Good morning to everybody. Welcome to be here today to our SYS-DAT Investor Day. It's gonna be an intense day today, where we will go through what we think about the ICT market in Italy, how we are gonna approach this market, what's the strategy we're gonna, you know, leverage on in order to be successful in this market. Before talking about the details, I think it's quite important to step back a little bit and have a broader perspective, because everything I think is around innovation. Innovation is something everybody's experiencing from day-to-day life to the way companies are competing. Today, in order to address this topic more in depth, I'm really honored to introduce you to our guest speaker. I'm talking about Professor Gianmario Verona. He's one of the leading economists in Italy.
He is also a Fondazione Invernizzi Professor of Innovation Management and former rector of the Bocconi University. I'll leave it to Gianmario Verona to tell us everything he knows about innovation. Thank you.
Good, good morning to you all. I hope you can hear me effectively. I'm sorry to not be there. It is a real pleasure for me to give you a brief highlight of my scholarship and what I think is particularly today, something precious for the entire economies and specifically for Europe, Italy, and more generally for many sectors in the economy. I have a quick talk, which is based on three points. I would like, first of all, as Emanuele Angelidis was mentioning, provide you with the fundamental context that characterize corporations today. I would like to try to draw some implications about the context. These implications have to do with innovation. Finally, I would like to emphasize what is particularly crucial today.
I will rely, besides my scholarship, on a very popular document in this day, which is the Draghi report, which I'm sure that most of you have read, and which represents, in my view, a fundamental guardrail for understanding the impact of this particular moment. Let me get started with the context very briefly. I like to represent the context today, and I did it, by the way, in a recent publication in Italy with a friend, Daniele Manca, who's deputy director of Corriere della Sera. Basically, we like to represent it with a, with a triangle that emphasize the quality of technology that we can experiment today. This triangle is based on three cornerstones.
First of all, the computing power that characterize our ability to produce data in these days. The second one is the quality and quantity of data. We used to talk about in the past of small data. Today we talk about big data, we're talking about biodata, nanodata. We are having more and more opportunities in terms of the quality of data. The third cornerstone, of course, is the new elephant in the room in the last few years, which is these algorithms of not only predictive AI, which is something we were already attuned to, but also generative AI. Let me get started with the computing power. It is pretty amazing to see today how much computing power we have.
You know, we started with this journey back in the late 1950s, and we started with important mainframe computers that, thanks to a popular commercial idea and vision of an important entrepreneur, Gordon Moore, became, in fact, in the textbook of information technology and economics, a sort of law. We talk about the Gordon Moore's Law because we've had the opportunity to improve substantially the productivity of the computing power every 18 months, thanks to the fact that we have been able to double the number of transistor per chip, and therefore we have had the opportunity to miniaturize, of course, technologies.
To have powerful technologies that were delivered more and more with smaller devices such as, for example, desktop computers, portable computers, and more recently, not only with telephones, but also with sensors that surrounds our environment. I would say also, even more importantly, in the last few years, we are also on the edge of blending this computing power with new forms of technology that we got to know pretty well. I'm speaking about the GPUs that have been crucial for Artificial Intelligence and that have been giving us the opportunity to produce not only powerful computers but also supercomputers. As many of you know, in many corporations today, we are experimenting also the new paradigm of computing power, which is quantum computers.
Of course, they are still prototypes, nothing commercializable, but in the next, of course, decade, we'll probably see something also very powerful about that. The first cornerstone is the fact that in these days we have an amazing computing power capability that helps firms of any kind to process data. The second cornerstone is the quality and quantity of data, starting from the web, which enabled us to connect computers and then thanks again to what I just mentioned.
This miniaturization of devices which we bring with ourself, there has been also the opportunity of producing a huge amount of data. This huge amount of data is pretty amazing because this data today represents, not only, of course, transactions between big important actors in the economy, such as corporation, but they of course reflect pretty well behaviors of consumers, of investors, of individuals. We know also the implications that are particularly important on the ethics on this side, but this is something again, particularly important.
The fact that we are miniaturizing more and more sensors in the environment, we are also giving the opportunity to have small devices such as, for example, wearable technologies, rings, for example, wristwatches, this is enabling us to bring it to another level in terms of the quality and quantity of data. We have beautiful machines, first thing that I mentioned, that can process data, and today we have a fundamental input, which is the quality of data which we never had in the history of humankind.
I simply remind my students all the time that I talk about these things that up until a few years ago, we used to make a lot of surveys to understand what consumer wants, what they want to think, what they want to express in terms of their needs, and today we have perfect data in terms of behavior. Last, again, element, last cornerstone is really the quality of processing capability that we can put on our computing power and our data, which is these new devices that have been, of course, become very popular starting from November 2022 when GPT became an instrument that was given to big audiences in the market.
Again, you know, artificial intelligence is something that we've been talking for many years, but the quality of computing power and the quality of data was very poor. Instead, thanks to this advancement that we have had, and thanks also to this important innovation we have put into the artificial intelligence machines, today we can not only develop important, again, instruments to predict, of course, the behavior, thanks to the data and the computing power, but we can also generate new data. I don't want to remark the impressive distribution and diffusion of these new tools that characterize modern AI. I think this has become something in the press which is constantly, you know, emphasized.
For sure there is a viral, you know, adoption of these tools, which by the way are many, and they are of course, different capabilities in terms of detecting and identifying single elements. To conclude, you know, my first of the three points that I wanted to make, the context today is particularly precious because we have a technology that provides us with computing power, great data, and the ability to process it in multiple ways. This is in the economic history, a typical technology that we call a general purpose technology. A technology which impacts, you know, all corporations, all sectors, all countries, because it's something that is as much as powerful as what we have seen in the past history of Homo sapiens, such as electricity, such as steam engine.
In this case, this is something particularly relevant because again, it is not specific to a sector or a company, but it's something which characterize the entire economy. Now, this brings to point number two, which is what is the fundamental implication? What I personally believe, and again, the data show that this is a fundamental implication, we are clearly developing the opportunity to create innovations that are extremely important from the efficiency viewpoint, from the effectiveness viewpoint, overall from the productivity viewpoint. In fact, we like to call this super innovation. We are living and experimenting an age in which, you know, regular new products, which is something that has been done up until today, can still be done.
You know, thanks to the fact that we can use these machines, we have these powerful agents that support us in creating new ideas, in delivering new ideas, in commercializing new ideas. We are really stepping up the quality. It's like when, you know, kids play with video games, it's like entering a new level, entering a higher level, which makes it extremely, again, more difficult, but at the same time, even more fascinating and more effective. Let me just give you a few examples of the research that I've been doing in the last years. Pharmaceuticals. Let me just give you some highlights in terms of example and case studies in terms of what is possible to do today.
I'm sure that, you are familiar with the fact that the Nobel Laureates in 2024 in chemistry has been for the first time two, information technology, experts by the way of a private corporation. These are the guys that, thanks to the creation of DeepMind and AlphaFold, have developed for the first time the opportunity of creating the unfolding of protein starting from a string of amino acid. This is a fundamental process for those who want to develop a new drug and deliver it to the market that in the past required about one year, two months, three months of, you know, lab done by a team of people.
