Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and thank you for being here following our invitation where we're presenting Solocal 2021 results. I will comment on these results with Olivier Regnard, who is here with me, our CFO. I would like to begin immediately by pointing at some of the key messages of 2021. I wanted to begin with a piece of good news, and that is that revenue in 2021 is stable. 2021 will go down as the year when we had stable revenue. We stabilized it thanks to three consecutive quarters of growth, the last of which, growth of more than 6%. The second key message that I want to share with you is that we have delivered on guidance.
You will remember that we said that we wanted to have EUR 120 million in EBITDA, and the final figure at the end of 2021 is EUR 121.5 million. Regarding customers, we do note a slight erosion of customer base, 309,000 active customers. What I'd like to underscore, and I will come back to this later, is the huge effort that has been put in by our telesales teams and Solocal employees generally in considerably reducing the churn rate. We've gone from 19% at beginning of the year down to 12.8%, and I would like to thank each and every one of them for the hard work involved in having met the goal. Finally, our subscription model is now well installed.
After two years of migration, the subscription mode is well established for the whole of the customer base. Finally, regarding cash flow, and Olivier will come back to this in just a minute, is sound. As of the 31st of December, 2021, we close at EUR 81.2 million. During the presentation, I would like to come back to the strategic plan that I presented in October 2021. We'll go back over this so that I can show you how we have advanced and are moving forward with the strategic plan. Let's begin with operational performance. The first is not so much performance as such, but the whole scale of the transformative program that Solocal has been implementing over the last two years. You may remember that in 2019, only 16% of our customer base was subscription mode.
24 months on, 89% of our customers are in full subscription mode. They have taken out a subscription contract. This is outstanding. It's a huge scale transformation plan. Like any subscription company, henceforth, we will have two key pillars. The first is customer loyalty, making sure that our customers are satisfied, keeping as long as possible our customers with Solocal, the churn rate. The second pillar of this business model is that henceforth, we need to go out and get new clients, new subscribers. There is a huge depth of potential. How did the customers behave in 2021? Well, we have significantly reduced our churn rate, and necessarily, we have reduced the number of clients who have left us. If you look at this in comparison with 2020, you can see that we have almost reduced by half the number of clients who have left.
We have the capacity to acquire new customers, and this is something we need to work on. This is really what's the heart of the transformative plan that we presented in October 2021. We have got a team that works on retention, some 60 employees who are doing an outstanding job of work, and I would like to thank them very warmly for everything they have done. We're going to continue along those lines, but of course, we now have to emphasize more our capacity to convert prospects into customers. Who are our customers? Have they changed since October 2021? Well, mostly they are very small companies with between zero and nine employees, for the vast majority, 89%, involved a lot in housing. This hasn't changed, and it generates a lot of value, 35% of our revenue at the moment.
Remember, I said that we were going to go out and try and develop a targeted vertical strategy. The second line of business that we wanted to address was B2B. You can see this here. B2B now accounts for 16%. It was much the same in October 2021 in volume, but almost 20% in terms of income revenue. This line of business is very dynamic, and we want to keep that going in 2022, but we also want to focus on services. Gradually, step by step, we are deploying our strategy to develop new lines of business. If we look at the other feature in our ecosystem is the PagesJaunes. This is in decline. That's a fact. It has been for many years already. It's a matter of some urgency to address this issue.
Fortunately, I'm optimistic about this, search engines together with PagesJaunes is doing well. 1.7 billion searches in 2021. What does this mean? Well, it means that the content is relevant. It means that searches are satisfied. The direct audience, the reflex to consult PagesJaunes is suffering at the moment. This is the whole purpose of our 2022 strategy. We need to reconsider PagesJaunes as an ultra-local media for businesses. Our sales channels. Now to move on, what's the situation there? Telesales has demonstrated its ability to adapt. It's extremely agile, and this is outstanding. In the first quarter of 2021, telesales continued to achieve client migration towards our subscription model. Then as we proceeded, the source dried up necessarily.
