Good morning and welcome to our Q4 presentation. My name is Terje Wibe, and with me today I have our CFO, Fredrik Eeg. Let's dive right into the highlights for the fourth quarter and the full year of Mercell. We report an ARR of NOK 793 million at the end of the year, including a downward revision of the initial ARR in Cloudia by EUR 2 million or around NOK 20 million. I will get back to that in a minute. The underlying growth has been good, especially in the pre-award business, and especially in our Swedish operation, Mercell Commerce. At the same time, we see a relatively flat development in the post-award business. Revenue was close to NOK 200 million in the quarter, with reported EBITDA of NOK 60 million. This included positive special items, mainly reversal of earn-out in Cloudia, and adjusted EBITDA was NOK 35.5 million. Revenue for the full year was NOK 706 million, with reported EBITDA of NOK 105 million and adjusted EBITDA of NOK 173 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin increased from 22% in 2020 to 24% in 2021. Our focus in 2021 has been on the platform consolidation that will enable us to secure continued strong and profitable growth in the existing business. We put our M&A strategy on hold through the second half of 2021, and this will continue also through 2022. Looking at existing business, we expect improving EBITDA in 2022 and a solid free cash flow after investments from 2022 onwards. We see strong organic growth potential for the existing business, and we believe we are on track for more than a doubling of the ARR in existing markets from 2020 to 2025. Our growth over the past few years has made us one of the largest B2B SaaS companies in the Nordic region. Annual recurring revenue increased eightfold in that period, from less than NOK 100 million to NOK 793 million at the end of 2021. 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. ARR growth in 2021 was 44%, whereas organic growth in local currencies was 18%. Turning back to the Cloudia ARR revisions, we saw that revenues did not follow the same development as ARR. After concluding the acquisition, we therefore initiated a full invoice review, which concluded that estimated acquired ARR was EUR 2 million too high. This has therefore been revised downward to EUR 7.9 million per the second quarter 2021 and EUR 8.5 million per the third quarter 2021. As a result, we are withholding all earn-out payments related to the ARR development. These were expected to amount to EUR 10 million in total, which was payable in the second quarter of 2022. We had already charged the results for the second and third quarter with their parts of the estimated earn-out, and this has therefore been reversed in the income statement for the fourth quarter 2021. Looking at the remaining ARR, we see a solid underlying growth in Cloudia, with a strong 13% increase over the second half of 2021. Also, the possibility of building up a supply-side business was another main attraction of Cloudia, and we are really glad to already experience positive response to this offering in the Finnish market. Overall, we see a healthy organic ARR growth. As already mentioned, we had 18% organic growth for the full year 2021. This graph show the development during the second half of the year, which was the first period in quite some time where we haven't made any acquisitions. This hence reflects true organic growth. Measured in local currencies, ARR increased by 8% in the second half of the year, equal to 16% annualized growth. This is in line with our 15%-20% organic growth target. Upselling in the pre-award supplier markets has been the main growth driver in the period, whereas the post-award market is holding back on the overall growth. Our Swedish operation in Mercell Commerce leads the way, with continued strong growth ever since we took over in Q4 2020. ARR increased by 20% in 2021, with 8% growth on the buy side and 26% increase on the supply side. This is a result of a clear strengthening of the sales team and implementation of the Mercell way of sales, plus optimization of both products and prices. Going forward, we expect to see improving effects of our new CRM systems with increased automation of sales and marketing. Moving on to the technology development. We are now getting ready to upgrade our customers across the source-to-contract platform for pre-award buyers, the Tender Finder for pre-award suppliers, and the procure-to-pay platform for post-award customers. The platform consolidation is a crucial element to be able to reach our high ambitions for long-term growth. We presented this chart on our Capital Market Day last year, outlining more than a doubling of ARR in the existing businesses in 2020 to 2025. This was made before our acquisition of Cloudia, but the same growth target stands also for our existing business today. The largest upside lies in the pre-award supplier space, where we are in position to start tapping the supplier market, both in Finland and also in the Netherlands. However, we also expect to increase supplier revenue in the existing markets with the introduction of Mercell Tender Finder. Pre-award growth will be supported by the upgrade to Mercell Source-to-Contract. Finally, we are looking forward to introduce Mercell