Today, up until 72 hours or four days, starting from a string of amino acid, with AlphaFold, you can come up with a perfect identification of the 3D image of the protein which unfolds and which becomes extremely important when I have to identify exactly how to include my solution into the specific cell. These implications in terms of the development of new drugs is amazing because you know that the development of a new drug requires a first phase, which is the drug discovery, which is more conceptual and related to the fact that I still don't develop it biologically. In these days, I can anticipate a lot of problems that I typically had in the phases in which I test the drug with mice and then in clinical trials with human beings.
The estimates are about to halving the drug discovery process, which typically lasts from three to four years. It happen till a couple of months. Another wonderful example we have in these days is in the OEM market. Think about what we can do with cars and with self-driving cars. You know that in most, you know, countries that have adopted widely AI and are pushing the creation of new products thanks to AI, we are experimenting, example, robotaxis, which is something that has become particularly important in the Chinese market, in most of the big cities that characterize these, the districts of innovation of China. This is something that we can see, of course, pretty easily on the West Coast in the United States.
Apparently we're gonna have something also in Europe, not too far. Plenty of examples in other industry. I'm thinking about the finance industry, which is also crucial. There is a great, you know, popular case. Again, the Chinese market has become particularly relevant in these days. There is a company called Ant Group, which makes of its business model, they call it 310. It is a major payment company which interacts directly with their customer base. They typically say after their business model that consumers have to take up to three minutes in order to understand the service they want to buy.
The company will take one minute in order to serve it, and there is zero human interaction, and that's what they call it, the 310 business model. It's pretty amazing. The company is made of 10,000 employees, and they serve the, of course, a huge base of hundreds of million customer. They are, of course, the subsidiary that develops financial services of the past Alibaba Group, now called Ant Group. I can go on and on forever with many examples, even in the case, for example, of my industry, which is education, in which we are experimenting new way to generate chatbots in order to have our students interact much better with the opportunity also of increasing their understanding of the lessons that we take in class. I will leave it up to here.
Again, what are the fundamental implications of this important emerging paradigm of technological change that characterize this triangle in these days is the fact that we can really make innovation a faster game and even a more effective game. Now let me get to the final point so that I will conclude. What it means this in terms of implication, and let me refer to the Draghi report, which I think, as I said, is a particularly important piece of information, even because it has been written by multiple scholars that have provided important insights of what is going on in these days. I would clearly remark that adoption becomes the name of the game.
In order to tackle this incredible opportunity that we have, so the fact that we are experimenting this new technological paradigm, it is very important that we try to embrace it. In order to embrace it, of course, it is something which is not very simple because we are used to something very different. We have been used to digital transformation in the last 20 years, but still, this is of course a jump step, as I mentioned before. I think that there are two fundamental target audience. One is individuals. We have to try to, again, get acquainted with these new instruments. I think that we are doing it because basically, like with the internet, you know, at the end, this is something which is very valuable for consumers, for citizens.
That's the reason why there is this adoption rate, which is pretty impressive. The second thing is organizations. Organizations, of course, we know that they are typically inert. A very famous professor in strategy, Professor Peter Drucker, that passed away some years ago, used to say that innovation is eaten at breakfast by organization, by culture. Because of course, organizational culture and inertia prevents oftentimes to make important innovations. Again, I do believe that developing the right incentive systems and developing the right, of course, agility within organization will help, you know, organization improve even more.
What I personally believe is that, in fact, this important technological change will, in order to be very effective and very fruitful, will have to be adapted sector by sector and company by company because there is no one best way of embracing this important technological change. Each organization and each sector will have to, of course, make their own journey in order to embrace it. If they do it, of course, they will for sure, you know, improve the quality of value creation that they have been doing so far. Again, what we are seeing these days is that, the quality of innovation really is at a higher level.
Let me conclude overall by saying that I believe that we are really experimenting an incredible moment of paradigmatic change. I believe that this is particularly relevant. We see it also in terms of the statistics between countries, and we see also in terms, if you allow me also, this geopolitical complexity. All the times that we've had a major technological change in human history, we've had, you know, as a follow-up, an important geopolitical confusion because the value of scarce resources changes dramatically. I believe that this triangle really is something that we have to embrace in a way or the other because the opportunity to again, create value differently and to improve the quality of the things at the process level we do at the organizational level is particularly relevant. I would leave it up to here.
Thank you very much, Gianmario. Professor Gianmario Verona, first of all for sharing your time with us, and most importantly, for sharing this very inspiring view about the future innovation. I'm pretty sure that everybody now is a little bit more curious, would like to understand a little bit more about what Gianmario told us, and we have the chance to read it through his latest book, A casa di Einstein. Thank you again, Gianmario. Now let's dive into our presentation. It's gonna be around 45 minutes presentation, mainly three blocks. I will start sharing with you a little bit about our vision, how we see us competing into the Italian IT market.
We'll go to the second section that Matteo will share with us, and he will try to share with us basically why we believe we can compete in a successful way on this Italian ICT market. We'll finish with the last section. I'm not entirely sure you are interested about this last section, but anyway, it's a section about numbers. What we at least target is 2026/ 2028 numbers. A quick wrap-up. We'll leave it to the Q&A. We also have a crowd of online people connected to the event. Question will come from them as well. Let's start, you know, setting the boundaries. SYS-DAT, as I'm pretty sure all of you know, is an IT company developing proprietary software solution for vertical markets.
Just to be on the same page, basically is a company which is now a group of 20 companies connected on a network kind of model. We have more than 650 employees at the moment, more than 6,000 customers from different sectors. We have more than 2/3 of our customer base made by clients where we have a relationship, which is a long-lasting relationship, more than five years. We have a negligible churn, so we have slightly above 2% churn. In terms of financials, we closed 2025 with pretty remarkable numbers. Also, in terms of growth rate we had across the years, we ended with roughly EUR 90 million revenues, of which 83% is recurring and repeatable.
This is extremely relevant, especially for an investor, because this is a solid base for the future growth. We achieved a roughly 20% EBITDA margin with over EUR 17 million of EBITDA, above EUR 8.5 million of net income adjusted, with a big chunk of liquidity, roughly EUR 48.5 million. With respect to this, what is our mission? Basically, we have the ambition mission to provide our clients with new business model, obviously leveraging on AI, with a kind of dual pillars. On one side, provide proprietary software solution, and on the other side, provide them also with ICT services.
We can do that in a different way compared to our competitors, thanks to the fact that we have an in-depth expertise of the vertical markets we are in. First of all, I said proprietary software. Why do we do that? We do that for a competitive reason. Basically, the fact that we have solutions which are proprietary gives us a real advantage against many of the players we encounter every day on the market. Obviously, this means that we can protect our margins, we have a higher return of the investment, and obviously, we have a position which is much, much stronger than players that are reselling third-party software. We are vertically specialized, meaning that our software solutions start their journey from the very beginning exactly for that specific market.
