Good morning, all, and welcome to the half-year 2024 earnings webcast of CM.com. My name is Serge Enneman, Head of Investor Relations, and I will coordinate this webcast on behalf of CM.com. As you probably are aware, we will first show a video summarizing the key highlights of the first half of 2024, after which we will have a Q&A session with the analysts. Sitting here next to me are Jeroen van Glabbeek, CEO and co-founder of CM.com, and Jörg de Graaf, CFO of CM.com. They will present the highlights in the upcoming video and later answer the questions of the analysts presented in this call. Before we start the video, please be reminded of the forward-looking statement for this presentation. If you choose to continue and watch the video, you are bound by these statements.
With this now out of the way, I would now like to ask the operator to start the video.
Earlier today, CM.com published the results of the first six months of 2024, and I'm pleased to present you the highlights. CM.com had an excellent first six months in 2024. The focus on bottom-line performance has resulted in record growth in EBITDA year-over-year. For the second quarter, our revenue was up 7% to EUR 70.8 million, and our EBITDA grew to EUR 4.9 million compared to - EUR 1.4 million in the second quarter of 2023. At the start of 2024, CM launched the four business units, which are Connect (previous CPaaS), Engage (previous SaaS), Pay (previous Payment), and Live (previous Ticketing). The ambition of this new structure is to better deploy all the talents within CM.com and to better serve the clients. As an agile organization, CM.com can quickly adapt to benefit from opportunities.
Each business unit has its own successes, such as Connect, who takes WhatsApp volumes to the next record levels. Engage was integrated GenAI in almost every SaaS product. And Pay, who sees growing volumes now with Live for its in-house developed acquiring and processing platform. And Live, who has signed eye-catching projects and more to come. Since the launch of the business units, we have seen that, one, new leadership arises within the business units. Second, cooperation between employees increased. And third, internal alignment between the different segments improved. With the formation of the business units, we concluded our restructuring program. We are now at a team size which we qualify as a right size for the near future. That means we don't expect restructuring costs going forward, and we are starting to see some new hires again to strengthen our various teams.
All these developments translate into a better match between the product offering of CM.com and the needs of our clients, with a fast growth of new order intake as a great result. That new order intake contains several strong partnerships. CM.com signed an agreement with Prénatal Retail Group, a large European brand in childcare and toys, who will use our software tooling for digital cloud communications. Another market that is evolving for CM.com is venues. CM.com is increasingly selected as a strong partner for venues that organize events. Hedon, a local event venue in the Netherlands with over 100,000 visitors per year, signed up with CM.com. Next to new orders, the pipeline is also looking good as well. CM.com is close to finalize landmark agreements in France and the UK on some eye-catching events and venues in the future.
Another development that influenced the performance of CM.com in the second quarter was the execution of the largest global WhatsApp campaign through our business unit, Connect, for a renowned brand. This performance showed that rich text messaging is becoming a widely accepted channel to expand communication with consumers. The business unit structure also leads to innovations in the product portfolio of CM.com. GenAI is an example of this. GenAI nowadays plays a pivotal role in the software offering of the business unit, Engage. Ever since GenAI proposition was launched in September last year, CM.com has noticed rapid quarter-over-quarter adoption of GenAI in the software offering to clients. Clients discover more possibilities to use AI technology, and CM.com operates at the forefront of its market, providing its customers with clear use cases for their business model.
CM.com will continue to develop applications related to AI to service a growing client base in their needs. We are extremely proud of several big recent projects, such as the Dutch KLM Open, where CM.com provided ticketing and payment services. For the Dutch Grand Prix, we introduced the use of WhatsApp in combination with payments for buying tickets, which is a novelty in the sport industry, a great example of conversational commerce. Overall, CM.com will remain focused on unlocking the talents within the organization to grow the business, grow the business by, amongst others, cross and upselling, and better operating leverage, aimed at reaching a structural positive free cash flow by the second half of 2024. Now, I would like to hand that over to our CFO, Jörg de Graaf, who will zoom in further into the performance of the first half of 2024.
As mentioned by Jeroen in his opening remarks, CM.com realized significant growth in gross profit and gross margins because of the shift in strategic focus to value growth over volume growth. In the first half of 2024, our gross profit grew by 6% to EUR 40.3 million, and our gross margins improved to 30%. That was supported by gross profit growth in all our business units. Although over the first six months our overall revenue declined by 2%, we returned to revenue growth in the second quarter with a 7% higher revenue than the same period last year. This was mostly driven by our Connect business, in which the value over volume strategy we initiated in Q1 2023 is now absorbed in the year-over-year comparison base.
