Good morning. Welcome to this Q4 webcast with 24Storage here from Arctic Securities. Together with me today, I have the company's CEO, Fredrik Sandelin, who will take us through the quarterly results and also give an update on what's the latest and greatest within this c ompany. With no further ado, I will give the word to you, Fredrik. Thank you, Carl Frederick. We have had now for a number of years, a steady growth in both revenue and gross profit. We can see that for last year, we increased our revenue with 21%. We increased our gross profit with almost 50%, and we had a fair value of SEK 71 million, increasing our property value. We also issued a bond in the magnitude of SEK 400 million. We had the IPO in late 2019, and we followed up last year, with the bond issue. We have a loan-to-value of 59%. We are a PropTech company. We use digitization, automization to a larger extent than most our competitors. We are also a growth company. We will see later that we have had an average growth, since 2016, of more than 30% compounded. Of course, we are a real estate company. What differs us from most other real estate companies are that we both own our properties, and we run the business in these properties. We have today 25 stores. We are present in the three major regions of Sweden, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmo. We have 11,500 units, a little bit more than 63,000 sq m select able area, and we have more than 7,000 customers. For those of you who have not been able to listen to our presentations before, I will give a short description of the self-storage industry and of our company. The main driver for self-storage is urbanization. More and more people move into cities. That leads to an increase in land prices, leading to an increase in real estate prices. That is leading to that we build smaller houses and apartments, and we build smaller and less storage units. That's where we come in. Self-storage is seen as a resilient asset class within real estate. This data is taken from the U.S. and cover the last 25 years. The reason why we've chosen U.S. is that that's where most of the listed self-storage companies are. You can see on the upper graph that the return, if we take the different asset classes within real estate, self-storage, is the one with the best return during this time period. Maybe of even more importance in the prevailing circumstances is that you can see on the bottom graph that this is an asset class that is seen as resilient in downturns in the economy. You can see the different downturns since the early 1990s, and that in most of these, self-storage has performed better than the other asset classes within real estate. Of course, we wondered about one year ago, will this downturn in the economy with COVID-19 be different from the previous downturns? We will come back to that as well. We can see already now that the impact of COVID-19 has been very limited for the industry and for us. If we take, for example, an office building, the day you open an office building, you often have an occupancy rate in the region 70%-80% because you're able to sign contracts with customers before you finalize the building. For us, it is very different. We more or less start the day of opening with an occupancy rate of nil. Very few customers are prepared to book a storage unit in advance. We say that we have a ramp-up period, for the first four years. During these four years, we aim to primarily increase the occupancy rate. If we do that correctly, after four years, we are at an occupancy rate in the region from 80%-90%. Then follows two years with revenue optimization. After then roughly six years, you have a mature facility. Then you have a very profitable and very cash flow positive facility. You can see some examples. There are larger companies listed in Europe, Shurgard and Big Yellow, listed, so the data is public. You can see that Shurgard is running NOI margin in more than 60%. Big Yellow have an EBITDA margin of even 70%. There are a number of good examples in the industry that when you have a mature portfolio, you also have a very good margin, and you have a good cash flow. This slide shows the three major regions in Sweden, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, where you can see all our facilities plotted. Last year, we made an extension down in Malmö. We opened a new facility in Uppsala, north of Stockholm. We plan to open a facility in Vällingby, that is a suburb to Stockholm. We have some slight delays to that facility opening in early January this year instead. You can also see that we are right now doing construction in Mölndal, outside of Gothenburg, where we have started the construction. We have also started the construction in Västerås. That is northwest of Stockholm. You can see the gray ones, that we also have three more properties that we either own or have a contract to acquire land that we'll start construction a little bit later. I will come back to that as well. If we look at the customers, we have about a little bit more than 7,000 customers. 