CFO Harald Popp, who will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your question directly to the management via the chat box, not the audio line today. Having said this, I hand over to you, Mr. Popp. Please, the stage is yours.
Thank you very much, and thank you to the audience, to the investors. I really welcome you, and I'm very proud that we could have a first English earnings call today. This was a wish of the English-speaking investors. We had a German language call this morning as the main base is still in German-speaking, but interest is coming up from the Anglo-Saxon area. We decided this year, first time ever, to do an earnings call in English. We will see the preliminary figures, which are not approved yet, but they are not expected to be changing materially. The final report, the final figures, will be published on March 21st this year. We will now discuss and present the key figures from the first financial year, and also we'll discuss our expectation for the current fiscal year and a little bit beyond.
As I know that most of you are in the equity story, we will not go into detail so much concerning the equity story. We will talk more about the figures and why we are confident for this year and what makes us successful the last year. As the moderator told you, it will be now around 30 minutes. I will present you the figures, the key figures, some reasoning, and then afterwards we have another 30 minutes for questioning. Please take advantage of it because it's important for us to see what questions do you have, and perhaps I can explain a little bit further and deeper when I did not explain it in the call. First of all, my name is Harald Popp. As you know, I'm the CFO and founder of SERVICEWARE together with Dirk Martin, our CEO.
Yeah, let's start. Before we go into the figure detail, I'd like to share our vision again with you because we do think that it's important to understand why we have this vision, since when we do have this vision, and what really changed with a turning point in 2023. This vision is a long-term vision. Before the IPO, it was a long-term vision that we digitize the service processes and let cost savings apply to our customers if they use our ESM platform. There was a turning point at the beginning of 2023. There was an outcome or the publishing of the commercial use of a big language large language model, the ChatGPT from OpenAI in early 2023.
Therefore, we had a central addition to our vision, and that is important to know because it changed a lot since 2023 in terms of how we see the market, where we have to go, and of course, technically, what will AI bring us. We did a deep insight, and also this quotation from our equity story from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He said he was asked what kind of industry will be affected a lot by AI, and he said, well, this will be the service economy, and there will be less people. We have more digitized processes and an increase of productivity. The money that goes into this area will be multiplied by 20 by the end of the decade, and also the automated interaction will be leveraged by a factor of 20.
Therefore, we had this, or we were looking into this topic with artificial intelligence long before. It is not a buzzword, what you see here. It is really something we started right after our IPO in 2019, and we can look back to long-term AI expertise. The AI team in Darmstadt, it is now seven years of experience, and a lot of decisions we made during this course since that time were influenced by the University of Darmstadt in discussions with really intelligent guys who came partly from the university now running our AI Lab. This is very important for the future. We come later on to the AI Process Engine. This is the first big outcome of these seven years, and I will talk about it later.
Our goal is to be one of the winners of the AI revolution, and we have a very good chance of emerging as a winner in the AI development because we did start the topic in 2019 and not since the publishing of ChatGPT in early 2023. What made us successful last year? This is the last slide before I come to the KPI figures, but I think it is important to understand what the two core elements last year were to be successful. This is also two core elements which will bring us further beyond 2025 and so on because it is something that has just started, this AI revolution. One core element is, of course, the internationalization, which took up speed after slowing down with Corona and so on. We are now in a good position.
The pipeline is full, the international pipeline, and also the second core element of our strategy and the driver for revenue, but also for profit, is the innovation through AI. That makes us very optimistic for the coming years for 2025, but also beyond. When it comes to internationalization, you could see that we were winning large customers with multi-year SaaS contracts in different industries. All kinds of industries can be named where our customers are in. The latest ones were construction, banking, logistics. We have also multi-supplier. You can imagine these kinds of companies in Germany are struggling a lot right now, but they are not quitting the contracts the other way around. The other way around is a fact that they will now invest more in our solution to get cost transparency and to save cost. Also, the regional positioning is quite good.
We showed in the U.S., in Asia, and in Europe that we are able to sell our products, that we were competitive against the big American players. I think it is also important to know that we are well set for this AI race coming up. When you migrate from a license model to the SaaS model, you know that the deals which we are talking about are not in the P&L so far in the income statement, but in the balance sheet. Recurring revenue has to be released by performance date. As I do a SaaS day today, you will see the revenue in the P&L in the future and not today.
This was different with license deals, and that is a little bit the fact that we are struggling in the last year with the earnings, and also it was lowering our growth potential, but we are coming to an end. We are in the migration, but we will see in the future years that this will be better and will affect our growth rate in revenues, but also our growth rate in profits in a positive way. When it comes to the success of the AI-first strategy, then a lot of concerns the last seven years took place, and we learned if you want to leverage AI in full, it's not the best way to attach AI to old software architecture, but to really build the software from scratch and put AI in the center of the architecture.