Procure-to-Pay to revive growth also within post-award. Looking at the pre-award buy side, we saw 4% growth in local currencies in Q4, mainly driven by positive developments in the Netherlands and Finland. In the Netherlands, growth is mainly driven by wins of new customers in the public sector. Many of these were previously using the state-owned platform, whereas growth in Finland has been driven by up-sales, where the Contract Lifecycle Management module is the key driver for upselling. Mercell's new source-to-contract solution is built on an adapted version of the Negometrix NX4 platform, and the first customers are naturally being upgraded in the Netherlands. So far, we have upgraded more than 100 Dutch public buyers. We have also initiated upgrades in Denmark and will start a rollout in Norway in the first half of this year. Customers will be upgraded country by country, starting with so-called basic clients with low functionality requirements and moving on to gradually more complex customers and functionalities. The Netherlands is leading the field here, having upgraded around a quarter of the customers, with an additional 10% currently being implemented. The plan is to have upgraded 60% of the customers in the Netherlands during 2022. The feedback from customers having upgraded, such as GGNet and the University of Amsterdam, is really, really good. Logging in is easy, layout is clear, and the application has become simpler and much more user-friendly. We are taking the best from the existing platforms and moving more functionality into the source-to-contract platform. This unlocks more upselling opportunities all the way from sourcing stage through to contract awards. I would like to highlight three country-specific products that are going to drive growth in other markets going forward. The Contract Lifecycle Management module, which is the main growth driver in Finland and not yet introduced in other countries. The Intake Management module in the Netherlands, which has not been available on other legacy platforms. The digital signature, which is mandatory in Norway and hold great upselling potential in other markets. Moving on to the pre-award supplier side, we saw 5% growth organically in the fourth quarter. This reflects both the strong growth I have already talked about in Visma Commerce and also good results in the Norwegian market and the promising initial commercialization of the supply side in Finland. We have begun upgrading customers to the new Mercell Tender Finder. Although we have upgraded more than 100 Norwegian customers, you should recognize that we have more than 25,000 supplier customers. We have therefore been working to enable mass upgrade and have successfully tested easy tech touch onboarding. This will boost the uptake in Norway, and we will move on to upgrade Danish customers later in the year and launch the supply side offering in the Netherlands in the second half of this year. The current monetization of our legacy supply side platforms are mainly driven by the various tender notification services, and the upsell opportunities with this model is rather limited. Our new platform will move from delivering a single point solution to delivering a workflow solution towards suppliers, bringing more of the customers off platform activities onto the Mercell platform. Our goal is to offer a continuous workflow solution for suppliers, starting with the customer's needs for market analytics, ending through tender notification, bid submission, and the award of a tender. Already in Q1, we will launch the first version of a workboard product. This product will be further enhanced throughout 2022. We are also looking to bring the Opic Analysis product in Sweden to the Norwegian market, and we are currently testing the value proposition with customers as we speak. We will, throughout 2022 and onwards, launch new features to support our strategy. Among the customers who have already upgraded, we find that Mercell Tender Finder generates greatly improved supplier engagement. The search frequency is significantly higher with Mercell Tender Finder than for our Opic and MTS platforms. MTF also generates significantly more clicks and openings on emails than the legacy platforms. Finally, we see a large untapped potential in the post-award segment. Even though the overall ARR has been flat and even showing a slight decline in Q4 from the churn of one customer, we see a strong demand for this part of the procurement value chain in the market. In 2021, we have worked hard to make the Tricom platform our future procure-to-pay platform, and we are now in a position to start upgrading customers from the Comcare and Aksess Innkjøp platforms to our common new P2P platform. Our ambition is to sunset the Aksess Innkjøp platform already this year, followed by the Comcare platform being sunset next year. The new platform has a broader set of features compared to either of the two platforms it is replacing, resulting in the new Mercell P2P platform, enabling meaningful increased monetization opportunities. For the remaining two post-award platforms, Truelink and Ibistic, there are still some feature gaps that we are working to close. We are getting there, and we really look forward to reviving growth in