85% of them are private residential, 15% are corporate customers. They stay on average 15 months. You can see on the right-hand side that when it comes to the different channels, how we communicate and how the customers do their purchases. We have an online sales part that is now 40%. It was 35% in 2019, and the run rate right now is between 40%-45%, so it's increasing all the time. This is a traditional industry. Most operators have local manning. You have one to three persons sitting at the facility. What we did when we founded a company back in 2015, was to have a different strategy and a different business model. Instead of having local manning, we have central manning. We have a central customer service center that are servicing all our 25 facilities, and from the service center, we can steer and control the facilities from distance. We can sit here in Stockholm, we can open doors and gates in Malmö, for example. Through intercom, we can communicate with the customer that wants to get in contact with us. We have a lot of cameras. We have self-service kiosk, where the customer can have a direct link to a sales agent and have a discussion, and they can even sign the contract. We have a totally different business model. We will come back to that when we see the numbers, the advantages of that. That was the first thing, and the second was, as we talked about on the last slide, that we have a larger proportion of the customers doing online transactions, rather than traditional way of booking a unit and then go down, sign the contract at the facility. Now as a customer, you can go in on our website, whenever you want, wherever you are, find a suitable facility, have a look what available units there are. If you find something, you can sign the contract. You can identify yourself with a BankID. You can sign the contract. You can pay with credit card, for example. Then you will receive a code to your email address, and with that code, you can go down to facility and use your unit. All that is done online. What we do, and there are two advantages. First is the cost side of it. We can run our facilities with less than one FTE per facility, where most of our competition have at least two persons sitting at the facility. It's an obvious economies of scale to have that business model. When we add more facilities, we don't have to increase the number of employees at the same rate as the traditional one, because often we can accommodate the extra work that one new extra facility is creating. For example, when we opened Uppsala in November last year, we didn't have to employ any new person due to that. If we had had the traditional model, we would have had to increase by at least two persons. We also, with the central service center, we can have longer opening hours, both during the weekdays and in the weekends. The flexibility from a customer point of view and the accessibility is higher with this central model. From an environmental perspective, the buildings we construct are not very complicated, as we normally use less resources than most other real estates. When we are operating, we also consume less electricity. For example, in the wintertime, the temperature is in the region 10 to 12 degrees, not more. The consumption of electricity is much lower than in a normal building. The electricity we use have no-carbon emissions when they are produced. Then there are other advantages that we can, from a society perspective, we normally can occupy land plots close to roads, for example, that is difficult to use for other types of real estates. If we, by that, leave the more general part and go into the actual numbers for last year, you can see that property value, lettable area, revenue, there is a more or less linear increase since we started in 2015. We continue exactly the same trend as we have done for the last years. If we do a split down to quarterly level, you can see that the com pounded growth rate since 2016 has been more than 30%. We increased, as I said, last year, 21% compared to 2019. In the fourth quarter, there is an increase of 17% compared to the same quarter last year. The reason for the increase in revenue, there are three reasons for that. One is that we increase the occupancy rate in the like-for-like facilities. When they reach a higher maturity, they also have this increase in occupancy rate. The same goes for the price. Most of the increase in revenue comes from higher occupancy rate and higher rate on the existing facilities. On top of that, we add new capacity every year. If we then do a specific dive into occupancy and the rent, you can see that now we are running at an occupancy rate of 68%. At the same time, the average in the Swedish market is around 85%. You can also see that we have reduced our occupancy rate. We had 74%, if we go back to 2016. The reason for that is that we are adding new capacity all the time. As I said earlier, when we start a new facility, the occupancy rate is very close to zero. It takes a number of years to increase that. This is in line with the expansion strategy, but it's important to bear in mind why we have the rate that we have. If we look at the rent per square meter, we see that it's increasing every year. We are now at a rate of little bit more than SEK 2,000, and it's increasing, but we're still below the country average. The country average is around SEK 2,300. Over time, when we have a more mature portfolio of facilities, there is absolutely no reason at all why we should have a rent that is below the country average. On the contrary, because we have newer facilities, and