That is what we did one and a half years ago after having built up this AI Lab in Darmstadt. We decided to really make an AI Process Engine, which is now fully born in the cloud, and it has AI in the center, and we put the software around in six quarters. Since the beginning, we had a double-digit order income in this new model, in this new software, and also international customers raised interest in knowing what is the AI Process Engine about. We are here in a pioneer situation because if you compare it to other software vendors, they are now adding AI to their software, but so far they did not start to really develop, from our knowledge, a really new product with AI in the center of our architecture.
We have a good starting position for national and international sales, and that is what drives our performance last year, and this is nothing which will stop this year. This is going to 2025 and beyond. Let's look to our performance. We see here that we reached, and this is a very important thing for us because it was something we announced to our employees, I think, back in the financial crisis in 2008. The revenue of the company was about EUR 17 million, and we said by the end of the decade in 2020, we want to be a $100 million or EUR 100 million company. It took a little bit longer, and we realized that on the way to our 100 million by the end of the decade, and then we decided to push a little bit more speed into the growth.
We have to do an IPO, and what you see today, and that is what makes us very proud, that we have more revenue than EUR 100 million. This is also internally for the company was a big milestone. We celebrated it a little bit, and that is a 12.8% increase of revenues. This is on the upper third of our original guidance, which was 5%-15%. We adjusted it to the upper half by autumn this year. Again, the growth driver is the SaaS and service revenue, which grew by 22.1%. This is also something which is very interesting because a lot of investors always asked me the last years, well, what is the part of services and what is the part of SaaS in this line? We had this line since the IPO.
This year, first time in our annual report, we will publish, we will split off, we will give the information how much service is in this line, and you will see that this dropped over the last years. The original growth of the SaaS revenues is much higher than 22.1%, and we will forward this to the coming annual report so that we show more transparency because investors ask for this transparency. The EBITDA and the EBIT line is also in line with our expectations. We did not reach the positive EBIT, but we did a tremendous step in the EBITDA, and this is important for us. Next year, we should really see there a positive after all profit so that we are after tax and everything, we are positive. That should be the goal.
We are close by because we get also from the cash position a big interest back, and so the minus EUR 320,000 is a little bit better, closer to the zero when it comes to the very, very low line. Also, I want to focus your attention to the recurring revenues, which is now a share of nearly 80%. I have been asked, Harald, what do you think? How will be the limit? I guess it will be higher in the following years, as you can see that contractual liabilities are higher. We come to this to the next slide. What is also important, I think, is that we generated a good operative cash flow in this year.
From this nearly EUR 12 million of growth, you can see that we converted into operative cash nearly EUR 10 million, and that shows you that we can generate cash as we did it before we went public. Here is the slide with some more KPIs. We decided to show you not only the cash, but only cash equivalents, which raised by nearly 20% from EUR 28 million to EUR 36 million. You do not see it in the cash position only because we decided for risk reasons to adjust or to put money in different baskets to be resilient if ever a bank gets in trouble. Therefore, we have about, I think it is about EUR 9 million in really long-term good-rated government bonds to park the money, but to also have the liquidity in two days if we will need it. We have this risk spread, what is important.
The equity since a long time absolutely grew a little bit. That is also a change. You see that the balance sheet total is a lot. It grew by 24.3%. This is mainly to the contractual ability, which grew by 45%. That leads to the point that the equity ratio is down, but absolutely we have more equity and also the contractual ability is a sign of what we did this year. Because as you do SaaS and recurring revenue, you know that this will not be released in the profit and loss account immediately. It will be released in the contract liabilities, and this is secure revenue for the future.
That gives us also confidence that in challenging times, we have a good backlog to release revenues despite the fact how hard we will be affected by our core market, Germany, where we still have nearly 80% of our revenues. That is what I said is reflected here. Perhaps you look first of all to the contractual liabilities on the right-hand side. It grew by 45% again. This is a leading indicator that should tell you, did we do business or not, and how much business did we do beside the growth in the P&L and the revenue side? You see we have now EUR 80 million of contractual liabilities with a strong growth. This is future revenue that will be released after November 30 .
