Hello and good morning to everyone listening to this webcast of Admicom H1 Results and Great Summer. We're happy to be here on July 9th to start the results call for Helsinki-listed companies. I'm the CEO, Petri Aho, of Admicom, and together with me in the studio is our CFO, Satu Helamo. Nice to be here with you. We have a few analysts with us as well, and then on the line, some listeners, hopefully, and you will have a chance of asking questions as we go through the presentation. Our agenda today is pretty much similar as we have done earlier, so I will begin by discussing our strategy execution during Q2, and then Satu will continue deeper into the Q2 financials, and then we will follow with the Q&A as stated.
This morning at 9:00 A.M., Helsinki time, we released our financial report, and the headline of the report was that the growth continued in Q2 despite the lower annual adjustment fees, and EBITDA improved to 38.4 percentage points. That is happy news. I think the market is quite in turmoil, and kind of the annual adjustment fees stemming from the volume revenues of our customers from last year were coming down, so we were actually quite anxious about whether achieving growth during the Q2. But we managed to do it, and at the same time improving the EBITDA margin as well. So I think that's a pretty good execution from our part. To those of you who might be listening to us the first time, I will go shortly through our strategic phasing and where are we in our transformational journey.
We refreshed our strategy from the beginning of 2023, and we have been now executing the Focus for Growth phase of our strategy. This strategic phase was aimed to be about two years length, where we are strengthening the platform, bringing together the different products that we are having, improving cross-sell technical integrations, and also building up a joint culture and Admicom brand for our products. Of course, this was planned to coincide with the recession in the construction field in Finland right now. We are now, of course, moving towards the end of the Focus for Growth phase, and we hope that during 2025 we are able to start the accelerated growth phase, where we aim to reach a growth level of 15% organic ARR growth and similarly increasing the EBITDA margins.
And this we hope to reach with, of course, having a better competitive position in our home market and protecting that market, but also widening our international presence to markets outside of Finland, and by producing, obviously, superior client experience to our customers using our solutions in the construction sector and/or the building sector. That's pretty much our strategic phasing and what we are doing. A reminder of the current product portfolio that we are having. We are, of course, very much known for our very comprehensive ERP solution, Admicom Ultima, previously known as Adminet, which is a very comprehensive end-to-end solution for managing both operations and financials in the construction sector SMB companies. We do have a suite of other solutions as well. Some of you might remember that part of them are based on the Tocoman acquisition from 2020.
For example, Admicom Estima, a quantity and cost estimation tool. Admicom Planner, a very comprehensive scheduling tool. Admicom Insight, Admicom BIM3 are from that acquisition. And that we call a project management suite. In 2022, we acquired Kotopro, which is today called Admicom Vision, which is a field documentation tool for gathering and producing information from the site in real time. Then we have a product, ERP product called Hillava, which is now called Flex, Admicom Flex, which is a fieldwork management and building maintenance operations ERP solution. And our latest acquisition from this year's January is Admicom Trackinno, which is an asset management and maintenance solution. And together, these solutions form a very powerful suite that is our strategic intent to more and more bring together via integrations and complete positioning. And of course, together this covers pretty much the whole lifecycle in the field of construction.
We are serving mostly SMB customers in the Finnish market, but also the large enterprise-level customers are using some of our solutions, for example, these project management tools that I mentioned earlier. There we have a very wide enterprise usage. Speaking of our customers and customer experience, I want to present you a very fresh customer reference case from a Finnish company based in Kuopio, Lämpövelho Oy, which is an HVAC company doing plumbing and such things with EUR 6 million revenue and 35 employees. Their managing director, Miska Rissanen, stated in the reference that you can see from our website that he has personally saved about 30% of his own time, which has enabled them to grow as he has been able to put more focus into the growth operations and sales in their company.
At the same time, of course, streamlined and made real-time visible lots of things that used to be paper-based and covered by partial solutions that they were earlier using. They have lately also moved into the Tempo scheduling software, which is a new software tool that we released in last spring. They are stating that they are very happy with this development. During April, they took into use the new dashboard, which is a combining view into all of our products. He hopes that by gathering this view there, he's able to have a much better visibility again into his business and providing access via web solutions, cloud-based web solutions also to his subcontractors. I think this very well highlights the strategic intent that we want to have.
