Good morning, everyone. My name is Rikard Engberg, and I'm an equity research analyst here at Erik Penser Bank. With me, I have Jessica Skon, CEO of BTS, and Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS, to present the second quarter. Jessica and Philios, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, BTS investors. It is a very strong pleasure for Philios and I to be presenting our very first quarterly report following the transition of our dear founder and CEO, Henrik Ekelund, to executive chairman. As you've seen from the results, we are both extraordinarily proud to deliver another record quarter, Q2 of 2022, which is our 20th consecutive record quarter. As you've probably seen, we're also upgrading our profit outlook for the year. Before we get into the details, I know that some of you have been very long-term investors, and we thank you for that, and you know us well. Others are joining and starting to learn about BTS for the first time. Just a quick introduction for those of you who are new. BTS last year did roughly a little bit over SEK 2 billion in revenue. We have around 1,200 people. We have over 36 office locations. You can see 50 of the Fortune 100 are BTS clients. We were founded in 1986. For those of you who are early investors, we have a pretty impressive stock performance. If you invested in 2001, we went public, you'd have on average 18% return. We'd have 13% annual revenue growth and 14% profit improvement since the beginning. Our focus has always been on strategy implementation and improving our clients' change strategy and culture. With that, if we go into the details of Q2. Again, we are really proud of our 20th consecutive record quarter. The demand for our services continues to be strong. We have 24% revenue growth, of which 21% of that is organic, and all three operating units delivering double-digit growth. Just as we said in the first quarter, the second quarter for the most part felt very similar. The increasing demand for physical deliveries, which our people are enjoying. We continue to invest in digital solutions. We're seeing increased demand from our clients to deliver our services at scale, so for tens of thousands of their people, to deliver services in a more personalized and kind of in the flow of work or in the moment way, and to provide more real time data and analytics to support our clients' execution. In addition to the revenue growth, our EBITDA is also growing 36%. In general, from that perspective, it was a great quarter. Now, as we also reported, and I can explain now, we started to experience some volatility. In some of our software clients, they are starting to implement or started to implement right at the end of the second quarter and a bit into the third quarter, some resiliency measures. I would say out of the software clients who either canceled or postponed their work with us, over half of them were unprofitable. Even a few of them have already come back and said, "All right, let's get going." I mean it when I say the beginnings of an experience that was a bit volatile. The software, just a little bit more context, the software industry last year represented about 20% of BTS's revenues, but the heavy concentration of that is in one BTS office, which is our San Francisco office. Moving into more details. You've seen this slide in other earnings release. It's simply reinforcing the 20th record growth. You can see it from a revenue perspective. When we look at the consecutive growth, we are not including 2020. Same thing in terms of profit before tax by quarter. You can see the details here specifically for Q2. Again, the 24% revenue growth, the 36% EBITDA performance, and you can see the EBIT margin down below. If we look specifically at the business units. Starting with North America, although there was some reduction in software work in the second quarter, the business in North America continues to perform really well at 14% growth. EBITDA went from 16.6% to 14.6%, and there's really one reason for that. It was a one time organizational investment. BTS Europe, extraordinary growth at 35% and a huge improvement in EBITDA margin from 20.3% to 27.6%. Strong use of resources. A nice license deal helped with that and so forth. BTS other markets, again continuing their strong growth at 35%. Strong EBIT performance improvement from Q1 with an EBIT margin of 14.8% versus 18.1%. APG also, nice growth. January to June, if you look at the first half, you're going to see some very similar percentages. 24% revenue growth and 36% EBITDA performance. Similar again for the first half. Per country, not too many different things to report there in the first half versus the second quarter. Just a little bit on, for those again who are getting to know us, why do have we had this performance? Why do we continue to grow year-over-year? In this case, our 20th record quarter. We're pretty lucky, right. BTS is a unique type of consulting firm, and we take share from different areas, both from the traditional consultants and from the HR and the talent consultancies. It's a highly fragmented market of which we estimate we only have, let's say, 1% or 1%-2% of that. We're in 36 offices around the world, so there's a lot of opportunity just for growth in those markets. We have a history of investing in both organic and inorganic growth. We continue to look for acquisitions, and we'll continue to do so. We haven't made any this year, except we expect in general to do one or two a year. On the organic side, we continue to increase our investments in our digital capabilities in marketing and sales. I'd say we have a very strong