This performance confirms that our focus on high-value business and the shift in product mix has improved our business position and our ability to grow earnings organically. The launch of the business unit structure this year adds to that performance, as the decentralized organizational structure strengthens customer centricity, efficiency, and internal alignment. Now, let's zoom in on the financial performance of the different business units in the first six months of 2024. First, Connect. In Connect, top line declined by 4% to EUR 108 million in the first half of 2024. Pace of decline, however, was reduced significantly, as guided during our first quarter trading update. Connect even realized 7% revenue growth in the second quarter to EUR 57.4 million.
As stated, this was the result of the transition, flows to higher margin business, and a global WhatsApp campaign that CM.com executed on in the second quarter for one of its major customers. Gross margins in Connect improved overall to 18% in the first half of 2024, up from 15.9% in the same period last year. This reflects our value over volume strategy. The number of messages we processed was well above the EUR 4 billion mark, with a record 2.4 billion messages in the second quarter. A significant part of these messages was related to WhatsApp traffic. We see a sizable growth opportunity in rich messaging services like WhatsApp and RCS going forward. In Engage, our demand for our cloud communication solutions continued to grow, with revenues up 10% and gross profit up 9%, while gross margin stayed strong at 87%.
Our annual recurring revenue grew to EUR 32.6 million in the first six months, up 6% year-over-year. This was driven by ongoing strong order intake. The pipeline in Engage is developing well and is expected to support future growth in the remainder of 2024 and 2025. In our business unit, Pay, the process volumes on our platform grew 29%, as especially our iDEAL offering showed year-over-year growth in volumes. The product mix did improve our margins to 56%, supporting growth in our gross profit by 3%. Our revenue fell by 4% as more of the process volumes related to processing flows only. This was partly offset by an increase in our in-person payment solutions. As more clients seek a one-stop-shop solution, we see new leads appear in our pipeline for our Pay solutions. That brings us to the business unit, Live.
In Live, CM.com sold a record number of 9.3 million tickets in the first six months of 2024. Ever since COVID ended, there has been a consistent growth year-over-year in events and hence in tickets sold. Gross profit grew year-over-year to a record level and gross margins remained strong at 87.4%. Also here, the pipeline looks good as we are expanding our activities internationally. So the overall performance in the first half of 2024 was the result of the disciplined focus on growing value over volume in previous years. It results in profit growth, margin growth, and eventually again, overall revenue growth, as we showed in the second quarter. Now that we have reviewed the financial highlights per business unit, let's zoom in on our OPEX and EBITDA development in 2024 so far.
As communicated before, CM.com has been working on improving its efficiency by lowering its OPEX while growing its gross profits, thereby returning to positive EBITDA generation. The majority of our OPEX is linked to personnel-related expenses. In the past two years, we have optimized our cost base for natural attrition, process redesign, and focus on areas where our investments in growth yield the highest returns. In doing so, and continuous focus on hiring the right talents, we have improved the quality of our organization. By the end of the first half of 2024, headcount was down 23% year-over-year to 681 FTE, down from 881 FTE in the same period last year. Total OPEX also fell by 23% year-over-year to EUR 32.1 million, as we kept a tight grip on expenses.
This performance means that we have every confidence we will be able to meet our full year 2024 target of lowering our normalized OPEX by 15% overall. As a result, our normalized EBITDA reached a record EUR 8.2 million in the first half of 2024. That compares to an EBITDA of - EUR 3.7 million in the first half of 2023. Our normalized EBITDA in the second quarter was EUR 4.9 million, which is another quarter-over-quarter improvement of our EBITDA performance, and a substantial improvement versus the - EUR 1.4 million EBITDA in the second quarter of 2023. The improvement in EBITDA with lower year-over-year CapEx resulted in an improvement in our cash flow. Our cash balance at the end of the first half of 2024 was near EUR 21 million. Free cash flow improved to - EUR 1.3 million for the first six months of the year, getting close to becoming free cash flow positive.
Therefore, CM.com reiterates its guidance to become free cash flow positive by the second half of 2024. Our credit facility of EUR 50 million with HSBC remains a standby facility. Looking ahead into the second half of 2024, CM.com will keep executing on its path to profitability. That means that CM.com will continue to focus on growing the business by delivering its customers the products and services that help them be successful, coupled with agility and a strong focus on efficiency and cost levels. To further highlight the outlook for the remainder of 2024, I will now hand back over to Jeroen.