This means that obviously it's the most efficient solution for that market, first of all, and secondly, that includes all the features and application that the customers of that segment are looking for. Very often, when we approach a customer, they start acquiring a solution, but not all of the applications we have in the solution. Then over time, they realize the importance of adding additional solution, additional, sorry, application of the same solution in order to be more competitive. For us, obviously, it's a great opportunity to increase the relationship with the customer, to increase the amount of recurring revenues, and to increase the share of wallet that the customer has with us. Lastly, mission-critical solutions.
The type of applications we have, Matteo will go in depth on this, some of those applications are really mission-critical for our customers. What does it mean? It means that if that kind of process doesn't work, the customer is not in a position to perform its business. This means also that in order to provide those applications, the customer has to, you know, embrace our philosophy and start a very long journey, because here we are talking about a relationship of 10-15 years at least, because some of these applications are so crucial that it is not easy for our customer to change them. Along this long journey, obviously our objective is to increase the level of loyalty, to increase the level of customer satisfaction, and go there every now and then with new opportunities, obviously driven by the innovation.
The way we pursue our strategy is through basically two pillars. We are what typically they call a buy and build player. 1 side we push very hard in order to maximize our organic growth, and alongside with that, we push very hard as well to add additional champions within our group. We look for companies attractive with the same, obviously, strategy and philosophy we have, proprietary solution and ICT services to, you know, grow even faster. Now let's have a look of each of the two pillars more in detail. Starting from the organic growth, I would say that we have several KPIs that every single day we monitor to make sure that they are in line with our medium long-term objectives. Obviously, the first one is growth. We are quite maniacal from this point of view.
We wanna beat, you know, what is happening on the ICT market. What we wanna do is really outperform the average performance of the Italian market, and by far. For example, last year we did more than 70% growth rate compared to the Italian market, so basically our growth rate was in the range of 10%. Other couple of elements that we look very, very closely, and when I say we look very closely, I would say that we have weekly internal meetings and then monthly management meetings with all the key managers of the group to make sure that all these targets are met. I'm talking about, obviously, EBITDA and cash flow. EBITDA is definitely the proxy of value creation, we are very ambitious on EBITDA generation.
We basically achieved back last year roughly 20% of EBITDA margin. Most importantly, we're also very much focused on cash flow. Cash flow is extremely important for a business like ours, obviously it is important in general, but in our case, given that we do a buy and build business model, the cash generation is extremely important because it's the powder then to boost our M&A activity as well. Just to give you a hint, in terms of operating cash flow generation from EBITDA, we have a conversion ratio above 70%, 70, so pretty interesting. Another metric we use, we look very closely is the up and cross-selling activity.
Upselling for us means once we have a customer and we have, you know, a huge portfolio of offering, it means going back to the customer and every single time trying to identify new propositions that are attractive for the customer. The way to make sure that the customer shares our view is to show them what's the benefit they are gonna get once they get this application. The benefit can be in terms of efficiency level, can be in terms of productivity level, can be in terms of the way they compete on the market. The cross-selling side of it is basically when we have a new company within the entity, and we try to sell somebody else's service within our group to customer of one of our companies.
These are important metrics because, as you know, it's much, much easier increase the value of an already existing customer rather than acquiring a new one, both in terms of cost and also in terms of timing. Innovation. I think innovation is the center of everything, right? Everybody's experiencing innovation on a personal day-to-day life. Everybody is seeing how companies are competing in a different way, and this is happening extremely fast, okay? For us, innovation means that every single day we are focused on improving our proposition. We have 10% of our technicians' time that is fully devoted to innovation, meaning development of new application within existing solution rather than developing new solution from scratch. Obviously this is happening, as Matteo will tell us, also leveraging on new capabilities such as AI. Another important element is client partnership.
We look very closely at the level of the relationship with our customers, both in terms of duration of the relationship, but most importantly, in terms of value. If we see a customer that is constantly acquiring new solutions, new application, that's very healthy. If we see a customer which is a long-lasting customer with no very much dynamics in it, in the relationship, that's not very good.
That's something we monitor very, very closely, and I'm pretty sure that for those who had the chance to follow us over the past couple of years and have seen the huge progression we had in percentage terms in terms of recurring and repeatable services, this is a clear sign, signal I would say, of how healthy is the relationship with our customer base. Now let's go to the other pillar, which is the M&A, so the acquisition side of our business. What do we look at here? Again, we have a subset of important KPIs. First of all, we look at companies that give us the opportunity to enter into new markets that we consider very attractive for us, because they have good perspective of growth rate over the next few years, that's one of the elements we look at.
We are doing analysis with specifically a vertical market in mind to try and find people with the same, so companies with the same strategy. Companies developing proprietary solutions with a lot of marginality, with a lot of innovation in it, with a lot of competitive advantage against the other players in the arena. Sometimes we meet them, not really as a competitor because they are in different markets, but we partner with them or we hear about them from our customers or friends of customers, and then we immediately focus on that.
The other element is looking for companies operating in the same markets as we are already in, and Matteo will tell us more in depth the markets we are focused on, and we look for players that have innovative solutions, so that have innovative technologies that could in some way complement our product offering in being more attractive on the market. In both cases, we are looking for companies that are, you know, generating EBITDA, generating net income, cash flow. For sure, they don't have the same metrics as our group, but that's not a problem at all because, you know, we are pretty structured with a very detailed process to make sure that within one to three years' time maximum, they, you know, ramp up and achieve the same, you know, KPIs that we have at the group level.
Another element which is extremely important is this area, is the valuation methodology that we put in place, and most importantly, how we pay those companies, right, in order to acquire them. This is crucial. This is crucial because the temptation of relaxing a little bit this KPI is very, very high. You start your conversation, you say, "Oh, these guys, they are so good. Usually I'm paying five times. Why don't I pay six times or seven times or eight times for these guys? They are so good, much better than anybody else." If you start doing these kind of conversations, then you are putting in danger the whole model, because obviously our business plan is based on a very detailed model where obviously multiples, valuation multiples are an important element. The other one is payment terms, okay?
As you could imagine, all the shareholders of these target companies, they will tell you, "Okay, I want everything now." We have absolutely to go towards the opposite direction and say, "Okay, we're gonna tell you the payment." We are gonna pay you something on top of your current value based on the performance you're gonna have in the next three years, and at the very end, it's gonna be a win-win situation. They will be happy to be getting more money, and we will be very happy to have our payment terms spread across a longer period. Another element is once they are on board, the integration process.
Here is where it comes the real difference between a successful M&A and a, you know, not so successful or painful M&A, because it's quite easy if you have money to acquire companies, right? Maybe you pay it a little bit more, you acquire them. The crucial point is the integration of those companies within your group, because otherwise you will never be in a position to bring them up to speed to your performance as a group. We have a very specific process, a very, a dedicated team leading this process to make sure that alongside the three months, now is three months, because everything is well, you know, defined, automatized, the systems the new companies will get are already available. In the space of three months, the vast majority of the companies are full up to speed.
When I mean full up to speed, I mean they use our same, you know, accounting systems. They use the same benefits in terms of leveraging on the Salesforce, on the customer base. They have a technical development software based on a common methodology. The HR department has under control all the new company's profile to make sure that they are mapped across the organization, to make sure that every single individual then is gonna follow a specific path in terms of career growth as well as training, and obviously the advertising part as well, because we have to make sure, because we go to a customer, especially if there is a big customer, maybe with two, three, four , even five companies all together, we have to be perceived as a unique entity, not as five, four, three different separated entity.