In just a few weeks, a few months, telesales performances in terms of upsell and cross-sell have increased threefold. Telesales performance in terms of acquisition have increased twofold. This shows huge versatility on the part of the telesales teams throughout 2021. This is all the more impressive because they contractualized 80% of new clients over a 24-month period in keeping with what was set out in the strategy. Now regarding field sales, the snapshot that we have here is varied. The hunters have met their targets. They are exactly on target as compared to expectations in terms of productivity, in terms of new clients, and in terms of ARPA, the average basket. The model works very well.
However, when it comes to more traditional field sales, and this is not new, not taken by surprise here, we're going to have to help our sales force, many of them over 20 years, focus mainly on contract renewal. We're going now to have to train them to help them adapt so that they can go out and get new customers. We have a picture here that's good on one side, less so on the other, but overall optimistic. Then regarding 2021, we met a capacity problem. It's clear that if we do not have our sales force on board, then we sell, yes, less. We had to deal with very high turnover, particularly in the second and third quarters of 2021, which is a problem. I will come back to this when we talk more about strategy.
Recruiting has to be well thought through, prepared, and planned beforehand, and this is what we're doing now so that we can have good achievements in 2022. Now, are we creating value? After all, this is what counts primarily. Fundamentally, the question is, is our business on the right track? Some more good news. The average basket is growing. It's grown by 2.8% as compared to 2020, and this is really good, but better still. The average acquisition basket is higher than the average basket lost, and this is what we need to focus on because this highlights two features. First of all, our ability to target the right prospects, the right customers. We need to have a prospection base that is based on quality analysis, and we need to focus on high-value customers. We need to retain those customers.
That's what I have to say about this first part of the presentation, which is, as you have seen, extremely positive, and I will now hand over to Olivier Regnard.
[Non-English content] Thank you, Hervé, and good morning, everyone. With the ARPU up to EUR 1,330 , we now have revenue of EUR 428 million for financial year 2021. This is effectively stable revenue, as Hervé discussed, after roughly 10 years of negative growth. This is the fruit of three consecutive growth quarters, so this isn't just a one-off. Q4 is at +6.4% versus Q4 of the previous year. This ties into a base effect that was in our favor. A very important takeaway today, as Hervé said, is that subscription sales account for 89% of our new orders. That rate is plateauing currently. As you remember, some of our big accounts, some of our largest clients, subscription-based models don't necessarily meet their needs the best.
Going forward, we're no longer going to be telling you the percentage of new orders that are subscriptions because 90% is likely to be our plateau. What does this mean for revenue? Well, you may remember we have three types of product. We have our Connect range, we have our Booster range, and we have our Website range. As a reminder, Connect is our digital presence product line. We invested heavily in this since 2019. We have our Booster range, which is the range of products that is related to our priority product. A Booster Contact is included in this. This is advertising and digital marketing. The Website range, as I'm sure you can imagine, is the production of websites and selling websites. Performance by revenue is very different depending on the range you're talking about.
The first range, Connect, is growing strongly, and that is due to two facts, the significant investments that we made in that range dating back to 2019, and also it's an excellent range for customer retention. Everyone needs to be visible online today. We have no professionals who simply don't care about being visible online. It's important for absolutely everyone. That is key, and that is what explains the strong growth dynamic we're seeing in that range. The Booster range is down about 8%, though, and there are a number of explanations for this. First of all, this is the range that is the most exposed to PagesJaunes, and this is why we're looking at media investment in the PagesJaunes brand this year and moving forward. That's the first thing.
Secondly, digital marketing is probably the range that has the least attractive retention rate. Finally, this is the range where we're putting our big accounts. Right now, our offering has not been entirely revamped in the same way that others have. This is the range that we're going to be investing in in 2022, so that we can deliver a product that better meets the needs and expectations of our big customers and to fill out that Booster range. Revenue comes out 1.1% lower than the previous year across the three ranges, Connect, Booster, Websites. I forgot to mention one thing, -4% on Websites. You may remember that we had negative base effects. If you remove the negative base effect, the Website range would be slightly up versus the previous year.
As you remember, revenue is kind of in the rearview mirror for our business, whereas the order backlog is how we look forward. We're currently at EUR 243 million. Those EUR 243 million enable us to, today, secure revenue for 2022 for EUR 207 million. Those EUR 207 million are comparable to EUR 237 million from the previous year based on the same indicators. There is a drop, and I'm sure you remember because this can be a little bit complex to understand, but our change in model changed the logging dates for our backlog in the order book. In the past, when the salesperson signed the contract, we would put an order in the order book.
