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SoftwareONE Holding reported a challenging Q1 2025, with revenue declining by 5.7% year-on-year, while adjusted EBITDA showed a modest growth of 2.3% to CHF 317 million. Despite recent market concerns, the stock has shown resilience with an 11.4% gain over the past week and a 25.6% rise year-to-date. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company appears undervalued based on its Fair Value calculation, with 12 additional exclusive insights available to subscribers.
Key Takeaways
- Revenue declined 5.7% YoY, raising concerns about sales performance.
- Adjusted EBITDA grew 2.3%, with a margin improvement to 19.8%.
- Successful cost reduction program exceeded targets, achieving CHF 88 million in savings.
- Strong billings growth of 10% in Microsoft business.
- Stock price decreased by 1.09% in pre-market trading.
Company Performance
SoftwareONE’s performance in Q1 2025 was mixed, with a notable decline in revenue but improvements in operational efficiency. The company achieved a 2.3% increase in adjusted EBITDA, reaching CHF 317 million, and improved its EBITDA margin by 1.4 percentage points. InvestingPro data shows the company maintains a healthy gross profit margin of 31.3% and holds more cash than debt on its balance sheet, demonstrating financial stability despite revenue challenges.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: Declined by 5.7% year-on-year.
- Adjusted EBITDA: Increased by 2.3% to CHF 317 million.
- Adjusted EBITDA Margin: Improved to 19.8%.
- Cost Reduction: Achieved CHF 88 million in annual savings.
Outlook & Guidance
Looking ahead, SoftwareONE anticipates continued negative revenue growth in Q2 2025 but expects strong positive momentum in the second half of the year. The company remains confident in achieving an EBITDA margin of 24-26% and aims to more than double its reported EBITDA by the end of 2025. Analyst consensus from InvestingPro supports this optimistic outlook, with price targets ranging from CHF 7.54 to CHF 16.42, and expectations of profitability this year. Get access to the comprehensive Pro Research Report for detailed analysis of SoftwareONE’s growth prospects and financial health.
Executive Commentary
CEO Rafael highlighted the importance of billings growth, stating, "Our billings grew 10% overall. So as long as these billings are growing, these are the fundamentals, right?" He also emphasized the company’s cost realignment, noting, "We have now established a new cost base in our company, which is also much more aligned again to our income streams."
Risks and Challenges
- Revenue Decline: The 5.7% drop raises concerns about future sales performance.
- Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Ongoing economic challenges may impact decision-making and sales.
- Microsoft Agreement Changes: Potential revenue impacts due to incentive changes.
- Market Competition: Increasing competition in the cloud services sector.
- Sales Transformation: Challenges in North America due to Go-to-Market changes.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the decline in North American performance, which was attributed to the Go-to-Market transformation and lost deals. The company also discussed positive developments in cash collection initiatives and strong performance in the APAC region, expressing confidence in recovering growth in the latter half of 2025.
Full transcript - Softwareone Holding (SWON) Q1 2025:
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Along with substantial synergy potential, there is clearly a significant value creation opportunity. Let me now take a look at the financial profile of the combined business based on 2024 results. These numbers are indicative and exclude the synergy potential. Together, we generated CHF 16,100,000,000.0 in billing, reflecting our combined scale. Revenue was CHF 1,600,000,000.0 with growth in constant currency of nearly 5%.
Adjusted EBITDA totaled CHF $317,000,000 implying a healthy margin of around 20%. Driven by significant revenue and cost synergies, we see strong potential for accelerated growth together with improved profitability. Our expanded geographic reach and capabilities will allow us to serve a broader customer base. Our enhanced services offering will support cross and upselling, while Crayon’s Tier two platform can be further leveraged. As a reminder, we have identified 80,000,000 to CHF 100,000,000 in cost synergies incremental to our implemented cost reduction program by achieving scale in many local operations and integrating premises and functions.
We expect to realize 30% of cost synergies within six months post closing and the remainder within eighteen months with one off costs matching the run rate synergies. We will, of course, be reporting on progress against these targets in the coming quarters. With expected closing only weeks away, our teams have made excellent progress on integration planning to ensure day one readiness. Our integration ambition is clear to drive growth from day one by delivering a superior customer and partner experience, while building a unified high performing organization. And as mentioned, we are committed to capturing full run rate synergies by end of twenty twenty six.
To get there, key decisions and frameworks are currently being addressed such as post closing governance, detailed integration roadmap and synergy targets at the functional level. We look forward to keeping you informed of key milestones ahead. Let’s now look at SoftwareONE’s stand alone performance in the first quarter. Revenue declined by 5.7% in Q1, while adjusted EBITDA grew 2.3%, reflecting a margin improvement of 1.4 percentage points to 19.8%. This was thanks to the impact of our cost reduction program, which is becoming clearly visible.
