W.A.G payment solutions H2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 25, 2025

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to WAG Payment Solutions PLC twenty twenty four Full Year Results. The presentation will commence shortly. After the presentation, we will conduct a Q and A session. If you wish to ask a question, you you'll be able to ask a question either through the Zoom webinar link provided separately or by submitting written questions using the ask a question button on the Spark Live webcast page. During the Q and A element of this morning's call, if you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen.

Operator

If you already have a question, please do this now ready for when the Q and A begins. I will introduce you, ask you to our mutual line to ask a question.

Speaker 1

Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today for our full year results for 2024. I'm joined by our CFO, Oscar Zahn, who will take you through our financial results in a minute, but a few words from me before I hand over. Back at our Capital Markets Day in 2024, we started to talk about our four KPIs, which are the key growth drivers of our business and are results of our strategic ambitions. We focus on number of trucks.

Speaker 1

Many of our customers have more than one truck. Each truck requires one or more products of our products and services. We now have just over 300,000 trucks connected to one or more of our products and grown 10% this year. Engage is about how our customers interact with our products. How are we developing our products to ensure we keep adding value to our customers.

Speaker 1

Our NPS improved slightly this year to 40 points. Industry benchmark, so logistics financial services software, is on average 39 points. Monetize is all about cross sell. I will come back to some examples of how we are achieving this today through our sales teams and our ambition once the platform is fully digitized end to end. Today our customers take on average 2.7 products from us, up slightly from the last year.

Speaker 1

And with more than 10 products on offer, you can see we have lots of opportunities ahead of us. Retain is about moving towards a full subscription model. This will take time and align with the full delivery of the platform. But today, with our data centric products, subscription revenues make up almost 27% of our revenues and growing.

Speaker 2

I will talk more about

Speaker 1

the launch of our Euroac office, or platform later in the presentation, but I must say it supports or even enhances each of these strategic pillars. It will support the new digital sales channels. It will drive customer loyalty and improve retention rates, accelerate cross sell and increase subscription revenue, which is higher recurring. As well as delivering these results, we have been focused on integration and transformation of our people, technology and data systems. We have made good progress and as a result, we have been able to deliver double digit growth of 14% and improved our cash EBITDA by 23%, which is a core financial KPI going forward.

Speaker 1

PirroFA has always generated strong cash flow. And as a result, we have been able to leverage to 2.3 times from 2.9 times this time last year. This is the momentum going into FY 2025 and our confidence in this year's deliverables. We reiterate our guidance we communicated in our trading statement in January. And finally, as a result of our outperformance in cash generation, the board has proposed a special dividend of 3p per share be returned to shareholders and is subject to approval at AGM in May.

Speaker 1

One thing I'm proud of since I started this business almost thirty years ago is that we have consistently delivered strong growth, no matter the macro or market headwinds. Through the financial crisis in two thousand and seven, through the COVID, we've continued to grow double digit. This year was no different. If you look across Europe, all the data points on this slide, which are key indicators in our industry show flat or declining trends in FY 2024. The reason Eurovac is able to outperform the market is because we've innovated.

Speaker 1

We've looked at the challenges in the market and we were solving for them, making us mission critical provider to our customers. The innovation has been about diversification of revenues, adding products to our offerings with the ability to cross sell, taking us from a fuel card provider to payments and data centric product provider, supporting our customers on every step of their journey. Looking forward, there are some positive signs coming into FY twenty five with our largest market Poland seeing better mileage in the first quarter than last year. Eurovac's priority is now about digitizing all our customer mission critical data into one place. This will not only bring further benefits to our customers and truly transform the industry for the better, but will improve Eurovac's ability to cross sell products and unlock further business efficiencies, positioning Eurovac well against any challenging backdrop.

Speaker 1

Now I would like to hand over to Oskar who will walk you through our financial performance.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Maarten, and good morning to everyone on the call this morning. As Maarten has already mentioned, we are pleased to share a strong set of results with you despite the continued macro headwinds we still see across Europe today. Before I move into the details of our financials, let me take you through some of the key highlights. Our net revenues increased by 14% to €292,500,000 driven by mid teens growth in both our payments and mobility revenues. As a result of our net revenue growth, adjusted EBITDA increased by 12% with margins flat year on year at 42% despite higher than anticipated credit losses.

Speaker 3

We indicated cash EBITDA being an important metric to EuroAAD going forward and this year it increased 23.2% to £88,700,000 Both adjusted profit before tax and our adjusted EPS decreased year on year as a result of higher depreciation and amortization partly due to the inclusion of Anello as well as higher capex spend and increased finance costs as a result of higher debt. Looking at our investment in the business we spent £35,000,000 in capitalized R and D, This is about the development and integration of our products and technology which will support the new platform. In addition to this, we spent just over £7,000,000 on onboard units which are key to our revenue growth. As a result of the outperformance in cash generation, our net position has improved significantly this year reducing net leverage by 0.6 turns to 2.3 times back within our target range of 1.5 to 2.5 times. The outperformance in cash is also the reason why the board has today proposed a special dividend of 3p per share to be returned to shareholders subject to the approval of the AGM in May.