Now, when that offer is renewed, it is renewed at the beginning of the service date that order is logged in the order book. This is simply a record date effect that accounts for EUR 26 million, and that's why the secured revenue is down from EUR 235 million to EUR 207 million this year. The order book is slightly down versus September 2021, and that is related to what Hervé discussed, with less of a sales force than we expected and a little bit less forward motion than what we had at the beginning of the year. Let's come back to the pure financial figures for the financial year of 2021. As you may remember, in 2021, we divested Codeco and Mappy. We turned the printing activity to discontinued.
On this slide, you can see the pro forma results without the Codeco or the Mappy contribution or the contribution of the print business line. A drop of EUR 432 million to EUR 428 million, with EBITDA at EUR 121.5 million in 2021, which is in line with what we predicted, what we had in our guidance at the beginning of the year. How do we explain EUR 115 million to EUR 121 million in EBITDA? As you remember, in 2020, we had a significant drop in our expenses and some positive collateral effects as well. We had a base effect that was EUR 13 million against us this year, as you can see in the presentation. Actually, that EBITDA comes from two things.
First of all, revenue, which is slightly lower than what we had last year, EUR 4 million on gross margin. Investment was also significant for media spend, and the product mix was slightly adjusted, which was a further EUR -4 million on our margin. All of that was offset by significant drops in personnel costs and external costs for EUR 4 million. This is how EBITDA is up from EUR 115 million to EUR 121 million, despite the EUR -13 million base effect. Behind that recurring EBITDA, you'll find EUR 9 million of non-recurring effects. Some of you may be thinking that non-recurring effects are quite rare. People generally put that in expenses.
This is simply the decoupling of all of the provisions that we set up for the social plans in 2018 and 2019. As a reminder, overall, these cost about EUR 225 million. Right now, pretty much all of the money has gone out. We only have EUR 1 million left to spend. So we have absorbed the legacy financial provisions that we had in our books for that. Amortization is down EUR 5 million, EUR 60 million there. Out of that EUR 60 million, a reminder, we have the CapEx amortization and also bonds which are booked compliant with IFRS 16. This is simply due to the efforts we've made to reduce CapEx over the last three years, and that is how operating profit is up from EUR 40 million to EUR 71 million, like for like.
EUR 49 million to EUR 71 million, excuse me. We're now at EUR 28 million negative in expenses. This is coming from EUR 20 million in cost of debt, EUR 4 million for interest on bonds, of which are booked according to IFRS 16, and then non-cash amortization restructure costs. Of course, this is non-comparable to the financial results from previous year, which was in the positive, but this comes from the accounting mechanics for the financial year. This means that before tax, profit is down, but not really comparable like for like versus the previous year, which is in line with the profit for 2020. EUR 19 million of corporate tax in France. These EUR 19 million include EUR 2.5 million of CVAE and also the revision of the tax rate downwards, which is good on our bookable deficit.
Profit, EUR 28 million, EUR 23.5 million at the end of 2021. As I was explaining, CapEx was drawn down over the last three years. As you remember, we committed to you, we committed to our main shareholders to reduce CapEx to less than EUR 35 million, and that's something that we've now achieved with CapEx that has been drawn down to EUR 34 million for the financial year 2021. This drop comes from less investment in product as we had heavily invested in 2019 and 2020 in revamping our product line, and that is what enabled us to achieve the good financial results elsewhere. That is where we mainly cut costs.
We also invested on go to market in parallel, and that's something we're going to be continuing to do in 2022 as part of our strategy plan as we presented in October 2021. Dropping CapEx and an increase in EBITDA parallel to an improvement in our WCR means that our cash flow situation, our recurring operational cash flow is EUR 72 million versus zero last year. You know that I'm a big fan of WCR variation. It's core to our business, and the WCR variations, especially related to the client side, had a significant impact on us back in 2020, as I'm sure you remember, because our backlog had collapsed and our revenue was delayed. That means that there was a disconnect between revenue and the money coming in.
