECIT, founded in 2013, more than 130 acquisitions, more than 250 entrepreneurs as co-owners in our subsidiaries. People business more than 2,300 employee represented in nine years. As we are covering the large areas of F&A and IT, which is what is important to master to manage a client company, we consider ourselves a strategic partner for our customers. Performance 2022: NOK 2.8 billion, NOK 480 million in EBITDA. Total growth 22%, of which 10% is organic. EBITDA margin 14.8% versus 14.6% last year. If we look at earnings per share, we have increased with 0.0 NOK per share coming from 0.13 NOK to 0.21 NOK per share in 2022. Our division performance. First, the comment that we are building, we are building a group. As a strategy, we are building a group, not building a group of companies. As part of that strategy, we have done four large mergers that are affecting 2022. 20 companies have become to four companies, and it's affecting revenue of more than NOK 1 billion. We are more than a third of our business, and it's affecting more than 400 employees. As a consequence of that strategy, now we are in a position where the 15 largest companies of ECIT represents more than 70% of group revenue and group earnings. As well, we have installed a new division management team in during 2022, meaning we have a Managing Director for each division in ECIT, very much strengthening how to build ECIT going forward. The F&A division, our largest division, is coming out with a revenue of more than NOK 1.5 billion and EBITDA of NOK 263 million. Total revenue growth 19% and an EBITDA margin of 17% versus 17.4% last year. A slight decline coming from margin, coming from mergers and just mentioned, and also from an acquisition of Norian, mid-2021, coming in with almost 10% of our group revenue, but at a lower margin than the rest of the business. Very good organic growth improvement in the F&A division compared to last year. As a consequence of the consolidation we are doing, we now the five largest F&A companies represents close to 60% of our division revenue. Of internal projects worth mentioning, the implementation of nearshoring in our operations is increasing. As well, our investments in internal education, where we are building the organization going forward, are increasing, and we have a quite high activity level there compared to the previous years. In our IT division, coming out of 2022 with a revenue of close to NOK 1.3 billion, we have delivered an EBITDA of NOK 164 million. Revenue growth, +20%. EBITDA margin, 13% compared to 13.4% last year. Margin also here affected by the mergers. NOK 700 million of our revenue have been merged in this division and the effects we have felt through 2022. This division is coming out with an even better organic growth than the F&A division. We have also experienced that the delivery situation regarding IT equipment has been normalized during the last quarter. Revenue measured in the revenue measurement or revenue recognition has changed because of IFRS 15, has changed from gross to net on licensed sales specifically and have reduced or affected our revenue with NOK 78 million downwards. The consolidation effect here is that now we actually are coming out with that the five largest IT companies represent 75% of our division revenue, meaning we have formed a good core, both of the F&A division and the IT division going forward. The effect of mergers going forward will be at a lower than we have experienced up to now because we have formed a core. The tech division is showing sign to actually become a division. We are coming out with a revenue of NOK 143 million, and for the first time since we started, with a positive EBITDA, small but important. Revenue growth, 47%, and compared to, of the 47%, 20% comes from growth in our annual recurring revenue, meaning the core software and the rest growth is coming from our Consulting Services attached to our software deliveries. In this division, revenue is affected by a change in revenue recognition practice and has reduced our revenue for 2022 with NOK 25 million. What we can see in this division is that we have especially two systems, parentheses three, but two systems, where we can see revenue is gaining traction internally and externally. One is ECIT Digital, and the other one is our payroll system, Intect, where we can see that external customers especially, really revenue from external customers are growing quite rapidly compared to what we had expected, actually. Very good in this division. Acquisitions in 2022. We have done 10 acquisitions, four in the account F&A division, four in the IT division, and two in the tech division. Whereas the accounting and IT acquisition is very much in line with our ordinary business, I would like to mention that we have acquired an cloud-based ERP system where we are able to use the system, implement this system over the coming years on something between 12- 15 customers, as we expected for now, probably more going forward, and an HR system that is very much scalable and that we're able to use on practically all customers we have who need an HR system. Really improving our Tech division. With that, over to you, Mads. Thank you very much, Peter. Some comments to the financials for the fourth quarter and full- year figures, starting with our top line in Q4. We came out with revenue growth of more than 25%, whereas our organic growth was just above 16%. The high organic growth in the quarter came from good performance across our three divisions and that also supply challenges regarding IT equipment were stabilized. Full- year revenue growth about 22% and organic growth at 10%, which means that we are well above our financial targets. Our IT and Tech division are the main contributors to the organic growth, whereas our F&A division steadily increased organic growth throughout the year, ending better than last year. As Peter mentioned, there are new IFRS interpretation of accounting principles regarding software licenses have reduced our IT revenue by NOK 78 million. In our tech division, we have also adjusted our revenue of NOK 25 million. It's important to emphasize that the adjustments only impact revenue, meaning that other financial figures, such as gross profit, EBITDA, net profit, and cash flow statements are unchanged. Considering that a third of the business has been through a merger integration in 2022, and also that we have made some important investments strengthening ECIT for the future, we are quite pleased with the EBITDA results and margins, being ahead of last year. The impact