We want to enable productivity of our customer base by having real-time data, by combining the data seamlessly so that you don't have friction between the data. You don't have to worry which data is correct, which is not, but you have one data in one place and you are able to analyze it. That's also the reason why this Focus for Growth phase and integrating the solutions further together. As a nice side note, Miska might be also listening to us because he stated in the reference call that he has also acquired some Admicom shares to his own company because he believes in the company so much. So if you are listening as an investor, Miska, thank you for that trust as well and happy to have you as a customer.
Okay, but that as a background and then moving more into the Q2 and where are we in our business wise. So our ARR, annual recurring revenue, growth was 6.7% year-over-year. We managed to have a reasonable new sales given to the market and especially in the project management solutions, the sales were really good. Generally overall, the deal sizes were smaller, but we had more cross-sell. But maybe as a kind of considering the growth, the kind of the small deal size has been a matter for us during this H1 overall. So we are able to close lots of new logos, but the deal sizes are not on the level that we are accustomed to. And that, of course, leads into smaller growth rates as we go further. The other matter affecting our ARR growth is, of course, the amount of contract terminations.
There we continue on the positive trend that we saw in Q1 already. So the amount of insolvencies is still very high, but the amount of contract terminations, excluding those, is showing a positive trend, meaning that they are going down. Insolvencies overall form still a quarter of total terminations from Q2. One sort of very interesting deal was the large contract with a Swedish construction company that is operating internationally in the Nordic countries. We managed to close a whole suite deal with our project management solutions, meaning the cost estimation, scheduling, documenting solutions. And the company plans to take this into group-wide use across all of the countries where they are operating. And they are also very keen on sort of having a partnership approach where they would like to push these solutions also into their subcontractors.
So we hope to see maybe a positive possibility for organic growth via a customer, which of course typically is a very nice route for internationalization. So interesting developments on that area. Additionally, in Q2, we kicked off our Admicom sustainability work that is aligned with our purpose of building a sustainable future together, and of course will be responding to the CSRD reporting needs. In that area, we also are quite interested about the possibilities for helping our customers to reach their CSRD reporting requirements. Lots of that data will come from the tools that Admicom is providing. And as we are piloting this ourselves, we will have a way of helping our customers also to reach this and provide easier access to this reporting data. Finally, to wrap up the highlights, I mentioned in the beginning that our EBITDA margin improved to 38.4%, which is an increase.
We've been in an investment phase for some quarters now, but at the same time, because of the market conditions, we have maintained pretty strict cost control and been looking very carefully on where to invest and where to not, and that led to a positive effect at this stage. And Satu, of course, will discuss further, but like stated in the beginning, the annual adjustment fees came down, so we had sort of headwind coming from the history coming from 2023, and that's the most of that effect comes into Q2, so that's good to bear in mind. Speaking of the market, this is a slide that we have been showing in our presentations earlier, and of course the situation still is that the construction sector in Finland is weak. What is the interesting question is that are the volumes now returning back to growth track?
When we look at this chart from Statistics Finland that has the latest numbers from May numbers, we can see that the decline is easing all the time. And of course, that's very interesting to see what the June numbers will be once they come out, but definitely there is a sort of clear progression, at least in the depth of the recession or how deep will the numbers go. Of course, it's clear that the market is still pretty dormant and it's not like a booming market in any way in the near coming months, but we are sort of hopeful that towards the end of the year things will start to look better. And it's good to remember that from our customer base, there are SMB companies that are quite flexible in looking after either new build projects or renovation projects.
So, once now the new builds are pretty frozen and will remain for some time still, these companies are transforming into renovation projects and into the renovation side. Of course, there will be constantly work ongoing. And now with the interest rates coming down, I think many of the residential building companies and so on need to start executing on their renovation projects. So that's where we are seeing this slight progress going forward. Good. I think that wraps up now. That doesn't wrap up yet my part. So what's next? This is actually exactly the same slide as I used in Q1 presentation. So what are we aiming to do right now? And of course, good to state that nothing spectacular has changed in our progress going forward. So what we are now aiming to do is we are setting up for accelerated growth during 2024.
