Good morning and welcome to our Q3 presentation. My name is Terje Wibe, and I'm the CEO of Mercell. With me today, as always, I have our CFO, Fredrik Eeg. Let me start off by reminding you of our vision, which is to be the preferred e-tendering and procurement platform in Europe. We want to do that by building a user-friendly and trusted marketplace in the tendering and procurement market. Public authorities in the E.U. annually purchase goods and services for more than EUR 2 trillion, and efficient, transparent, and compliant public procurement processes is important to ensure that the taxpayers get more value for their money. As you can see from the table, public procurement typically make up 10%-20% of the gross domestic product, and as much as 20%-40% of the total government spending. Given the size and importance of public procurement, the OECD calls public procurement the cornerstone of public governance, highlighting the need for transparent, fair, and efficient purchasing processes. That is why the E.U. and other governing bodies are driving regulations in this area, and the way to do it is through digitization of the procurement processes. Mercell's markets, highlighted in blue, are among the biggest spenders as share of GDP and government spending. However, it is worth noting that they also are the most compliant markets in Europe according to the Single Market Scoreboard. We provide workflow solutions for the full procurement life cycle, all the way from identification of procurement needs to tender awards, and all the way through the purchasing process to payment and spend management analytics. While the value chain on top describes the workflow processes from a buy-side perspective, we also cater to the suppliers with tender search and notifications and tender management solutions. Today, we service our customers from multiple different platforms, and our aim is to consolidate these into one common platform across all our markets. This is the way to generate economies of scale on the revenue side and cost efficiency in the production and maintenance of our services. Our growth since 2019 has made us one of the largest B2B SaaS companies in the Nordic region, measured in ARR. Annual recurring revenue increased eightfold in the period from less than NOK 100 million to NOK 792 million at the end of September. A significant part of this growth comes from acquisitions, as the 12 acquisitions we have carried out in this period have added more than half a billion NOK in ARR. Big chunks of this has come in the last year with the acquisition of Visma Commerce in the fourth quarter last year and Negometrix and Cloudia in the first quarter and second quarter this year. However, we also keep growing organically with 21% growth, excluding acquired ARR in the 12 months to September. Year-on-year, the ARR has increased by 134% to NOK 792 million. Given the growth and the acquisitions, reported revenue naturally lags ARR by some time, although revenue for the last twelve months also increased by 134% year-over-year to NOK 615 million in the third quarter of this year. Looking at the quarter in isolation, we have increased our revenue by 142% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA came in at 26%, although reported EBITDA margin was lower at 6% due to special cost items which mainly relate to non-cash earn-out for previous acquisitions. As you will remember, we are aiming for a long-term EBITDA margin above 40%. We see from our Norwegian and Swedish operations that this is feasible, and we believe that larger scale and more efficient operations will drive our margins going forward. However, this is not going to be a straight line, as the margin development will depend on timing of new product launches, development of our platform consolidation program, and various cost efficiency measures. Turning to our technology development in this quarter. We are continuing our efforts to move towards a common platform suite. Our first pilot customer in Denmark was onboarded to the new Mercell Source-to-Contract platform for pre-award buyers in the third quarter, and we expect to be able to scale the onboarding process in 2022. The new platform will gradually be localized to new countries and enhanced in functionality and technology. Our new Mercell Tender Finder for pre-award suppliers has been tested with the first customers in Norway with good feedback. This solution offers improved and Google-like search and filtering solutions, making it much easier for suppliers to find relevant business opportunities. We are now working to resolve any outstanding issues before continuing to upgrade Norwegian customers and move on to other markets. We expect the solution to be rolled out in volume through 2022. Finally, we are working towards launching our new Mercell Procure-to-Pay for the post-award market in 2022, and I will get back to that process in a minute. Ultimately, we believe the upgrade to a common platform suite will offer our customers better functionality and an improved user experience at the same time as this will enable us to save maintenance costs on the different platforms. We have already reallocated personnel from old to new platforms and expect to save additional costs, such as server costs as we upgrade our customers to new solutions and sunset our old platforms over the coming years. Over the past year, the number of buy-side customers has almost tripled, mainly as a result of the Mercell Commerce, Negometrix, and Cloudia acquisitions. Whereas the Mercell Commerce acquisition has been the main driver of a 61% increase in the number of suppliers. As part of the integration of the acquisitions, we are currently in the process of implementing a group-wide CRM system across all the acquired entities. This will significantly strengthen the efficiency of our sales and marketing efforts and strengthen our internal control functions. As part of these efforts, we are consolidating our customer accounts. Some supplier customers have contracts with more than one Mercell Group