Although, we had anticipated a revenue decline for the quarter, growth at the group level was slightly below expectations. This was due to weaker than anticipated results in North America, while all other regions are on track. Noram underwent significant change as part of the GTM transformation. Macroeconomic uncertainty also became a factor in March, leading to delayed decision making by customer. In addition, large transactions in the prior year distort year on year growth.
Further action has been taken in Neuron. And with another quarter of hard work and focus, I’m confident we can drive a turnaround. The GTM is working in other regions, even where the implementation initially failed. In Mexico, for example, we have now delivered two quarters of double digit growth. The U.
K. Has stabilized with strong services led growth. We are also navigating vendor incentive changes this year as flagged back in October. ’2 third of our total negative exposure on Microsoft Enterprise Agreements falls in H1. We are managing these changes effectively through CSP transition initiatives and focus on pre- and post sales related funding programs.
This will help accelerate growth in the second half of twenty twenty five. Despite these changes, fundamentals in our industry remain strong, which is evident from 10% growth at the billings level in our Microsoft business in Q1. Customers continue to prioritize investments in software and cloud and increasingly in data and AI and our value added services resonate well with customers. Looking ahead, revenue growth in Q2 is expected to remain negative at similar level to Q1 twenty twenty five due to the Microsoft incentive changes waiting particular on June. For the second half of the year, we expect a turnaround in DRAM and strong positive momentum across the group, driven by lower impact from the Microsoft incentive changes in H2 and acceleration in services led offerings such as CSP, benefits from the GTM transformation coming through as well as a more favorable comparable period.
The significantly improved top line performance in April gives us additional confidence in a strong recovery in H2. In terms of profitability, we have now fixed our cost base. So I’m very confident in reaching our adjusted EBITDA margin target of ’24 to 26%. Moving on to the regional performance. Overall, we are on track in the regions with the exception of North America.
We have a new leadership in DACH and rest of EMEA and highly experienced successor in APAC who have my full confidence in leading our teams on the ground. APAC delivered revenue growth of 16% with strong results across the region. We saw excellent growth in services over 50% year on year as we expand our AWS practice and drive growth in application services. DACH revenue declined 4% driven by the Microsoft transactional business. Our largest exposure on EA incentives is in DACH, so this was expected.
Rest of EMEA was down 1%, a clear improvement compared to Q4, which was down over 6%. Based on current pipeline and backlog, I’m very confident in a return to growth possibly already in Q2. Disappointingly, Noram was down 31% driven by persistent GTM related sales execution issues impacting both business lines. Revenue in LatAm decreased by nearly 3% with Colombia down for one final quarter due to the lost public sector contract. Mexico performed well as did Central America and The Caribbean.
Now turning to our business lines. Software and Cloud Marketplace revenue declined 11% driven by the Microsoft transactional business. Microsoft gross billings grew 10%. So we continue to see momentum at that level, while revenue declined due to the incentive changes. This impact was anticipated and we have mitigated initiatives in place.
We have accelerated efforts to transition customers to CSP, collaborating with Microsoft who has also announced more options around subscription terms for customers. We are also focusing on Microsoft funded pre and post sales activities, with revenue more than doubling quarter to quarter, which will increasingly help to compensate for a sizable part of the EA incentive impact in H2. In the meantime, Services was flat with mainly Noram and large deals in prior year weighing on growth. Excluding Noram, Services revenue growth was over 6%. Going into Q2, we are confident in seeing our Services business returning to solid growth.
Driving a turnaround in Noram is critical and we have taken further action in April and May to ensure the region is back on track for H2. Specifically, we have deployed our President of Software and Cloud, Oliver Berthold to the region for the rest of Q2. We have rehired key salespeople in the other ISV space and built dedicated tiger teams for priority sales motions EA to CSP, other ISVs and IT Asset Management. We also have global and local subject matter experts, coaching and enabling new joiners to ensure they ramp up quickly. As our Noram business merged with Krions, we also look forward to benefiting from further scale, talent and services capabilities.
Given top line headwinds, the cost reduction program that we initiated with my CEO announcement in November has proved critical. By end of Q1, we had achieved CHF 88,000,000 annual savings against an original target of over €50,000,000 by removing unnecessary management layers and unproductive costs. This meant we were able to increase profitability for the quarter and reestablish a sustainable cost structure going forward. The program is now completed, but cost control remains a high priority for me. We are also now in a strong starting position for the integration with Creon with an additional CHF 80,000,000 to CHF 100,000,000 of synergies.
