Hello and welcome everyone to BTS Q1 presentation for their first quarter results. My name is Karl Norén. I'm an equity analyst at SEB covering BTS, today I have the pleasure to be joined by the CEO of BTS, Jessica Skon, who will give a short presentation of BTS Q1 results. After that, we will go into a Q&A session where everyone has the chance to ask questions to Jessica. With that said, I would like to hand over the word to Jessica. The floor is yours. Wonderful. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Dear shareholders, it's been a challenging quarter for us, right? We're not happy about it, but we're using these challenges to make us better, right? Better in two ways. Let's say next level efficiencies and overall market competitiveness, both of which I have found are easier to do in challenging quarters, right, than when times are going good. I'd say even if it looks like a loss or a temporary loss, it's gonna be a pretty big win in the long term. Let's dive in. Yeah, a challenging quarter, for us, we experience an overall more cautious, more conservative market that in some cases led to slower decision-making and overall project delays. There are major differences in our markets, right? The North America market actually declined 6%, but on the other hand, BTS other markets and BTS Europe had nice double-digit growth. In terms of the overall EBIT margin, we're definitely not happy about that. It shrunk from 10.8% to 8.2%, and that's because of the North American market, simply put. Let's dive into the North American market. We saw the slowdown again in the tech sector, so it's starting to be a similar story. We saw it in Q3 last year. It bounced back in the fourth quarter, and then the slowdown hit us again in the first quarter. Why? It was really the second wave of tech layoffs, right? The first wave was in the fall. The second wave was in early January with another 100,000 people losing their jobs, and then as the quarter went on, in some clients it was even a third wave. This just simply caused delays. It's confusion, chaos, and projects got delayed or pushed out. We then had bank failures, which I'm sure you experienced in the news. There was three of them, which for some of our fintech clients also caused chaos and some delays. One important thing on the North American market is we're not losing work. We're not losing work to competitors, and clients aren't changing their mind. It's just being pushed and delayed or starting smaller. In the first quarter margins, inflation and bigger payroll affected the margin, and I would say temporarily. That's North America. In terms of the other two markets, we had good growth in Europe and other markets at 13% and 14%. If we take a look at their margins, BTS Europe margin declined a bit from 11.9% to 10.2%. Basically, increasing consulting costs in Europe are the reason there. Even though they had good growth, it was slightly slower than we expected. BTS other markets improving margin from 1.5% to 5.8% due to improved efficiencies, better pricing, better utilization of their team, shared resources across the countries and so forth. Improving margin from 1.5% to 5.8% due to improved efficiencies, better pricing, better utilization of their team, shared resources across the countries and so forth. All right. Improving margin from 1.5% to 5.8% due to improved efficiencies, better pricing, better utilization of their team, shared resources across the countries and so forth. In terms of the APG market, we saw the same slower decision-making affecting them that we talked about in the fourth quarter. On the same time that we're seeing a much stronger sales pipeline and outlook. Going back to my opening comments, never waste a downturn. This has been true for me at BTS for the last 24 years, and it certainly feels like it's the same sentiment inside our company right now, given the first quarter realities. We're taking advantage of our slower market. We've identified a lot of problems, and we've taken some fast actions. Let me go into one in more depth. In terms of efficiencies, North America's been doing quite a lot of fast work through the first quarter. We have a plan, and we've already started to move forward in terms of 60 million in Swedish krona in annual savings through these efficiencies. We'll start to see the impact of this in the second quarter with full effect in the second half. It's a combination, of course, of the hiring freeze that we stopped towards the end of last year. Even more so, it's about a reduction in our spend with externals because figuring out certain work can be done more with our internal consultants than in the past. We're kind of cleaning up and clarifying different specific roles of experts and generalists in the company, which results in better resource utilization and savings. We've slowed down a bit of our investment in our overall digital roadmap because frankly, we've invested a lot and there's a lot we're taking to market right now. That's what we're doing on the efficiency side, specifically in North America. If we look at what's happening in the first quarter in terms of increasing our overall market competitiveness, we're actually continuing to win a lot of new clients, and there's been some really cool innovations that have been released. First thing I'd say on the client acquisition side is we have a client-first mindset everywhere in the company. We have stopped any and all activities that are not client-facing just to maximize all of our time with our clients. We've had a referral drive in place for the last 6 quarters for all partners and all consultants, which has led to a lot of great meetings and new clients. A result of that is we brought in 33 new clients in the first quarter. Across the three different markets, just to give you some ideas of some of the companies who have came in, American Express, Hyundai, Harbour Energy, Datadog, Emirates Global Aluminium, there's a bunch. I'd say from a new client acquisition perspective, it was actually a really strong start to the year, which will help us