company in the markets where both Mercell and an acquired company has been competing. This is a solid example of the fact that many suppliers have a fear of missing out on business opportunities within the public sector. Going forward, we are registering all customers once, including suppliers who are customers of several Mercell companies based on their unique organizational number as an ID. This will simplify and improve the relationship between us and the customer and prepare for more relevant sales approaches and better customer follow-up. However, it also means that the number of registered supply-side customers will be reduced by approximately 2,000 entities. However, we estimate this to have very limited effect on the underlying value of the contracts due to our tailored packages to these customers, providing them with Mercell as a one-stop shop solution. Moving on to development in our recent acquisitions, I am extremely pleased to see that we have been able to revive growth in Mercell Commerce after the acquisition from Visma in Q4 last year. Visma Commerce has seen quite flat revenue development for years before we took over and showed only 2% ARR growth from the third quarter 2019 to the third quarter 2020. Already in the second quarter this year, we showed that Commerce with Mercell as the owner had a much stronger growth than before, namely 10%, and now in Q3, we can inform that the growth has reached 15%. This has been achieved by strengthening of the sales teams, by implementing the Mercell way of sales, and by optimizing product and price plans. The ongoing implementation of the new group-wide CRM system is set to further improve the effect of our sales and marketing efforts. Moving on to Cloudia, we are glad to see that the strong growth trend we saw before our acquisition in June continued also in the third quarter. As you will know, Cloudia has historically focused solely on monetizing of the buyers within pre-award, and we see a large untapped potential on the supply side. We are planning for launch of our supply side offering through Cloudia at end of Q4 this year and look forward to showing the effects of this in the quarters to come. Our post-award segment has shown relatively low growth in 2021. Excluding the ARR acquired through Ibistic, the ARR is up some 4% since year-end with modest new sales and upselling and some currency headwind. As already mentioned, we are working towards developing a new Mercell Procure-to-Pay platform, and the focus through 2021 has been on preparing the Tricom platform to be able to upgrade CompCare and Aksess Innkjøp customers to this platform. A lot of work has been put into closing feature gaps to the other platforms and on enabling integration with different ERP systems so that customers will realize true benefits when being upgraded to the Tricom platform. We are now getting closer and expect to upgrade the first customers early 2022. We will follow the same pattern as in pre-award, starting with a select set of pilot customers in order to develop a scalable upgrade process. It's also worth mentioning that tenders in the market show that many pre-award customers are interested in post-award solutions and data analytics functionality, and we expect cross sales of post-award solutions to pick up after the launch of the new Mercell Procure-to-Pay platform. With that, I'll leave the mic to Fredrik to run you through the financial details. Thank you, Terje. As always, I'll start with the ARR development in the quarter, which overall showed an increase of NOK 22 million from the end of the previous quarter. This was all organic, as we did no acquisitions in the quarter. New sales were NOK 14 million, and upselling and price optimization NOK 28 million, which was partially offset by NOK 16 million in churn and contraction. Finally, we had an adverse effect of NOK 3.7 million from currency and NOK 0.2 million from other adjustments. The currency movement reflects a strengthening of the NOK versus our local markets. If you look at this year to date, this effect has shaved NOK 11 million of our ARR. It is worth noting that the third quarter is the seasonally lowest quarter for both new sales and renewals due to the summer holidays in July and August in our markets. Looking at the P&L, we show 142% year-on-year revenue growth to NOK 188.6 million. This was an increase of 11% from the second quarter, mainly driven by one full quarter of revenue from Cloudia. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 167% year-on-year to NOK 49.3 million in the third quarter. This was 3% above the second quarter, when costs were lower due to holiday pay. This translates into an adjusted EBITDA margin of 26%, which compares with 24% in the third quarter 2020 and 28% in the previous quarter. Reported EBITDA was NOK 12 million, up from NOK 3.5 million last year, and a loss of NOK 2.1 million in Q2 2021. The lower figures reflect NOK 37.3 million in special cost items. NOK 27 million of this is earn-out provision from previous acquisitions, of which NOK 26 million is non-cash. Further down, you see increased depreciation and amortization as a result of acquisition and capitalized software development costs. Focusing on our technology development investments, we are running a major program to develop new solutions to consolidate into a common platform suite. We have earlier this year indicated a CapEx level of between NOK 160 million and NOK 180 million in software development this year and now expect around NOK 165 million for the full year 2021. Looking ahead, we expect to reduce the CapEx level to approximately NOK 130 million in 2022 and believe this will stabilize in real terms from there on. Given increasing revenue, this means that the CapEx to revenue ratio has peaked in 2021 and is expected to decline in the years to come. We are confident that our investments will improve both our revenue generation capabilities and our cost efficiency going forward and support our long-term EBITDA margin targets. Operating cash flow was NOK 4 million