The first six months of 2024 were a confirmation of what we aimed to achieve through the changes implemented in the recent years.
After years of fast growth, CM.com improved its organizational structure and performance in 2023, and launched the business unit structure in 2024, all this to strengthen the proposition of CM.com and to be prepared for the next phase of growth. As the market changed, we wanted to be able to generate cash and grow our business independently. Our gross profits and gross margins improved as we innovated our product suite and increased our presence in the higher margin businesses. CM.com continued to grow its gross profit and EBITDA to record levels. For the remainder of 2024, CM.com continues to aim for further improvements to the bottom line performance and to become free cash flow positive by the second half of 2024. Normalized EBITDA is expected to be in the range of EUR 14 million-EUR 18 million for 2024, coming from a -EUR 1 million in 2023.
Normalized OPEX is expected to be at least 15% lower year-over-year in 2024. As all the restructuring now is being completed, we expect going forward no longer to refer to the term normalized. Thank you for your attention. I would now like to hand it over to the operator for the Q&A session with the analysts. We look forward to your questions.
Now that the video has ended, we would like to open the lines for the analysts to answer any questions they may have. We would like to ask you to raise your hand in Teams. This is for the analysts. Raise your hand in Teams and keep your mic on mute until we hand over the turn to you. Mr. Thymen Rundberg of ING, please go ahead and ask your question. Remember to unmute your phone, otherwise we won't hear you.
Sure. Thanks. Good morning, all. I have a few questions. The first one on your EBITDA guidance for full year 2024. So given the strong performance in the first half of the year, already EUR 8.2 million in adjusted EBITDA, I feel that the normalized EBITDA guidance for the full year is somewhat on the low side, EUR 14 million-EUR 18 million, given especially that you also mentioned that the pipeline for the second half of 2024 is quite strong. Is the guidance more conservatism on your end, or do you expect maybe any specific challenges or market conditions that might impact growth in EBITDA in the second half? That was my first question. The second one is about Connect and the geographical exposure there. We can see some year-over-year variation in geographical exposure in general, particularly within the Connect division.
We see strong growth in the APAC region, particularly in the first half of the year. Net revenue is nearly doubled there. Is that related to the large WhatsApp campaign? Could you give more insight in general into this and also how sustainable you think this is going forward? And then the last question is about your value over volume strategy that you started last year. What's the status on that currently? You obviously started to add some volume in terms of messaging in the second quarter, while Connect's margins remained quite strong. But margins in the Live division have declined a little bit. Just wondering if you could elaborate a bit on that and what to expect going forward from a margin perspective as well. Thanks.
Yeah, Thymen, thank you. Let me answer your first question related to the EBITDA guidance. I think we had a very strong first half of the year in terms of performance also on EBITDA level. That means we are well on track to hit our growth ambition there as well. We have been a little bit conservative in the guidance in the sense that there is obviously the markets that we operate in are not necessarily always stable, so there's always a little bit of volatility. Also, what we know is that the second half of the year, mostly Q3, is typically where we have the highest peak in, for instance, our marketing spend, which is kind of a recurring thing. So we're right on track in terms of where we want to be, and I think also ballpark where we kind of guide it.
At the same time, yeah, we want to leave a little bit of range open for some volatility as we get closer to the end of the year. So by Q3, we will narrow the range, but we don't want to overpromise. But we think we are in a good spot here. It's developing nicely, and I think the range should really be looked at indeed at the range where the midpoint is still truly a midpoint, but with a little bit of potential volatility. Jeroen, to you for Connect question.
Yes, Thymen, about your question about the geo. So where does the revenue come from and how volatile is that? Indeed, we always see in Connect that the biggest chunk of revenue is quite stable as we have a long-term relationship with our clients all over the world, whether they are tech companies or banks or other institutions. But there is a smaller portion of our Connect revenue that is a bit volatile. So also, if you see in the long-term developments over the last years, we've seen a consistent growth in the Connect volumes and revenue. But on top of this consistent growth, there's always some volatility of some bigger clients coming and going or increasing or reducing the traffic a bit with us. This is coming from the largest clients in the world who typically work with several suppliers.
So, most of our clients only use CM.com as a supplier for the messaging, but the biggest players in the world, they most of the time have different various suppliers like CM.com and our competitors. So what you've seen is that always there's a top layer of revenue, which is a bit volatile, and that you see also in the geo split, so where some of the countries have produced and in other countries a little bit more revenue. But that for us, it's a normal way of doing business in this CPaaS world.