We are setting up in order to reach the accelerated growth in 2025. What it means is that we have already brought into the market these things that we have shown with the check mark. We brought in the customized dashboard SSO for the suite. We will follow up with some other modernizations during the fall. We have a joint go-to-market approach. We have increased cross-sell. We are actually very positive on the AI developments that we have been able to do and hope that during fall we will see much more progress in that area. We have done the first M&As in this strategy period. What is still open is, of course, our mission of becoming international. There we have stated that we look for acquisition as kind of the priority route for opening some other market outside of Finland. That work is ongoing.
Of course, it's not a black and white thing that we need to do M&A by the end of the year, but we are looking for opportunities and executing that. I also mentioned that we are looking towards the market improving by the end of 2024. Still, of course, we are in a recession as a market and the short-term priorities are clearly inefficient sales, churn prevention, and we will continue cost control until we start to see sort of the market picking up speed and can be confident on that. That's how we plan to go forward during the fall and then maybe a deep dive into numbers. Satu, thank you. Thank you, Petri.
So the adjustment fees, they have now been mentioned a couple of times already, and there's a clear reason for that because the second quarter is when we invoice the majority of the adjustment fees based on our customers' 2023 revenues. And also we recognize them in our income statement at the same time when we invoice those. So now that we have had our customers' revenues somewhat declining, or at least some of our customers have had their revenues declining from 2022 to 2023, we have now a negative impact in our growth rates from the adjustment fees. But despite this fact, we were able to deliver our growth of 6.7%, which is a number that we are quite satisfied with. In the recurring revenue growth and revenue growth, we have more modest numbers, and also there we have the adjustment fees impacting the growth rates.
The comparative period growths in recurring revenue and revenue, they still contain inorganic impact from Kotopro acquisition that was made in June 2022, but in ARR we don't have any impact from that anymore. In profitability, the adjusted EBITDA that is also mentioned in the headline of our release, that was 38.4%, and that is an improvement from the comparison period. And obviously, the revenue growing impacted also the profitability, but also we have a little bit more capitalized development now that we have been able to shift our R&D focus more on the new technologies and AI. But I would also like to mention that our whole organization is doing an excellent job in managing the costs in a very reasonable way. So that's one key reason why we were able to deliver a good profitability this quarter.
The year-to-date customer churn was 3.6%, and for those who remember our year-to-date figure from Q1, that was 1.8%. Basically, first and second quarter were pretty much identical in churn. We have said it in our previous commentaries that we expect the churn rates to start improving towards the end of the year. This was pretty much in line with our expectations. As previously, the recurring revenue is the majority of our total revenue. 94% of all the revenues that we have are recurring in nature. Moving on to a little bit more granular view of our key financials. The Q2 we already discussed quite in detail, but maybe one additional comment related to EBIT.
So in EBIT, we have—or the Q2 EBIT is below the comparative period EBIT—and the main reason for that is that, as a non-IFRS company, we have amortizations for our goodwill. And at the end of the year, we changed the amortization period for Kotopro goodwill, and also when we acquired Trackinno in January, we have some additional goodwill amortization from that. And one last thing about Q2 is that we don't have any adjustments, so we didn't have any material out of ordinary items in our P&L in the second quarter. Then if you look at the quarter-to-quarter variance, you can see that Q2 beat Q1 in almost all of the key financials.
There's a small dip in ARR related to the adjustment fees, but basically Q2 is typically better in terms of profitability and growth for us because we do invoice the majority of the adjustment fees, which boosts both the revenue and the profitability. Then finally, the first half, we managed to grow our total revenue by 2.6% and recurring revenue by 4.3%. Profitability is slightly below last year's first half, and this is related to the strategic investments that were made during 2023, and they are now fully in the cost base. For those who have been viewing our past two quarterly releases, the next two slides are already familiar to you. So first we have here the ARR trend. The growth was now impacted a little bit by the negative impact from our annual adjustment fees.
Maybe worth recapping here that when we calculate our ARR, we take the rolling 12 months impact into consideration. So that means that the really high Q2 that we had a year ago, that has now been dropped from the ARR calculation, and the new second quarter now replaces that one. The second largest quarter for us in terms of the adjustment fees is the third quarter. So we do expect the adjustment fees to be lower than previous year also in the third quarter. Then in this picture, you can see in more detail the elements of the ARR, so what led to the growth. And a couple of things to highlight here are that if you look at the new sales number, EUR 1.4 million so far this year, that is almost half of what we made in 2023 in total.