competitive position. Now, if you look at the circle in the middle, one of the things I've done in the last three months is I've spent time in 10 of the different markets, so every major market in Europe and in South Africa. I mean, it was no surprise to me, but it was nice to feel it both in the conversations with our clients and of course in the conversations with our people. The BTS culture is quite special and quite extraordinary. Not only do our people revere it and wanna protect it as we grow, but our clients notice it and are curious and wanting to learn from it and take from it what they can for their own cultures. We think we have significant market potential ahead. We have a very strong position in a large and growing market. If you think about what companies typically invest in, it's technology, process, and people. For us, we've always been on the people side, and we see increase in investments towards people only going up. We have a long track record of double-digit growth and stable margins, and we have even more ambitious long-term financial goals, even despite the beginnings of the experience of the volatility and some uncertainty in the market. In terms of the longer-term financial goals, they maintain consistent with 20% revenue growth year-over-year. That would be a combination of organic and inorganic growth and a 17% EBITDA margin. Just to reinforce, we've upgraded our profit projections for the year. We expect our results to be significantly better than in the preceding year due to the strength of the first half, and what we're seeing across the market. We feel that this is. We're confident with this. At the same time, given what we experienced in just one industry towards the end of the second quarter and a bit into the third quarter, even though we're not seeing any spillover effects into the other industries, it feels more uncertain than normal right now in the market, and we have plans in place in case that spillover does begin. With that, I think we'll turn it over to questions. Thank you, Jessica. My first question to start with before we discuss the quarter is, can you please describe a bit your career in BTS and what made you choose BTS as a company? My career? Yeah. I would love to. That's a very sweet question. I've been with the company for 23 years. I joined them as an undergrad, so I actually felt it was quite serendipitous in how I met them. I had just moved to San Francisco, and I told myself back then, as long as I keep learning at the pace I wanna learn and I'm enjoying my colleagues, then I'll stay. Of course, I thought I'd go to grad school, and I've had many offers from clients to join, but I am still here. If I look back on the career, it's a combination of two things. It's having the freedom and the culture that Henrik created to innovate for our clients, which I spent the first probably 15 years of my career doing, was listening, and they expected us to help them with bigger problems, and we have the freedom to go after it. I felt like I've invented quite a lot of our services and points of view and practices over the years. At the same time, being part of the company that's growing your own firm at the same time has been a wonderfully challenging, rich, and in a way, beautiful experience of having the ability to do both. Besides being a consultant, my entire career has been in our San Francisco office, but I went from being a consultant to running the San Francisco office to North America West to our leadership practice to North America, which was my last position. I took over North America in 2016. The quick summary there was, for the five years leading up to 2016, on average, BTS North America grew less than 5% a year. From 2016 through 2022, not including 2020, it's double-digit growth quarter after quarter. I'm quite proud of the increase in growth that the leadership team in North America did. Excellent. My next question is, can you please describe what is driving the growth in both BTS Europe and BTS Other Markets? Are there any certain industries? Why don't I actually turn it over to Philios to talk about most of the world first? Great. Yes. Thank you. Actually, it's quite across industries, growth. I mean, we see, we're quite strong in both the financial sector, but also we see in the pharma, medical sector, we're quite strong and it's quite even across. I mean, different markets within we would work with different sectors, but there isn't one that is kind of pointing out to being more particular in these times. I would say that also when Jessica mentioned that we are upgrading our outlook, we're upgrading, and we are mentioning that there is volatility, but we have to mention that especially in other markets, we haven't really seen any impact of any moves or resilience moves or recession moves as such, no. Our clients are not responding that way. However, we wanna be cautious because, you know, the news are out there and we are expecting that volatility, and we are making plans to ensure that we are there when it happens. I would say both in other markets and in Europe, we're seeing less. In Europe was a little bit more because of the war, but less because of that tech industry impact. In Europe, all of the markets are performing really well. They're extraordinarily diversified in terms of industry coverage. There's not really a standout growth one at the moment, but it's just all the offices are performing great. Okay, great. Can you please talk a bit about the mix between physical and virtual delivery during the quarter? Has it gone up or what level is it? Yeah. The percentage of physical has gone up. Yeah. About 