Okay, then let me answer your last question, Thymen, on the value over volume strategy status and going forward. I think, first of all, we implemented that strategy by the beginning of last year quite successfully, I think. It's not something that, yeah, in that sense has a status that it's our way of how we run our business. That basically means we will not be chasing volumes in any of our business, but we'll be looking at what will it contribute to the value and profitability of our company. That also means that our focus is not necessarily on margin percentage, but our focus is on just bottom line year-over-year results. That means that as our business progresses, there can be sort of temporary changes back and forth with mixes, etc. For us, that's okay.
I think we have to be agile also in accommodating that. But our true focus is every piece of business, every customer, every volume that we add, is it contributing to our bottom line? That's what we're managing the company on now, but also going forward. It's really key to our commercial strategy.
Okay, clear. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Thymen, for your questions. I would like now to ask you to mute your phone then, and I will hand over to Wim Gille of ABN AMRO. Wim, please go ahead with your question.
Hey, good morning. Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Loud and clear, Wim.
Very good. I've got a few questions, obviously. First of all, focusing on the CPaaS that is currently called Connect business, can you give us a bit of an indication on the growth of WhatsApp or OTT channels? What percentage of the volume in Q2 is already converted to OTT in Q2? And can you remind us about the unit economics of OTT versus a traditional SMS message? The second question related to Connect is voice. This line item remains in decline while the COVID pace is well behind us. So can you give us a bit more feeling on what is happening to this particular channel? And should we be worried in any sense there? Then moving to the ticketing or the live business, it's up 10%, so growing quite nicely. But I don't have the feeling that you're significantly outperforming the market here.
Given your local proposition vis-à-vis the competition and also taking into account that both your biggest competitors, CTS EVENTIM and Ticketmaster, are distracted, one is digesting a fairly large acquisition, the other one has significant legislation coming against them. So my feeling is that you should be outgrowing the market and that you should be growing the ticketing business, Live business, much faster than what you currently do. So can you give us a bit of a feeling on how you look at your market shares, how you look at the internationalization that you are currently embarking upon, and what's holding you back from really accelerating in this part? And the last question would be on the SaaS business or the Engage business.
You talk quite nicely about all the, let's say, yeah, engagement that you have with clients on, in particular, generative AI and how that particular capability is really filling up the pipeline, if you will. Yet your ARR does not really go up in line with kind of the potential that we could see in this particular setting. So is this more or less a situation where we are just anticipating and filling up the pipeline, and at a certain point in time, it pops and we see an acceleration in the growth here, or is something else going on that the ARR is growing relatively slowly? That's it.
Thank you.
All right. Yeah, thank you, Wim. I will answer the first questions about Connect and ticketing, and then I'll hand over to CFO Jörg de Graaf about your question about AI and SaaS, although it's very tempting to answer the question as well because there are great things happening within that domain. But let's start with Connect. Indeed, yeah, you know what we always said is that this communication channel of text messages will become much, much richer in terms of experience than it always has been in the past. So in the past, it was text messages, notifications, one-time passwords, and that is still a valid business model and still a growing business model. We still send more and more one-time passwords. We send more and more deliveries.
But on top of that, since I would say like 2019, we were able, just before our IPO, we were able to also put WhatsApp, Rich Communication Services, RCS, and Apple Business Messages into the mix to enable our clients to have a much better experience actually with our consumers. And we saw that growing. We invested heavily on that. We are in the top list of the WhatsApp global partners. We are maybe the number one or at least within the top five WhatsApp players in the world, at least for the last quarter. So we are quite successful in making messaging richer. And so you see that our volumes are growing in terms of messages. And for the vast majority of the growth, I think came from richer messaging. Now, how does that work in terms of unit economics? I think actually very good.
What we see with text messages, we sell them at a sell rate, we buy them at a buy rate, and we make a margin in between. That's how CPaaS always worked and still works. The same actually goes for the new type of messages. WhatsApp, we buy them from Meta, and we sell them at a higher price. RCS, newest kid on the block, so to say, we buy it from the operators, we sell it to our clients also with a margin. And especially coming up for the next quarters, we are really looking forward to see more growth in RCS. I think WhatsApp has been tremendously successful over the last quarters, but next will be RCS. Why? Everybody in the market expects that our partner Apple will introduce RCS in iOS 18, which will be released somewhere in September, so not far from now, a few months.