we only have them in the three major regions, where prices are high. We talked a little bit earlier about the impact of COVID-19. With the benefit of hindsight now for last year, we can say that the effect has been very limited. The industry has shown that also in this time of downturn in the economy, it's very resilient. We also see that there will be most likely some changes after the COVID crisis. We will see more work from home. Of course, we will not be working from home five days a week anymore, but a lot of people will be working a few days, and that will lead to that you need more space. At homes, you have to convert living area into office area, and that is a trigger that will increase the need and increase the demand for storage. Of the corporate customers, we have one segment, are smaller sales companies, and the increase of online business, we will see similar companies on the online side, where we can be an interesting partner to them, where they might have small inventories, can be demo products for fairs, et cetera, but they don't need a warehouse or part of a warehouse. We sell storage. We are an interesting alternative. We will also see that with online sales increase, and there will be a need for space closer to the customers. Last mile and all that, and we can be part of that as well. If we look a little bit about on the gross profit and the gross margin, you can see that the trend also here is positive, but it's not as linear as for revenue. The good thing is that revenue increased faster than our cost. That is, as we talked about, there are many reasons for that. One is that as we increase occupancy and rate, of course, we increase our revenue, but we don't have to add any cost at all to do that. Secondly, with the business model we have, there is a scalability that when we add new facilities, we don't need to increase the cost base relatively. The increase of cost is lower. We also see that as we say, when we open a new facility that initially impact profit in a negative way because we have more or less the full cost, but we don't have the revenue. You might wonder why do we have these up and downs? There is a seasonality in the cost base. You can say, for example, that the second quarter we normally have higher marketing costs than we have in the first quarter because the best period here is starting in April. On the marketing side, we spend more in the second quarter than in the first, for example. Then during winter time, the operating costs are higher because we need more. Even if we don't use much electricity, the electricity we use, we use more in the wintertime than in the summer, obviously. The cost is higher. You have all this, cleaning snow, et cetera. That type of cost will happen during the wintertime. The Q4, for example, then have a higher cost level relatively seen than the third quarter. What happened in the fourth quarter last year was that we are laying a new roof on one of our facilities, and the cost for that is SEK 900,000. If we add back that cost, the margin would have been 28% in the fourth quarter instead of 24%. The downturn for the third quarter is in line with seasonality, but it's deeper this time because of this, you can say one-off cost. If we look at the yearly number, if we adjust for that, the margin goes up from 27.5% to 28.5%. Here we have plotted our existing facilities. Here you can see that there are regression lines where you can see that they follow very well the trend of maturity. You can see that a lot of the facilities we have that are more than five years old, they are running at a occupancy rate of 80%-90%. There are a few ones with lower, but we have a number of them with 80% and more. The same goes for rent level that the older and the more years a facility has been in operation, the higher the rate is. The variance between the highest and the lowest, as you can see, is much higher on the rent level than the occupancy rate. That is due to the regional factor, that there is much more variance on rent level depending on the geography than there is on the occupancy side. If we dig into the income statement, we have talked about the increase in revenue. We have talked about the increase in gross margin. We have a good fair value development in the fourth quarter. We did an external valuation at the end of the fourth quarter, the three quarters starting the year with the internal valuation. At the end of the year, we made an external valuation. We have a fair value of almost SEK 54 million in the quarter, and almost SEK 71 million for the year. That leads to a good increase on the EBIT number, a good number on the profit both before and after tax. You can see that compared to 2019, it's a good improvement. We also increase the interest cost, as you can see in the quarter compared to last year. We had some one-off items on the year. The interest cost is slightly lower. We borrow more now than we did one year ago, that is also affecting the interest cost. All in all, you can see that the result is improving quite a lot compared to the year before. On the balance sheet side, we have a strong position. We have a property portfolio value of more than SEK 1.3 billion. We have cash of almost SEK 150 million, and when we issued the bond, we issued SEK 400 million, and we repaid a bank loan of SEK 