It's very important that obviously the way of speaking, the job titles, the logos, the way we write emails is absolutely the same. Okay? Another element is cross-selling, because obviously, what's the recipe to boost the performance of those companies? Obviously, we integrate them. We give them our systems. We share with them our managerial processes. Obviously, every month we meet. We grow their managerial expertise and know-how. We have to leverage on people, right? Our salespeople and customers, our customer base. Obviously, as I said, we have a set of customers, huge set of customers.
As soon as we have a new company being part of our group, we try and see what we can sell of that new company, sorry, to our existing customer base, because this is what really accelerate everything, revenues, EBITDA, cash flow generation, also because they are well-known customers, paying customers. This is extremely healthy for all these companies. Everything I'm telling you is not something that is relating to the new strategy. obviously it's relating to what is gonna happen in the new three years, but most importantly, it is related to our experience, and if we go back, for example, of six years, and we look backward from 2019 to nowadays, we implemented exactly this strategy.
Organic growth on one side, where we, you know, outpaced the Italian market by far, and inorganic growth on the other side, where we acquired companies that were champion in their areas. Just to give you an idea here, we acquired, since we were listed, July 2024, we acquired basically in total so far, including the two companies we acquired in Q1 this year, EUR 37 million of revenues. If you do the math, how is possible that now we have EUR 48 .5 million in the bank accounts? We raised only EUR 32 .5 million as IPO proceeds.
Obviously, the combination of the significant cash we generate every single month, plus the approach we have in the M&A, where we dilute the payments of the new acquired companies, enables us to grow quite significantly in terms of cash. Last year, for those who followed the 2025 results, the operating cash flow we generate along the year was pretty much enough to do big acquisitions, because A&C Group was the biggest acquisition, as a company was totaling at the time roughly EUR 25 million revenues, and the value was pretty much the same. Nevertheless, we managed to cover everything was needed by the M&A, by the buyback, paying same dividends, managing the, you know, investments for innovation. Managing cash is extremely relevant for our business, especially because we have the buy side alongside the build.
Basically, if we look at the numbers, what we experienced over the past six years is that basically every three years, we doubled our size. Obviously, every time it's getting more and more difficult because, you know, you start from a bigger base. If you look at here, revenues, for example, within slightly above EUR 18 million back in 2019. These are management accounts because when we listed the business back in 2024, we went back to 2021 in terms of audited accounts. Andrea Baldini is pretty good on making numbers, so it should be quite right? Should be. You know, the EUR 18 million doubled to EUR 38 million three years later and doubled to roughly EUR 90 million last year. The same to the EBITDA, from EUR 4 million to roughly EUR 8 million to EUR 17.1 million last year.
Again, the net income adjusted to EUR 1.8, to EUR 3.9, to EUR 8.7. As you see, there is this recurring path. Obviously, as I said, it's always more and more difficult given that the base is starting. What we will try and share with you in giving visibility is that we are targeting again to double again as a result of the organic and inorganic growth, so that by 2019 2028, sorry, we are targeting something that is roughly a double size of what we achieved at the end of last year. Thank you very much, and now I leave to Matteo.
Thank you, Emanuele, and good morning, everyone, from me as well. Today, I will give you an overview of our strategy, our approach, our vision for winning the ICT market, as Emanuele said before. To reach it, to achieve it, I have prepared a presentation that focuses on four key elements. The first one is about the ICT market, but at the same time, the industries that we are addressing, we are targeting. The second is about our landscape competition in order to better understand the competitor that we find every day in the market. The third one is about our offering with the AI adoption, the last one is about our customer base from different points of view. Let's start from the market. The market, as Emanuele said before, is very healthy, it's very strong, it's very solid, it's very sound.
In the last three years, the CAGR between 2022 to 2025 was 6.6%. The next five years, the estimated CAGR is 4.7%. In 2025, as Emanuele said before, the growth rate was 5.8%. This resulted due to the digital enablers, mainly driven to the digital enablers that are AI, cybersecurity, big data, and cloud. In this environment, in this landscape, we did better. SYS-DAT did better. SYS-DAT achieved an organic growth of almost 10%, 9.8%. That is about 1.7 x the market growth. This is due to our strategy that focuses on three pillars. The first pillar is our capability to create cross-selling or cross-business. We create a lot of value between the companies in our group.
We push the fact that every company in our group can and must sell all the solutions in the other companies and vice versa. The second pillar is about the upselling. Upselling in order to sell to our customer base always the newest solution, the newest add-on that we have in our customer portfolio. The last point is about innovative. We invest about 10% of our technician or personal cost, or about 5% of our revenues. In summary, we are in a very healthy market. We are growing faster than the market, but our capability to create value are cross-selling, upselling and innovation. Now let's see the industries we are targeting. Here we can see the estimated CAGR for the next three years, four years in the industries that we are addressing.
Here we have our proprietary and vertical solutions. This is a very important point. We provide vertical solution. There is a big difference between a vertical solution and a verticalized solution. A vertical solution is a solution that is born for a specific industry, while a verticalized solution is a solution that was born for general market and then adopted for a specific solution market. Also these markets that you see in the chart, we are looking at, we are looking for other industries, for us very attractive, like insurance, banking, healthcare and HR that in our strategy could complete and complement our portfolio offering. After having seen the market, we can analyze our competitive landscape. We have segmented our competitors into four categories, divided by two axes.
The vertical axis that shows the company's approach from who provide vertical solution for vertical markets at the top, who provide solution for market generalist at the bottom. In the horizontal axis, we shows the company's offering from who has limited solutions to who has end-to-end solutions. Starting from the first quadrant, the upper OS quadrant, here we find a lot of little companies. They are often targeting our M&A activities. They have limited solutions, but at the same time they are vertical solutions for specific markets. In the bottom left section, we see who we find the system integrator or the resellers, the reseller of all the third parties solutions. They are provider of limited solutions and provider of market generalist.
In the bottom right section, we find the blue chip, the big company, the big four, big five. They are usually market generalists, but they have an end-to-end solutions. In the last quadrant, in the top right section, we see ourself, we see SYS-DAT Group, and we see our strategy to provide vertical solution for vertical markets, but at the same time to provide end-to-end solutions. Just to give you an idea, in the markets that you see before, you saw before, we have our ERP solution, CRM solution, BI solution, retail solution, digital solution, and so on. Let's see our offering, the third pillar. Just to remind you, we have segmented our portfolio solution in three families. The first family is composed by the core business software solutions.
Here we have the solutions that manage the core processes, the core processes that can never end. Here we have our ERP solution, MES, WMS, PDM, PLM, and this represents about 66% of our revenues. The strategic relevance for us are several. The first one is that we create a high barrier, a high exit barriers. Just to give you an idea, if a customer decided to change our ERP system, he would take at least two or three years before implementing the new one. The second is about a long-term relationship that we have with our customers. We have a lot of customers that have been using our solution for more than 15, 20 years. The third point is that we create a real relationship, a real partnership with our customers.