Speaker 3

Later in the presentation I'll clarify our capital allocation priorities going forward. Moving to slide nine. Before moving to the details I wanted to bring to life what Martin has just said about EuroWag's ability to outperform the market and remind you of what EuroWag has achieved since the IPO just over three years ago. In that time our compound growth has almost has been almost 25% whilst the market has had to navigate through the macro challenges Martin has just alluded to. This has been partly driven by our investment in organic growth, the two darker blues on the left chart, and investment in acquiring new businesses, the lighter blue boxes.

Speaker 3

Our organic growth has been as a result of continued geographic expansion of our solutions and strong growth in active trucks, as well as investment into developing new products such as a toll solution, which generated 50,000,000 in net revenues this year, and finally, our ability to cross sell. Our recent acquisitions were about adding mission critical data centric products to our offering, so subscription revenues and therefore recurring in nature, and as a result, our mobility in revenues now contribute about 43% of total net revenues versus 26 of the IPO. Not only have these acquisitions added extra revenues, it's positioned Erawak as a market leader in mobility solutions in Poland, the largest international freight market in Europe. Erawak has always generated strong cash flow. The right chart shows adjusted and cash EBITDA having been in a heavy investment phase the last few years, you can see the inflection in cash EBITDA starting to come through and today we reiterate that we are confident that this will only continue with the rollout of the platform and further operational efficiencies we can achieve with the integration of our acquisitions.

Speaker 3

Moving to slide 10, as already mentioned, our net revenue growth was supported by strong growth in both payments and mobility segments. Our payment solutions grew 13.6% year on year to £166,900,000 supported by strong growth in toll revenues of 50.2%, which was a result of our Eats geographical expansion, which contributed to the double digit growth in our payment solution trucks, as well as a benefit from CO2 charges in Germany and Austria. Mobility solutions grew 14.6% year on year to 125,600,000.0, driven by growth across our fleet and work time management solutions, which also has an extra two and a half months of Inela contribution this year. On a like for like basis, assuming Inela had been acquired on the 01/01/2023, net revenue growth was about 10%. Moving to slide 11, as already mentioned, adjusted EBITDA grew 12% to €121,700,000 As you can see from the chart that despite 14% growth in revenues, we have remained disciplined with our OpEx spend.

Speaker 3

Of the £17,800,000 increase in operating costs, £5,200,000 relates to the annualization of Inelo. In order to attract and retain the best people, particularly as we are in the peak of our transformation phase, employee costs increased by 8.5%, technology expenses grew 12.2% mainly relating to technology transformation and cloud transition, whilst other operating expenses grew 8.2% mainly due to the Neto acquisition. As I've already mentioned, we have seen an increase in credit losses mainly due to higher insolvencies across the CRT sector in markets such as Poland, Romania, Hungary and Portugal. These have especially affected small to medium sized businesses who often generate very small margins. Our credit loss ratio has increased slightly from the December from 0.3% to 0.4, However, our receivables portfolio and cash collection remain robust.

Speaker 3

And just to remind you, we calculate credit losses against gross revenues and toll volumes, not on net revenues. Gross revenues including toll volumes was £3,800,000,000 in FY24 up from £3,200,000,000 in FY23, so a 19% increase. Another way of looking at the 2024 performance is to exclude the other operating income items. In 2023 we had an FX gain of £8,000,000 and in 2024 we had a commercial settlement of £2,700,000 So Simple Breach would take the £8,000,000 off the 2023 numbers so £108,700,000 becomes £100,700,000 and similarly in 2024, the 121,700,000.0 becomes 119. This represents an 18% increase year on year in adjusted EBITDA.

Speaker 3

Moving to slide 12. I'd like to take a moment to remind you where we've been investing our capital. At the IPO in 2021, when we were very much a fuel card company, we communicated a 15,000,000 transformation program, which took place in 2022 and 2023. In that time, we acquired two large businesses, INELO and Webeye, which are very much data led services and require investment in both technology and onboard units, so hardware. You can see on the left hand side of the chart, this added around 12,000,000 of additional CapEx to Eurovac's capital allocation.

Speaker 3

And then within our transformation program, we spent just over 20,000,000, so almost half, on developing our our toll solution, which includes the technology in the back office and the hardware in the truck. And as I mentioned earlier, tolls into FY24 contributed 50,000,000 in net revenues, so around 17% of total net revenues. The other part of the transformation program was getting ready for the new platform. This included building a data platform, bringing all our customers data from the different businesses into one system that will take a few years to complete, building the foundation of our e wallet solution, this is an important service in the new platform particularly for our transactional services Energy and Toll, enhancing our customer experience through digital onboarding and finally and most importantly mapping and designing the Erawag office and its front end user experience. These are just a few of the areas we focused on.

Speaker 3

Fast forward to FY24 and we now have a capital allocation model which you can see on the right hand side. Capitalized R and D will be invested in products, the Euroag office, technology and data platforms. The way to think about the product and Euroag office investment is about a third will be on maintenance, a third on development of products to drive growth, and a third on the EORAG office, building and integration of all the solutions. Around 7,000,000 of CapEx was spent on hardware, which I already mentioned is driving revenue growth, and infrastructure of 4,000,000, which relates mainly to our legacy truck parks, buildings and IT hardware. Moving forward, as we communicated earlier this year, R and D will be capped at £50,000,000 and you can assume OBUs and infrastructure will remain at similar levels to FY24.