Yeah, we cannot comment on what we're doing with Apple at that stage at the moment, but it's widely spread in the media that everybody's anticipating that rich communication systems and the RCS messages will also be included in Apple devices, and that will be a great new feature where there's like a global coverage coming up for RCS. And then we are actually where we always wanted to be for the CPaaS market. We can buy text messages by the operators, but if you want to negotiate with the operators, we have alternatives with WhatsApp. You can go to WhatsApp. And if you want to negotiate with WhatsApp, we also have leverage because we can go back to the operators and negotiate about RCS. So it gives us more power to buy these messages for our clients.
And yeah, we really believe that this will have a positive impact on our margins going forward and a positive effect on the experience of the consumers worldwide using these channels to communicate with their businesses. So we are very positive about that development. Then another development you mentioned is the voice minute. So CPaaS, of course, is multi-channel and not only messaging, also voice. Voice is very relevant for our clients. Imagine we sell this software in our Engage department where we have also our Mobile Service Cloud where we receive a lot of incoming questions for our customers and enable them to answer those questions. Where we enable those incoming questions, we support all the existing channels, messages, chats, but emails, but also voice.
So voice is an important part of our business in terms of necessity to be relevant for our clients, but it is not so important for our business in terms of volumes. If you look at our latest press release of today, we say in terms of numbers, our number of messages is 2.4 billion messages in the last quarter. If we talk about voice, there's another order of magnitude. The number of voice minutes is 58 million. So 2.4 billion messages and only 58 million voice. So voice is not an important part of our revenue or margin compared to text. So yeah, that's why we are mainly focused on the number of messages. Voice is a nice add-on, a must-have, so to say, for our other disciplines like Engage and also for our clients. So that's to put in perspective our voice business compared to our messaging business.
Okay, that concludes my answer for Connect, but you also had two other questions. One is about ticketing and one is for SaaS. Now, I would like to answer the question about ticketing first. If you look at ticketing, yeah, indeed, we're growing fast. Then your question was, are we outperforming the market and what are opportunities given the facts what's happening with the competitors? Indeed, few of our competitors merged, so they will be distracted. I can believe that what you said there. And also we heard also news about Ticketmaster, which is, yeah, not always positive in the news. So big opportunities for our ticketing department. And do we see them or will we see them back in our figures? Now, we certainly believe so. We also indicated here and there in our press release that we are working on several big deals, especially in Europe.
A few of them are also related to ticketing because indeed we see the opportunities, but also our potential clients see the opportunity we have for them. We have this ticketing solution in place. It's really integrated to our platform. It works seamlessly together with our marketing cloud and with the service cloud. And most promoters and the organizers of events, they know that if they go to CM.com, they can stay independent. So we are aiming at independent players in the market. What does it mean? Now, some of the competitors or some of the players in the event space are not independent. So for example, owned by the company called Live Nation. And this Live Nation company also owns Ticketmaster. So if you are part of Live Nation, you have to work more or less with Ticketmaster. And this also goes for some venues.
But there is a part of the business where we aim, which is our target market. And this part of the business is where we aim for to win them. And we are winning more and more deals there. And that will translate, we certainly expect that that will translate into growth for the ticketing department in the near future. But it will sometimes take some time to get it in the numbers. So we are really looking forward to make more deals to these independent promoters as we speak at the moment. So that's about ticketing. And then GenAI, yeah, a lot of things are happening. And for that, I hand over to Jörg de Graaf to tell you more about it.
Okay, thank you, Jeroen.
Yeah, our SaaS or Engage business, including GenAI, I think over the last almost a year when we also launched our GenAI proposition, but we also really made the whole package or our suite of SaaS products much more condensed. So it's really sort of integrated. It works well. It is all suited for the same target market. So mid-market and high mid-market, that's really where our sweet spot is. We're seeing a lot of traction there with GenAI. We're still ahead of the game in terms of what we're able to deliver. We're continuously improving, developing, but seamlessly integrating it with our software solutions. And I think that's very important that it allows us, the GenAI solutions that we are integrating, allows us to accelerate the order intake on our total software package. And that's what we have seen basically since the fourth quarter of last year.
That has continued for, well, the last three quarters. In total then is that order intake, not just in the Netherlands, but around the world has been very good also compared to historical standards. We really are closing a lot of deals with also very interesting brands and names. Prénatal you've heard, but we also have a large energy software soft drinks company signed up, and there's many more. And what we see basically happening is that the new order intake with our new combined proposition is really getting a lot of traction, is doing well. The implementation of that within our customers is sometimes a phased thing. So a large company typically doesn't immediately implement the whole thing, but they do it unit by unit. So you see the order intake translate step by step into revenue. And that's sort of what we see happening.