That created a gap for WCR, about EUR 70 million for the client WCR in 2020. This year, that WCR has been reduced to EUR -10 million, which is much more standard, which shows two things. First of all, our WCR is now stabilized. We're losing some old customers who used to pay significantly ahead of time, and we're getting some new clients who tend to pay much nearer the beginning of the provision of service with higher ARPA. Higher ARPA means that the payment is generally made in 12 blocks rather than a single payment. Our management of cash flow this year comes from the improvement in working capital requirement. The other WCR items are the other component. As you know, we had accrued some debt.
We paid back EUR 5 million this year, and that's included in the other WCR items, in part due to the VAT rate in 2021. The recurring operating cash flow has enabled us to fund non-recurring items such as continuing to pay off PSE 2019 and 2018. To date, we only have EUR 1 million out of the EUR 225 million that we had provisioned from the beginning. Financial profit, EUR 13 million. As you remember, for the bond side of our debt structure, we had a spike in the first year, 4% cash, 4% spike, which explains that on the normal EUR -22 million financial burden, we actually have EUR 13 million this year. Corporate tax is EUR 6 million.
This is the IS tax with EUR 3 million CVAE, and this is simply because we're using the delayable debt that was built up during 2018 and 2019. This means available cash is EUR 40 million versus the EUR -75 million from last year. Out of those EUR 44 million , you need to take away the payment of debt. Remember the revolving credit facility, we paid back part of the BPI debt and EUR 2 million were paid back for the WCR line. Other payments are just rents that were paid and are booked as part of the IFRS 16 standard. All of this means that we have a positive cash position for 2021 of more than EUR 80 million with a net change in cash of more than EUR 18 million.
This is a very comfortable situation for the group. What does this mean for our debt structures? I'm sure you understand, the net debt is down from EUR 195 million to EUR 175 million in 2021. We are at a 1.7 x financial leverage ratio, which is relatively low, and a coverage ratio of 5.3% ISCR. This is effectively the headroom that we have with our bankers. 75% of the interest average coverage ratio and 52% for the leverage ratio. There's another thing that I know that a lot of investors are very attentive to this year, and this is something that we have been looking at for a number of years. This is ESG performance.
Our ESG performance is based on four main pillars, society, governance, social, and environment. Now, I'm not gonna get into the details of each of these legs to the table, but it does seem relevant to discuss at least each of them a little bit. By society, we mean we're fighting against desertification of city centers and also facilitating everyone's access to services. One of the highlights of this would be how we've been able to achieve better accessibility for the visually impaired on our websites. That's something we've done. On the governance side of things, we have some significant challenges, and we are very cautious about ethics and data protection, GDPR, health and safety. Significant investments have been made and will continue to be made on all of these components.
Another thing that's going to be important for us going forward is going to be our sourcing policy that, we want to tighten up and make more responsible. That's how we're going to improve it. For the social side of things, we are going to continue to support the transformation of our business. As you know, Solocal has changed significantly over the last couple of years, and we're looking to support people throughout this through training, as Hervé discussed. We're talking about training people, training our staff. That's absolutely fundamental to what we do, and we've invested a lot in that too. Finally, for the environment, of course, recycling waste is a part of this. Electronic waste, non-electronic waste. This is very important for us, and it's something that we've been committed to for a number of years now.
The next challenge is going to be reducing CO2 emissions for our car fleet with more than 700 cars. This process is something that we've been a part of for a while now, and this has led to some grades and certifications, Gaïa being one of them. We have an 80 out of 100 score on the Gaïa rating. We are third ranking out of 30 in our sector. That's a nod to the processes and the efforts that we have been able to make on the ESG side of things in the last years. I'd now like to give the floor back to Hervé, who's going to give us an update on the strategy plan that was presented in October 2021.
Thank you, Olivier. Yes, I would like to now share with you our strategic plan as presented in October 2021 and see where we're at the moment. Let's begin with a presentation of the business model of Solocal. The question that arose is, what model should we be supporting? What is it we're about? One of the Solocal's priorities has been to develop its B to B to C model. Because what's Solocal about? Well, it makes available to professionals digital solutions that can put them in touch with consumers. By definition, this is a B2B2C model, by definition. But at the same time, PagesJaunes, our proprietary media, requires that we manage the whole community of internet users, and that's a B2C business model.