In the other side, the reasons to buy, customer side, are to have solutions that are very vertical, very tailored, and we have a comprehensive solution, an end-to-end solutions. Let's see the second family. The second family is composed by the value-added software solutions. Here we have the solutions that manage specific processes, not core processes. Here we have our AI, CRM, e-commerce, digital passport solutions. It represents about 12% of our revenues. The strategic relevance for us is to help markets under pressure, to expand upselling, and to create high margin for us. Customer side, the reasons to buy are to accelerate time to market and to have a solutions that can integrate easier with the core processes. The first two families are addressed to specific market-specific. The last family is composed by the ICT services.
Here we have all the services that better manage the business of our customers. Here we have cybersecurity, cloud, GDPR, managed services, and this family represents about 22% of our revenues. The strategic relevance are different to create a protected moat and recurring fees with our customers to complete our offering, to maximize the lifetime value with our customers. The reasons to buy customer side are to have an inclusive partnership with them, at the same time to know very well his organization. In all the three families, we are using AI. We are using AI in two different directions. On the one hand, we are providing some solutions that manage specific processes, specific needs with our arIA suite. On the other hand, we are embedding AI in our solutions.
We are embedding AI in our core, in the core of our solutions. The goal is to transform our solution software to intelligent solution software, is to transform the feature reach and intelligence reach, is to transform the solutions that have embedded the best practices of the industry to have embedded the best intelligence of the industry. This is the use of AI in our offering, but we are using a lot AI internally in all processes, in HR, in finance, in marketing, in sales, but also in all operation activities. In this slide, we can analyze 4 activities in our operations, like customer engagement, requirements analysis, project development and after-sales of support. How is the difference before AI and after AI? How is the impact?
In the first activity, customer engagement, the impact goes from efficient to effective in the requirements analysis from ad hoc to standard 1, from project development, from manual to agentic, and in after sale in support solutions from reactive to predictive. In summary, we are using AI internally, we are using AI externally towards our customers, but we are using AI to create a stronger partnership with our customers by leveraging proprietary data to build a defensible AI moat. Now let's see the last pillar of our strategy that is composed by our customer base. In this chart, we can analyze the customer base from different points of view. In the top side, we see the revenue by market sector. We have a lot of market sectors. 45% is represented by manufacturing.
Here we have also the made in Italy sectors. 23% is represented by services, 25% by commerce, and so on. There is a business de-risking thanks to high level of market sector variety. In the top right section, we see revenue by market size. This reflects Italian market mix. 40% of our revenues come from customer with revenue more than EUR 50 million, 28% with customer between EUR 10 million and EUR 50 million, 14% from customer between EUR 2 million and EUR 10 million, and the rest at 18% with customer less than EUR 2 million. In the lower section, we see the quality and the loyalty of our customer base. In the bottom left section, we see revenue concentration by our customer. There is no concentration in our customer base.
Just to give you an idea, the first customer is represented by 1.3% of our revenues. The first 10 customers represent about 10%-12% of our revenues, and the first 30 customer represent 22% of our revenue. There is a very diversification. There is no revenue concentration. Another important point to underline is our revenue churn that in 2024/2025 was 2.2%. The last point, the bottom right section, we see the quality of our revenues. Repeatable and recurring revenues represent 83% of our revenues. Is very important percentage that increased by 17% from the last year, 17 from 2024.
Just to remind you, recurring revenues are maintenance fees, outsourcing fees, while repeatable are revenues coming from our customer that have been using our solution for more than five years. This is the last chart. After having seen the market, the competitive landscape, the offering, and the customer base, I leave the floor to Andrea, who will present you our financial data in our three years business plan. Thank you.
Thank you very much. The guidance is basically a couple of slides here to remind you about the data. We analyzed them last week, so it's a short reminder. This is about the 2025 data and the Q1 2026 data. That's the base on which we of course built the guidance for 2026 and then the business plan, which is up to 2028. The numbers, as I promised, are the same as last week. The 2025 data is very positive. We had a growth, a very significant growth also given by the fact that we acquired A&C Group. As you remember, A&C Group was the biggest acquisition of our history. About 1/3 of the revenue.
In this case, you can see that the organic revenue is always the gray portion in the slides, and the rest is, you know, the red is the organic portion. As usual, all these slides are always based on these two pillars, the organic portion on the one hand, and then the M&A portion, which is accelerating the growth. 2025, very strong year, both in terms of revenues and in terms of EBITDA, and then it goes down to net income. As you can see, the growth is significant, more than 55% to almost 56% in terms of revenue. We go to an EBITDA, which is historically has always been around 20%, and again in 2025 was around 20%. In Q1, we confirmed these results.
Q1 revenues, again, a very strong organic performance plus two acquisitions that were completed in Q1, 2026. We go to the EBITDA, which is even stronger. As a matter of fact, we are growing more in terms of EBITDA than in terms of revenues. This is because, you know, the machine, if you will, is always pays something in terms of margin when we acquire companies and then bringing them up to speed in terms of value creation. That's always how the machine works. Acquiring new companies, bringing them in. This is paying something in terms of EBITDA and then, you know, bringing up to speed and so pushing them, which means that the EBITDA, if you look at the data, is improving.
Net income is also very good in Q1, so basically confirming what we see in terms of growth. The cash available at the end of March is still very significant, EUR 47 million. This is liquidity available, so we still have quite a bit to invest in terms of M&A, which is part, of course, of the plan. For the keys lie here. This is a target, 2x, so now I have to convince you that we can actually reach that through the numbers. First piece is the organic piece, as expected. The organic growth, if you look at historically, we have an organic growth historically of around 10%.
What we are seeing here in this slide, we're also saying is that we are growing more than 70% IT growth market rate, and we think we can get up to 10% growth in terms of revenue and in terms of basically the other, the various parameters. Effectively, we can get to a significant number already in terms of organic growth. The basing machine is able to grow substantially. In terms of EBITDA, now 2026, we have the effect of the two acquisitions of Q1, which have a way lower EBITDA than the group EBITDA, so we expect a little bit of a hit in 2026. The forecast is a bit conservative. It's around 90% of EBITDA margin for 2026 in terms of guidance.
For 2028, we certainly can improve that. If we look at the same perimeter, if you look at the same companies, we can certainly push that well above 20%. We'll see the numbers later on this. In terms of operating cash flow, we are historically able to convert quite a bit of the EBITDA into real cash flow, into operating cash flow. As you can see, our target is still around 70% of the EBITDA converted into operating cash flow. What does this mean in terms of tactical, you know, targets and priorities? First of all, integrate the companies immediately, which we are already doing. In terms of companies we acquired in Q1, they are already mostly integrated into the systems and actually integrated into the commercial aspects.
The second point is about the commercial aspects. Of course, we acquired last year quite a big chunk of revenues. The big objective here is to get them up to speed to get to the cross-selling of all the products. A&C Group alone could represent a significant growth because, of course, if they can cross-sell everything that we do, that's already a big boost. Of course, A&C Group has another set of products we can cross-sell ourselves as a group. The third element is the innovation. As usual, you need to keep relevant into the market, so in the market, so we have to continuously innovate on the existing portfolio and on new things to add to the portfolio.