Also, the whole onboarding needs to be done. So in that sense, there's a little bit of a delay between order intake and when you see the revenue coming. If you compare it to our financial results, we show a 10% increase in revenue for our SaaS business. That's quite okay. Obviously, we have ambitions beyond that, but I think that's quite okay. Comparing that to the ARR uptake of 6%, which is below that, of course, I think it's not a 100% like-for-like comparison because the ARR consists of more elements than just a SaaS deal. It's sort of all of our recurring revenues within CM Group is ARR. And also there's a little bit of a timing thing, as we've mentioned.
So by the end of last year, due to several circumstances, mostly also financial related, some of our SaaS customers had to stop taking our services for their corporate reasons. And yeah, that sort of still needs to is fading into our results. So that's putting a little bit of pressure on the year-over-year ARR growth. But generically, yeah, we see a lot of traction on our SaaS offering. The GenAI really propels the value and the impact of our total software suite. And yeah, we're quite bullish in that sense in terms of how our SaaS business is developing.
Very good. Then I have two follow-up questions more related to the cost side of things. If I'm not mistaken, in Q3, you not only have the big marketing event related to primarily Formula 1, but also you implement your merit cycle in Q3, if I'm not mistaken. So what should we pencil in for wage inflation as per the second half of this year? And then related to that, how do you look at the number of FTEs? I saw more or less stabilized versus Q1. Should we expect to stay at this level or should we expect a bit of an uptake? What can you tell me about that?
Okay, yeah. Okay, thank you, Wim. Yeah, so indeed there's a couple of elements happening in Q3, Q4 that impact our cost base. Just sort of to give a total overview of sort of the main elements. One is obviously the marketing peak that you mentioned. It's sort of an annual recurring thing for us. So that's, yeah, you probably know ballpark what to have in mind there, even though we did scale it back somewhat. But then there is also another element that does impact our cost level, also traditionally in the second half of the year. And that is that there are more vacation days than in the first half of the year. What does that mean? That means that our developers are not writing as many hours as they do in the first half of the year on new development projects.
So that means fewer hours are capitalized. So there's lower CapEx, but a little bit higher OPEX. It's also every year the same. Then you are right. The last thing is we have our merit increase, which is always in September for us. And I think we try to be in line with the total market there. So I think order of magnitude, yeah, it's a little bit over 5%, 5%-7%. I think you should sort of take into account all things taken into consideration. On the headcount, as we mentioned, by the end of this quarter, yeah, we're sort of where we want to be. There may be a little bit of volatility within and between the quarters, but that's mostly related to attrition, hiring. So yeah, how fast that's sort of compensating each other.
Ballpark, I think the headcount that we ended Q2 with is kind of what you need to take into account.
Thank you.
Okay, thanks for your question, Wim. Then I would like to move on to Robert Vink of Kepler Cheuvreux. Robert, please go ahead for your questions and remember to unmute your phone, please.
Yeah, great. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Perfect. All right. Two questions from my side. With the restructuring process out of the way, could you maybe share with us how you expect the composition of your employee base to evolve going forward? Like if I look at the numbers, what I noticed is that the number of R&D staff already went up in the last quarter, while sales and marketing and G&A actually shrunk. Is this a trend that you expect to continue, meaning that research and development will grow in proportion relative to sales and marketing and G&A? And maybe as an informative question relating to this topic, I was wondering if you could roughly quantify how many R&D people in your company work on GenAI solutions. And also how do you expect this to evolve going forward? Thank you.
All right. Robert, I'll take those questions if you allow me. About restructuring, indeed that came to an end. We are happy where we are now. The number of employees we expected to be more or less stable, as you just indicated as well. And then in the composition of the different groups of employees, yeah, indeed we have yeah, we divide them in three groups. The smallest group, general admin, the overhead, so to say. We're quite stable there, below 100 people. So that's great that we with such a small team manage to manage all our corporate stuff. Very efficient, lower than we were in the last year since our listing. Indeed, we have a great staff in terms of R&D. It's still a lot of work to integrate all the products, to develop them further.