Lastly, on the next two slides, I would like to highlight two key growth opportunities, Public Sector and AI, and how we leverage our capabilities and hyperscaler relationships to drive digital transformation and business outcomes for our customers. This quarter, we secured a DKK 1,500,000,000.0 cloud consumption spend framework agreement over four years with the Danish government. Going forward, we will be supporting them with all cloud related projects across the hyperscales, which also creates services related opportunities to drive and grow their cloud consumption. Another customer called Oxygen Finance specializes in public sector insights. They are a great example of how we help clients harness the power of AI to better serve customers and drive efficiencies.
Faced with the challenge of manually reviewing thousands of public sector records every month, we collaborated with Microsoft and Oxygen Finance to develop an AI powered solution that would streamline data extraction and analysis. We implemented an advanced web crawler that extracts relevant data from public sector sources and using Microsoft Azure and OpenAI automatically categorizes and summarizes the information. This solution significantly reduced processing time while data coverage and accuracy improved. I would now like to hand over to Rodolfo to take us through the Q1 financial. As this will be Rodolfo’s last time presenting results for us, I would like to thank him for his contribution over the last few years.
At the same time, I would like to welcome Hans Peterschraner, who will be joining as SoftwareONE’s Group Chief Financial Officer as of first June. With more than twenty years of international senior financial leadership experience, we are pleased to have him joining us at this pivotal time. You will have the opportunity to meet him soon. Rodolfo, thanks again and please go ahead.
Rodolfo, CFO, SoftwareONE: Thank you, Rafael. I’d like to start by extending a warm welcome to everyone joining us today. Let me provide an overview of our financial performance at the group level. Revenue declined by 5.7% year on year on a constant currency basis. All regions are on track with the exception of Noram, which delivered weaker than expected results in March.
This region continues to struggle with go to market related execution issues, exacerbated by macroeconomic uncertainty towards the end of the quarter. Importantly, we were able to offset this decline with significant cost reductions initiated in Q4 last year. Our contribution margin slightly declined by 0.8 percentage points due to mix and our adjusted EBITA margin was 19.8% for the quarter, an improvement of 1.4 percentage points compared to the same period last year. I will go into further detail on the EBITA building blocks on the next slide. This slide provides a detailed view of the year on year changes in adjusted EBITDA.
Marketplace delivery cost improved significantly compared to prior year, thanks to continued process optimization while service and delivery costs remained flat. The significant reduction in sales, marketing and administrative expenses again reflect the success of our cost reduction program. Moving on to the business line view. In Marketplace, revenue declined by 11.3%. Revenue growth in other ISVs was flat, while Microsoft revenue fell driven by the anticipated vendor incentive changes.
Increased efficiency in our delivery operations contributed to an improvement in contribution margin reaching 86.5% for Q1, up by 0.4 percentage points. The adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter was 48.3%, up 2.2 percentage points from the prior year, reflecting the SG and A reductions. In Services, Q1 growth was impacted by GTM related execution issues in NORM and certain large transactions in quarter one last year. Delivery costs decreased slightly with the contribution margin increasing by 0.6 percentage points. SG and A decreased by 7.2%, driving an improvement in the adjusted EBITA margin by over three percentage points to 6.9.
I’ll now hand back to Rafael for our full year outlook.
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Thank you, Rodolfo. We confirm our 2025 outlook on a stand alone basis, which is based on a recovery in Nora. Revenue growth will continue to be negative in Q2 at a similar level to Q1 this year. We then expect a strong positive momentum in H2 with only one third of the total impact from the Microsoft incentive changes hitting us in this period. That’s very important in terms of explaining the growth dynamics between the two halves.
This outlook is also driven by an acceleration in services led offerings such as CSP, benefits of the GTM transformation and a more favorable comparable period. Our improved performance in April gives us further confidence in the underlying momentum of the business and recovery in H2. At the same time, we are very confident in achieving our margin guidance of 24% to 26% based on our already achieved cost savings and continued strict cost control. Along with adjustments below €30,000,000 we confirm our target to more than double reported EBITDA in 2025 on a stand alone basis. Finally, as mentioned previously, we will provide guidance for the combined company following completion of the transaction.
With this, I’ll now hand back to the operator for the Q and A session.
Conference Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. The first question is from Nazzati Noushin, Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Nazzati Noushin, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. A couple on side. Can you please elaborate on the decline in North America? Is it mainly due to contract loss or churn or any other reasons here?