Speaker 3

Moving to slide 13, I'm very pleased to report a 6% points reduction in our net leverage this year to 2.3 times, which is due to our outperformance in cash generated from our operations of 147,000,000. Part of this, as you can see, is a positive working capital improvement of 46,000,000. We have a slide in the appendix which shows our gross revenues, including both energy and tolls, which is almost 4,000,000,000 this year. We invoice our energy and toll customers for the total transaction, therefore this is connected to our working capital. With total invoice sales of about 4,000,000,000 over a year, our working capital on any day can easily swing 50,000,000.

Speaker 3

The positive swing of working capital is partly related to our focus on implementing some liquidity initiatives such as the organization, such as reverse factoring, reviewing both customer and supplier terms, all of this will support a stable working capital despite the gross revenues growing. We also benefited from the last two working days in December falling during the week as opposed to 2023 when they fell on the weekend, which meant we had two extra days for collecting cash. We communicated at the start of the year that we were expecting to pay around £35,000,000 of deferred consideration from past acquisitions. And as you can see, we ended the year paying £37,300,000 We have some small payments in FY25 but the large deferred considerations are now behind us. EuroEC has always been able to generate strong cash flows particularly with margins above 40%.

Speaker 3

Thinking about capital allocation priorities going forward and in order of preference, EuroAG remains committed to reinvesting its capital into the business to grow its top line and Martin will come to talk about this shortly. Essentially the ability of the platform to unlock further value through acceleration of cross sell and reduction in cost to acquire new customers while improving our operational efficiencies. All this will only make our cash generation stronger. We have proven this year that we are able to delever at a reasonable rate having been at around three times only a year ago. We are now within our leverage range of one and a half to two and a half times and expect to be around two times by the end of the year even after the proposed dividend payout.

Speaker 3

The way we are thinking about M and A going forward is that we're looking for businesses that will either add a new product to the platform, factoring is an example, or businesses that have trucks connected to one or similar services to us that we can simply migrate them onto our platform and start to cross sell. And finally, if the business has utilized the cash in the above three scenarios and there is excess cash available, the Board will consider whether to return some of it back to its shareholders. Moving to slide 15. With our performance today, we are reiterating our 2025 guidance. We continue to deliver strong results despite the headwinds we see impacting the European CRT industry.

Speaker 3

This gives us confidence in delivering low teens revenue growth in the near term with adjusted EBITDA margins remaining stable. The business is now focused on cash EBITDA and expect this to be between 90 and 100,000,000 in FY 2025. As already mentioned, capitalised R and D is to remain capped at £50,000,000 and OBU and infrastructure around the same as this year. And we expect our net leverage to fall to two times after the proposed dividend payment of £25,000,000 With that, I'd like to hand over to Maarten for a more in-depth view of our strategic highlights.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Oscar. My opening slide was, about our key strategic priorities and the progress we have made this year. This slide is a representation of why these metrics are so important to us. And then you add the end to end digital platform, which we started to roll out last year, will only enable us to accelerate both the number of trucks on the vertical axis and the number of products per truck on the horizontal axis. Our focus on customer acquisitions to date has been about door to door sales and integrating our sales teams post acquisitions to ensure we maintain sales momentum across all products, as well as to drive cross sell.

Speaker 1

I will come back to this on the next slide, but going forward with a digital platform, our focus is about both digital marketing and indirect channels, which is a new channel for us. The indirect channel will be established with our three OEM partners who have strong brands across Europe and will open many doors for us, not just in our current markets, but also in markets in Europe where we are under penetrated, such as Western Europe. Focusing on these additional sales channels will significantly reduce our acquisition costs. Having a fully integrated platform will also accelerate our ability to cross sell. Today, it is the responsibility of sales teams to revisit customers or sell multiple products at the point of sale.

Speaker 1

Increasing the number of products will ordinarily increase the average revenue per truck, but it has also material impact on customers' retention rates. Once a customer is taking four or more products, we can have customer for a lifetime. Staying on a subject of cross sell, I wanted to share with you some cohorts which proves our track record in this area. At the Capital Markets Day two years ago, we've shown you the top graphs on the slide, and our ability in our most developed markets, Czech and Slovakia, that we are able not only to continue to grow our customer base, but our ability to sell more products. Our thirty years reputation has built a strong client portfolio and we've tested different methods of cross selling our products to customers.

Speaker 1

We are now able to take this template and replicate it in our other markets with strong boost from the platform. And as you can see on the top right hand graph, we still have significant opportunities to cross sell more of our products. The bottom graph is a result of cross selling in Poland post our acquisition of Inelo. Our priorities in 2023 was about establishing a cross functional, cross brand commercial teams. As we acquired Inelo, they were also trying to digest some recent acquisitions such as CVS or Fire TMS, and we had also recently acquired The Buy, who also has a presence in Poland.

Speaker 1

We were able to unify the sales teams across the region, have them training on all of our products, and then utilizing their relationship to cross sell more products. The result is additional revenue generated, seen on the bottom graph, because of these cross sell initiatives. For those who are not familiar with our new platform, Jirovak Office, let me take a minute to remind you of what it is and what we are trying to achieve. The basis of our platform is to digitize all the mission critical products our customers use today to run their operations and ensure they are integrated into one application. Most of these products today are being supported by different businesses and are not connected.