If you ask me, what will be or was released from this 55.4% from last year, you can see that this is a wave that is getting higher and higher. You see that we nearly now with SaaS and service revenues are at a level of EUR 70 million of SaaS revenues. This is, as you can see, with 22% still the growth driver and will be the growth driver for the future. Yes, we are still in the process of migrating from one-off to recurring. As can be seen in the fact sheet, the inflow into the balance sheet is far higher than the outflow from the balance sheet. We are not in a swing state. Anything we do in growth mainly goes into the balance sheet and not to the profit and loss account.
This is something that is normal for software companies which migrate from license to SaaS. Here we have some more financial figures, KPIs. You can see the split of SaaS, maintenance, and licenses. You see that our HR costs were stable over the last three years. If you see a little peak in 2024, there is some provision made which can be released perhaps next year partly. This was something our auditor asked us for. You can see directly in the last three years, we have a positive track record on the right-hand side concerning our EBITDA and EBIT. Since our after IPO life, you see it is the best result we achieved so far, but we are confident that there is more to come.
As we now try to fix, not fix, but try to lower our growth rates in cost terms, but try to enforce the growth in revenues. That will, of course, then lead to higher margins, what we are focusing on the next years. Also keeping in mind that we have to grow and that we have to grow a significant growth rate in terms of revenues. Here are other selected KPIs. You see on the left-hand side the recurring revenue. We have already seen it. It's up 24%, so a higher growth rate than the CAGR we saw before. The non-German revenues grew faster than the national revenues, and that is important. As I always say, the favor of our company lies in the internationalization because the customers are bigger, the margins are higher. The more international business we do, the more profitable growth we will see.
As now the German revenue and the non-German revenues grew much larger or much more than the German revenues, we are on a good way. Please keep in mind that this is only one part of our international business because the other part was put to the passive side of the balance sheet in the contract liabilities. There is more to come in the following years. You can see that we have a turnaround also in the cash and cash equivalents position. As we are generating operative cash again, we will expect to follow up this path 2025 and further on. Always important in recurring revenue models is what is the churn? We define the churn as a number. There are a lot of definitions I know and the cohort definitions.
I learned a lot from you investors because you always tell me, well, what is about the churn rate? Please explain me. We try to keep it very simple. What we calculate here is how much EUR or $ are quitted a year in comparison to the volume. If you have EUR 100 or $100 in volume, then 3.2% means that you lose this of this volume, not taking into account that you do more business because you have more customers, that you're losing 3 point this year or last year, we were losing just from churn EUR 3.20. This, I think, is still a low rate, especially if you think about what we are doing behind the scenes with the AI Process Engine and so on. I also do not worry about the equity ratio.
As I said, the maximum, the absolute equity in absolute ways raised a little bit. This should be going on next year. What do analysts think about our share? They have updated the guidance. Especially Quirin sent me after the morning call a new buy goal. It is a little bit larger than the 25. Also Montega, after the roadshow in Hamburg, I had in the beginning of February raised their goal, their price goal to 21. These are prices you can realize if you talk to investors in the U.S. or in the Anglo-Saxon area. They say that this can be a fair price and therefore I take this very seriously. You see the main shareholder structure is still constant since the IPO. Dirk and me are earning together 62.8%.
This gives stability to the company because you might have seen that some companies in the stock exchange were taken private in the past, but with a stable shareholder structure the likelihood is not happen or the likelihood is lower because we see much more potential than the analyst quotes you see today. We are expecting more mid-term and long-term for the company. What will be the outlook? Before I come to the outlook, I will again focus a little bit on the growth drivers, which will help us to achieve this guidance and to give us optimism about the current financial year, but also about the future beyond 2025. With optimism in Germany, it's a little bit difficult right now.
As we do 80% of our sales still in Germany, I think you have to be a little bit careful because you do not know what this concentration in a comparable weaker market compared to international markets will bring. We still have an optimistic view on our future service development and beyond in 2025 and beyond because the most important lever, as I said, in the future is internationalization. The international pipeline is filled very well. My colleague, my CEO, Dirk Martin, and the COO, Alexander Becker, went in the first half of February to our partner, Merriwell, to see what deals we can do. Is the pipeline really hard or is it not that hard? They came back with an optimistic feedback.
Of course, this international pipeline, which is filled very well, has a positive impact on the sales and the earnings in the future. Do not forget the tailwind from the contracts we have already signed and which are not in the income statement, but in the balance sheet. This is also something that makes us confident and optimistic to expect a further increase in sales despite difficult market conditions. Since one year, the circumstances worldwide, but also especially in Europe, are more interesting, so to say. We have to focus really that we are taking into account what happens and being better. AI will be a sales and earnings driver.
