Good morning, and welcome to ABG Investor Days. My name is Simon Jönsson, an equity analyst with ABG. With us today, we have Erik Grohman, CEO of Awardit. He will host a presentation of the company, and afterwards, we will have a short Q&A. Without further ado, Erik, I leave the floor to you. Thanks, Simon. Good morning, everyone. My name is Erik Grohman. I'm the CEO of Awardit since March last year. I will briefly present Awardit as a company, and then a little bit about what I believe for the future, and also touch on the Q3 results for this year. Awardit is the market leader in the Nordics in two market segments: in loyalty program solutions and gift card solutions. Within these two segments, we provide a one-stop shop service for our clients. Basically, whatever a client needs in terms of loyalty program solutions or gift card solutions, they can come to us, and we have the solutions for our clients. So we work with everything from consulting services and insights around how to create a loyalty program, how to increase sales within certain channels and with certain customer segments for our clients, with strategies and concepts for loyalty programs and gift card solutions, with designing and implementing these programs with our clients, with SaaS-based technical solutions that are key ready and fast and easy to implement for our clients towards their customers and clients. We also have partnership programs, adding value to the loyalty programs that we provide in terms of partners that can provide added benefits into a program, and also for gift cards. We provide shop solutions, so loyalty marketplaces, where you can turn your loyalty points into products or services or gift cards, and customer support, logistics solutions, shipments, et cetera. The full cycle of services within loyalty solutions and gift cards. This company was founded in 1999. Today, we are about 300 employees. We have our headquarters here in Stockholm, and we have an office in Gothenburg. We have offices in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and in Wels, outside of Austria, and our latest acquisition is in southern Germany, in Baden-Baden, in Weingarten. We have conducted 12 acquisitions since we went public a bit more than five years ago. What is attractive with our segments is that we have created this unique position of being a one-stop shop provider within loyalty programs and gift card solutions. We are today the largest platform and largest provider of these services in the Nordics, and now we are rolling out in DACH. We are now a leading provider also in the DACH region, and we see an opportunity to consolidate these markets now across Europe. And our vision is to be the leader in the European market on these services, and we see that there is a need for a consolidating force across Europe in these two segments. And there is an opportunity as well to really make sure to capture the different segments that are out there, consolidate that, and be the one-stop shop provider that we are in the Nordics today. And we have built this position by putting together different capabilities from our acquisitions into one pool of resources that we now utilize to provide these services in the Nordics and in DACH. And we have several programs, obviously. We have more than 250 programs now in the Nordics, touching I mean, more than actually. Now in the presentation, it says 50 million consumers in the Nordics. With our gift card solutions, we cover more than that as well, and we have an even wider reach in terms of touch points with consumers in DACH as well. And if you look at the market segments we are in, we see global trends, where we see growth in loyalty programs and gift card solutions. In loyalty programs, more and more companies obviously see the need to retain their loyal customers. They see an improved ROI in investing, in benefiting consumer and customer relationships. And they also have, you know, the importance of that. It's very strategic to many companies, but they don't have the core capabilities internally to run these kind of programs. So more and more are looking for a solid partner to run these programs and to provide these services. And here we are. We want to be that partner, of course, for our customers. In gift card solutions, we see obviously higher utilization on mobile phones and digital solutions, driving the trends of digital currencies and digital usage of gift cards, and that's also the arena we're playing in with our gift card solutions. So really strong growth globally and in Europe, across loyalty and gift cards, and we are in a leading position to capitalize on that. Looking at our different solutions, our clients have, in their turn, customers, consumers, employees as their target groups, so we provide solutions for our clients to achieve a greater share of wallet against the competition in terms of creating loyalty, of course, than with their target groups. We provide solutions that make our clients or give them the possibility to reduce the focus on pricing and discounting towards their target groups. They can talk about something else. They can talk about the fantastic things that you can achieve