Speaker 1

As you can imagine, this makes everyone's life difficult and operations inefficient. On the left hand side of the page, you can see all products and services we can offer our customers today, but through different user portals and logins. Migrating them into one platform allows our customers and its key personas, who you can see on the right hand side, the driver, dispatcher and our owner, to have one sign in for all their operations need. Each having different needs. For example, the driver needs reliable navigation for the tape.

Speaker 1

He needs to find parking at the required time when it's mandatory to stop and rest. He needs a means of payments for fuel tolls and roadside services. The dispatchers need all of the required systems to help find a profitable load, coordinate instantly the driver on their journeys in the most efficient way, and easily manage administrative tasks at the end of the journey. We've taken each user journey and gradually designing it in the platform to create seamless experience from order to cash. The platform will step by step, but fundamentally transform the way how our customers operate and will enable them to be more efficient, streamline their operations, grow revenues, improve their cash flow and accelerate their journey to a low carbon, greener future.

Speaker 1

Briefly looking at our long term roadmap. Last year we started the rollout of the platform. We have migrated and improved our navigation product, which is the backbone of the platform. Real time navigation will enable better and more accurate decision making whilst planning a load or whilst the truck is in transit. We have also migrated our EuroVac fleet management services product along with some customers.

Speaker 1

2025 is about the migration of our energy and torque products and customers, the launch of our indirect channel and testing of our subscription model. I will go into more detail on the next slide. Next year, we will integrate back office services such as tax, work time management, and enhanced AI tools available to customers, and will have the ability to accelerate cross sell through the platform. The phase rollout has different stages. First, you need to migrate the product user experience.

Speaker 1

Before you can migrate the customer, you need to integrate their data from their hardware. Our ambition is to complete migration of around 30% of our customers onto the platform this year. And by the end of next year, we'll have around 80%. Once the product has been migrated to the platform, we can also start to digitally onboard new customers straight to the platform. Looking at our focus for 2025, As I just mentioned, migrating both Energy and Tor products onto the platform is a priority for this year.

Speaker 1

Alongside this migration, we'll be launching our e wallet service. This will allow our customers to have all their transaction documents in one place. It allows them to pay their bills through the wallet and as well as ability to see their credit balance. The other area of focus is our indirect channel. We have been working with our three OEM partners on the integration of our platform within their infotainment, starting with our navigation product.

Speaker 1

Part of ongoing discussion with our partners is to find effective ways how to sign up new truck owners for Euroactivates, Euroactiv office services, be it through their dealership or resellers. Having a digital onboarding process will enable us to accelerate the acquisition of trucks through this channel. Finally, last year, we were looking across all our hardware procurement and understanding where we can consolidate. Currently, our EVA onboard unit for Toll includes Eurovac telematics and payments functionality. We are looking to create one standard Eurobag hardware in Inelo, whereby and CVS customers can use going forward.

Speaker 1

So far, we have already integrated the bio data into Eurobag hardware with CVS and Inelo to be completed this year. I wanted to show you two use cases which might help you to understand the customer benefits from using the platform. The first is through the eyes of the dispatcher or owner. The slide shows you different steps on the truck journey, each requiring input from the dispatcher of 30 administrative tasks for every journey. Having our energy network connected to the navigation allows dispatcher to find the most effective, efficient route with the best fuel prices to see traffic, border crossing times, restrictions for heavy vehicles, which other navigations do not have, and gives them the best route with the most accurate delivery times.

Speaker 1

Connected monitoring the driver's behavior and work time allows to adjust routing as well as submitting work time reports to local authorities. Finally, having all their products and data in one systems allows the use of AI to help drive efficiencies such as highly precise estimate of overall route costs. All these benefits leads to significant cost savings for the owner. The margin in industry is between 2% to 5%. These scores therefore are significant and noticeable for their business.

Speaker 1

The next use case is for driver. As I already mentioned, our three OEM partners are already producing our navigation product within every new truck. This gives the driver the best possible route using their weight and height restrictions. Truckers are also able to input breakdowns and other hazards which might be affecting their route, which will notify other truckers in the area. This product on the slide is the next version of application within the truck, which is about having the ability to fuel at the station without a physical card.

Speaker 1

The driver, through the dashboard, chooses what fuel they want to top up with, the card limit is already set, and the pump automatically unlocks itself. Once the transaction is completed, the invoice is generated within the platform and available to the customer, so no paper trail is required. The benefit to the driver is they do not have to worry about physical card and the risk of fraud due to matching vehicle and transaction location or keeping receipts from the transactions. They have less administrative task as the navigation will calculate the best possible route with the best price and allows the rest time where parking is available. Vehicle routing is key determining factor for cost efficiency.

Speaker 1

Therefore, over the time, we will be connecting other data sets and functions, such as reservation of electric charges. So as you can see, benefits are endless for driver, dispatcher and owner. Talking about alternative fuels leads me nicely onto our sustainability achievements this year. At the core of what we are trying to achieve is about helping the industry to become clean, fair and efficient. During the year, we have been able to reduce our own emissions by 16%.

Speaker 1

In approximately 10% of our energy network are available low carbon fuels, which drives increase of the number of trucks using those alternatives. We have also proudly announced being the first European CRT focused e mobility service provider. We have also invested in the well-being of our customers and drivers, ensuring there are ways to help them on the road. Looking inwards, Uruguay is all about diversity and inclusion. We are committed to reach 40% of our leadership team being women.