this area with the new sales and cross sales to existing pre-award customers. Summing up, we are moving towards an integrated user journey all the way from sourcing to payment and also to business intelligence that can feed into new tenders. Offering a seamless overview of the entire procurement lifecycle will solve important customer problems and generate another sustainable competitive edge for Mercell. With that, I'll leave the microphone over to you, Fredrik. Thank you, Terje. I'll start off with the ARR and revenue development in the quarter. As Terje already has mentioned, ARR increased 44% to NOK 793 million, supported by acquisitions in the first half of the year and with pure organic growth in the second half of the year. The revenue line in the graph is for the last 12 months and shows that reported revenue more than doubled in 2021. As you see from the graph, the gap between ARR and the revenue narrowed significantly during the year. This mainly reflects that the ARR contribution from Mercell Commerce was included in the total ARR. However, contribution from revenue was only 1 month in 2020 since closing of the transaction was in December 2020. As we are putting our M&A strategy on hold in the current market climate, this gap will continue to narrow going forward. Revenue in the quarter almost doubled to NOK 199 million, whereas revenue for the full year more than doubled to NOK 706 million compared to 2020. Reported EBITDA was NOK 59.7 million for the quarter and NOK 105 million for the full year. However, the reported figures were positively affected by special items of NOK 24.3 million in the fourth quarter. This reflects NOK 30 million net positive effect from earn-out provisions, mainly due to the reversal of the earn-out provisions for Cloudia. Adjusted EBITDA was hence NOK 35.5 million for the fourth quarter and NOK 172.9 million for the full year. Further down, you see increased depreciation and amortization as a result of acquisitions and capitalized software development costs. We ended the quarter with a profit before tax of NOK 6.6 million for the quarter and a loss of NOK 116.5 million for the full year. Whereas the reported EBITDA margin was 30% in the quarter, the adjusted EBITDA margin was lower at 18%. Comparing with the previous quarter, the main underlying cost driver is personnel expenses, which increased by approximately NOK 14 million, adjusted for earn-outs and other special items in both periods. This increase mainly reflects year-end adjustments and bonuses. Summing up for the whole year, we ended up with reported EBITDA of NOK 105 million and an EBITDA margin of 15%, whereas the adjusted EBITDA was NOK 173 million and the adjusted EBITDA margin 24%. We expect continued revenue growth and EBITDA margin improvement also in 2022. 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 believe large scale and more efficient operation 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. Overall, our IT spending was around NOK 234 million last year, reflecting a rapid pace of innovation. NOK 161 million of this was capitalized software development costs, and around NOK 73 million OpEx for IT people working on commercial and platform maintenance. In 2022, IT CapEx will continue to decline, whereas IT OpEx will increase, reflecting new modules being set in production and will thus require maintenance. We have seen this shift starting already. Overall, we expect total IT spending to decline by 10%-15% or NOK 30 million-NOK 35 million in 2022, and total IT spending is expected to decline significantly in the years to come, measured by spending in% of revenue. Turning to cash flow, we had operating cash flow of NOK 26 million in the fourth quarter. Net investments amounted to NOK 40 million, mainly reflecting the software development CapEx. Cash flow from financing activities was a negative NOK 25 million. We hence ended the year with a cash balance of NOK 97 million. Looking ahead, we expect improving operational cash flow in the first quarter 2022. We have already increased the cash balance to around NOK 120 million and expect positive cash flow from the existing business after investments from 2022 onwards. Rounding off with the financial position, we have added assets over the past year through acquisitions and investments in software. We have financed this with share issues, increased bond loan, and cash at hand. Our equity ratio is still 47%, and we operate in full compliance with all loan covenants. With that, I'll leave the microphone back to Terje. Thank you. Thank you, Fredrik. I only have a few brief comments before we move on to the Q&A part. We have already built a unique market position as the clear market leader across the Nordics and in the Netherlands. We are by far the largest tender platform in Europe, with around 11% of all European tenders above EU thresholds being published through Mercell. This is twice as many as our nearest competitor in Europe, and our market share is growing. We have been playing the part as the market consolidator in Northern Europe and continue to see opportunities across Europe, with most markets much more fragmented and immature than the Nordic region. However, in the current market climate, we find it challenging to create value through