40%, 60%. Yeah. I was gonna say gut feel is somewhere between 40%-50% of the work now is in person, which, I think as I mentioned, our people are enjoying quite a lot. It's really rewarding to be closer with your customers and spending time with them together, and I think people on the client side are loving the time together as well, so. Okay, great. How do you see the recruitment market right now, both for graduates and more senior consultants? Yeah. Well, first, one comment on that. I think out of the three markets, most of the world did a better job of attracting talent as needed throughout last year and into the first quarter. Europe and North America have been a bit behind, so it's taken us longer to fill the open positions that we've needed, which has meant that our people have been quite busy in the first half. In general, North America now feels like a big group of consultants are coming in, and so we're actually pretty pleased with. Actually, we're very pleased with our efforts to date. I think it felt more competitive at the end of last year and into the first quarter, and it seems like the process of getting candidates through is speeding up. Okay. Can I maybe add that we are seeing a turnover that is quite less than what is out there in the market for professional services. It seems that our people, you know, are sticking a lot more with us and are being a lot more engaged as such. We're seeing, you know, even the people who may actually move on, they probably move on for different reasons, like more like either moving into the corporate world or doing something that they actually like more and so on. We're seeing a lot less of that typical professional service resignation changing from firm to firm. That's primarily because of the culture and the way we're working. People believe that we are the place to be if you want to be in the consulting business. Okay, great. I will hand over to the phone conference for questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing the star. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question of today from the line of Carl Mårén from SEB. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning. I have a couple of questions. Maybe if we start with the little bit lower margins in the U.S. and other markets. Just curious about what you write in the report that they've seen a peak in the investments, and how should we read that going forward? Should we expect margins to improve in the second half of the year in these regions or how should we see it? Sure. Just to respond to the second quarter, the major investment there was we had an all consultant conference. For going back to in-person, BTS did as well in terms of an annual event. We just haven't had that annual event in that quarter in previous years. I think that's the major standout cost difference, which is a one-time investment. From my perspective, it was an incredible use of time and investment in terms of engaging the talent, getting everybody aligned to where we're going and so forth. The only other small increase for North America and most of the world was an increase in our digital investment, which has been kind of on strategy from the beginning. Anything else on most of the world? Yeah. What I would say is, I mean, we are growing, as you've seen, about 35%-40%, including the acquired revenues, and we wanna push to continue growing, no? That means that we are making a lot more investments. I mean, the integration of the acquisition, we are working with them. We're seeing benefits. We're seeing now the first deals coming where, from the acquisition, either from their clients to the core BTS or from BTS to Netmind or Agile working things. Therefore, what is there, I would say, is that we are seeing that we can continue high growth. We'll continue with higher profits. Our focus right now would be to ensure that margins over time start to go up, but we will kind of prioritize our growth at this moment, rather than cutting costs to get to a higher margin temporarily. We wanna do that gradually over time so it's more sustainable. I mean, for North America, we'll cont- Yeah, that's great. Go ahead. I was gonna say, for the second half for North America, we'll continue to monitor the, you know, the uncertainty and the volatility of the software clients and see if there's any spillover effect there. I think there'll be a high correlation between slower market growth and the impact on our margins as to be expected. Yeah, agreed. That's, that was my second question maybe on that. How big of a slowdown do you foresee because you grew, I think 14% organic in Q2. I mean, how should we think about the organic growth in North America for the second half, or what have you been seeing so far in Q3? If you could maybe give us some kind of guidance, that would be very helpful. I mean to date, it continues to be isolated just by that office and a handful of the software companies. It's just in the US right now. I think there's a lot of hype and noise and fear around will there be a recession or won't there be. What's gonna be the impact on the inflation. I sense some of our CEO clients wondering the same thing in terms of how conservative should they be in terms of temporary hiring freezes and whatnot in order to plan for what potentially could happen next year. It feels like it's quite hard to say right now. Yeah. Can I? Okay. Maybe for Jessica. Yeah. Can I add to that? Jessica and I, together with the management team, have also worked out what we call a resilience strategy. Which is basically how we should start working, strengthening what we do in case we