We will focus also now on the AI Process Engine, which I have said, which was well welcomed in the market with double-digit order income since the 1st of December, where we have this live or marketable. We will see that we have national, but also international opportunities with this AI Process Engine. Our goal is that the cost will develop flat. With rising sales, this should lead to the positive earnings development in the future. Saying that, I come to the guidance for the fiscal year. We expect another 5-10-15% earnings, sorry, revenue improvement for the next year. Of course, I got some feedback last year. This is a bright range. Couldn't you narrow it?
We were guided by this guidance to avoid with a high confidence interval to go back during the week to during this week and tell you investors, well, it's not going to be or it's going to be a lower guidance. We are very confident with this guidance and there should be a likelihood that we can, as we did it last year, to adjust it to an upper range. Let's see. We started quite good in the first quarter. I think there is room for improvement, but we want to be safe not to do some warning during the year. With this more challenging situation, we said despite the fact we are expecting more, we will be conservative in our guidance. Also we will see a better EBITDA and EBIT level compared to previous year.
This is very important because when I go back, then I must say that let me check it here. Yeah. Where am I here? Sorry, I did not see the doesn't work anymore. Yeah. The next slide, please. Okay. We have to face the fact when we come to the EBIT guidance that we had to capitalize our development cost for six quarters. We stopped this by the end of November as the product AI Process Engine is now up at market and we don't have to do it anymore. I know a lot of American companies do this capitalization of R&D costs. We don't like this. We want to have it in the fiscal year, but we had to because we developed a brand new product. This is over now.
Therefore there will be no cost relief anymore for EUR 1.7 million of last year is stopped. It will also affect a little bit the EBIT because since 1st of December, the depreciation started and will affect the EBIT. Nevertheless, we do think that we can show growth in EBIT and EBITDA. That is most important. Therefore we are confident for the reasons I told you. Thank you very much for your interest, for your time. We are now about to switch to the question and answer mode. I am happy to receive a lot of questions because it shows me what you learned about this presentation. Thank you very much.
Yes. Thank you for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. You can submit your questions in our chat box and we will read them out.
We already have some questions. We start from the top. I would say operating cash flow was very strong. Was there one-offs in here or is this a level that can be considered a base to grow from?
Yes, I think the second part is the reality I will expect for the future. As you might know, we get cash when we sign the contract. Cash is always first and then we put it to the balance sheet and it comes to the income statement. Therefore, letting our SaaS recurring business grow, we can expect a good conversion from revenue to cash. Therefore, it is fair to say that that can be considered as a base to grow from. I did not say that next year it will be again EUR 9 million because it is a little bit complex to really forecast this.
As you know, that it depends a little bit how the deal comes in. If the customer pays one three years in advance or just a quarter, that affects a lot the cash flow statement. As I can see how it went last year and we had no one-offs or additional things, I think it's fair to consider a base to grow from.
Thank you. Yes. We move on to the next question. How did the gross margin develop in the second half of 2024 and what were the key drivers of this development?
Yeah. I did not have the KPIs of the gross margin, but it developed from my knowledge in line how we saw it.
As you know, our ESM platform, especially in the German market, often comes with some products because we have smaller customers who want us to implement their cloud services and so on. It comes with cost of goods sold, especially the national business. Therefore I say the international business does not come with this additional business. Therefore the profitability in the international business is much larger. The key driver is really for this cost of goods sold. First of all, if you do a new SaaS contract, then you have some cost in advance, which has to be acknowledged in the cost of goods sold. As we try to outsource also our service business to partners to enable them to sell the software worldwide, we are selling services from other vendors. This goes also into the cost of goods sold.
For the future, the more international share we see from the revenues, the higher is the gross margin in future. This is a direct function and that's the reason why we focus on international growth.
Wonderful. Thank you. We have two questions from one participant. The first one is, can you give us some insight in your U.S. pipeline?
Yeah. Of course, it's always like this that we cannot talk about names and logos because companies want to have it unsecured and they don't want to see, want to get relation. As I said, Alex and Dirk were in the U.S.. When they came back, we had a meeting and I said, is there potential more we see after your visit? Is it really hard a forecast or is it that we do think there might be something coming up?
They acknowledged me that there is a real good forecast, a good quality, much more logos than last year. Of course, this pipeline, we started this in 2019, the pipeline or the international pipeline, and it melted away in 2020, 2021 because of Corona. The good thing in Corona was that you now are able to sell your software and your services and your SaaS revenues virtually. You do not have to go there. Also, it is important to have this U.S. partner because the most feedback we receive from U.S. customers, well, we did not know that such a cool software is existing. Merriwell is helping us to make the brand SERVICEWARE available and noticeable in the U.S..