We really like to invest in our products for our clients going forward. We have many ideas, although we already were able to deliver a lot in the last years. So when the downturn came in the market a few years ago, I think in summer 2020, when we realized we have to scale down, yeah, we also choose to keep the focus on developing the really core priorities for our product. And by doing that, we now are much more advanced in terms of our product suite than most of our competitors, whether it is in payments, in ticketing, in SaaS, or in CPaaS. We were able to deliver the features our market wanted. And that's why we are so successful now in our order intake. So I'm very happy that we were steady in our R&D department. I also believe that we can do that going forward.
Of course, we try to do our best in R&D to become more efficient with every new tool coming out. And also GenAI helps, of course, coding for our developers. But we have a very great base of R&D people. Also a bit relating to the question earlier of Wim Gille from ABN . No, we invest a lot in people. We hire young talents coming from universities around our offices. We hire them, we train them, we make them better in the work every year, every year. And then somewhere in their career, they flow out, they go to various other companies. And then we hire new young talent and train them more and more again. So that's also a bit also managing our cost base as well. So we try to promote our talent to next levels because we invest in their growth so they become more valuable.
We're very proud of that. And then they flow out, maybe later on, help make other companies successful as well. And that works for us, this talent, this investment in talent, and also keep on refreshing the talent with young and energetic people. So that's about R&D. Then we go to sales and marketing. You know what it is with sales and marketing? We can really, really, really measure everything. So we know per campaign, per sales individual, the performance. And of course, we always have patience. And we look at the figures and we give people a second chance. We try things again and again. But then eventually, if we see, okay, we can invest better in these and these countries and in those products. And maybe we can also invest less in certain other countries or close countries like we did last year.
We're now happy where we are with the number of countries, but we had to decide to close a few countries in the past. The same is in where we invest in products. We like to invest in terms of sales and marketing in the sweet spots or where we have traction in the market, where our products are really hot in the countries where they're really hot. And there we want to sell them. Very efficient nowadays in our ROI. So the costs we make in sales and marketing, we earn them back quite rapidly. And yes, we are capable of doing that with a smaller team of sales and marketing. But like we said also in my CEO message, we do more with less. That means we have more order intake than ever before. And we do that with less people.
Maybe because we are more efficient, maybe we let go the right people and we capture the right people. We have a great group of talented sales and marketing people now. We are very effective and efficient. So yes, indeed, we are able to do more with less in terms of sales and marketing. How do we see that going forward? Yeah, the same as looking backwards. Every day we look at the figures, see what is the ROI on our efforts in marketing and sales, where does our dollar have the best return on investment, and there we invest more. So also looking forward for the next quarters and the next years, we're allocating our resources where we can deploy them best in terms of efficient growth, sustainable growth going forward.
And we believe that we can do that more or less with the same number of people as we employ today. Yeah, and then of course we have some natural attrition. People grow further, go to other companies, and we hire also young talents like I discussed. So that's a bit about the employee base. And then in GenAI, I cannot exactly answer the question about how many people we are employed within CM on AI. Why? Because actually the development of AI involves everyone. Everyone, whether you're in sales or marketing or finance or the help desk or developer, all our employees some way or another use AI on a daily basis.
But if I have to make a guess how many FTEs within the CM.com are working on delivering products about AI, implementing them at our clients, but also integrating them in our product suites, my best guess would be around 100. I think around 100 people on a daily basis working at CM.com every day to make our own models, to host them on our own chips, to test them. We have our own testing capability, which is really advanced, to make the guide rails where GenAI lives on, that our enterprise customers like utility companies, financial institutions, insurance companies, that they can trust CM.com that our GenAI capabilities will not, yeah, go off rails and say a lot of stupid things which we've seen competitors in the markets. So we have a very good reputation on AI. We invest a lot.
I think, yeah, 100 people for a Dutch company working on AI on a daily basis, I think it's a big amount. I think we might have been one of the biggest investors in AI in the Dutch context. And that we do so because, yeah, one, we are really good at it. We started it really early. When we acquired CX Company, we acquired Building Blocks, we invested in it ourselves. And certainly, yeah, we really believe that this is the market company. Someday we will be maybe an AI company instead of a software company, which we are today. And we are preparing for that. So that's why we invest heavily in AI. And we see the returns as we go along. I hope that answers your question, Robert.
Okay, thank you. That's very helpful. And maybe one follow-up question on the venues. Yeah, could you maybe give us some more context on the dynamics behind venues and maybe how that differs to event organizers? And maybe you could also quantify the size of the venue opportunity for the live division and maybe for other divisions in the company. Thank you.