And the measures taken to regain some market share, are these to retain the existing customer or regain the market share? Can you tell us, like, what what are the measures exactly you are hoping for to achieve here? And then what is the overall exposure to public sector globally, especially in Europe? And I was wondering also if you have taken any actions, specifically in Dachon and LatAm to restore growth. Thank you.
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Thank you, Nassari, the questions. Me quickly an input on the public sector situation. So our public sector exposure or on the total revenue is around 15% on the total revenue is public sector. This is just for your information. In terms of North America and the decline, why has this happened?
We have already mentioned some of the reasons. On one side, we have to be aware, we implemented the GTM from Q2 to Q3 last year in a very rushed way. 90% of customer accounts switched hands. And I would say, we are still struggling to recover as fast as we initially wanted on that. What we see though is on billing levels that the Microsoft billing levels, as an example, are still growing, not double digit, but they are growing single digit.
We see a slight decline on the multi vendor billing levels, so for other ISVs. And for sure, we need to make sure that we focus on our other ISV business. Therefore, we also have put measures in place. Like I mentioned before, we have rehired some of our Alumni spec into the business. It’s a handful of people who have very specialized experience on other ISV, and they are now already in place and fully focused on helping and improving the situation on the other ISV business.
Another topic which is important to emphasize on is, you might remember that last year in Q1 in North America, we had about 26% growth. So we had quite a big growth last year in Q1. And there are some significant one timers and large deals, which is affecting now on the growth basically in this quarter. These are some of the reasons in Doran. In DACH and Latin America, we are basically on track with our performance.
It’s in line with our expectations. DACH has the largest exposure on Microsoft enterprise agreements. Hence, they are impacted from the incentive changes and that’s why we see a negative 4%. As a reminder, in Q4, I think they had negative 6%. So the trajectory is improving.
If we look into our other ISV business in DACH, it’s growing around 20%. So we see nice growth there. So I would say the underlying business, the billings, the momentum is there. And therefore, we are in line with expectations there. And LatAm is another quarter impacted by this large public sector deal in Colombia.
But overall, going into H2, we are very positive that we will see solid growth numbers in LatAm again.
Nazzati Noushin, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Thank you. If I can just follow-up on North America. So is there any contract loss that you would report to us, or it’s just purely on what is the switch of the accounts between your managers?
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Yes. Especially on the other ISV side, for sure, we have some deals which we lost and which we couldn’t repeat. For sure, we also see some customer churn. That’s the impact. We also win some new customers and new deals.
But at the moment, for sure, we have lost some business as well in North America.
Nazzati Noushin, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Understood. Thank you.
Conference Operator: The next question from Noot Waller, Bader Bank. Please go ahead.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Yes. Good morning and thank you for taking my questions. Also trying to get back on North America. Rafael, can you give us some color here? Do you see already first impact from the rehiring?
Did you see some stabilization particularly in terms of churn? And also on the Microsoft incentive headwind, can you give us some numbers to the headwind? And a final question on for Rodolfo first to start with. All the best Rodolfo going forward. And looking at cash collection, I know that you’re not disclosing cash collection and conversion for the quarter.
But can you give us some insight whether the patterns of cash collection changed meaningful in Q1 compared to prior years? Thank you.
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Thank you very much for the questions. On Noram, again, what makes us positive is that the services related pipeline is growing. We are actually very confident there also going into the second half of the year that we will see the fruits and that we can come back into growth territory in the second half of the year. And again, I think what’s important to understand also is that if you look into the Q1 last year, we had some large one timers. We also have an exposure on that in Q2 also related to vendor incentives.
And therefore, we see a recovery in Q2 as difficult, but we are positive that we can turn around things going into the second half of the year. On Microsoft, on the incentives on enterprise agreements, so I think what’s very important to emphasize again is that two thirds of the impact is in the first half of the year, one third only in the second half. So that should help us significantly to drive better results and come back into growth territory in the second half of the year. Rodolfo, I hand over to you.
Rodolfo, CFO, SoftwareONE: Yes. Thanks, and thanks, Nud, for your kind words. On the cash collection, we see a positive development on the net working capital. Let’s say compared to the prior year, it’s at similar levels and then compared to the developments in the second half of twenty twenty four, we see an improvement. Important to mention, we have an initiative across the different regions to accelerate collections.
This is a clear priority for us and so I’m also quite confident that when we report second quarter, you will see a positive evolution on the net working capital.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Thank you.
Conference Operator: The next question from Christian Bader, ZKB. Please go ahead.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Yes. Good morning, gentlemen. Three questions for me please. I’d like to do them one after the other. And I’d like to start with something positive.
And I wanted to ask you, could you maybe talk a little bit more about the strong development in Asia in the first quarter and whether you see this to continue for the rest of the year? That’s my first question.