300 million. We got SEK 100 million extra that we now are using primarily for new constructions. We have an equity to assets ratio of 33%, and we have a net loan-to-value of 59%. The bond issue last year meant there are a lot of advantages with that. One is that we get access to a larger and more flexible limit. Over time, we expect also that the interest cost will come down. When we look at the debt maturity profile, you can see that we had before the bond issue, a rather large part of the loan was expiring during this year, 2021. By the bond, we have pushed that now the main part to 2023. The maturity profile with debt is better now after the bond. Cash flow looks very much the same as last year. We still have a slightly negative cash flow from the operating activities, and that is due to the fact that we are still in this build-up phase where we are increasing the level of maturity. We haven't come yet to a point where we have a cash flow in balance. We do a lot of investing. We buy properties, we build properties, we have a cash flow effect from that. On the other side, last year, we made new issues, share issues, and in this year we made the issue on the bond side. To a large extent, it's very similar to last year. If we look into the future a little bit, we have a clear ambition and objective. We want to increase with three to five facilities every year, and that equates to around 10,000 sq m of lettable area. We had an extension down in Malmö. We opened Uppsala, and we had a slight delay in Vällingby. Instead of opening in December, it opened in January. There we can say that there was a COVID-19 effect. Part of that, not all, but part of that delay was due to the COVID situation, and also with import of material from abroad, et cetera, from countries that were in a lockdown. If we include Vällingby in the 2020 number, we can say that we reached a 10,000 sq m objective last year. For this year, excluding Vällingby, we have three projects. Two that I mentioned and one that will be announced in the future. They together amount to more than 10,000 sq m. On top of that, we have already contracted another 10,000 sq m. They will be up and running from 2022 and onwards. Fredrik, that was what I was planning to say in the first part. Excellent. Excellent, Fredrik. Thank you for that. We have some questions here, which I think we could try to address right away. One of them was on a topic you already touched briefly, which relates to construction delays related to COVID-19 during 2020. Have you seen any other negative effects besides the Vällingby construction process? No, we haven't. The extension we did in Malmö was on time, no delays there. Uppsala was even a little bit ahead of timetable, so we didn't see it there. We only had an effect last year for the Vällingby property. The two constructions we have ongoing right now in Mölndal, in the Gothenburg area, and Västerås, north of Stockholm, we haven't seen any delays. Not from COVID-19, but not for any other reasons either. The answer is no, we haven't seen any other negative effect. To follow up a little bit on that one, there's another question here regarding the three projects you aim to open during 2021. Could you perhaps give us some indications on what quarters you aim to open these new facilities? As we started the construction, we sent out the press release on Västerås late last year, and we started the construction in Mölndal early this year. The third one, we have not yet acquired. They will all open in the second half of this year. We will not have any one of them opening in the first half, but they will all come during the second half. Excellent. There is a question here from someone who has noticed that you are now, in terms of business development, you have now launched a new service where customers are able to order pickup or delivery of their goods for storage. Yes. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the rationale behind expanding your product service in this way? That's a good question. We have done two things. We have an online sales on packages and boxes, and we're also offering a transportation service. We also, during last year, we have these trailers that as a customer, you can rent for free. We have done different things. If we start with the package material, we can take that first, because the need for package material appears before you come down to the store. The problem today for most self-storage companies is that when the customer gets to the store, they already have their boxes, for example. If they need to buy something, they just need to buy a few extra because they have a shortage. What we now want to do is to, at the same time as you book the storage units, you can also buy the material you want. We can also then go into different custom segments. It's good for us to be visible on the net, for example, in another environment, and it's a service to the customer. That's the reason for offering online sales on what we have in the shop. Transportation, the first step was to offer these trailers that you can rent for free, so you can get your stuff to the storage facility. You still need to have a car. There is a huge potential in people living in the city center without a car. A lot of them have a good financial situation and they have a shortage of storage area. By