We took a lot of effort to think before we entered with an agreement with a partner how we can be successful in the U.S. market. Because if you take a look inside for many software companies which took the step, some of these initiatives failed. We learned about this. I think for our way to the U.S., it is really the right way to do it with Merriwell, who is one of the best partners of our American competitor, Apptio. As you know, they were bought by IBM. Merriwell was reaching out for a second step or a second level to rely on to also be a software and SaaS seller in the U.S.. That helps a lot. The EBIT, I take this question because I see it was also a little bit weaker in Q4, yes.
That had main two reasons. One reason was that we had to do some provisions and they could come back in the new year to partly offset. This will hopefully support us in the next year, but the auditor asked us to do so. Secondly, we had some currency issues which were valid in the date of the balance sheet on 30th of November. You might have noticed that the U.S. dollar, after Trump was voted in the U.S., was very strong. Our liabilities, which were booked on the passive side, were not that value anymore. Meanwhile, despite the dollar price is the same, we bring that up again. I think it was just a valuation topic for this special day. I do not expect to go this further. As I say, we want to be better in earnings this year.
That is the fact that we and we have to earn at least EUR 1.7 million more because the relief is not there from the capitalization of our developing cost. Therefore, you can expect that we return to old levels of EBITDA and EBIT to achieve our goal to see a better EBITDA and EBIT by the end of the year.
Thank you very much. That was actually an answer to some of your questions in the chat box. I would kindly ask you guys to remove questions when they are answered so that we can move on. We have another one, which is pretty interesting. Any interesting ideas to use your cash pile?
Yes, that is the most question I received so far in roadshows. As I see of all, I'm pretty comfortable with the cash.
I know as an entrepreneur, and I'm also an entrepreneur, I know holding cash is not the best way to improve our earnings. It gives us a lot of flexibility to decide on our own without any help from outside what we do with the cash. One could be, of course, another add-on for our ESM platform so that we see technology which fits very good in our ESM platform. There are one or two technical things we are looking on and we are looking to inorganic growth, of course, every month. As we have a lot of opportunities and we put the focus on organic growth, we look at these inorganic chances. If there is a good perfect chance, we will take. Therefore we will use then the cash we accumulate.
Right now, we do think that to focus on the organic international growth is much more valuable for the company than now buying a not very good fitting asset into the platform. This is also a topic which is on our book. We have to, of course, find answers in the next quarters what we will do with the cash because we are not a floor manager to distribute cash. We allocate this cash very securely that it does not go away. As I said, we put something to the governmental bonds with a very high rating and in many baskets. We have this and we are comfortable with it to use it when it brings the best value for the company.
Thank you very much. We have one participant with three questions. The first one was also about the Q4 EBITDA.
We can skip that actually. We move on to a question which is further on. The salary costs increased approximately 7% in the second half. How do you expect this development in the full year 2025? Maybe you can refer to the operating costs which increased sharply in the full year 2024, and if you expect a similar development.
Thank you. Coming to the HR cost, it was very flat. You see there were about EUR 700,000 more in the last fiscal year compared to 2023. That has something to do, I just mentioned it, with the provision we had to take.
In the times where we were not successful in 2022, we wanted to bond some of our employees to the company and therefore said, well, if there will be a time and some measures are met, of course, and one measure is the earning level, then we might pay you back this bonus we did not pay out in the year of 2022. This was one part. It was something not in the term. You can expect that we start rather from a level of 2023 than a level of 2024. Of course, we are looking especially in sales and in marketing. We have a leg here to invest to be more relevant in the international market because that is a little bit undermined or a little under focus. I think our social sales and marketing, there is a space for improvement.
Therefore, we will see or we will invest some money in it. On the other hand, we got a lot of efficiency through using AI internally. Therefore, I expect on the other way to offset some of the more cost and then to be nearly stable. Of course, there could also be a little growth, but the plan is to be as stable as possible for the growth in HR cost. The tremendous growth, of course, in the non-personal cost and not in HR cost, yeah, where topic from, yeah, still it sounds a little bit silly, but we really came back from Corona beginning of 2023. So 2023 and especially 2024, where in the age of post-Corona, we visited a lot more our customers anymore. We are big fans of physical meetings and not doing too much in Teams.
Therefore, the travel cost raised a little bit more. We had more traffic, more activity in visiting our customers. Also, international travel cost raised. Therefore, we saw this rise. We tried to keep it in a limit for next year to really elaborate more on the EBITDA and the EBIT.
Thank you. We have a question. How much did you increase prices and how much was upsell to existing customers? What is the new customer growth?