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Thank you, Christian. I would say in APAC, we have we just continued the trend basically. We had a similar growth rate to previous quarters. So we are very happy, as I mentioned, especially on the services side. We improved a lot with 50% growth.
For sure, I’m looking forward. I think we also seen we are also affected in APAC like in every other market by the Microsoft EA incentive changes. So this affects us and can have a little bit of an impact also in the following quarters on the overall growth rate. But we are very confident that we continue to see solid positive growth in that region for the remainder of the year.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Okay. My next question is on this enterprise agreement. Can you tell us whether you do expect another headwind for your results next year?
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: No. We actually expect this to bottom out by end of twenty twenty five. We’ve mentioned that a few times already and I think that’s very important. The EA incentive headwinds are done by then. And this will actually kind of give us the opportunity to start into next year with, I would say, a balanced baseline, and it should help us to even accelerate growth.
Because again, important is also our billings. I mentioned for Q1, our billings grew 10% overall. So as long as these billings are growing, these are the fundamentals, right? And they are trending in the right direction. And so once the EA incentive hits are done, it should have a positive impact on growth.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Okay. And my last question is, you gave an example with the Danish government that you won a framework agreement worth DKK1.5 billion. What does this mean for your turnover numbers for this year? Or let’s say, what does it mean in general?
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Yes. This is a cloud spend commitment from the Danish government basically, which they have based on contracts with the hyperscalers. We are the transactional partner for this. We are going to be the partner who is helping them to, I would say, consume this cloud consumption. And as in general, with these cloud based agreements, you get then some incentives related to that also from the hyperscalers itself.
So it should have an impact, especially as the consumption is growing. It should have a positive impact on our overall revenue growth. And as well, I think in addition, it will trigger opportunities on the services side helping driving consumption into the cloud.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Okay. So in terms of modeling for us, we should then have make an assumption about the incentives on the overall value of the contract? Is that Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Okay. And when does this contract begin? Or has it begun already?
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: It has begun already. And we will see this is a four year agreement, so the total spend is over four years, the maximum spend. And as the spend and the consumption is growing, the more impact we would see from a revenue perspective.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: Okay. And is a 10% incentive, is this a good assumption? Sorry? Is a 10% incentive on the overall framework, is that a good That’s
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: a too high assumption. Yes, think.
Noot Waller/Christian Bader, Analyst, Bader Bank/ZKB: All right. Okay. Many thanks. That’s clear.
Conference Operator: The next question from Florian Trausch, Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Florian Trausch, Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux: Yes. Thank you. Good morning, gentlemen. I have a question on your cost savings. So the feedback you gave on reaching 88,000,000 instead of initially this €50,000,000 targeted.
So my first question would be where is this or how can you explain this kind of overachievement? Where is the biggest gap? And then in the second round, and this is why I’m probably asking it, I think what are your lessons learned from it as I believe a smooth execution on cost cutting measures will really be a key to generate the cost synergies you’re targeting with the merger of Crayon. So really trying to get a feeling how your confidence has developed since executing your own cost cutting measure that you can do the same or duplicate these kind of efforts as a combined entity going forward. Thank you.
Rodolfo, CFO, SoftwareONE: Yes. Florian, thanks for the question. On the cost savings, as you when you have followed the trajectory of SOAP4 I, I think we have had two phases here. One was operational excellence, which was a transformation of our operating model to make it more scalable. And then this second phase, Rafi joined, it has been about making sure we reduce layers, we reduce, let’s say, less productive resources in the organization, so we go back to a lean, agile organization.
So I think it’s two programs that have helped both change the operating model as well as make it leaner and more agile. I think these are great learnings, as you say, as we go forward when we think about integrating the two companies, we have these learnings from SoftwareONE that we will apply to the combination and that gives us very high confidence in achieving the synergies of 80,000,000 to €100,000,000 going forward, which will come on top.
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Yes. Maybe to emphasize a little bit also from my side, right? I think we have now established a new cost base in our company, which is also much more aligned again to our income streams. And I would say this is really paving the way now for a future with, I would say, ongoing profitable growth. So it’s fundamentally important.
And I would say it’s a key milestone achieved.
Florian Trausch, Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux: Great. Thank you very much. And looking forward for a combined SoftwareONE in Crane. Thank you.
Rafael, CEO, SoftwareONE: Thank you.
Conference Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this was the last question. I would like to turn the conference back over to Anna Engel for any closing remarks. Thank you.
Nazzati Noushin, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Thank you, and thank you to everyone for joining the call this morning. We look forward to speaking soon again.
Conference Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.
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