Speaker 1

So to conclude, another strong year with much progress made across the organization. We started the phase rollout of the platform with a clear roadmap outline for the next stages. We are starting to see results from the integration of our acquired businesses and with the outperformance in cash generation we've been able to leverage back within our guidance range to 2.3 times. Looking to this year, our priorities include migration of payment solutions, energy and toll into the platform and digital end to end onboarding. Around 30% of our customers migrated with improved cross sell momentum.

Speaker 1

The indirect channel launched a new subscription pricing tested before introducing it through the platform. Further cost synergies realized from the integration of acquisitions and streamlining operations, which as a result will further strengthen our cash generation. With this, I would like to open this session to Q and A. Thank you.

Operator

The first question is from Gautam Pillai from Peel Hunt. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

Speaker 4

Great. Thank you for taking my questions. Good morning, Martin and Oscar. So my first question is on Eurobag office. Can you give a sense of how many customers are currently live on the platform?

Speaker 4

And have you seen examples of, Eurobag office customers adding more products to their portfolio? Or is it still early days to see that? Second question, just kind of coming back on the OEM partnerships with European truck manufacturers, is there anything, any further update you can provide on that on the development with the manufacturers? And also when do you anticipate customers to start joining the EuroVac platform via the OEM channel? And last question, perhaps for Oscar, really impressive cash flow generation in 2024.

Speaker 4

Can you comment on if you have made any structural changes to your collections or payment schedules? And is this working capital improvement sustainable in the future? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Gautam. Good morning to all. I will take first two questions. When it comes to number of customers, the number last year, a number which we reported was already in October when we are launching the platform in II Hanover when we are speaking about 4% of the customers. Our ambition for this year is to achieve 30 around 30% of the customers.

Speaker 2

So we will we do not have now actual numbers, but how I I think what is important to share is how the things work. On one of the slides, I was depicting that the first, and you can think about a platform like a house, the first you need to migrate the products, then only like a furniture into the house. Then whenever you have a house, you have a furniture, you can move people to live there, our customers. So, since our launch where we were launching the platform with transport management and fleet management solution, we are looking now at the second quarter when we'll be launching the biggest product in terms of number of transaction, which is energy, energy payments, which will be followed in Q3 by tall product. So, and only then we can take the cohorts of the customers which are using these products or mixture of the product which are already migrated and then start to migrate.

Speaker 2

So Gautam, you will see the huge inflow of the customers, especially in the second half of the year. And therefore, I will answer as well your second question is really too early to judge. We would see more accelerated cross sell, this in the next cohort of the customers, especially in the second half of the year. When it comes to OEMs, the most advanced corporation we have is IVECO. That's a matter of history.

Speaker 2

We started as well, communication with IVECO. The first and we are testing and now training their dealers in Italy and Spain. And we are testing how to optimize the workflow in between their dealership and customer while using newly developed digital channel. So that's what is happening now with OEMs. Similar discussions are ongoing with other two, with World War Ambassadors, but this is too early to comment.

Speaker 2

We do not have yet concrete plans when it comes to distribution channels. This is just now under development. Anyway, we remain very excited. And I do hope that this year, we will see already this channel functional in minimum with one of those with one of those tract manufacturers, very likely this IVECO.

Speaker 5

And Gautam, on your question on cash generation, yes, we are very pleased where we ended up the year. And in terms of structural change, what we've done is we've obviously had a very clear focus on cash generation. We've set up a liquidity committee as an example which looks at all manners of improving working capital, whether it's terms for suppliers, customers, it's electrical digital onboarding, it's digital credit limits, it's reverse factoring, it's across the board. So, everything is on the table for us. And we only now are beginning to see the fruits of that hard work.

Speaker 5

Going forward, the question is, is it sustainable? We've always said that our ambition is to remain working capital neutral as we continue to grow the revenue, the top line, and we try and balance our supply with our receivables. And that is our overall ambition is to make sure that we don't end up in a negative cash flow movement.

Speaker 2

Great. Thank

Speaker 4

you both and good luck for the year.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Operator

The next question is from Alex Short at Berenberg. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

Speaker 6

Thanks guys. Can you hear me? Yes. Got some color for you in mind, but I just wanted to appreciate you've commented on the macro, particularly the improving mileage in Poland, which is great news given it's your largest market. Could you please provide some commentary on what's going in your other key markets in Eastern Europe as well as Portugal?

Speaker 2

Yep. Alex, thank you. We were specifically mentioning Poland because this is the biggest transport market in Europe, which is very much representative. So, we see similar evolution. However, I would like to cool down, let's say optimism because this is few months of the year.

Speaker 2

And of course, we all of us are concerned with evolving trade wars or at least rhetorics around that. So we need to remain cautious with the optimism. But of course, we are pleased to see that this trend already started in November and December and continued throughout first quarter that simply mileage in Poland has increased compared to the comparable period of 2024 and '23. So, that's indeed enhancing, but I would say it's too early to make a long term judgment. That's why we remain rather cautious with the outlook.

Speaker 6

Okay, great. And just one follow-up for Oscar, please. On the capital allocation side, can you just run me through the thinking behind how much debt you pay down versus the special dividend?