If you look at the upsell, we are now at EUR 2.3 million, and the full year of 2023 was EUR 2.5 million. I think this quite nicely visualizes that we have been more successful also in our cross-sell this year. The upsell comes from all the products, and partially it's adding users to the existing products, but also we have been selling new products to the customers who were previously using some of our products. This quarter we brought to your attention our cash position. We wanted to highlight that our cash flow and cash position are both really strong. Obviously, we distributed dividends in the first quarter, but basically our cash position is increasing month by month. Our net debt is also declining. We still have a little bit of debt left from the Kotopro acquisition, but the net debt ratio is improving constantly.
We also have a really strong cash flow, and basically our operative cash flow and free cash flow are almost identical, which means that we have quite little CapEx in our cash flow. The cash conversion is also really high. Approximately 80% of our EBITDA is converted into cash on an annual basis. There's a little bit of fluctuation between the quarters, but basically that means that our EBITDA minus taxes is fully converted into cash. And then another thing that maybe differentiates us from our peers is that despite the fact that we have now started to capitalize a little bit more of our R&D costs, the majority of the costs are still recognized in the P&L. So on the left-hand side, you can see the EBITDA as share of revenue, so basically the relative EBITDA and also EBITDA deducted with the R&D CapEx.
If you look at that graph, you can see that they are almost identical percentages. On the right-hand side, you have the absolute R&D CapEx amounts. The reason why we are capitalizing more is that we have now been able to shift the R&D focus more towards new technologies and AI and can support further capitalization. So the projects that we capitalize, we expect to see cash flows from those in the future periods. Finally, a recap of our 2024 outlook. We expect our ARR to grow by 5%-10%. We expect our total revenues to grow, and we expect our adjusted EBITDA to land between 32%-37%. The outlook remains unchanged. Also, the drivers of the outlook remain pretty much unchanged. We have added the price increases as one of the growth drivers here this quarter.
The reason why we are not changing our outlook is that, as mentioned previously, the adjustment fees will still continue to bring headwind to us in the third quarter. So we are still believing in this 5%-10% ARR growth at this point. I think this concludes the financials, and now giving back to Petri.
Thank you, Satu. We are quite confident on the guidance that we gave from the beginning of the year. As we expect that the kind of the worst part is behind us, hopefully, then we can start to focus on the actual growth. As a reminder, why to invest in Admicom? We are a profitably growing vertical SaaS platform for the building ecosystem.
I think we have really now managed to move into this vertical SaaS concept and start to reap the benefits of being quite focused in that area. We have a strong foundation that we have been building on. There is a huge long-term potential in the construction technology overall, and we have a comprehensive cloud SaaS suite already supporting that long-term potential. We are now prepared for the accelerated growth. Of course, the H2 is still very much of building, and the kind of how the market develops is finally the kind of the key on how the accelerated growth will start. But we are confident that we are going in the right direction. We will, as Satu said, we will still see headwinds from the volume-based pricing of Ultima, and that will continue in Q2, Q3, for example.
We are not sort of, we are not expecting the growth to pick up fast or the profitability to be on the same levels as they were last year in Q3. But kind of the direction is to the good side in our opinion, and we are confident in the future. Thank you very much for listening to this webcast so far. Now I think we are happy to take questions as we go forward, and we have a few analysts in the room, so maybe we'll give the analyst the right of the first questions. And I think we are starting there with Emil.
Yeah, Emil Immonen from Carnegie. Thank you for your presentation and congratulations on the report and results. Could you describe how many new customers did you acquire now during Q2?
We have not stated the kind of the exact amounts, but let's say that the overall amount of new customers was on the same level as in Q1. So kind of there was a good amount of logos, but we are not releasing the exact numbers.
Okay, can you open up then in more detail what was your organic growth in Q2?
Yeah, so Trackinno is the only thing that contributes to our growth in organically. And you can see that from the release, I think it was something of EUR 550,000 that Trackinno contributed in our revenue in the first half.