through being a member of the loyalty programs, from what you can get from the points, which is mostly more worth than what you can get from discounts instead. So we create something to talk about and something that can be of very high value to our clients, obviously, and create a high interest in our clients. An example of that is SAS EuroBonus or Ahlsell, the aClub, that they provide to their clients. And, of course, the aim is to reduce churn with the clients to improve the customer lifetime value of clients that are acquired into the programs. And, of course, I mean, we--you also run a lot of communication and help our customers to be successful with their programs, and we have a lot of data points to prove that investing in a loyalty program or a gift card solution truly is a high ROI investment for our clients. Also, of course, we've offer lots of value-added services to the programs. So, not only does the programs provide a value for the clients directly in terms of increasing purchase and share of wallet for the clients, but also it extends the partnership network of clients, where you can have partners extending the network. So as an example, if you fuel the company car at Circle K, you can earn points in a program run by our partner. So really creating a network for our clients to work with towards their clients. If you look at our business models, in loyalty, we provide a platform, as I mentioned, on a SaaS basis, that is turnkey ready. It's easy to implement, but it's also possible to customize for our clients. For this platform, we charge a set-up fee when we engage with the client. We also charge a monthly fee for access and usage of the platforms and the services. Then we earn revenues from sales of products from the shops that we provide to clients, so that is actually a larger share of the revenues from our loyalty programs compared to our platform revenues. So as an example then, in a shop such as SAS EuroBonus, when points are used in the SAS EuroBonus shop, that's our sales of products where we earn revenues from the SAS EuroBonus program. Then we provide a loyalty marketplace, as I mentioned, I mean, that can be the shop solution or the partnership network. And the partnerships, that's a separate one here, where we earn commissions from points earned from partners into programs. And we also can sell points through the partnerships and earn campaign fees in campaigning partners or offers in our different loyalty solutions. And on the gift card side, we also earn set-up fees from setting up the programs with our clients. It's a bit different depending on what kind of program we have. We run several different type of gift card programs, obviously, but typically, we have a one-off set-up fee and then a monthly fee to run on our technical platform to process the gift cards. We have a loading fee for each card being loaded on our platforms, a commission fee from our partners that we provide content for and that we also distribute in retail. In some of our gift cards, we earn breakage, which is earnings from unredeemed gift cards. That's basically on our products, where we own the concepts and the packaging ourselves, which we call our private labels or our own labels. That's typically mostly in the experience product sector, such as packaged gift cards for hotel stays, et cetera. But also in our SuperGift business, which is a meta card that we have launched. SuperGift is our own gift card solution. You can, instead of buying a specific gift card for a specific retailer, you can buy a SuperGift, exchange that for any gift card in our portfolio, and obviously then, if the SuperGift is not redeemed for a different gift card, we earn the breakage on that product. So, the SuperGift is something that we have created because we have a network of clients, and we can package that offer, creating our own gift card solution on the top of all our other gift cards. On the private label side, what we have, this is examples of our private labels. We have, as I mentioned, SuperGift. We have Hotelbox, which is a packaged gift offer, primarily in the DACH region, where consumers can buy, you know, a hotel stay for two or a brunch for two in a packaged solution. And there, we also source all the content for this product, so we actually procure all the hotel stays, et cetera, into that program. So again, if a consumer purchases, purchases a product which is not redeemed into an actual hotel stay, we then earn the breakage from that non-redeemed sales. And we have a wide variety of different private labels. We also run a Mastercard-based program called Paygoo, which is a licensed product that is sold through, primarily through retail. And in retail, we cover around 80% of Nordic retail in terms of distribution. So we are the largest processor of gift cards, where we process retailer gift cards, and we are the largest distributor of gift cards, where we distribute gift cards across retail in the Nordic region and also through our own loyalty programs. And basically, what we have built here is the sum of what we had originally in the original Awardit business before the ipo, and then the acquisitions that we have made over