of cost inflation has been limited in 2022. However, we expect that impact will be visible in our cost base in 2023, consequently, we have made reasonable price increases towards our customers to be able to defend our margins going forward. On the finance income side, we have in 2022 had two divestments representing a gain, a total gain of NOK 25 million, explaining the development to last year on that account. Moving to our EBITDA margin development, we have made this slide a little bit more a deep dive into our EBITDA development. Since, as Peter also mentioned, large acquisitions and large mergers affect our margins, we have analyzed the impact to the margins the last two years. Norian, which we acquired back in 2021, operate with lower margins than the rest of the F&A business and consequently impacting our group margins. Similar effects from larger mergers where we merge a large part of the business, and it is actually expected that the business will be impacted since it both takes time and also cost to be absorbed so many companies into these large units. When we adjust for the Norian acquisition and the large mergers, we end up with a base margin of approximately 15.1% in 2021 and 15.6% in 2022, meaning that we have made some improvement in our underlying business. Although the integration work related to the mergers is expected to continue in 2023, we have come far in 2022. Also we are quite pleased to see Norian is getting more and more integrated into our ECIT business and that margins actually are improving. Cash flow and financial position. Our cash flow from operation was NOK 327 million compared to almost NOK 250 million last year. The increase is mainly coming from improved EBITDA, offset by an increase in our net working capital. The higher net working capital is mainly as a result of the high organic growth we had in the fourth quarter, meaning that we have increased our trade receivables. Since comparable figures were impacted by COVID-19, where VAT and other duties were prolonged, we have adjusted our free cash flow figures, which are illustrated in this slide. As a result, 2022 was NOK 222 million compared to NOK 187 million last year, representing an increase of almost 20% and close to our EBITDA development. Our financial position is considered healthy. Excluding IFRS 16 leasing debt, we have NIBD of NOK 124 million. If we include the leasing debt, our leverage ratio is approximately 0.8x EBITDA and still very way below our ratio limit of 2.0x EBITDA. We are also in a pretty good shape when it comes to our financial headroom. We had approximately NOK 423 million from our revolving facility undrawn. Key financial targets measured on a mid to long-term basis. What we have done here is we have included two separate column next to the financial targets to highlight the financial impact of the changed accounting principles, as we have just mentioned before, impacting only revenue and our EBITDA margins. Since the impact to our growth figures and the earnings is not considered significant, we have not changed our financial targets. Also that the license revenue being impacted is not expected to represent a significant part of our total revenue going forward. All other key financial targets are also not changed. With that, back to you, Peter. Thank you. Mads, overall evaluation coming from inside, we consider the full- year 2022 financial performance to be on plan. We made a plan in 2020. We are actually performing on it, a little outperforming, which we are very satisfied with. We have delivered a good organic growth, 10%. All divisions are ahead of last year. All division are on the positive growth side. We made a small margin improvement even though we have really invested in consolidation and mergers in 2022. We have made a new management structure which we consider to be very important to build the business going forward, appointing a new managing director for each division, all coming from the inside of ECIT with a good period of ECIT experience in their backpack. We have improved earning per share, partly due to better earnings and partly due to increase in ownership compared to last year, whereas we now is owning 69% in average of our subsidiaries. On the M&A side, we consider activity level to be unchanged, meaning practically very high. We have a solid pipeline. We can see that more and more quality companies would like to be in discussion with ECIT to consider a future partnership. With that, we are fairly satisfied, as said. Thank you for your attention so far. We would like if there would be any questions. Thank you for your presentation, both Peter and Mads. It is now time for the Q&A session. We have received a lot of great questions and have selected some of them for this presentation. The questions that we don't have time to answer will be answered afterwards. The first question: With respect to your target of more than 5.5% organic growth, what are your expectations for 2023, considering uncertain macroeconomic conditions? It's difficult to look into the future about the macroeconomic conditions, but we are to keep up with inflation as a first starting point and then on top of that to deliver the 5.5% growth. Coming out of 2022, we are positive on the growth side for the period into 2023 for as long as we can see. Thank you, Peter. The next question is: What is your expectation for the M&A activity for 2023, and what kind of acquisitions are you looking to do going forward? If we take the last first, we are looking to more quality companies. We are looking after companies who can bring to us geography, scale, competence, technology, things that we do not have in ECIT already. We are also looking into volume, but a little less than we have been done previously, and expect the level to be at least on par with our target. Thank you. The final question: What is the status of the integration work in connection to the four large mergers? I would say we are progressing according to our plan. Absorbing so much of this of all these companies into four large units takes time. We are slowly seeing some good outcome of this of the mergers. Even though there are still work to be done also in 2023, we are, I would say, optimistic and positive of the outcome. Absolutely positive because mergers is part of our strategy, and with these mergers done now, we have formed the core. Once those are in place, we feel in much better shape looking into the future. With that, very much thank you for your time and attention so far.
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