Our model is very sophisticated because we need, w e see that there's more complexity, but there's also a huge strategic bonus to be gained from this sophisticated model. We reached the conclusion that our business model at Solocal is double, it's dual. This means we cannot have a trade-off in favor of one of these two communities at the expense of the other. We need to take care of our B2B2C strategy, but not at the expense of our B 2 C strategy. We have to protect both because one feeds into the other and vice versa. This is our day-to-day business, and this really sets Solocal apart in terms of strategy and business model from so many other companies. As you remember, in October 2021, I presented the plan and the various components of that plan for 2022 and 2023. It's made up of three core pillars.
First of all, we need to focus much more on our sales strategy. Secondly, we need to rebuild trust with our customers, of course, the professional and business customers, but also with the end users, the internet users who use the PagesJaunes media. Finally, and this goes almost without saying, that we realize that we have to continue with constant innovation, our principle, which is to constantly offer new digital solutions. Where are we at the moment? Let's begin with the sales strategy. The sales strategy is made up of four components. First of all, geographic deployment of the sales force. Secondly, a performance management system within the sales force. Thirdly, training. Fourthly, a toolkit to help the sales force sell more. We've made huge progress on all four.
First of all, when it comes to the rollout, as I mentioned in October, we have a new national sales director with two new regional directors, and a third is being recruited as I speak to you. For the business channel, which accounts for the most volume, we are up and running. Regarding performance management, it seemed to us obvious that we needed to rethink our pay plans. We couldn't continue with pay plans that dated back to 2014 and were out of date. It was a priority to have a pay plan that is in keeping with the priority on subscription, as decided. This is done, and it's now up and running as of the 1st of January 2022. Regarding HR achievements, as I told you, I wanted to emphasize training.
Since October, more than 300 members of the sales force have benefited from training. Furthermore, as you know, we're currently in a recruitment phase. Our plan consists in recruiting 140 new sales force over the first quarter. We've already got to more than 100. It's going well. We are recruiting. We train, and we make sure that a new member of the sales force is accompanied, is trained. They have five weeks training before they go out into the field. Then, of course, we have to assist and help our sales force. We have to make available to them the whole gamut of tools that they need to fulfill their mission. First of all, a contact plan. Where should you go? Who should you be meeting? What kind of customer should be looking at?
Artificial intelligence needs to be made available to our go-to-market. This Connect plan is now ready, and the sales force have it at their disposal. The second pillar for our 2020 - 2023 strategy is what I call the trust compact, and we need to rebuild trust first and foremost with our customers. I said in October that we were working at the assessment of our customer experience. Did we understand customer experience? What are the pain points in the customer journey with Solocal? We've been working on this. We've continued with this analysis, and as you can see here, we've identified two critical events. First of all, prior to the sale before the contract is signed, we need to work on this.
We need to be much clearer, more explicit, and we have to help our customers to take on board and use their digital solutions. Then the second pain point, critical point in the customer journey is post-sales information about how to use the digital assistant. Any queries that our customers might have regarding the billing, the content of their bills, update of content, these are all features that have to be improved. They have to be upgraded, and we will be working on this over the coming weeks and months. What I would like you to remember is that during this customer journey, the product itself doesn't come under criticism. It's the sales and commercial environment that requires more investment on our part. What are we going to do about it?
Well, we're going to take what I've called a phygital approach on this road to trust. First of all, a physical support. There is nothing better. We want to have human interpersonal relations between the customer and the service provider. In 2022, we're going to set up CSMs, customer success managers, which will provide customized support for new customers. They will help them in the installing and taking on board the products, the services, the solutions that they have bought from us. The second feature, there will not be just a support for new customers. We need to look after existing customers, and we are going to have customer care managers who will handle questions and queries and concerns about existing customers. We need to do this faster. We need to be more attentive to their needs, to their questions and queries.
All of this is customized and personal physical support. I don't think we communicate enough. This is my conviction. We do not showcase the value added that we are selling, value creation that we're selling, and this is why we're going to set up a huge plan for reporting for all of our customers. 100% of our customers should know, should recognize how effective or not the digital solution they bought actually is. We need to strive for transparency, information about the payoff of the investment they've made with us. This is vital, and we're going to begin with the site and the Connect offering. Then gradually, we will roll out our dashboarding.