throughout the next three quarters. In Europe, the number of meetings are way up. They had their largest client event in history with over 300 people. In terms of innovations, there's a few things I would like to share. One is we launched a new frontline leadership offering around the world, and what's cool about it is it gives maximum consumption choice to our clients. They can purchase it from us and use it with all their frontline leaders on, like, a fixed price, which has been more traditional, or they can do it as a SaaS model, up to them. Overall global reactions from the clients right now has been very powerful in the initial wave of marketing events and client tours. The second thing is, you know, BTS also competes for share with the traditional consultants. Just give you two examples of some cool work in the first quarter. The first one is on process redesign, which is traditional consulting work, right? It's not typical BTS simulation work. One of our clients is one of the biggest banks in Thailand. The team was able to work with our client's employee base and take one of their course work processes from 11 months down to a few weeks using BTS's innovation technologies and approach. In our Korean office, we are now coaching Korean CEOs on communication, on their strategy plan, and showing up as a more authentic self. Innovations at the C-suite in the traditional consulting process market and in scaled frontline leadership, but being delivered as a SaaS offering as well. We also, after the close of the quarter, made a really cool acquisition. We bought a company called The Boda Group. With The Boda Group, we expect both growth and EBITDA improvement. A little bit on why Boda. First of all, it's gives us a new capability, right, as an executive coaching offering, which is one-on-one services for C-suite down to vice presidents. We have very little client overlap with The Boda Group in the North American market. In the first five days, we had nine new opportunities come through the BTS account managers. They're a growing firm. They've had a lot of success. They have great brand with their clients, and better margins than BTS. Also, because they provide coaching, their talent model is more flexible, so it's easier to ramp up when growth is faster than expected, and it's also easier to manage costs in a slowdown. This is a big source of pride for us at BTS. It's also what you've come to expect from us, right? A story of long-term profitable growth year- after- year. Given what we're seeing, I mean, this is our historic performance. Given what we're seeing in terms of our pipeline, the cost efficiencies I've talked about, our overall market competitiveness, how much time we're spending with clients, our outlook for the year remains unchanged. We believe that earnings will be better than in 2022. Thank you. Thank you. We'll first do is that I ask some questions, and then we'll have the opportunity to ask questions on the telephone conference, and then also from the room, in the audience in the room. Maybe I can start off with a question on the North American side. What are you seeing maybe right now? You have entered, May. You have seen some parts of the second quarter. Are you seeing any improvement or is it still a tough market out there? Yeah, I mean, we typically don't give too much- Yeah. ....information on the in quarter, right? I would say in software and tech, because there hasn't been a fourth round now of layoffs- Yeah. ....things have settled a bit. Yeah. Right? The chaos is coming down. I mean, people are still nervous. There's a general uncertainty in the American psyche- Yeah. .....right now with the, all the mixed news hitting them. It's, it's calmed a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The reason why I wonder is because in Q3 you said that the Q4 has started a bit stronger, I guess. Now we can maybe read it as it's still maybe a bit tougher out there in the North American side, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. There's still delays, but it's not as bad- Okay. -in the sec- Yeah. ...software sector. Can you also maybe give some more flavor on the other parts of the business? I mean, you have two-thirds that is not based in San Francisco or on the West Coast. Can you tell us a bit more on the development there, and how do you work with this efficiency program? Will it also affect the whole- Yeah. American organization? Is it-- or is it just- Yeah. ...the San Francisco office? Yeah. First I'll talk about our East Coast office, 'cause that has very little tech. It's mainly financial services, CPG, a little bit of telco, and they performed really well in the first quarter. It wasn't exactly a perfect balance of the decline in San Francisco, but it made up for quite a lot of it. I would say given the bank failures, we started to experience the beginnings of just some, "Well, wait a minute, we're all nervous right now and we're reevaluating," but nothing too material on the East. The overall efficiency initiative is across NAM. Absolutely across NAM. You know, I talked about the benefits of one Europe the last couple years, we started that kinda similar planning for North America in January, and it's across all the offices. Okay. It does not include any layoffs in the efficiency program. It's more... We've done performance layoffs. We'll continue to. A few people have quit, which is just helpful. Yeah. It's mainly around less external usage and then kinda reprioritizing who does which work. Okay. It's more long-term beneficial than short-term. Yeah. Yeah. On the efficiency program, I guess it's expected to improve or show improvements in the second half of the year. You still keep your guidance for earnings to grow. You I guess you have some visibility on that. It's not gonna get that much, much worse going forward. Can you just give us some more, some more flavor on how we should think regarding the rest of the year, because you had the earnings decline that was quite steep here in Q1. Yep It really needs to improve going forward- Yeah ...for the outlook to