Does that mean that your revenues organically decreased a little bit?
No, sorry, I mean EUR 550 in ARR. That was the number. I can't now remember exactly the revenue portion.
Okay, excellent.
But it can be found in the release. Yeah.
You mentioned at the end price increases. Have you done any in Q2?
There is a price increase that are starting to take effect for the project management solutions and the accounting services. So they will start to take effect from July forward.
So we don't have any effect from price increases in the first half.
Okay, what kind of impact are you aiming for in percentage-wise? Low single digits?
Yeah, single digit increases. Obviously, kind of the inflation rates have gone down and so on. It's a little bit sensitive information, so I don't want to maybe share it completely openly.
And they will be gradually. Gradual impact in our revenue, so we don't have all of the impact in July yet.
Yeah. Okay, I see.
And it's also regarding Q3. It's good to note that we last, from the beginning of last July, we had the Ultima price increases come into effect, and now we don't have these in the coming Q3, which is sort of affecting the growth rate as we go into Q3.
Then one last question on the cost side. You've been increasing your headcount, but your operating costs don't seem to increase that much. Is there some pressure from wage increases now, or how do you see costs developing in the future?
Yeah, so the FTE increase is actually lower than the headcount increase that we have in the release. We have, especially in the accounting, we always have people on longer leaves, and they are calculated in the headcount number. So the actual FTE increase is a bit lower than what has been stated in the release.
Overall, we could say from the headcount increase is that we have seen a pretty strong demand in the accounting services side, which is of course a positive thing. In that regard, we have sort of increased the headcount in that area somewhat. Other than that, it's been mainly very strategic roles that we have filled in, and we don't sort of intend to start a hiring spree going forward. So we are very cautious there, but there are certain areas that we want to fill and supporting the strategic execution.
Yeah, thanks. That's all for me. Thank you.
Thanks. Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. You showed briefly the ARR bridge, but can you still discuss the churn a bit more compared to previous quarters or previous year? Because is the churn moderating more, or are you succeeding more with the upselling and new sales at the moment? Because I'm trying to sense which is providing more positive delta here at the moment.
So I think that can be the downsell and churn are divided in the bridge. In general, churn has been pretty much at the same level since H2 of 2023. We are still seeing a quite high amount of churn from the bankruptcies. But on the other hand, the customer-led, so the sort of the voluntary churn is decreasing. So together with the market, we expect the churn rates to decline towards end of the year. But I think the change will still be quite moderate this year.
Maybe from the upsell and downsell, it's worth mentioning that the kind of the overall balance between the user contractions and user increases within the solutions has now been more positive.
So it was pretty much in decline the whole last year and still in the beginning of the year. Now we are starting to see that in some accounts they are increasing the user bases again. So the kind of the decline is at least not as fast and so on. So that's also a kind of a positive sign that there is a good thing happening at our customer companies as well.
Great. The next question on the currently smaller deal sizes that you discussed, which are leading sales at the moment. Do you see any sort of cross-selling opportunities for the ERP in these new local customers in the future, or are these already Adminet customers or just out of scope to big customers?
Yeah, it's variety. So still we have, I think the majority of the deals is Ultima customers, but they are this sort of smaller end Ultima customers. And what is positive in the cross-sell is that they are getting more solutions at the same time when they are closing the deal. And also stating that we are increasing the amount of customers that have been Ultima customers and now getting a new solution. But it's not still on the euro wise, it's not that remarkable yet. But it's a clear progress from the beginning of the year, for example.
Do you still see further potential for cross-selling to these Ultima customers, or are you even close to being done?
No, we are definitely not done. So we've only started.
Then about margins, are there any sort of bigger OpEx investments to be expected later this year, or should we expect better scalability now than the growth is picking up?
I don't think we have any major investments in the plans for second half.
Yeah. That's maybe right. Of course, we have quite, I would say that we are eager on how the market develops. So we want to move into accelerated growth phase. And of course, if we see opportunities to support that, for example, in further cost-based investments into sales and marketing or developments in AI and so on, I think we are very interested in evaluating these possibilities and then maybe taking them if they feel at the right time and right business case.