time have been a key factor in pulling together this capability into creating a one-stop shop offering for our clients. So we have, as I mentioned, made 12 acquisitions, and partly in loyalty solutions and partly in gift card solutions. So in loyalty solutions, we have built together the capabilities of what we have bought there. Now we have a very competent platform that can provide all the services we need for our clients. We also have a hybrid model for distribution of products and services. We have our own warehouse from where we ship products, and we have drop ship solutions, where we work with other partners to provide direct shipment of products. And we also obviously sell our gift card gift card products into our loyalty programs. So there's a good, good fit in there. And then on the gift card side, we have also then made several acquisitions where we have the retailing side, as I mentioned, the processing side, and also the content side, where we can produce our own gift cards, our own packaged solutions, really. So, so we have a, a toolbox where we can really, offer to the clients exactly what they need, and several different technical platforms that will be used depending on the client needs, both in loyalty and, and gift cards. And in the last two years, the last three acquisitions we have made have been in the DACH region. So it's the first acquisitions we have made outside of the Nordics. And here we started with a company, called Prämie Direkt, in Germany, and this is a rewards management program, running loyalty programs and running shipments from their own warehouse. And this has been complemented with Connex, which is based in Austria, and they ran similar programs, but more longer-term, points-based programs, such as we do in the Nordics, and with drop ship partners only. So we are now building these two capabilities together in DACH to create the same kind of one-stop shop solution as we have in the Nordics, with a hybrid distribution model and a full-scale solution in terms of different services and platforms we can offer to our clients. And then, now, here, this year, in November, on November first, we acquired IPO in south Germany, which is more a play where we can increase the scale and the intensity and our presence in the market by adding valuable clients and some technical capabilities to our mix. And this business is very similar to what we already had, actually, in Prämie Direkt, but adds scale to our presence in DACH. So, looking very quickly now at some numbers, we have historically, before acquisitions, been able to grow organically, and we continue to grow organically with our core business. And then, our model is we focus on organic growth and then adding acquisitions to the mix and accelerating growth from acquisitions, but also making sure that the acquisitions we make add value to what we can offer in the markets, and not only adding volume, basically. And then over time, we have come from a rather high EBITDA margin due to the fact that in the early days, Awardit had mostly only drop ship solutions in place and had a much higher margin, and margin recognition was different in the early days. And now we are making acquisitions with a different margin structure. So that takes down the margin in the combined business. But over time, our focus is to grow the margin in each part of the business, so the businesses we acquire and in combination with the rest of the group as well. So we are now sort of very focused on realizing synergies across the group in the acquisitions that we make, and that has also been the case historically, where we have made acquisitions, adding them to the group, and realizing synergies in platform, in people, in services, and in volumes of scale. And just looking at the last years, in last year, we made revenues of SEK 862 million. We had an EBITDA of SEK 111 million. Looking at the right-hand graph here, we had a strong underlying growth of what we call the core business of Awardit, and that is basically the business excluding the acquisitions of Inspiration Company, MBXP, Prämie Direkt, and Connex. So the Nordic or the Swedish-based business of Awardit is still growing strong organically. And then, obviously, we make sure to look for the right acquisitions to accelerate this growth. And in Q3 this year, we have seen continued growth. So we can see that the underlying business continues to grow, and also we have added, as I mentioned, the latest acquisitions, and they all bring capabilities and growth to the mix. However, we have seen earnings challenged in the last quarter, and also actually in Q2, primarily due to MBXP, which is our Danish gift card subsidiary. And that is a special case where MBXP has been our only earn-out acquisition that has been under an earn-out for 2021 and 2022, and we now see that the results for 2023 are substantially lower than they were in 2021 and 2022. So we saw that in Q2, and we see this also in Q3. So therefore, we have taken measures to look into these results and why that can be. So we have dismissed the CEO and founder of MBXP. I am now the interim CEO of the company, and we are conducting an internal audit of the