reach, I guess. I know. I know. I mean, it's a combination of essentially what's still or was on the screen, right? Yeah. It's the benefit of the efficiency savings, the higher sales activity, and what we can see right now from our pipelines across all the markets, and then the expected positive contribution from The Boda Group acquisition. Okay. Yeah. It's really all three. Yeah. And we'll keep adjusting with the market- Yeah ...right? Yeah. Then there's the last question from my side. You saw still good growth in my view, in the other regions, such as other markets and Europe. Can you give any more, can you say something about which industries are driving this, or are you seeing any, like, recessionary, signs, or what is really the picture out there? Well, I'll also say I've, since I've spoken with you last, I've spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia and then Greater Asia. I've been to our Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur offices and met with probably over 50 or 40-50 different companies and the teams. I have a little bit of sense of what's happening in that market just from those conversations. In general, I would say as the year has progressed, we have experienced more delays than usual outside of tech, right? It's not just tech. However, the materialness of those delays is not, you know, so significant. Right. Right? I mean, they're a nuisance and our pipelines have to be bigger, but we've known that. It's, it's gonna be a challenging year, no doubt about it. Yeah You know, some things are affecting other markets and countries, I would say, later than North America. Yeah. Right? Like. If you look on a broader base, do you still feel that you are taking market share, or how is your feeling that you perform versus the market, if you understand me? Yeah. Again, the story for us, which helps confidence- Yeah ... is it's delays as opposed to losing deals. Yeah. Right? I'll just give you a fun story, but it's an n of one. Yeah. Right? The fun story is, one of our long-term clients in North America, CEO was sponsoring a big transformation effort, and we competed against the small companies and the big consulting firms. One of the big consulting firms won it because they said they'd do phase one for free, which was a three month upfront phase one. We just got a call saying, even though it was for free, they're taking forever and they're very unhappy, so can the CEO meet with you again next week? Like, we love to hear things like that. Competitiveness, I'm very bullish. Yeah. Also on the innovation and just the culture in general. Yeah. Sounds good. Yeah. Do we have any questions from the telephone conference? If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. We seem to have no questions from the teleconference. Do we have any questions in the room? Yes. Hi. I can start. Daniel Thorsson with ABG. Thank you, Jessica. I start off with a question. In your guidance, do you expect Europe and other markets to remain growing for the rest of the year, or do you expect North America to come back to growth again? I think it's gonna be challenging for all the markets. We'll see how they do, right? I wouldn't say we have some sort of general optimism just because of, just because we expect more delays to hit, right? Therefore, we just need bigger pipelines like we've been doing. It's hard to say, right? Yeah, I see. Okay. Secondly, on the hiring freeze that you mentioned, is that only in North America or in the other regions as well? All of BTS Group is in a hiring freeze. All of BTS Group? Yeah. I will say the markets are doing a nice job of sharing resources more than we've done in the past. There's a specific group in Europe that was overutilized and one that was underutilized in NAM, so they're just covering on each other's projects, as an example. Okay, because that was actually my next question. I guess that it's much easier to move resources within the U.S. because it's the same country from west to east coast, even though it's different end markets. Yeah. While moving consultants from Spain to Sweden, for example, or between Europe and other markets may be slightly more difficult if we see a slowdown in those markets. Do you agree with that, or-? Um- Do you think you can mitigate that in any way? Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit more difficult. The language is the biggest issue, right? For example, we have needs for Spanish-speaking people to work on projects south of the U.S. and South America. We have consultants in the U.S. who would love to do it. They're starting to engage with that. We also have openings in leadership positions in Southeast Asia. We're opening that up to European and American directors and above. I think we'll see this year a lot more movement than we have. It's also pretty easy to help each other virtually, right, on projects without requiring a big move, at least for temporary work. Our people love to do that. Okay, I see. Final question on The Boda Group. Do you have received any questions internally from the organization in the U.S. that you at the same time do efficiency programs, cut costs, but then go and do an acquisition in the same market? Have you? Not at all. Not at all. Okay. I think the team in the U.S. is pretty excited about the efficiency moves. They just make good strategic and operational sense. There's a lot of support there. I think it's even energy driving for them. I think because we made an acquisition in the coaching space four or five years ago with Coach in a Box, the organization is used to coaching as part of our service offering. We've had a gap at scale at the executive level, it almost just is a very natural kind of relieving, oh, great, we have this now, right, at quality. No. Okay. Thank you very much. Yep. Yeah. Hello. Rikard Engberg, Erik Penser Bank. I have one question regarding The Boda Group. You say that they have stronger margins than BTS as a whole. Can you please shed some light on the level of the better profitability in The Boda Group than BTS? Well, I will just say in general, their