in the third quarter and NOK 62.5 million for the first nine months. The deviation from EBITDA mainly reflects increased working capital. Net investments were NOK 46 million in the quarter, net financing -NOK 33 million, and we ended the quarter with NOK 135 million in cash. The seasonal pattern in our industry means we will see higher invoicing and improved cash flow from operations in Q4 and Q1 next year. Finally, a few comments on our balance sheet. The changes this year mainly reflect acquisitions and increases in intangible assets, such as software development assets and goodwill. On the other side of the balance sheet, we see increased equity as a result of the share issue. The equity ratio is solid at 49%, up from 46% at the end of 2020. Our cash position is NOK 135 million, and net interest-bearing debt at NOK 1.5 billion. Our financial flexibility was further strengthened in July when we signed a NOK 100 million RCF with Danske Bank. We have not yet drawn upon the facility, which is for general purposes and financing of further possible acquisitions. Thank you. I'll leave the mic back to Terje for some closing remarks. Thank you, Fredrik. I will now do a brief summary and outlook before we move over to the Q&A part. In the third quarter, we focused on realizing synergies from acquisitions and on developing products for our clients. Mercell Commerce and Cloudia showed solid underlying ARR growth, while Negometrix and post-award was more or less flat. We look forward to the introduction of our new source-to-pay solution for post-award in 2022. We are also gradually launching our Mercell Tender Finder, which we believe will add significant value to new and existing supply side customers after great feedback from testing in Norway. The same goes for Mercell Source-to-Contract, where we onboarded our first pilot customer in Denmark and expect to scale the onboarding process in 2022. Due to seasonal patterns, we will also see higher invoicing and improved cash flow in the last quarter of 2021 and in the first quarter of next year. We will continue our focus on realizing synergies and product development in the fourth quarter, which we believe is the right focus for Mercell now on our journey towards our long-term targets. At our Capital Markets Day in May, we introduced a target to more than double the ARR in existing markets from 2020 to 2025. In June, we acquired Cloudia in Finland, and we see roughly the same organic growth potential in the Finnish markets. It is important to highlight that the journey towards our 2025 target is not going to be linear. It is depending on product and market introductions, as well as customer uptake. We expect the largest part of the growth to come from the supply side. Building on the strong buy side positions in the Netherlands and Finland, and the gradual launch of the new and improved supply side platform in all our core markets. With that, I believe we can move over to the Q&A session. All right. We have actually gotten some questions during the presentation. I will read the questions, and then either you, Fredrik, or I will answer. The first question goes as follows: You highlight guidance for midterm ARR growth, and you highlight CapEx for next year. Many other moving parts for 2022. Could you help us understand a bit what you think about adjusted EBITDA margins? We have guided on an EBITDA margin in 2025 of 40%+. We haven't provided any short-term guidance, and we have said that it will not be a linear path towards those 40%. You know, we're working on steadily increasing both the revenues and the profitability in the company. Yeah. The next question, Fredrik, also goes within the same topic. Could you please give a rough indication about margins in the different regions? Yeah. We have companies in the portfolio that are on these 40% plus margins already, and that's, you know, one of the data points that proves that we will get there over time. It's important for us to get to a leading position in the market and monetize both on the buyer side and supplier side and utilize the network effect. Then we see that the margins come, and we have data points both in the companies that we have owned for some time and also the companies that we have acquired. Thank you, Fredrik. The next question goes as follow. ARR growth tracking in the high end of the guidance right now with your 21%. Given all initiatives you have and versus maybe platform integration, acquisition consolidation, do you think 2022 is a year in the low end or in the high end of the guidance? What we have guided on is that we aim to deliver 15%-20% CAGR until the end of 2025, and we do not want to go into specifics about next year, but we are confident that we will be able to deliver within the guidance. Let me see. Next one. All right. The next one is about the platform consolidation work. How far is Mercell from having a complete best-in-class platform that is business ready? Fredrik- Yeah Maybe you can give some flavor to that. Yeah. We have on the Q2 presentation, we gave an update, you know, we're having soft launch the supplier side in Norway in Q3. We're starting to migrate or upgrade the less complex customers on the pre-award buyer side in Denmark. Then we will start also with post-award customers in Denmark in Q1 2022. I think that's proving that we're on our way. Keep in mind that both on the pre-award buyer side and on the post-award side, we have the platforms. You know, it's basically localizing and building more modules on the current platform in order to upgrade all our current customers. Okay. Next question. Looking into 2022, which organic growth opportunities are you the most excited about? As we just said, related to or in the presentation, we see that we will achieve growth in all our three business areas. The business area with the highest growth will be on the supply side because especially as many who have listened in earlier know that both in Finland and the Netherlands, we have now positions as the clear market leader on the buy side. In those