Speaker 5

Yeah, it's a good question. So, if you looked at the opening debt we had in the beginning of the year 2023, it was about $320,000,000. We ended up with $275,000,000. And within that movement, we also had a deferred compensation consideration of as I mentioned in the presentation of 37,000,000. So, you can see despite some significant outflows, not only the CapEx that we've talked about, but also consideration that deferred consideration of 37,000,000.

Speaker 5

Despite that, we reduced the debt by almost 35,000,000, 40 million. And that is what was really pleasing. And then you take the increased EBITDA, you get the reduction in the leverage from almost three to 2.3 times.

Speaker 6

Great. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank The next question is from Hannes Leitner at Jefferies. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.

Speaker 7

Hi, everyone. Thanks and great presentation. I have also a couple of questions. Maybe you can just like focus on 2025 outlook, growth outlook and how you believe the building blocks come together between the two segments. Mobility had been very, very flattish in terms of absolute euro amount.

Speaker 7

You talked throughout the year from tough comparatives with OEM. Maybe you can double click there. And then maybe also give us a little bit of a feel within the components like Toll Roads had an amazing year. It's also facing tougher comps. Then maybe just like two smaller items.

Speaker 7

The cash management side, you called out reverse factoring and higher interest costs. I think here is a little bit of a trade off. You preferred the cash coming in. How much headroom is there and how much of that will it cost going forward to finance that? And then the last thing, just in terms of the new cash EBITDA metrics, maybe you can just like soft guide us where do you see R and D capitalization develop over the next years?

Speaker 7

And the other moving factor is the share based compensation. Was there any change in policy? Or should this remain at the SEK1 million, SEK2 million range? Sorry for the couple of questions. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Hannes. I will touch the principles of the growth drivers for '25 and I will ask Oscar to complement eventually with some more numbers. When you look on a mobility space, in let's say short and near term, typically mobility products are growing slower. The industry is growing 7%. So this is quite natural.

Speaker 2

When we had this investment thesis about acquisition of thereby, INELO, etcetera, we knew that and we didn't expect it that this will be very much different. But our investment case was built around cross sell. Because if you think about typical customer of fleet management companies, They have, they are on one hand very loyal. So there is very low churn because the software is deeply embedded in their operations. But on the other hand, they are charging on average $15.20 euro per month, per vehicle, per truck.

Speaker 2

However, if you look on old cohorts of Eurovac, these old cross sold activities, you see that they are cohorts with, all the cohorts are having €150. So the our investment case was to, acquire these companies, migrate them into the platform and accelerate cross sell and achieve these high revenues per truck as soon as possible. It's already happening even without platform. So that's what we've illustrated in some of the slides as you've seen very successfully. And our expectation from the platform that is ability to cross sell Veltad to accelerate because simply we will not offer only customer, one organization which is selling it, but real value by connecting these two products.

Speaker 2

Internally, we call it one plus one equals three means that if you connect the data, simpler user experience, data are flowing, decision making is happening without human, improving the efficiency and of course bringing cost savings. So that's just to explain what you can expect from mobility solutions going forward. However, there is one important things and this is subscription. We were already talking for quite some time that our objective is to increase from current 27% of last year, it was 26% of subscription revenues to get it into 60%. That's our ambition.

Speaker 2

Simply it's by bringing all the pricing together into one simple charge per truck. This is another layer of simplification which customers will appreciate, why we will be bundling all the services into one and which will bring transparency, simplicity, and again, economic benefits for the customer because overall he will pay less for all these products which he will have available under the subscription. And for us, again,

Speaker 8

it's a stimulus for customer to take more products, which is

Speaker 2

extending lifetime value of the for customer to take more products, which is extending lifetime value of the customer. So in long term, Hannes, I would stop or I would start to downplay the proportion of mobility and payments because as I said, everything will be converging. And that's what we announced for this year, that we'll be market testing it. This rollout next year and scaling next year, the subscription model, we already run pilots, even the last year. And therefore, the things will be melting in one revenue stream per truck, which will be then complemented by interest and ethics, which will be charged separately.

Speaker 2

Nowadays, it's part of the product price, part of the toll price or fuel, but in the future, it will be, separately, which is allowed by e wallet, which we already launched. So this is how I would think Hannes going forward really. And that's why we introduce now these new metrics, number of trucks and number of products, which shall override this past perspective, mobility and payments. If this makes sense. Then, when it comes to OEMs, really this year is about implementing, about setting up everything to be functional.

Speaker 2

So we do expect scaling only really next year. It's a massive job on our side, on the tech manufacturer side in order to ensure that really dealers have least possible effort, but at the same time delivering the biggest conversion from this premium which is sitting in a truck with the which is pre installed into into paid customers. So really this year about setting it up everything, delivering, the trainings, agreeing around revenue share, etcetera. And that's what we are doing gradually to all three OEMs. So that's why, in terms of, like, impact on P and L this year, the it's rather rather small.

Speaker 2

We do expect rather scaling and larger impact, next year. And when it comes to Toll, your your last question or last point regarding the growth drivers, yes, indeed, it was very strong. You know, tax is a toll is a tax, and there is the saying, about about taxes. So we were always very keen, to, to, play important role in it. And we are very pleased to see the further evolution of the market.