EBITDA margin is higher. That said, they also need to scale, right? They're gonna need to scale to keep up with demand in North America, and we're also like gonna have to scale them globally. I think their margins will stay higher, but we will also help them make some investments in order to take, you know, to double in size over the next three years or so. Okay. Thank you. I have a follow-up question also on The Boda Group acquisition. I mean, it looks quite interesting. It looks like they have a good customer portfolio. Can you give us any more color on if they are exposed to the same, let's say, some tech clients or... I guess that they are also seeing somewhat of a market decline. Yeah. What's the risk that you're buying it, so to say, on a peak level here and that it declines going forward? I mean, always a risk. I think the quality of their work, and the repeat work, and the referrals from their companies, help to you know, shoulder that work. They also had some delays in the first quarter. Yeah. It was, like, $150,000 worth of delays, so they had some- Yeah Not super material, at least to date. They are not as exposed to tech and software as we are, although that is part of their portfolio. They have quite a bit more private equity, venture capital, and financial services- Yeah ..work than we do. The rest is kind of a nice mix of cross-industry. Okay. I will say their customers, When the founder reached out to at least their top 15 customers, they were absolutely thrilled with her that she had joined BTS 'cause we have a strong brand, and at least from those who have known of us before and vice versa. There's a lot of really positive energy right now- Yeah ....from both groups. You said that you want to invest in the business and to grow it and maybe to double it in size quite in quite soon. Can you say anything about is it possible to take the coaching, executive coaching offering and launch it on a global basis, for example, in the Europe or other markets? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, they're establishing the quality approach and the quality promise- Yeah ... right on behalf of BTS, so they would be the ones responsible for finding the coaches, let's say, in Europe and then certifying them in the Boda way. We do have the beginnings of a global network, right? Both from the other acquisition and just from some ad hoc work we've been having to do, so they wouldn't be starting from scratch. We'll let customer demand drive that. Yeah. Do you have any more acquisitions in the pipeline? We're always talking to a lot of companies. We've said no to a bunch as well in the last quarter. Yeah, we have active conversations still. Sounds good. It'll be a great year. Yeah. Yeah. We have some questions here on the chat here as well, one from Jonas. Does better earnings for 2023 include M&A contribution, or is it purely based on organic and restructuring program? It's all of it. It's including M&A? Yep. Yes. Okay. One question from Adam. You mentioned slightly longer decision-making processes and greater price sensitivity among customers, is also noted in Europe in the report. Can you please expand on this? Is there any specific sectors, or is it a general pattern that you're seeing? It's not enough to be a pattern. I think Europe lost around 4 deals in the first quarter where the feedback from the buyers was price related. Yeah. Specifically on a couple of those, again, it's an N of two, not 15 or 20. On a couple of those, the client expressed that they were surprised by how cheap the competitors were willing to go. It's almost like they saw a new level of, I'm not gonna say Yeah I mean, that what that tells our European team is that consultants have- Yeah ... which we know they do. Yeah. We know they do in North America as well. That's what we've experienced so far. Okay. There's the question from Isac on the pricing. You raised prices in 2022 quite heavily, I think. Have you also implemented price increase in the beginning of 2023? Yep. Okay. Yes, we still have the discipline across all the units that every proposal is head of office approved. Yeah. What they're looking for is that everyone's using the pricing and scoping tools as they have before. I mean, there's always a tension between having enough work for all of your people. Yeah and not wanting to lose. I think right now the discipline to scope and price, especially when we're providing services against the big consulting firms, 'cause we still have some room to go- Yeah ...to catch up in the pricing. Okay. If you still feel confident that you have the ability to offset any higher salary costs with increased prices- Yeah ... it's more of a utilization problem that you have. It's, that's the issue. Yeah. Yeah. Those benefits gained are right now completely offset by too many people- Okay ... in North America. Sounds great. That was all of my questions if you don't have any more in the room. Yeah. Yeah. Daniel? Yes. We'll see if it's on. Yes. Thank you very much. A follow-up from Daniel here. On M&A prices, The Boda Group, for example, we didn't know about the margin. Now we heard a little bit about the margin. You're paying somewhat upfront, and you have earn-out, which is coming later on, but we don't know how much. Yeah. How do you think about the multiples you pay for M&A targets in general, just to get the feeling on future acquisitions?- Yeah. ... and Boda as well ... it really hasn't changed, right? In general, we're typically between four and five multiple. For a really special company, it might go five to six, something in there. The Boda acquisition, it's the whole package is really focused on year three and year four performance, so it's a long-term partnership. We should see Boda as a specialist company, slightly higher than normal multiples, I guess. Slightly. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Mm-hmm. With that said, I would like to thank you everyone for asking the questions, and thank you, Jessica, for presenting BTS Q1 results. My pleasure. We'll be back in the Q2 results. Yeah. Thank you.