markets, there are no monetization yet of the supply side. That's an important task for us going forward. Yeah. Next one related to M&A. Can you walk us through how the strategy changes given the current leverage and the stock price? How do you think about to either stop the pace of deals or alternatively, what are the solutions for inorganic growth? When we presented the Q2 results and also our capital market update day, we informed the market that our main focus for the rest of 2021 would be to really realize the synergies and implement our best practices into the acquired companies. As we have shown today, we have a really strong development in Sweden through Mercell Commerce. Of course, we will continue to have focus on getting the economies of scale results and the synergies in the acquired companies. At the same time, we also have a lot of ongoing dialogue with potential M&A targets in different countries in Europe. These dialogues will continue, but at the moment, we are not in a rush to close any new deals. How large—next question. How large do you think the supplier side business can become for Cloudia over time? Where are you in the timeline to go to market with a full offering? I can answer the last part of that question, and we are preparing as we speak, and we are aiming at launching our offering against the Finnish suppliers at the end of this quarter, fourth quarter this year. We expect to see results of this at least after the first quarter 2022. Fredrik, how large do we think the supplier side business can become? When we acquired Cloudia, we set a target that we'd double the ARR with a timeframe of 2025. You know, a big part of this will come from the supplier side. Let me see. Many of the same topics we have covered. Yeah. It's many of the same questions that we already answered and also through the presentation. Yeah. Let us see. There are some questions related to the growth, the impressive growth we already have been able to achieve in Sweden through the Mercell Commerce, formerly Visma Commerce. The questions are about what levers we have been using to achieve that growth. As mentioned in the presentation some minutes ago, the growth of 15% so far, which we aim at also continue to increase going forward, has been achieved by strengthening of the sales team, both how it's organized and also how many sales reps we have in the Swedish market. Also by doing changes on the packages in Sweden and also some price optimization. Everything is a part of the same solution. When we entered in as owners in Mercell Commerce, we already had, let's say, a plan for what we would like to change and to achieve because we knew the Swedish market and the company really well since we have been competing in the Swedish market for almost 15 years. Let me see. Do you think it will be possible to use your share and/or earn-outs instead of cash as payment for acquisitions, Fredrik? Yeah. You know, that's of course the possibility. It's like Terje said. It's of course important for us to focus on value creation and creative deals is of course super important. You know, our focus is of course now to do the best with what we have and then integrate with the companies. I think, you know, I think that was more or less covered in the answer that Terje provided. Let me see. We have a lot of questions. We must just see that we don't read one that we already answered. Which one do you think, Fredrik? Maybe the ARR one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that one. All right. The question goes as follows: The ARR was in line with the market expectations of a strong 21% growth without any acquisitions. However, sales was a bit lower. How do you think about timing of sales and ARR? How do you think about this next year, sales versus ARR? When we calculate ARR, it's contracted ARR. When we sign a deal, then it goes into the ARR, and when it enters the P&L, then it gets recognized as revenue. On the supplier side, you know that time to when it gets recognized tends to be very short. On the buyer side, there are some instances that when we sign a deal, then there is maybe a lag of a couple of months or some months before the license starts, and then there could be a gap. All in all, over time, the gap shouldn't be so far. You know, from time to time, there could be. There are some questions also, Fredrik. Yeah ... related to the fact that we have informed the market today that the CapEx level will go down. Yeah. Could you say something about the effects this will have on the cash flow and- Yeah. We ramped up the investments in CapEx earlier this year with the use of consultants, which are now mainly turned off, and we will turn off as much as possible. Spending within this area will come down. You know, that's the message here. There are also some questions related to churn. On a general comment, general level, we can say that churn mitigating initiatives is something that we work on all the time. We see a lot of improvements actually, especially in the markets where we have been for a long time, which is what we define as our mature markets. We think that it is going in the, let's say, right direction. As we have commented on earlier, we see really little churn on the buy side, both in the pre-award and the post-award business areas. The churn is mainly on the supplier side and mainly on the first-year customers, which need to actually test the tender services and how difficult it is for them. company to win public tenders. We actually see companies leaving us and then coming back, months or maybe a year later because then they feel more ready to be competitive within the public, bidding, atmosphere. All right. I think actually that we have covered, also included the actual presentation we just gave, most of the topics that we see questions about. I think we will stop it there. The time is also 8:30. All that remains is to give everyone a really large thanks for listening in, and we wish you all a really great day ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Loading workspace