Road to trust with our customers, of course, but also road to trust with the internet users, the people who visit the sites, and who have the bright idea of looking at pagesjaunes.fr. We want to provide better service still for them. What does this mean in concrete terms? It means, first and foremost, that we need to enhance, we need to incite all of internet users, all of the customers to enrich and improve the content. The content is the key to success. The content for our customers, of course, but for all businesses who are registered on PagesJaunes at the moment, we're going to encourage them to update their opening times, to improve their photos, to upgrade their products. Internet users must find what they're looking for when they need it and to help them take their decisions.
Is that in and of itself enough? Of course not. We also need to continue to improve our algorithms. We're currently changing our search engine. It's done. The one we have now is really optimized. It's the best on the market in terms of artificial intelligence. This means that very rapidly, we are going to be able to position our professionals as best possible on the PagesJaunes media. We want to continue to be more and more transparent in the data that is provided. Professionals labeling is something that we are going to be showcasing over the coming weeks and months. Well, why are we doing all this? We're doing it because our ambition is to create a label to distinguish best professionals on PagesJaunes. This is our ambition because we believe that it's important to create an environment of trust for users.
PagesJaunes needs to be valued on the French market. That will be possible if internet users realize how very useful it is for them, if it benefits them. The top of mind has to become the driver of our action over the coming weeks and months. We're not going to stop there because in 2022, we're going to roll out a media campaign on a very broad and ambitious scale, probably in September. All of which will enrich and feed into a better positioning of PagesJaunes as a search engine for ultra-local searches and business. Moving on, the third pillar, innovation, the offering, Olivier has mentioned this. We really want to take the market by surprise, and we will. First of all, with the advertising range. Currently, it represents more than 50% of our revenue. It's lopsided, if I can put it that way.
The advertising range at the moment is carried mainly by our search engine expertise. We get advertising campaigns on Google on the PagesJaunes. In the meantime, social networks and display represent 50% of advertising investment in France at the moment. Solocal only has EUR 10 million of revenue from those sources, social networks and display. What we want to do in the first half of 2022 is to launch a fully rounded offering, search engine, social networks, and display. We want to do this in a completely seamless manner. The second offer at large accounts, Olivier mentioned this, we need to catch up and accelerate our performance on large accounts. Let me remind you that Solocal is the leader for large accounts. We have more than 800 large account customers.
We need to continue to provide them with a good service, and above all, to make sure that we are giving them the very best of what we achieve and deliver. We are currently a machine that organizes a centralized presence campaign, but most of our revenue comes from ultra-local VSEs and SMEs. We need to work also with the large accounts, and technically we are going to change the rules and we're going to offer our customers a mix of ultra local and central. This is something that's going to be coming out at the end of the first semester, 2022. Finally, this is something that I mentioned when I presented the strategic plan. Data. Data is an activity, an expertise that we have here at Solocal, but we're a broker.
We have addresses that we offer to our customers for them to organize direct marketing campaigns in the form of SMS or emailing. We have our own data. If we manage to enrich what we broker and also what we have ourselves, then we can become a data editor, and then we will be much more relevant. This will enhance our relevance, and this is our ambition for 2022. This is what I had to say at this stage regarding the rollout of our strategic plan. As you can see, we are on track. We are making good headway and moving forward. By way of conclusion, I would say that 2021 has been a year of transition. Solocal has undergone changes in terms of governance, changes in terms of management. This has not been easy, it has been complex.
At the same time, it should be noted that despite all those changes, we have delivered on our guidance, and we have, above all, maintained flat revenue. I would say this is a year of transition, but it has been a very useful year. We've switched to a subscription model. This is now completed. What are our key priorities for 2022? I think that I have presented these already, but I will reiterate, we want to strengthen the sales force team and the commercial strategy. We want to have better knowledge of our customers and have better customer satisfaction. We're going to invest heavily in this, and we are going to continue to innovate and to come up with the digital offering of the future. We can confirm our guidance.
Financial results, which are comparable to 2020 in terms of revenue, EBITDA, and operating free cash flow. This is a year that came to an end on an up note. The team is raring to go, and I think that I have been able to demonstrate that we are looking to the future with great optimism. Thank you very much.
[Non-English content], Hervé. [Non-English content], Olivier.