offering also a transportation service, they don't have to have all the hassle of getting the boxes to the facility. It's one way to facilitate for them to become new customers, because if we look at the customer base, if you have, say, people below 35 years living in city center locations, in smaller, the apartments normally are smaller in the city center, so there is a shortage of storage space. We can reach them, if we also offer the transportation service. That is the main reason for doing it. We can see that some of companies that are not self-storage companies, but you have a lot of companies that you can store, more kind of warehouse, they pick up and bring the boxes to the warehouse. What we do is that we can pick up the boxes and bring them to self-storage facility. The difference with that is that with the self-storage facility, you have the ability to get down to your own unit and do whatever you want with the boxes, et cetera. If you use more of a store far away, it's more difficult to get access to the things that you have stored. It's also important to notice that we do it through partners. We should not be a forwarding company or a transportation company. We don't tie up any capital in lorries, et cetera, because we are not in that industry. Through partners, we are able to offer that service to our customers. Thank you. I think that was a very good distinction. Then there's a question here regarding the rent up-phase on new facilities. Could you elaborate a bit on the rent level per square meter on the new facilities versus the older ones, and what kind of discounts you have to give in order to attract new customers? The first answer to that is that that varies a lot depending on the location. It's difficult to say that the facility that is less than one year is on a certain level. There is a big difference. The reason for that is that for a new facility, you need to have more or less 100% new customers. The older a facility gets, if you're running, for example, at more than 90% occupancy, then there's a rather small portion of the total supply you have that you need to direct to new customers. Instead, you can start increasing prices on the existing customers. That's one of the reason why the profitability and the margin is so high when you have a mature portfolio, that there is a stickiness in the business that a number of the customers stay for a rather long time, and they are not very price sensitive. You can increase your prices on the existing customer base. You only have to attract a smaller portion of new customers. It's only the new customers, really, where you have to fight with prices, and that's also where the competition normally lies. It's difficult on the total portfolio to give a clear indication because it varies from time to time. The interesting thing is that the longer, the more mature facilities, less new customers do you have to attract. You can instead optimize revenue on the existing ones. If I recall correctly, Fredrik, you had a campaign ahead of opening the Uppsala facility where customers were able to pre-book at a discount. Yep. Could you perhaps share some details on how the interest was for this campaign? It was very high. We did that both for Uppsala last year and for Vällingby this year, and we haven't done that to the same extent in the past, but now we are. To some extent, it's also an IT question that we're now more able to do it than we were in the past. We can now do it in the future on our new facilities. It was a very positive outcome, a good interest, and of course, there is an advantage to get kind of a kickstart for a new facility to start to build up occupancy. The outcome was very positive and something that we will use also for the coming projects. Related to another follow-up on the same topic, there's a question here about how often are you able to adjust rent levels on existing contracts? The standard contract for the industry here in Sweden is that after six months, we can increase prices, and then we can increase them more or less whenever we want. There's, I would say, no contractual obstacle to increase prices. It's more a question of the acceptance from the customer side. It's a flexible contract, and after six months, it's very flexible. Then it's more a business acumen question rather than a legal question. Finally here, we have a question on the competitive situation. Have you seen any material changes in the Swedish market during the past 12 months? There are coming some new stores to the market, yes. Not really from the larger ones. It's more the next tier, if we call it that. There are some new facilities coming to the market, yes. Not more than what we have expected. If I recall correctly, there has been some consolidation within the industry as well? Yes, it has. I would not say during the last year to any large, but if we take it a little bit longer, yes. Excellent. I think that was all we had for now. I would like to say thank you very much to Fredrik Sandelin for taking the time to share his thoughts on the current situation for 24Storage. Also thank you to all of you who have been listening. This webcast, of course, will be available through link within a few hours. Thank you so much, and have a nice day. Thank you, Fredrik.
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