Yeah. Yes, with the inflation, we had a good argument to increase costs, and especially as we have a very big bonding in of our customers. Once they are on our platform, it is very sticky and very hard to leave our platform because AI data and processes are renewed in our platform.
If you quit with our platform and go away, then you do not, you might have AI with ChatGPT, but it's not related to your data which was stored for over years in the platform and also not to our process. You cannot copy data and processes out of the ESM Platform and transfer it by a mouse click to another vendor. Therefore, our customers are very bonded and the software is very, very, very sticky. That is the reason why we do think that we could have the chance. We did this to rise prices, but the main focus in growing our revenues was new customers and of course, customers winning in 2023 and now coming the contracted liabilities into the income statement.
Thank you. We have a pretty detailed question. I'll read it out to you.
You added close to EUR 12 million in sales, but only EUR 3 million in EBITDA during 2024. Your guidance is for a similar improvement for 2025, but with stable HR costs and high gross margin software sales. Why should we not expect more of sales growth to fall through to the EBITDA?
I like to be on a conservative positive side when it comes to the guidance of revenue. As we shown last year, there is potential. Yes. This guidance was discussed in the board and the majority felt positive about this guidance. Knowing that there is also the likelihood of upbeating this guidance, I would say personally is much higher than somehow downgrade this guidance during the year.
To be on the safe side and what we see in 2022, when we had to make the profit warning, the effect of this profit warning was so much more worse than really what happened. It was around some money, of course, but it was not that the value of the company was breaking down so much. I mean, in our size, with our liquidity in the share, you really should avoid adapt or changing your guidance to the lower. You better do a guidance which you can do better during the year because that helps you on a long-term track in evaluation in the company to see a higher valuation. Therefore, it was more a conservative move to put this. Of course, with this contractual abilities and the opportunities to see internationally, there is a big potential, of course. Yeah.
Thank you.
I would kindly remark to the participants that if anything is answered meanwhile, then you please just remove your questions for a better operational statement. Thank you. We have a question. How long can ARR growth keep growing faster than sales growth?
I think this will be the case until the date we are run through the transition. In my expectation, we will reach a level of recurring revenues, as I said, 80%-90%. Of course, the SaaS growth determines the overall company growth. I expect, of course, that the license revenue and also the maintenance revenue will go down, especially we started in the first, or we started in 2025, an additional initiative to move our maintenance customer to SaaS customer and to demand an uplift from the yearly fee because maintenance is just software insurance and support.
SaaS makes so much more because you get a fully configured solution and just getting credential and use it. This is a big value for our customers. Therefore, we can demand more money when we migrate our maintenance fee to SaaS fees. With the existing customer, we started this approach just this year because now we have really with the new AI Process Engine, the platform which is born in the cloud. Before, it was a software which was decades old with an old architecture. Now we have really this architecture which can be scaled up. We have also for big, large customer environments a solution to put them into the SaaS mode.
Thank you. We move on to the next question.
What is the current portion of contract liabilities and what is the spread between current portion of contract liabilities and contract assets?
Yeah. The contract liabilities will be divided into parts, a short-term part and long-term part. The long-term part is much smaller and it contains durations up from 12 months from the date we put it in the balance sheet. The contract liabilities, the long-term will include terms or invoices which reflect the date 30th of November 2025 and further on. Months 12 and ongoing further. The short term, which is the majority of the nearly EUR 80 million, is the majority. This will be released between December 2024 and November 2025. As I said, the release of this money, of this EUR 50 million, will be offset in the growing business.
There will be more getting into the contract liabilities because the long-term contract liabilities will come shorter. They come into the short-term contract liabilities. The long-term contract liabilities will be fed up with new deals, but also the short-term. I expect this figure to grow and make our business model more resilient in the future as the value of contract liabilities is growing. I cannot really deal with the word contract assets because I do not know what exactly is submitted there. I know the contract liabilities, which is a very important KPI for us because it shows what business we did in the fiscal year. Therefore, we look at this and contract assets. Perhaps we can dig deeper there because I really do not know what it is about.
Thank you. We have some more questions.
Concerning the time we have left, I will move on to the next one. What was CapEx tangible and intangible and lease payments in the year?
Yeah, very specific questions. I wanted to focus on the main KPIs and I do not have any numbers as they are not final in mind. Before I tell you some figures which turn out then in the annual report differently, I cannot really talk about these specific figures. As you can see in the cash flow statement, it has developed very well. Of course, there are, beside the operative cash flow, which was nearly EUR 10 million, we had some negative cash flows from financing because of this IFRS topic 16, I think, where you have to capitalize your lease and your rental costs and then write it off.