Thank you, Hervé. Thank you, Olivier. Moving on now to Q&A, starting with the room. Otherwise, we have some questions online.
Good morning. Are you maintaining your guidance for 2023 and 2024, especially for top line EBITDA and operating cash flow?
Absolutely. Yes, we formally confirmed our 2022 guidance because that is part of the procedure for annual result announcements. As Hervé said, we are on track to achieve the targets that we set and that we announced to the market in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Mid-single digit growth for revenue in 2023 and 2024. Mid-teens growth for EBITDA and more than EUR 80 million in free cash flow in 2024.
Eric Blain from Finance Connect .
I have a number of questions for you. First of all, you presented a pie chart that showed that 10% of your business volume was related to companies of more than 10 employees. That's volume, but what about revenue?
These are mainly our large accounts. I couldn't tell you exactly how much it is. Do we have it? A little bit more than 20%. The large accounts are, for us, about 15% of revenue and the smaller companies of more than 10 are about a further 5%.
More than 10 people, 10 employees counts as a large account?
No, our large accounts are the large networks. Renault, Castorama, Leroy Merlin, et cetera. However, a company with 20-25 employees is going to be assigned to our in-the-field category.
These are categorized based on ARPA potential, actual ARPA about EUR 2,500-EUR 3,000, and any large accounts start at EUR 7,000. The SMEs are nearer EUR 500-EUR 1,000 in ARPA. Just to help me understand your guidance for the year, you're expecting stable revenue, which seems to make sense. Stable EBITDA as well, and you've put in a good performance on EBITDA this year, looking at the figures through drawing down personnel costs. What are expected changes in personnel costs? i.e., are we expecting further gains based on restructuring plans, employee inflation, and can you tell us about headcount?
We did have a good performance in 2021 for cost management. We're going to continue to keep an eye on things going into 2022. However, we're not expecting any further significant leaps in personnel costs for financial year 2022. The main reason for this is that, as Hervé discussed, we had a lack of sales force capacity in the second half of this year. So yes, savings, but actually it's not a very healthy saving to make because it means that we weren't able to achieve the kind of sales figures that we otherwise could have. So we're going to be reinvesting in 2022 on that sales force capacity while also controlling our costs. There will be a little bit of employee inflation because as you know, for us, as for many others, inflation is on the rise. As to outlook, I think that comparable personnel costs is to be expected.
How about headcount? As a follow-up question, you didn't have any slides on headcount.
As it stands, the spread for the central functions and the sales.
Yes, it was in the appendices. Okay. A final question, just to not take up too much time. Your investment campaign. Generally, this kind of thing doesn't improve margin rates. What kind of budget are you considering?
Yes, exactly. This is a choice that we're making. We're looking at about EUR 5 million.
Still keeping CapEx under EUR 35 million? Is that including the EUR 5 million?
No. We're not counting advertising campaigns as CapEx, and we're going to keep our CapEx within the same envelope in 2022 and moving forward, as we mentioned during our strategy presentation in October.
You say comparable cash generation. Is that net? 'Cause you're not going to be able to improve WCR as significant as in the past.
No, absolutely. If you look at our cash flow graph with stable EBITDA, WCR variation is going to be similar. This means that the bottom line should come out pretty much the same. Tax is going to slightly increase, it's true. It's going to be a small increase. We will have fewer non-recurring items because the social plan will be over, but we'll be paying a little bit more financial interest. All in all, we should be in a relatively similar situation to this year with our cash position that is improving, but not hugely.
What? EUR 20 million?
Yes. Yes, the net delta for cash. No, our cash position is EUR 80 million. Free cash would be similar with ups and downs on each side, but it's likely to be comparable with slightly higher taxes. We haven't given any specific guidance on this, but it's likely to be similar.
We have a number of questions on debt. Given the good results, do you think you can renegotiate your bond debt? And are you considering banks as a source of money?
No, we're not thinking that we're going to renegotiate our debt structure. If we were to change our debt, it would be through refinancing. You know that until March 2023, we have a no-call clause that applies, so no refinancing. However, we are getting ready to seize any market opportunities from March 2023 onward to refinance our debt.