business. And basically, the earn-out that this company has been on has not been paid yet. This will be calculated once we have completed the internal audit, then we will know what the earn-out will be. And we have in our books, we have today roughly SEK 130 million for the earn-out, and we believe that the earn-out, once it's finalized, will be lower than this. So this is now what we are looking at and what we are hopefully now finalizing before New Year's, in terms of MBXP. But we believe that MBXP is a profitable business over time, but there might be misallocations of revenues and costs between periods of time here, and that's basically what we are looking into. We have also seen a market challenge in DACH, and especially in Germany. We have a weaker market there, and we are more exposed to market demand in that market because we are selling more short-term loyalty solutions in Germany than we do in the Nordics and through our Austrian company. So there, we have also had a challenge in terms of revenues for the third quarter. Looking at the underlying business, we continue to grow. This is, again, the core business in yellow. We continue to grow year over year. We saw a 12% growth in the third quarter of the core business, and then again, being held back somewhat by MBXP and the development in Germany in terms of earnings. I mentioned we are strengthening our gross margins over time. So, now, for the third quarter, we see a strengthening of gross margins due to including Connex in the mix, which is a very high-margin business. But overall, what we do is we look at every part of the business in isolation to improve margins over time, and follow up on that, and also in combination, of course, and look at ways to improve through synergies of scale and synergies of cost across the business. I will not go into any kind of P&L, but just looking at the pro forma now for 12 months, including Connex and IPO, we are at about SEK 1.3 billion in revenues for a full year, rolling 12 months. We are at an EBITDA level of around SEK 110 million-SEK 111 million for 12 months pro forma. The way I see it is that the acquisitions of Connex and IPO really provide now the platform for further organic growth in DACH. Creating this, again, the one-stop-shop solution strengthens our position to take new clients and to improve our offering in the German and Austrian, Swiss markets, and also beyond in Europe. So we're really now in a good position to continue organic growth through these companies in DACH. And we are now half of the employees outside of the Nordics in DACH, and almost half of the revenues now from the group come from outside of Nordics. So very, very interesting times for us, of course, on our quest to grow across Europe. And just summarizing where we are? We see a strong continued organic growth. So we, I believe that we have a strong foundation to continue to grow organically, both in the core business that we have in the Nordics, but also now in DACH. And we have a strong position in DACH. It's a perfect fit that we have found between what we had in Prämie Direkt, Connex, and IPO, and we look forward to really accelerating these, synergies between these, these companies. We're also looking at cost savings and synergies across the group of around SEK 15 million-SEK 20 million for the coming year. That will be realized, fully during 2024. We have also potential to launch products that we have not yet launched across territories. We have SuperGift, our success story from the Nordics, just being launched into DACH. We have products in DACH that are not yet launched in the Nordics, so there's lots of, synergies there and, and business opportunities that are yet to be realized, that we are working on, as we speak. We also have a steady flow of new clients, both to our gift card platforms and services, and to our loyalty programs. So we believe we have a strong pipeline of new clients that will fuel our organic growth, moving forward. We also have identified potential acquisitions moving forward as well, so we believe there could be more acquisitions in the pipeline. I don't believe there would be the same speed of acquisitions. We would probably not make three acquisitions next year, but if we find the right one that fits our strategy and our market mix, our service portfolio, we have an opportunity to go for that. We have a strong cash position. Also, we have the internal audit ongoing at MBXP, and I'm confident we will come out of that audit and that work on the right side. Sure, we will not overpay for that company. We will conduct the internal audit, and then we will initiate the discussions around the earn-out. And then, obviously, our vision continues to be to become the leader in the European market, and I believe we have made some good progress, and look forward to take the next steps there. So that's that from me. Thank you, Erik. Thank you. Unfortunately, we don't have the time for questions, but I think you covered it quite well. So thank you for coming. Okay. Thank you, and obviously, I'll stay around if there are questions, so please don't hesitate. Okay. Thank you.
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