Which means that we can go from EUR 89 million in 2025 to around EUR 105 million in terms of revenue in 2026. Just to note, these numbers include Technis Blu and et.ics, so the acquisition for Q1, just because otherwise the analysts in the room are gonna freak out. They do include Technis Blu and et.ics. EBITDA is around EUR 20 million, so a nice growth from the EUR 17 million last year, and the EBITDA margin is more or less the same. As you can guess, this is also due because of the various acquisitions we did in 25 at the time and in 26 in Q1. Net income is also growing. That's always a given for us.
If we project that, if we push that to 2028. We see a significant growth which could go up to circa EUR 126 million in terms of revenue. As you can see, the trajectory is quite nice, it's quite strong. EBITDA could go up to EUR 26 million, which means that EBITDA margin is improving to well above 20%. This will reflect down to the net income on an adjusted level. One other note on adjustments, which is technical, but again, it's important to understand that the adjustments are for the future, the PPA.
This is just the depreciation amortization given by the fact that we acquired a lot of companies, and those acquisition generate a lot of amortizations in terms of the purchase price allocation given by IFRS 3. This is for the organic portion, and as you can see, the pace is way outpacing the Italian market. The other side of the picture is the M&A portion, the inorganic growth. This guidance, of course, is based on history, as the organic portion was based on history. We acquired 20 companies. As Emanuele was saying, we acquired EUR 37 million already from the IPO, so we are well on their way to build the next piece of the picture in terms of M&A.
In this sense, we think we can acquire EUR 45 million-EUR 60 million in the period, so that's a three-year period, 2026-2028. We already acquired a piece of that with et.ics and Technis Blu in Q1, which means that what's, you know, the number to remember is EUR 38 million to circa EUR 53 million of extra acquisition from now to 2028. The EBITDA margin we are acquiring in terms of target, as I said, is always a little lower than our own EBITDA margin. Our target is around 15% margin with variable revenue size, meaning that we can acquire companies with smaller sizes, and they are easy to integrate or easier to integrate.
We could acquire also company with bigger sizes, which means, you know, one like A&C Group, a bigger chunk of acquisition just to be brought in in one shot. The total investment, given the multiples we are running at, it's around EUR 40 million-EUR 55 million. The multiple here is slightly higher than our historical multiple of 5x, so this is 6x EBITDA multiple just to take care of the fact, and then, you know, the model is resilient to that. There are two effects here. One effect is people are always asking for more money, not surprisingly.
The other effect, the market is actually not supporting that because with the volatility that there is in the market, you know, software companies are valued certainly less now than they were a couple of years before. That's true for our acquired companies, right? There is a push on one hand and the push on the other, and so we decided to stay a little bit higher than our historical rate just to be safe. Just the assumption of the model, everything is done the year-end 2028. This is a technical assumption just to avoid, you know, complications in terms of timing of these acquisitions. Why we acquire, that's already been kind of explained, but just to remind you, we acquire to find new markets.
Here we have a few markets that we could be interested in, like insurance, banking, and healthcare. Those are markets that are growing quite nicely, very big markets. Second point is to strengthen both in terms of technical solutions and in terms of market existing solutions and existing markets, and of course, creating this cross-selling to maximize growth and value creation. This is always very important because it plays on both sides. It plays on the acquired company sides, and it plays on the group side, which of course is way bigger.
If you go to the numbers, we can see that if we put down those numbers, EUR 38 million-EUR 53 million of revenues, you know, EUR 6 million-EUR 9 million of EBITDA, which is around the target we said earlier, the 15% EBITDA target, we go down to the net income. In this case, what we have as a complete picture is the one on the right, which is a 2028 total, including the M&A, this comes to the magical number of EUR 164 million-EUR 179 million, which is around double what we had in 2025. Then it follows down to the EBITDA margin of more than 20%, so EUR 32 million-EUR 35 million.
Then we have the net income of EUR 16 million - EUR 18 million. The total here is based on a model we of course tested, and the result of this is that, of course, we are investing EUR 40 million - EUR 55 million, which we still have. In terms of net financial position, this will go below zero. Right now is in terms of cash positive, it's above zero in terms of cash positive items, and will go below zero. As you can guess, even with this type of plan, we have a negative financial position of EUR 25 million - EUR 40 million, depending on how many acquisitions, which is still around the EBITDA, right? It's not real strong leverage here. This is without leverage, so without banks, without loans from banks.
This is just internal cash. That's pretty much it from the numbers, and maybe you can conclude with this.
Okay. Very briefly, if we manage to achieve those numbers, we double again. Just a quick slide to wrap up and then leave the floor to the Q&A. I think this is a pretty compelling, you know, investment opportunity. It's a capital growth business, obviously managed by the two parts. Obviously, we have a strong history, which is in some way underpinning what we are telling you as a potential growth over the next three years. We have a proven track record from every point of view: organic growth, M&A, cash flow generation, margin, EBITDA margin. It's not something that we are inventing out of nowhere today. We have a very solid financial position, so we have no issues about how to fund this business.
Most importantly, we are starting from a very strong base, both in terms of sticky customer base, recurring revenues, strategic services to the market. I think all the ingredients are here. Just to, you know, to add an additional step to this, we should have another aspirational target. What we could say that potentially we could aim double again in the next three years, following obviously the current three years, so after 2028, and double it again to target roughly EUR 350 million. We don't believe this is absurd. This is part of our history.
If we will carry on maintaining this, how to say, you know, adherence to the main KPIs on the organic side and the inorganic side, there's no reason why this shouldn't happen, because we have a huge portion, 85%, 84%, 83% of our revenues are recurring. We have a fantastic floor with year-over-year growth because this 84% was 20% less three years ago. This is an important element of de-risking of the whole plan. Having said that, I'll leave it to you to go ahead with the Q&A from the floor and also from people online.
I think I need a clarification regarding cash generation. Okay. Hi, thanks for the presentation. Gabriele from Intesa. I'm asking you a clarification regarding cash generation. If I understood correctly, in the scenario in which you assume a EUR 55 cash out for new M&A, you project a net financial position at the end of 2028 of EUR 40 million. This implies that without M&A, net financial position would have been, would be, EUR 15 million cash. As is, versus the result posted at the end of 2025. It means no cash generation. What am I missing?
There's buyback, there's dividends.
Investments
Investments. The existing investments, of course.
Okay.
Hello, and thank you a lot for the presentation. Tommaso Nieddu from Kepler Cheuvreux. I have few question. The first one is on EBITDA margin for 2028, which is guided above 20%. My question is, how much of the 160 basis point expansion comes from the harmonization of AC to group margins and how much it comes from operating leverage on legacy SYS-DAT? A question on the phasing of this 160 basis point expansion. Should we expect some kind of a linear path at 60 basis point per year or otherwise? Maybe the next question I will ask later after this.
In terms of EBITDA margin, in our model, the EBITDA margin is of course increasing quite linearly because it's, you know, the way the machine works if you look at the organic side, right? That's easier in a sense to forecast. The difficult part is of course the M&A side. Given that the model is based on all the acquisition done at the very end of 2028, that component is not taken care of on the acquisition side, which means that if you look at the organic, it's more or less linear. It's more or less the improvement of processes is both in terms of A&C improvements, and also in terms of internal operational improvements given by various factors, AI and efficiency and so on and so forth.