Yeah, if you look at ticketing, ticketing is a broad spectrum. You buy tickets for a lot of things every day to grant access. And that's, yeah, the core of our vision. Our vision is mobile phones will be the remote control of people's lives. What do people do with remote control? What do people do with their mobile phone? You communicate. You want to download information, look things up on the internet. You want to make payments with the mobile payments, but you also grant access. A lot of things in your daily life, you get access to things. Even through a parking lot, you get access with your mobile phone. So mobile phones are important. Ticketing is important for mobile phones. And we invest already 10 years in this field. We started with, yeah, with our own background.
We came from discotheques and clubs 25 years ago, and we founded the company. So we really also liked to sell tickets for festivals. But most festivals are like a one-year, once-a-year happening event. Now, with our software suite and a communication suite, we can help our clients to make it a year-round communication. But still, every festival takes a course on average once a year, same as with sport events. So over the last decade, where we were developing our ticket portfolio, we came to the conclusion that our revenues will become more stable if we look for client groups in venues. Now, the first venues we did were museums. We acquired Global Ticket a few years ago, market leader in selling tickets to museums like the Van Gogh Museum and Heineken Experience, Moco Museum. We have many great names.
And also in the near future, we expect to announce other great names in other countries for our museums. So that's how the first venues. And the nice thing is with museums is they are open every day. So they sell tickets every day. And they give us a constant flow of income in our live division. Now, on top of that, we now lately see an uptake in other venues. And so the independent venues, not owned by some other ticket companies, so they are free to choose. And where venues are free to choose, they like to choose CM.com. And yeah, what kind of venues are that now? So on top of the museums and the attraction parks we already had, we see now more and more, yeah, like music venues where they organize on a weekly basis, on a daily basis, music and live events.
We announced one name, Hedon, which is just one name. If you look at our order book, we see we've signed up many other venues as well, also bigger names, household names, so to say. And yeah, we expect a more consistent revenue stream coming from the venue. So that's why it's important for us going forward. And it's nice to see this traction. And that's why we also mentioned it in our press release.
Okay, thank you. Okay, if there are any follow-up questions, please. Thymen, you have a follow-up question. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you, Serge. I just have one last question from my side about the new business units and cross-sell performance. So you already mentioned the business unit structure and how it has had a positive impact in the first half of the year. But I was wondering a bit about cross and upsell performance. So you mentioned already in an answer to another question that order intake on the total software package is accelerating. But I was wondering if you know how many products a new customer takes and how does it compare to, let's say, your existing or legacy customers. So I know that also some years ago you reported some cross-sell KPIs. Is that something also that you would consider again in the future? Thanks.
Yes. Well, good question, Diamond. For us, obviously, our vision is that the integration of the different solutions that we have is what brings most value to some of our customers. So we are actively selling integrated solutions where that helps our customers. We're also selling them standalone, of course. What we have seen over the years is that as we progress, a number of sort of natural combinations have arisen very actively. So for instance, in Live, we see practically all deals done with either payments included or Engage solutions included or both. We see a lot of integrations between our software solutions that kind of propel conversations with the conversational channels. We're now also integrating payment links into WhatsApp. So it's kind of a continuous focus point of ours.
Also, despite the fact that we're now sort of organized in business units, our commercial teams are still very actively looking for these cross-sell opportunities. Not because we want to push it, but because our customers are asking for it because it solves a challenge for them. It helps them be more successful in their business. At this stage, we're not disclosing the exact numbers, but we do see continuous progress in terms of the number of average products that a customer takes from us. It's a KPI that we are considering to disclose again at a point in the future, but we haven't decided upon that yet. It's important for us. We put a lot of effort into it, and we see that our customers do value the integrated solutions a lot.
Okay, great. Thanks.
[crosstalk] Yeah, can I respond last week?
Yeah, I see. So we're coming to the end of this presentation and the Q&A. I think, yeah, obviously we had a great quarter. Yeah, you know, this was only possible, of course, with the help of all our colleagues. I think, yeah, they did a great job. We did more with less, and that means a lot of things, of course. This group of people loyal to CM.com worked very hard to make this all possible. I'm very grateful for that. Lastly, yeah, I'm looking forward for the next quarter, what it will bring. Then I hope to meet you again and to continue this dialogue.
Thank you, Jeroen. This concludes our webcast. Thank you all for attending and for all your questions. Our next release will be the third quarter trading updates, which will be released on the 18th of October, 2024. There will be no webcast for that release. For all other details and our financial calendar, please visit our investor relations website on CM.com. This concludes the call. Thank you all.