Speaker 2

Yeah. So because market is consolidating. We've seen already one each provider being sold. We hear about other activities in this sense about divestments. So we are very pleased to see that Eurovac made the right bets.

Speaker 2

And in fact, going forward, you will see number of drivers in tolls. At first, additional countries will be introducing kilometer based tolls. Secondly, CO2, charges, as part of the decarbonization, as part of the green industrial deal and green deal as such. There will be increasing unit rates. And as well, EuroVac is switching, from national tolls, its customer base, to Eats.

Speaker 2

Example will be Switzerland just around the corner in two months' time. We'll be switching all our customer portfolio from old nationalist scheme into e scheme, which is having different technology, different different contractual framework, and higher remuneration. So these are the three levers in in tolling. And last but not least, what I would mention, tolling is great, a platform for us again to cross sell. So, customer needs that.

Speaker 2

This is, again, mission critical service. So, we are more than happy to leverage the tall customers and cross out energy or software services. Oscar?

Speaker 5

Thanks a lot. Anas, a good question on the cash management. I just wanted to clarify a few things when you referred to the reverse factoring. So, what tools do I have at my disposal to manage working capital? Clearly, you start with the basics, the terms of the suppliers and the customers.

Speaker 5

When you go into a new territory or remember, we're having to supply our own sites for fuel and our bunkering sites. So, we're managing fuel across a very large region, but of course, we sometimes have to use new suppliers. They would typically ask either cash in advance or a guarantee of some kind. So, you start off with the basics. How do I get the terms up so that they are at least matching the receivable terms I have for my customers?

Speaker 5

Where we can, we try to reverse factor as we've done in Spain. So, supply financing, essentially. And that, of course, helps in terms of the cash flow. But what tools do I have in my toolbox? Apart from the basics of the terms, I use a guarantee.

Speaker 5

So, when the customer says, supplier says, can you please provide me cash in advance? I'll say no. They'll say, what can you give me in terms of security? I'll say, okay, how about an issue a guarantee? However, that costs money to I mean, about 1%.

Speaker 5

So then we say, okay, what about, a parent guarantee of that that that that that

Speaker 8

and on a group level rather than on

Speaker 5

a country specific level? And then you're dealing with insurance companies that rate Erewag in terms of supply. And you enter that stage of trying to get the best rating for Erewag as a whole. And then you get into, okay, now, factoring our receivables is, again, a very important factor. So, where we know, for example, on on V eight, on tax refunds, where it's a good quality receivable.

Speaker 5

However, we're uncertain of, for example, the Kingdom Of Spain, when will they return the funds? We will factor those receivables off our balance sheet. So where we typically finance our customers on our balance sheet. When it comes to, dealing with our our our the receivables of our customers, we can also help factor those. And, of course, we charge a fee for that.

Speaker 5

So it's quite a wholesome thing. And and back to your question of favoring the reducing the debt whether versus, and they're hence trying to reduce the interest costs. The interest costs, if you look break it down, the interest costs consist of the interest on our loans, our factory, which has actually gone up year on year, and the cost of cost of guarantee. So those three components make up our interest bucket. And, of course, they were higher than last year.

Speaker 5

Essentially, we had two and a half more months of debt versus 2023 on the another debt we we were essentially that we we took out on acquisition and hence the increase year on year. We believe that the the the allocate capital allocation is appropriate for the company now. So if you look at What's our first goal is to ensure we invest appropriately in the OpEx and CapEx of the business. The second priority for us remains deleveraging. How can we get this down?

Speaker 5

We then look at M and A opportunities. What is it can we do? And I mentioned that in the presentation in terms of bolt on acquisitions, enhancing services, products, etcetera. And then finally, if there's cash available, we would look to to to share it with with our with our with our shareholders if if that's appropriate. But we believe at the moment that that that our cap cash capital allocation is appropriate for the business.

Speaker 5

In terms of the cash EBITDA, I guided 90 to a hundred million. Why a range? Some of it's the uncertainty, but also capitalized. We said capitalized R and D is capped at 50,000,000. Doesn't mean you'll spend it all.

Speaker 5

But the reason we started with 50, as I mentioned at some stage before, is we have a finite not a finite resource, we have a resource that's in our CTO and CTO organization. We can't just go out and hire another 300 tech people. So we have a almost a finance resource that is fairly flexible on the sides, but that is what we want them to focus on certain priorities during the year. And Martin Martin has mentioned the roadmap at the high level and what we expect to deliver in the next three years. And that is essentially how we look at the capitalized R and D going forward.

Speaker 5

I'm not sure if that's answered your question, Hannes.

Speaker 7

No. I mean, maybe just like to quantify that you think that will decline over time or how long do you still have for the platform and for the product elevated investments in it, which clearly you put on the balance sheet? So just like in terms of timing?

Speaker 5

So in terms of we're not giving specific amounts per year. We know that we have work to do to get the platform fully operational, as Maarten has mentioned, you've heard, to get even our customers up to three years in terms of getting up to around 80% of the customers migrated. It's going to take some effort. We also know that there are other products out there factoring as an example. So factoring of our customers' receivables is a key objective of ours, in addition to the OEM investment that Martin's alluded to.