see more of a slowdown. That may mean focusing on particular industries, working more with particular clients, focusing on particular services that we think will be more relevant, and that we have started to put in place. We are kind of even though we are not seeing it widespread, we are preparing to ensure that if it happens, we are in a much better place to continue providing the right returns and the right growth for our clients, for our investors, sorry. Those actions began in North America in early June. Okay, that's good. Maybe if we look at Europe, which was very strong in the quarter, I think. Is there anything you would like to mention as like a one-off larger project or what was driving the strong growth and the very strong margin? The good news is that it wasn't a one-off stronger project. It's just overall good growth across the countries. We had a little bit of a bump in our licensing revenue in one of the markets, but it's overall growth. Being a bit behind on the hiring. Okay. Yeah, that's good. Just the last question from my side on the cash flow, which I think was a bit weak now in Q2 as well, driven by working capital build-up. Is it possible to say anything, what is driving this whole increase in working capital? Should we expect a release in the second half or how should we see? Yeah. I mean, the major issue in the first half is that that's when all of the bonuses get paid out, right? That's between March and April. That's the real reason for the issue. We don't see any other, you know, alarming point there. Probably like every company, we'll be preparing for potentially what could happen from an inflation and recessionary perspective and look at adjusting some of our discipline perhaps around not only which clients we'd be targeting, but then the types of deals we would be structuring with them. That's a bit more in the future. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Dennis Dorton from ABG. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi, Jessica and Philios. Two questions from my side. First is on the delivery split here, physical versus virtual in the quarter. How was that and what's your expectations into H2 on that split as well? Also how much of the growth was coming from higher pass through travel invoicing to customers in the quarter? Thanks. Oh. I don't have the exact number on the higher invoicing costs. It's not much. W e can get back to you on that. In terms of the split? Yeah. I would say what we are seeing now is customers are using a segmented approach. It's not like I would move everything to physical. They're looking to see, you know, what sort of things make more sense to keep on being virtual. The rest, what they really believe that the physical side will actually add to them, they are moving there. Probably, as we said before, we are seeing this around 40/60. It's more because clients are prioritizing that way, not because we cannot do it for, let's say, COVID reasons or for anything else. I mean, clients everywhere around the world, we are starting to do physical deliveries where it makes sense, no? That's actually an interesting point that we believe that our investments in the virtual side will pay off even as we go into the future years because clients are seeing that works equally well. They will be continuing to use that and so on for certain things. It makes a lot of sense from an efficiency perspective. Yeah. That combination allows us as well to balance, as you know, our way of working in the market, no? I'll just say one trade-off in terms of the increase in physical is you could say, yes, there's the travel time for the consultants and all of that, so that could be a downside to that. At the same time, the time with clients is worth gold in terms of hearing about their challenges and opportunities and finding more problems to solve and the ability to increase the account revenue, so. Makes sense. Okay, thanks. That was a great answer. My second question is regarding the hiring. You say that Europe and North America is slightly behind the plan. Is that by intention because you see a slower market? Or are you doing the best you can to increase the pace? Yeah. It was not by intention last year and into the first half. I mean, the team has worked really hard given the growth. In hindsight, I regret that in North America in September of 2020, we didn't hire 50 or 60 people. We needed that next class to come in. At the same time, times were pretty bleak back then. We didn't realize how fast the uptick would be in the Q1 of 2021. From that perspective, it's not by design. We did get a group of people who joined towards the end of Q2, which is great, and now we have the bit of the slowdown in Q3. We'll ramp them up and still feel the relief. Yeah. You plan to ramp up the recruitment. Yeah. across your group in Q3 at least? Yeah. However, given the class of consultants who just joined, we will now pause additional hiring until we see how the market, you know, kind of evolves over the next six to eight weeks. Okay. Can you say how many joined in August now? I can't say for sure, but it's, you know, somewhere between 30 and 40. Okay. That would be between June and August. Yeah. Okay. I see. Okay, excellent. That's all for me. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jessica Skon for any closing remarks. Yeah. Jessica. Do you have any closing remarks? It's a special moment for me and Philios. I appreciate the investors who have helped to build the company, right, over the last couple decades and, we're excited about the next quarters. Thank you. Jessica, thanks. Thank you everyone who's been watching.