Secondly, from paying back some bank loans, this will be stopped by the end of the year. There is EUR 1 million left, I know, which has to be paid back. Then we have no bank credits anymore. We can show a lot of good conversion to free cash flow. That is something to expect, that these two cash flows are negative besides the operating cash flow. It turns out that we strengthened our cash position, as you could see. In total, we generated cash also when you take the investing and the financing cash flow into account.
Fair enough. Thank you. I'll move on to two participants with their questions who did not put any questions before. Can you say something about how the average duration contract length for the SaaS business?
Perhaps if you could give some more color around forecasting EBITDA improvements, is it as possible to narrow that similar to revenues range?
Yeah. The second question to narrow the EBIT guidance, I was asked this in the morning call as well. It's a very complex thing to do a forecast for us when it comes to the bottom line because at the end, there is an auditor who has to sign the annual report. He has all the IFRS knowledge and says we have to do it like this and this. We do it over the year, of course, with him together. By the end of the year, everything will be checked. Therefore, sometimes this auditor asks us to do some things I wouldn't do because I would say this is not something necessary, but from the rules, we should do it.
Therefore, it's very difficult. We always work on that to narrow this guidance. There will be a day, I'm sure, where we can tell you it's in the range, the EBITDA and the EBIT in that range. Being at a zero level, it affects a lot our EBITDA when, for example, EUR 400,000 provision has to be made because then it leads to the point that you are negative. It's a big difference if you're negative or positive. Therefore, let us work on the probability to a certain level. Then the EUR 400,000 or EUR 500,000 provision, which comes up, doesn't matter anymore in terms of being precise in the percentage way. Therefore, it will come, but it should take a little bit of time. It also comes with levering out the level of how much SaaS revenue is now in swing state.
I think when we are at 80%-90%, then it's easier to forecast because it's more secure. This was the second part of the question. Could you just, I forget the first part of the question, repeat it? It was about the contract liabilities, right? I can't hear you. Sorry. I can't hear you.
I'm sorry. That was a question about the contract duration length.
Yeah, sorry. Normally, standard is three years contract minimum. We also see customers after the second or the third year, they prolong to five years. As you can see with the churn rate, there are customers with us for 20 years or more. We have this internally, this view, and it shows a number of about four and a half year duration.
We are looking at this because it also will help us to better forecast the profit in the future because this exactly determines, for example, this is one reason how the profit will develop.
Thank you. We have three more questions, and we have come to the end, but I will post them if it's okay with you. Can you elaborate on the ESM financial performance knowledge business shares in the SaaS service revenue line now and their respective growth rates?
Yeah. The financial performance part is a part we do internationally so far, and that will take a big focus in the international business. Therefore, the growth rate is much higher than the overall growth rate coming from a lower level. In recent years, we saw growth rates about 40% year- over- year. Last year, it was lower than this number.
This is something we do internationally. As we want to see the growth there, this will grow. When it comes to knowledge business, this is also, as we did buy the knowledge product in 2019, it was born in the cloud company with a high share of SaaS. When we bought it, it was very unprofitable. They were making a lot of losses. During this time since now, it shows only this area from knowledge. It shows profitability, which is beyond the point I have as midterm goal, 10%-15% EBIT margin. You can see if you have a full swing, then the profit is coming. This was a smaller part, which was growing over the last years.
Where we have seen some decrease is not very much, but slightly in terms of the portion of the overall revenue was the processes business. As I said, there was a trigger than the large language model from OpenAI or the AI topic in whole to bring us to the point to build this software very new up from scratch around AI. Therefore, we expect here for the future because we also see international interest that we will, in our expectation, see a growth pass again. That is the reason why we think overall that it will grow. When it comes to the split off, I think as it is a fact that all ESM products contribute mainly to the SaaS line. Therefore, there is not really a big difference how they contribute either in license or in SaaS.
Of course, I said there are products like knowledge, which have higher SaaS shares because we have this old history of the processes product. Last year, we had a big license deal because a customer who is 25 years on the platform decided to roll out helpline or SERVICEWARE Processes, not as an AI Process Engine, into another country. He was on the license model, so he bought licenses. That is something to change. I think the younger the products are, the more accessible or the more SaaS portion will go into the SaaS line.
Yes, thank you. We will now move on to one, I guess, final question from the participant who put the upcoming question.
With European and German business shift toward SaaS-based solutions, do you see more German ESM customers willing to buy cloud-native ServiceNow at the cost of local players like SERVICEWARE? In the context, how do you convince your German ESM customers to stay with SERVICEWARE?