Speaker 5

So we know there's going to be always new development going forward. So we we do we do not want to, at this stage, just as I've announced the cap, start talking about reducing the cap. So we are just we we feel that having that limit, while the revenues continue to grow double digits means that the percentage of overall spend will come down. And that is what we want to do is to ensure that there's a limit to how much we're gonna spend whilst continuing to deliver double digit growth. So, we know that this is a continuous journey.

Speaker 5

Our R and D will never just stop. We always want to provide new product services to our customers as we develop, as the markets develop as our customers develop. So, hopefully that is more clear now.

Speaker 7

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Operator

And the final question is from Brian Burring at

Speaker 8

Hi, and thanks for the presentation, guys. I have a question regarding some of the new KPIs, specifically, if you are providing any guidance for them for 2025. Specifically, I'd be interested in the number of active trucks and the average products for trucks. Do you have targets you can provide for those, please?

Speaker 5

We're not giving specific targets for each of those because what at this stage, Abraham, so what we're doing is, we stuck to the overall guidance in terms of revenue growth being double digit, margin staying similar to 2024 and leverage coming down to around two times as a whole. Behind that, of course, as Martin has alluded, our model has changed to active number of trucks, number of products. When we were at the Capital Markets Day, we talked about our long term, ambition of as much as I mentioned, subscription revenues going to 60%, products going to roughly six times six six products per active truck. So that is and our North Star being 1,000,000 connected trucks. So that's our long term ambition.

Speaker 5

How we get there in the near term is more difficult to predict. But of course, we have our own ambitions. When you break down the revenues by energy, by toll, by tax refund, by FMS, TMS, etcetera, we have specific targets that we want to drive, but that's an internal budgeting process. We are not giving guidance at this stage on the KPIs. They're brand new.

Speaker 5

We've launched them only now today. But as we get more comfortable with the data that we're collecting on a daily basis, of course, and the accuracy of forecasts, as you can imagine, it can be challenging, only until we get to a stage where we're more comfortable that will we start perhaps guiding to some of these KPIs.

Speaker 1

And Bram, if I may add, it's very much connected to

Speaker 2

what we were discussing. This year is really transition from this single products and number of single product sales into integrated experience through the platform. And we are truly pioneering. There is no precedence in our industry. Nobody was selling digitally.

Speaker 2

Nobody was selling more products, nobody had e shop, nobody has connected the data. So, although we run-in the past, of course, market test, customer groups, we had a lot of examples of like isolated integrations of two products. So this feud

Speaker 8

of

Speaker 2

our passion and confidence in the concept, but at this scale, it's totally new. So that's why we are saying that this year we need to really get house full of furniture, get into the house decent number of customers. And we are targeting a set, approximately 30% of customers. And then tune and experience what effects it has on accelerated cross out, but as well on a number of tracks. So, through the new channel digital and OEM.

Speaker 2

So this is something what we'll be experiencing now. Indeed, the minimum target is to deliver growth and cross sell, which we are delivering so far in this manual mode. But of course, all the investments and all what we did last few years was in order to accelerate. But how much it will accelerate, I believe you'll be better positioned at the based on a basis of numbers 2025, which then shall be really scaled and seen in full force in '26. So please bear with us.

Speaker 2

This is really interesting year for us and the numbers, exact numbers and forecast eventually to be produced only based on this experience.

Speaker 8

Understood. Just a very short follow-up. You mentioned that you're migrating energy payments and toll payments in 2Q and 3Q respectively. Are there any other big business lines that will get migrated in 2025?

Speaker 2

One thing which I would mention specifically is Evolut. Evolut, it's a hard, it's like a small banking system in a banking system, isn't the new platform, where customer has own accounts with IBAN, with all the features, gradually having more and more functions to really be that customers effectively could abandon their traditional banking provider. This is something what will be gradually developed because of course it's a complex system and we'll be deploying more and more functions, be it ethics, being separate charge for interest, etcetera. This is one large things which then enables, Oscar already mentioned, the receivable financing. So receivable financing in a past GIPA, which didn't work out, but we are looking at it very intensively because our customers, and again, last two years confirmed huge demand for this service.

Speaker 2

We are seeking a stable source of financing and Evolut is exactly the place where the new receivables factoring solution digital one will be connected. And then again, the aging seamless experience when customer load the new job order. Immediately, we can pre score his customer whenever customer delivered the goods without waiting for the proof of delivery because we have a data that the goods was delivered through the fleet management solution. We can issue the invoice immediately, factor it, credited to e wallet account and customer can immediately view. You know, so something what was so far again, fragmented number of steps, you know, taking two weeks, we can do on on one click, you know.

Speaker 2

So these these are the benefits which we are seeing and this is the e wallet will be enabler. Other products, we were commenting on our release will come, the rest of the products, mostly back office services like tax returns or work time management, which we acquired as part of the ENA law. And further products will be deployed in 02/1926.

Speaker 8

Thank you, Bram. Thank you very much.

Operator

There are no further questions. I will now hand back to management for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

So, thank you very much for your questions and for being with us on this journey. I hope that you see that we are now in exciting times when we are starting to harvest the efforts and these heavy investments periods of last few years. We are having great confidence stepping into 2025, having slight positivism based on the numbers. Our teams are well running confident in terms of deliveries of these migrations of products and consequently customers. So I do hope that you will see further positive news from our side throughout the year.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much.

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Earnings Conference Call
W.A.G payment solutions H2 2024
00:00 / 00:00