Okay. Does it work? Yeah. Okay. The second one is on the deals, on the potential M&As. You talk about EUR 40 million-EUR 55 million of M&A investments over three years. My question here is just trying to understand what are you looking for. You said you are open for a different size, but would you rather go for two to three mid-sized deals like A&C or just more, I don't know, like five to 10. Bolt-on deals. Thank you.
Yeah, we are quite agnostic in terms of size of the deals. What we really look and value is the strategic profile of the companies we are acquiring, because that's what really matters. We don't want to bring on board people that divert from our strategy. It's quite important that they share the same view. It will be much easier for us to bring their operational level to our levels. At least the view, the strategy, the direction has to be that one. Based on this, we really prefer, for example, acquiring a smaller company rather than a bigger one, if the bigger one is not in line with our strategy. This is why we are not so much focused on the size of the deal, but we are much more focused on the strategic profile on the deal.
Hello, good morning. Pietro Rinaldi from Intermonte. Just a couple of questions from my side. The first one is on the, again, on the cash flow generation. It seems that your, let's say forecast for the 2028 seems quite conservative. I would like to understand what are your assumptions for the net working capital, since we have seen historically you are able to generate cash with the net working capital. The second question is on the, again, the M&A. I would like to understand the target multiple you are, let's say addressing and also across the different families of your value proposition. I was wondering if to acquire some core business software solution, it's more expensive rather than ICT services. I would like to understand what is your direction in terms of M&A, also looking at the, your products family. Thank you.
In terms of net working capital, we are conservative, meaning that in the model we haven't considered any big or material actually change in the working capital, which means that there could be an additional advantage in terms of cash, right? Because I mean, if we had to really squeeze out the working capital, improve the management of the working capital way more than what we do, then, of course that's way more additional cash that we could have available. In that sense, yes, we are conservative. The second point I don't know if you wanna-
Yeah, about the second point, basically, yes, you are right. When we value a business, we value it from different perspectives. First of all, we look at the management team. The very end is what really makes the difference. We look at the business, typically we look at the marginality of the business, how much recurring they have, if their solutions are strategic solution for the customers. Obviously attached to this kind of valuation, we provide higher multiples. In other cases where, for example, we have ICT services which are less vertical market specific and more horizontal, obviously the multiples go down a little bit. All in all, what we have in mind on average is something in the range of 6x. That means that somebody is gonna be paid a little bit less, somebody else a little bit more.
We haven't observed major differences in the various types for now, or companies we acquire, I mean. If you distinguish the core versus value added, we tend to invest bigger companies on the core side, like A&C. In that case, the negotiation was quite different, so it still resulted in 5x more or less multiple. Whereas if you look at the companies in the value added sector, for example like, BI, AI, et cetera, those are smaller in nature. For now we were able to actually acquire them aggressively at pretty much the same valuations. Again, the model can grow up a little bit on valuation, so it's a, it's a blended 6x.
Andrea Randone, with Intermonte. A couple of questions, if I may. The first one is, if you can share with us some comments about your projections, in terms of contract value, average contract value, and number of new contracts or existing contracts, I mean, in order to understand what is your perception in also in the bargaining power you got with customers. The second question is about your, I mean, your target to grow with M&A also in the banking and finance sector. That is for sure a huge market, but to some extent is also quite crowded. If you can spend a few words, in, telling us, what are your specific, capabilities that can give you the chance, to be successful in this, important market. Thank you.
Okay. You want to address the first topic?
Yes, for the first questions, the first from industrial side. Thank you. We don't see contraction no more. There are some sectors that are growing most, like healthcare and food, the sector that are not growing so much. We see the industry from a different perspective. We can offer solutions that can improve o perativity in our customers. Sometimes we sell solutions that can improve their business in terms of selling or saving. We have the possibility to push different kinds of our solutions. We are present in different sectors, in different industries, but also with different solution for each industry. We can balance the difference of the moment with our solution. We don't see a contraction in the market now.
Yeah. Plus from the contractual point, maybe we can add that we have pricing realignment every year based on ISTAT and recurring revenues growing. I mean, the recipe here is once you establish a relationship with your customer, especially if you're providing mission critical propositions, there is through providing a high quality level of service, really carry on upselling this customer because obviously the share of wallet increase is what really makes the growth much easier, both in terms of, you know, as I said, in terms of timing to achieve it, and also in terms of cost to achieve it. Going to the second question about the industries, we are already inside the, we are already providing services both in the healthcare and banking industry while we are not in the insurance market.
What we can provide is what we are already providing to that market. Obviously we have to think of this as an M&A opportunity, so identifying players who are already there who could benefit from our comprehensive portfolio because these kind of customers require also a lot of services which are not specific for their industry only. Think about cloud services, cybersecurity, GDPR, or predictive solutions on the customer's portfolio. You know, in this case, obviously our AI knowhow plays a role. The idea is really to become more relevant in those industry where we are already present, but our presence is very, very tiny at the moment. Please.
Well, I'm in the room with the expert, and I'm not. My question is just to understand if what I've been teached at the beginning when how to look at your sector is true. Someone told me basically that service providers, you know, the center of this world, are in the mid-teens. People like you who has a proprietary software should be around the mid-20s. I wonder whether this could be a long-term target for your EBITDA margin, or structurally your business is different and will achieve result below the 20 say, 25, 24, 26 around. That's first question. Second question is again, on acquisitions. You have a dream number, 85%, 83% of recurring revenues. You're growing, you generate a lot of cash.
I perfectly understood your vision of how a good target has to be chosen, but I think have you ever had a possibility or think about possibility of hunting for a big elephant sometimes? You know, you can have a lot of During the weekend, it's completely different example. I read that there is a potential bid for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and it's EUR 5 billion equity value and EUR 25 billion already net debt. They are adding new debt for this acquisition, so just because they generate a good cash flow. I wonder whether in your sector, which has been under scrutiny recently because this cash flow, especially in U.S., has been put under scrutiny. In any case, if in Europe, you think you could do a different acquisition in the future, so of a different size?
Thank you for your question. As you know, we already shared our views on this because we had the chance to talk about the very same topic few months ago. Yes, the opportunity is there. Obviously, this is the presentation of a strategic plan over the next two years, and that's a little bit the answer for the first and the second question altogether. Here we have to be realistic and really see what we have in our hands is a realistic opportunity to be achieved over the next three years. On top of this, are we gonna now to perform and achieve the mid-20s? We'll see. Are we gonna find a big target? We'll see. We don't say no, but in a realistic plan is very unlikely that you can present something like this without losing a little bit of credibility.
I think this plan really reflects what we have done so far in the past years, and so has a very high level of credibility. Now we are talking to the investment community. We have to forecast numbers that are credible. Doesn't mean that we are gonna meet them. Maybe we will miss them, hopefully not. We are not talking about dreams. We are talking about realistic numbers. This is why in this kind of presentation, we stick to what we have already, you know, demonstrated in the past. We are ambitious, so if there are opportunities, we'll try to grab them.