As to whether that will be through bonds or bank debt, from our perspective, right now, it's likely to be bonds, but all options will be on the table when that time comes. We'll see what kind of decisions we make, and it'll also depend on the market conditions as that is going to be the deciding factor from March 2023 onwards. What kind of window of opportunity we will have to optimize our debt situation will be decided then.
Are you looking to further increase capital through debt?
Not at all is the answer.
A similar question, are you considering bringing back dividend, and if so, when?
Our bond debt does not allow a dividend right now, not at this kind of leverage ratio. Right now, no, we're not looking to get back to a distribution policy as was the case a long time ago.
Nothing in 2022, nothing in 2023. When the debt gets refinanced, then the dividend policy will be a key part of our bond renegotiation process.
Something on the implementation of the P plan. Can you tell us what kind of deal was signed with the sales force? What is it, and when will it be implemented?
This is an agreement that's been drawn up, that's been signed, and that's now rolled out. Since the first of January 2022, our in-the-field sales reps are managed and incentivized based on the plan. The P plan aims to match the strategic plan that I presented just a few minutes ago. By matching, what I mean is emphasizing sales towards new clients rather than legacy sales. The big change is the weighting of new customers in the sales business.
Secondly, we have the speed of the P plan. This is a monthly set of targets for some targets and quarterly for some others. Alongside Eric, we wanted to give rhythm to the P plan and not wait until the end of the year to find out what's going on. Right now, we have performance criteria that are assessed at the end of every month, and a couple of them are assessed at the end of the quarter, but that is now rolled out and in place.
A follow-up question on vertical B2B. Can you come back to that? Is this related to the large account?
Not at all. B2B at Solocal means, let's say, an entrepreneur in industrial cleaning for small local companies. We're talking about a small company working for other small companies.
That's the vertical segment as we define it, B2B, which is very different from our strategy for large accounts. I would like to remind you that that business segment, as we define it, has 1 million professionals in France in it.
A question on current trading since the beginning of the year, especially the customer base.
No significant changes. We are currently six weeks into the financial year, so I don't have much more information for you at this point, but we haven't seen any significant shifts up or down at this point. It is worth saying on current trading that the hiring plan and the strengthening of our sales force is well underway, and the first people as part of that plan are already with us.
I think that shortly we'll be back up to our target capacity and for current trading, that's probably the most important thing that's going on right now and what we're being the most careful about.
A few questions on Xavier Niel's purchase of local.fr. I take that acquisition as very good news.
Xavier Niel isn't a bad investor to have on board, and he's very reliable. The market is very attractive right now. Solocal is a leader. Having competition and pressure is good, 100% good for us, but I have duly noted that investment is moving towards ultra local right now, and I'm very happy for Solocal for that.
A few questions related to the subscription model, with a number of shareholders wondering if the customers are fully informed on their obligations, their duties as part of that, and whether the churn rate hasn't led to some arms being twisted.
Okay, there were a number of questions there. That our customers are fully informed? Probably not. We have seen recently that the first cohorts of subscriptions that were set up in 2019, may have not been fully explained to our customers. It's something that we're experiencing right now, and it's starting to become evident now. That's something that we need to be very careful about, and very careful about in the coming months and years. That being said, I don't understand the relationship between churn rate and the fact that they weren't properly informed. It probably would have been the opposite with the churn rate dropping.
We might have customers who right now are surprised at having committed to 12 or 24 month periods. That's why the presale period needs to be a key point of attention for us. We need to make sure that our customers are fully informed of the ins and outs of the contract that they're signing. Seeing as you asked a question about Xavier Niel and local.fr, everyone works with a subscription base nowadays. I think the subscription base with the automatic renewal will become standard in our market. Yes, we still need to explain things. We still need to raise awareness with our prospects.
Maybe a final question on customer satisfaction or maybe customer dissatisfaction. Can you see any shifts in the trend?
To be honest, right now, no. However, we are starting to see and understand the driving forces behind dissatisfaction that we're working with.
I think that before you can improve things, you need to have a solid diagnosis. You need to understand why people may be dissatisfied. We've explained them today. We've got them in the forefront of our minds, and now we have a strategy for customer satisfaction that will be rolled out in the next weeks.
We have no further questions.
In that case, thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for giving us your time this morning, spending your time with Solocal. I'd like to wish you all an excellent day.