accretive M&A and will rather deploy all our resources into profitable organic growth. To repeat myself, we see an opportunity to more than double ARR in our existing markets from 2020 to 2025. We see several drivers to accelerate that growth in the years to come with the new Mercell Source-to-Contract, Mercell Tender Finder, and Mercell Procure-to-Pay opening new sales opportunities and revenue streams going forward. On this backdrop, we expect continued revenue growth and EBITDA margin improvements in 2022. With the decision to put M&A on hold, we are set to generate solid free cash flow after investments from 2022 and onwards. Thank you for listening. With that, we will open up for questions. All right, we have received some questions during the presentation, and I will read the questions, and then either you, Fredrik, or I will answer. Yeah. The first one goes as follows. Given a solid free cash flow, are paying dividends a part of the new focus, Fredrik? The cash flow will be spent on either accretive M&A opportunities in the future, share buyback, or potentially, dividends, but we haven't decided on that yet. Thank you, Fredrik. The next questions we have received is the following. Can you say approximately how much of the increase in personnel expenses, quarter-over-quarter was driven by year-end bonuses, Fredrik? Yeah, roughly 40%. Thank you. Next question, also to you, Fredrik. What was 2021 pro forma adjusted EBITDA? Yeah. We have only reported on the revenues and the P&L in the owner period. We have not reported on the pro forma 2021 P&L. Thank you. Next question goes as follows: Is Q4 adjusted EBITDA annualized a good proxy for what to expect going forward? If not, why? Yeah. What we said in the report is that we expect the EBITDA margins in 2022 to be higher than it was in 2021, and in 2021 we reported an EBITDA margin of 24%. Thank you, Fredrik. We also have a question about how much the year-end bonuses in the company affected the Q4 for EBITDA. Yeah. We, I think, answered that on, you know. Yeah ... on the 40, roughly 40% of the increase. All right. Next one. How much of the reduction in IT CapEx stems from the reduction in FTEs? Will any of the reduction instead increase the OpEx? Yeah, as I mentioned in the presentation, we have, you know, we're going into production of the modules, which will require maintenance, but the main part of the reduction in IT CapEx is, of course, also related to the reduction in IT consultants that we also have been transparent on. Thank you, Fredrik. Did you enter into an M&A insurance in connection with the Cloudia transaction? Yes, we have an M&A insurance within the Cloudia transactions. Yeah. We also have a follow-up question, which, what are the possibilities and prospect when it comes to partial repayment from the seller of Cloudia? We mentioned in the report that this situation resulted in Cloudia not reaching the earn-out goals in ARR growth, we will not be paying the NOK 100 million in the earn-out, as mentioned in the report as well. We at this stage can't say anything else about the process because it's an ongoing dialogue of course, as mentioned, we have also an M&A insurance. Let me see. Next question. We need some comments on the current stock price. It has strongly been declining without specific news from the company. What is your comments in that regard? Yeah. I think, you know, we have seen a decline in a broad decline in many of the IT shares, not only in Norway, but also in Nordics and internationally. You know, we've been quite transparent on our side what we wanted to do when we got listed on Euronext Growth, and I think we have, you know, followed our strategy quite well as well. You know, we need to focus on the underlying strategy and executing on that, but of course, being able also to maneuver and adapt to the market conditions, and I think, you know, this report reflects that, and also the focus on profitable growth going forward, which will be important for us as well. Thank you, Fredrik. Then we have a question about if we can split how much of the growth in Mercell Commerce that comes from price versus new or upselling, and the comment on that is that we never do price hikes standalone. We always go in and look at the content in the various packages we do, et cetera, and if the prices increase more than, let's say, a normal increase, it's always also included some changes for the clients so that they get a better service and get better product mix. Actually, most of the increase is from the new sales and the upselling, but with some changed content in the packages so that the package prices could be higher. It's not only by price increases, and this is the model we follow in all the markets and all the business areas. It's really important for us to make sure that the customers get a strong value proposition, and that being a paying customer with Mercell gives competitive advantage for the client. All right. That actually concludes the incoming questions we have received. I think we just will end the session at this stage. All right. All that remains then is to say thank you very much for listening in, and we would like to wish everyone a great day further. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Loading workspace