Eezy Plc's Interim Report 1-3/2021: Corona continues, focus on the re-opening society

EEZY PLC  --  INTERIM REPORT  --  11 MAY 2021 AT 8:00

Eezy Plc's Interim Report 1-3/2021: Corona continues, focus on the re-opening society

January-March 2021

Revenue was EUR 36.6 million (EUR 55.1 million in January-March 2020).EBITDA was EUR 2.8 million (2.8).EBIT was EUR 0.9 million (1.0).Earnings per share was EUR 0.01 (0.02).Continuing corona pandemic continued to decrease business volume.

Outlook for 2021

Due to the Corona pandemic, Eezy does not give guidance for year 2021.

The goal is to give guidance when visibility improves along the re-opening of the society.

Key figures (IFRS)

CEO Sami Asikainen:

Back to growth track during summer

Eezy's performance was burdened by the lockdown and clear tightening of the Corona related restrictions. Fortunately, the infection rates are going down, vaccination progresses, and we expect the society to open up during the summer months. In the difficult conditions, we have successfully implemented our strategy and our focus is now tightly on the post-corona times.

Smallest quarter for staffing services

The first quarter is the smallest one even in normal conditions, and this time the tightening restrictions significantly affected our business. Our revenue was only approx. EUR 37 million. The decrease compared to last year comes especially from our horeca business, where our revenue was almost EUR 10 million below the corresponding quarter last year.

We estimate that the staffing services market has contracted by some 20% during Q1. For Eezy, the decrease has been visible, in addition to horeca, in our largest sectors, industry, construction and logistics, especially in the largest city areas. Our other units have been near the 2020 volumes. The franchise units have performed clearly better than the total market. This shows how corona's impact to our customers has been strongly polarised. The retail sector decreased mildly as some customers moved their own horeca sector employees to the retail sector.

During our history, we have consistently expanded into new customer segments. E.g. Eezy Doctors has already established its position in staffing of doctors. Eezy United has quickly found its place in bringing athletes and work together. We have also recently invested in developing office personnel staffing services and outsourcing services. All together, these developing business areas correspond to approx. 7% of the revenue in this small quarter. Our intention is to widen our offering further.

Professional services grew according to our strategy

We strengthened our professional services last autumn through acquisitions. Integrations inside both teams - Eezy Personnel and Eezy Flow - have been efficient and successful. Organisations, values and services have been combined to be part of Eezy. The revenue of professional services grew by 48% from last year, and its share of the total revenue doubled to 8%. We seek higher profitability from the professional services, so good progress there is vital in our journey toward our long-term profitability goals.

Recovery from corona conditions to normal will offer a great basis for growth of Eezy's employee and customer experience services, the change management services, and the recruiting services. Our goal is to grow the professional services both organically and inorganically, and that way widen the scope of the working-life services offered to our customers.

Success is built by operational abilities and good spirit

We focused last year in improving our efficiency, and thanks achieved a new productivity level. The main theme for this year is growth. We will not achieve growth by cost-cutting, so instead of one-time cost savings we have increased our sales activity and invested into good spirits and into enhancing the operational abilities of our employees. I am happy to note that the employee satisfaction surveys - done by Eezy Flow - confirm that we are on the right path. I am also delighted that some of our key persons have increased their ownership in the company during the spring. The ownership of our key persons and employees is currently almost 10%. This boosts our belief in Eezy's good future.

Toward growth

We expect the first quarter to be clearly the smallest in 2021. Naturally the corona restrictions will still have impact on the second quarter, but the activity level of customers has clearly increased in the last few weeks. This shows up as growth in open jobs and amount of applications, as well as growth in the number of projects in the professional services. Third quarter will likely be a clear step toward recovery, and we expect the last quarter to be near normal conditions. If all goes well, the opening of the society may trigger the pent-up demand and the domestic consumption springs into wild increase.

Availability of workforce will again rise as a competitive factor when the economic recovery is brisk. Also, as the underlying megatrends have not changed, we may need to import foreign labour into Finland to cover the resource gap in several sectors. The pandemic has also increased the customers' needs for flexible workforce, so we expect the share of staffing services of the total market to grow.

The positive result impact of our more efficient organisation will become visible along the revenue growth. We can clearly scale up the business from the current level with the current staff. During the corona we have also continued the active development of the company, e.g. digitalisation of our services, and we focus our growth investments according to our growth strategy. We, the Eezy employees, aim to build good team spirit via successful work experiences. I encourage everybody to use domestics services and products, and this way help the Finnish economy back to growth track.

Result publication event:

A Finnish-language briefing for analysts and media will be held on 11 May 2021 at 13.00 as a webcast at https://eezy.videosync.fi/2021-q1-tulos

The briefing will be hosted by CEO Sami Asikainen and CFO Hannu Nyman. During the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. The presentation material will be available at the company website at https://sijoittajat.eezy.fi/en/investors/reports-and-presentations/ before the conference. A recording of the audiocast will be available at the same website later.

Attachment: Interim Report January-March 2021 in PDF format

Further information:

Sami Asikainen
CEO
sami.asikainen@eezy.fi
tel. +358 (0)40 700 9915

Hannu Nyman
CFO
Eezy Plc
hannu.nyman@eezy.fi
tel. +358 (0)50 306 9913

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