Yeah, the step was made in the past. Now we have to put it on the road. We did develop a really hot product, which is really cutting edge. As I said, we built the software around AI. I did not know any of our competitors who did this. They put AI to the software, but they did not do a new product from scratch. I think that brings us in a good position. There is a reason why we did not move for AI Process Engine for international business because ServiceNow is very dominant. You can see worldwide.
If we have potential in the financial and the performance area to grow internationally, why should we put a focus on that? That was a meaning or that was an opinion until last year. Now, as we can see, that customer asked actively for the AI Process Engine internationally because ServiceNow is more expensive, because it's perhaps in the terms of configuring it in terms of AI differently. There might be a chance not only to sell internationally financial and performance, but also as addition or cross-sale the AI Process Engine. Therefore, we have good arguments also nationally. Twenty more order incomes in the last time since 1st of December. I think this is a strong message that shows that there is a product on the start, which can be a game changer and a good success for the future.
Thank you.
We have two or three more questions. I would ask you, Mr. Popp, if it's possible that we stay longer in the call to ask answers.
It's very good. I like that you have shown interest.
So wonderful. We move on to the next one. How much?
Let's go for the last few questions. Yes.
How much third-party product SaaS sales does the company do?
Yeah, this is a figure we do not disclose. If you read the analyst reports, I think you get some more insights. Also, if you see how the cross-margin is developed and it changes, of course, what I can say is that the business model did not change in the IPO. Therefore, it's fair to expect the same when we are through this migration to expect the same margins. We do not yet publish this split.
Of course, in all products we sell and all solutions we sell, we have in equal the same ratio concerning SaaS and one-time revenues.
Wonderful. We have one question. You are now going to split SaaS and service revenues, and it looks like the pure SaaS revenues grew up above 30%. Do you expect SaaS to continue this growth rate going forward as well?
Our goal is 20% plus. 30% is in reach, yes. I am away from promising that we will see a 30% year-over-year growth rate. What we see is with the contract liabilities that a lot of recurring revenue is coming in, and that is a growth driver. We also see that the other business is going down or switching to the recurring revenue. Therefore, I can imagine that the growth rate will be at least 20% or more.
If it's above 30%, I don't know, but it will be more taken into account that the business is in, and we just have to release it. It's just a matter of time that it will follow up in the income statement.
Thank you. We have one more question. When new customers sign up for the new SaaS contract, is it usually for one-year term or what term is it customers usually sign up for?
No, normally it's a minimum of three years. This is easy to sell because the customer also wants to have a security in the investment.
Normally, after the first or second year, they come back and say, "Well, please, let's prolong from three to five years because we see that the value is there." We rather now prolong to save the price and not face a price increase after three years. Therefore, the minimum is three years, and it's no doubt that the customer will do it. Therefore, when a customer comes, it comes usually with three years following up longer time when they see really what value they get from using our software.
Great. Thank you. We move on to the final question of this call. What is growth of contract receivables?
Yeah, this grew, of course, as well. For me, the growth of the contract receivables is not the important figure.
The important figure is the delta between contract liabilities and the contract receivables because that shows exactly the cross-margin carried forward after the balance sheet date. That grew from last year's EUR 17 million to this year's EUR 25 million. There are some figures I did not show I have in mind because they are very important for me to see that there is a higher margin in the balance sheet, which grows every year. It came from EUR 10 million. After that, it came to EUR 17 million. Now, this year, it will be EUR 25 million. That shows that there's not only revenue in the balance sheet, but also deferred, yeah, raw margin or cross-margin you see there. Therefore, I'm looking exactly at these figures. I have this always in mind because it shows me if there's just revenue coming in or if there is profitable revenue coming in.
The second thing is right now the fact.
Thank you very much. We have no more questions in the chat box. We come to the end of today's earnings call. A big thank you to you, Mr. Popp, for the presentation and taking your time to answer all the questions. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. I wish you all a lovely remaining Friday. With this, I hand over again to Mr. Popp for some final remarks.
Yeah, we are honored. I'd like to thank you for the interest to take part in this call, to place so many questions. That is fun, really, because that shows me that you're interested. I think now it's the time not to sell the share.
We are not at the end of our story with the AI thing. It just began to reach the new level. Especially PE funds are very active right now, but I can assure that these prices are much higher. I expect more to come. It is a good investment now to invest in SERVICEWARE because we expect more to come and to see a higher service value in the future. Saying that, I hope I convinced you to stay at the share and be comfortable. If there is any question furthermore, please reach out to me. I am more than happy to answer them. Thank you very much for your time and your interest this morning or afternoon, depends where you are. Thank you very much. Good luck and have a great weekend.