Great. And the final question on the revenue trends that you showed in the industry and annual adjustment fees, as we have still seen some decline this year, but we are heading towards flat and hopefully positive revenue trends later this year. How do you see the impact for the annual adjustment fees for the next year?
We will probably comment on that a bit later when we have more knowledge.
All right, that's clear. Thanks.
Hi, it's Jukka Bäckman from Nordea. So I just have one question. You have the great success of the Swedish big customer sales under your belt now. So do you expect to also transfer to more direct expansion on top of your M&A internationalization strategy now that you have the success behind you?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Of course, we stated in the beginning of the year that kind of the bulk of the internationalization will be done via M&A. So we are looking for M&A target, and we will not sort of drive organic growth just kind of by trying that. And by the way, we closed the Swedish pilot that we had. So that was not providing successful selling of Vision in Sweden by small piloting force. So that trial we ended. But this sort of big customer is of course a little bit different thing, and that provides us an added opportunity. It's maybe yet too soon to say that how will it play out and is it an actual possibility or not. But we are definitely looking into it and kind of building a maybe second foot for the internationalization around that possibility.
So we are definitely looking it out, but I think the H2 will kind of show us that how will it start to play out and how it goes. As a deal, maybe to comment that further, that was a five-figure MRR deal. So it was sizable, but it was not sort of huge in itself. So we are very happy to have it. But I think the bigger things regarding that deal were, first of all, the capability of winning that size of a deal. That shows us a promise that actually in the enterprise customers with these project management solutions, we have a very good competitive position because it was a global tendering process that this client held and we won it. So it shows that we have potential for reaching other international customers as well. And then there's this internationalization possibility.
That's the second big thing regarding that deal.
All right. Thank you so much.
Good. Then I think we have questions online as well. There's Atte Riikola asking that earlier this year you have been pretty cautious regarding Q2 and today's results seem like positive surprise. Which was the biggest positive factor compared to your own expectations? Sales, churn, or adjustment fees?
I don't think we had a huge surprise in any of these. I think it was a combination of smaller positive development in all areas. So nothing surprised us.
Yeah, I think it was a combination of all of those. And actually the adjustment fees were pretty much in line with our expectations. I think there's a second question from Atte that how is Trackinno performing under Admicom? Trackinno is pretty well performing as planned and kind of the product integrations are still underway.
So we are not clearly finished with the technical details. We are having an integration into sales processes and getting our salespeople familiar with Trackinno and also presenting that to our customers. But as I stated earlier, the first feedback from the customers has been very positive. So clearly there is a need for this type of solution and we want to integrate it pretty thoroughly with Ultima. So that's the plan as we have discussed earlier. Any updates from the M&A side of your strategy from Atte? And I think you will see company release when we have additional information regarding M&A. So we obviously, like stated, we are ready to take on further M&A and we are looking for target companies. We are having discussions. We are searching for these. But of course, there are other companies that are interested in buying companies as well and so on.
So we don't want to take any unnecessary risks or sort of be paying too high valuations for any companies that we acquire. We are quite confident on our organic growth capabilities as well. And then the final question from Atte. Can you tell us a little bit more about how do you see the organic growth opportunity with this new big Nordic client? How fast could you try to sell your products to subcontractors of this client? Yeah, we touched that question a bit. And like said, we now need to formulate, as the contract is signed on the last day of June. We now need to formulate the strategy on how do we drive the growth forward. And of course, that's also a little bit the question of the investments that we put in there.
Because in order to reach the subcontractors of this customer, we would need to place people to Swedish soil near to the customer's headquarters and start providing work from there and so on. And before we do that, we probably want to understand what are the possibilities and understand how willing the customers are to change and so on. So like said, the H2 will be pretty much the determining factor when we create these plans and see how things go forward. And we have not sort of switched our focus of doing an M&A internationally into this, let's say, organic opportunity. But I think they provide a quite interesting different route for becoming international. That was a final question from Atte. So I think we have covered all the analysts. No general public questions or investor questions online.
I think we have covered our ground and talked about the things that we like to talk. At this stage, I think we want to wish you a very pleasant summer. Have a great summer vacation when you have time for it. We continue to be digitalizing the construction industry as we go forward. Thank you very much for being with us today.
Thank you.