If we find the elephant.
Hi. Simone Cremonini, Alkemia. I have a business question about sales. Organic growth is achieved to sales team. I wonder how long is as an average the sales cycle? First question. Second question is if to achieve the plan results you need to hire new sales guy, and if you see feasible based on your plan the number of people that you need to hire in a competitive market where sales guy are like the most requested resource for technological company.
Yeah. Today we have about 70 people in our sales force, is about 10% of our people, is the average that we have maintaining in these years, and we're seeking to maintain the same percentage also for the next years. The sales are circle, it depends on the solutions. In a core business software solutions, it could take at least three, four, five, six months, but in the other families, the value add software solution or ICT services is shorter. Life cycle is about one month, maximum two months. This is the average.
If I may add something about the hiring process. I think salespeople are making a big distinction on the market among the different players because when you compete on the market, and the salesman for sure knows it, at first glance, basically you immediately distinguish between companies providing high level of services, well-regarded by their customer base, compared to companies where the level of satisfaction coming from their clients is very low. On one side there is competition for sure, but the competition is among good companies. Not all the companies on the market are providing very high level of service. We hope to be on that side, a little bit of competition, but also attractiveness as well.
Yes, thank you very much for your presentation and outlook. Klaus Kummer from Delmore. I wanted to talk a bit about the competitive landscape. Do you see the landscape evolving a bit thanks to the widespread or more widespread adoption of AI? Secondly, could you give us a feeling what is happening at your customer level? Like, are customers increasingly adopting AI to build product instead of buying them from you? Thirdly, if there is a meaningful difference between the size of your customers in terms of adoption of AI, meaning that bigger companies are more inclined to use it and to start developing own products versus the smaller end of the market or customers, they rely more on you to deliver proprietary solutions. Thank you.
You wanna go with this?
Yeah, yeah. For the first question, in our competitive landscape, we are using the same methodology. We are pushing AI with our verticality, with our solutions. The difference between our competitors is this one. We are embedding our AI engine in the core of our solutions. We are transforming our solutions from feature reach to intelligence reach, despite the other competitors that are selling AI solutions like add-on solutions, right? Like solutions that are completely outside the core, outside the solutions that they have. The integration between AI engine and our solutions is the difference between us and the other customers. The second questions was? I don't remember.
The adoption.
The adoption. Yeah. The level of adoption is very low. Today we have less than 5% of our customers that are using AI. There is a great interest. There is no presentation without AI. AI is the king or the queen, and we always insert AI in all our presentation. As we have lived in our IT disruption, like this one, time to adoption comes later, time to market. We are ready now with our solutions, but our customer not yet. We are ready to sell to the other 95% of our customer our solutions. We are confident that there is a great opportunity in the next in the next year with our offering.
Yeah, going back to your last question, if any of our customer is building the solution by themselves, not likely.
Yeah.
Even nowadays, even before AI, you could see a lot of big players, blue-chip players, with their own IT department in it. Typically, what they do, they manage the day-to-day operation. When they have to do a new development, they always talk to a partner in order to do it. If not, to avoid being blamed that it doesn't work, you know?
Marco Corsiglia, Intermonte. Remaining on the AI topic, clearly you perfectly know that the sector has been destroyed by this concern about AI. While the possibility that AI will replace entirely the enterprise software seems a little bit premature at least, I don't know if you agree with the fact that the idea that more and more agentic AI on the customer side will interact with your and other software. This to me seems a little bit more realistic and closer. Don't know what you think. In this case, if you agree with that, what will be the impact on the structure of your revenues?
You mentioned the fact that majority of your revenue are recurring or repeatable. I suppose that this evolution on the customer side shouldn't have a great impact on your revenue, but maybe you can elaborate a little bit on this.
Yeah, absolutely. If I may, the impact would be extremely positive rather than negative, you know. First of all, I think we have to really see AI for what it is. It's a tool, right? It's an opportunity for those who know how to use AI to get some benefits out of it. These pictures where the entire humanity's jobs will be disrupted by AI is quite unrealistic, right? At least in the next, I dunno, decade or so. While the fact that companies that know AI, know how to use AI could get benefit out of it, that's absolutely realistic. We believe we are well-positioned for that. We started investing in AI back in 2021, if you remember, which is when we acquired Humatics, a company fully skilled on AI.
It was a university spinoff, 100% AI-based. From there onward we started, you know, transferring the AI know-how within our group. We started providing solutions to the market. Obviously we believe we are well-positioned because this is not something new for us. It's a tool we are using. In the future, not very close, I think also we will experience new business models, new ways of, you know, defining the contracts, right? Nowadays, we define as a one-off, recurring revenues, pay per use. In the future, there will be different metrics that we will use in the markets in the offering. It's not gonna happen very quickly, especially in Italy, because as you know, Italian people are very, you know, traditional, adverse to innovation. They are worried that if they use AI, their private information will spread across the net.
I mean, it's gonna happen because there are plenty of benefits, even for the customers. I think the first benefits will be for the IT companies, using it in a proper way.
Maybe just a comment on that. I think we heard from the professor at the beginning, right? The big problem is the inertia, right? The organizational inertia to adopt any innovation. Imagine an innovation like this, which is changing everything potentially, right? It's gonna be a huge problem. Now, the question is what are companies gonna do and who are they gonna ask information about this and who are they gonna ask deployment, you know, or basically how to use this. We think, and we have some indications from the market, that we are the guys they are gonna ask, you know, how to implement the AI in their own companies because we are experts in processes, and we are experts in the core processes.
Being in the ERP space for two-thirds of the business means that we already own the space of the core processes of the companies. It's way easier for us to integrate new processes and integrate new concepts, especially if there are software concepts like the AI, into the companies', the customers, rather than for other people coming from the outside, right? It's a matter also of who are you gonna give your data to. To the guys who already own the data because they treat it and they basically use it to build your ERP or to new guys coming from the outside, right? It's always a bit of a struggle there. We think we have a competitive advantage there in terms of AI. Second point, it's always the question, you know, are the customer gonna develop themselves?
You know, I think it was a bit of a drunken behavior that of the last few months. Now, if you look at the bleeding edge of research, there's already some indication in papers, scientific papers, peer-reviewed scientific papers, and the costs are not as low as it seems because they don't include maintenance costs, which are huge in software. Everybody forgot that developing software is not about coding, but about maintaining software and being able to recode it after two years, which is not evident for an AI which is changing every week. The second aspect of that is, in the end, those costs are calculated on U.S. costs, right? $200,000 a year for an engineer, that's not our cost base, which is completely different.
It's still debatable if even, you know, a magic solution with AI would substitute coders. I cannot imagine them substitute the coding, the consultant, the knowledge of the system and the knowledge of the processes as a whole. Again, that's not even taking into account the inertia of the organization, the human element. You know, there's just taking into account the real costs of implementing the AI. Yes, I think we are going from the drunken level of hubris, if you will, over the last few months to the reality of the fact that, yes, you can probably fire a piece of your personnel base just because you want to fire them, not because the AI is coming in, right? That's a bit of an excuse right now.
Okay. No other questions. We are done. Now the nice part, the lunch.