Good morning everyone, and welcome to Admicom's Q1 results webcast. My name is Simo Leisti. I'm the CEO of Admicom, and as usual, I'm joined by Satu Helamo, our CFO. Okay, let's go into the agenda for today. We will be sharing with you the Q1 2026 key highlights. Also we want to repeat some of the messages that we delivered during our February webcast regarding our positioning into the AI disruption or the fears in the market towards the SaaS and software companies. I will also give you a little bit of insight into this morning's announcement of our strategy acceleration with the change negotiation that we have announced this morning. Satu will go through our Q1 financials and have the view on our financial outlook for the year.
I remind everyone that there's an opportunity to pose questions. In the end of the webcast, we will take some time to respond to your questions. Let's go into the Q1 highlights. We had a, I would say, decent sales performance in the tough market that we have now in the construction industry in Finland. We have been disappointed with the development of the industry revenue volumes and the market recovery. Still despite that, we were able to deliver a 5% growth in the ARR and a decent bookings performance. We did have a quite volatile performance over the months, and this is something that we're currently also evaluating that how can we make adjustments into our sales compensation models and how we run the business operationally to have more steady monthly sales performance.
At the end of the day, we felt like the sales performance was decent given the tough market condition. We also continued the profitability improvement that we were able to show already during the end of last year. We had a solid performance in the profitability, and we delivered 28% adjusted EBITDA, which was a significant improvement compared to the previous year Q1. Also, what I'm very pleased to say that our strategy in focusing in the existing customers, making sure that they can leverage our broad portfolio of products and capabilities, has been really developing positively. We had a 23% product penetration for customers with more than one Admicom product by end of Q1. I recall that when I started at Admicom, this number was significantly below 20%.
We have made a significant progress over the time with the investments that we have put into managing the existing customers, helping our salespeople and teams to do cross and upsell, and this has really now shown in the improved product penetration. We had a great event with the Nordic Construction Forum in the beginning of the year. It is starting to make an established platform for the construction professionals and leaders to come together and discuss about the industry, discuss about the technology trends that are out there in the market, and also to share customer success stories. Despite the tough market, our customers have seen great momentum in their business while focusing on specific niche in the market, developing their digital capabilities and really taking the technology into use, how to build better and make better business in the construction industry.
We did address the AI concerns, like I mentioned in February. We delivered a webcast regarding the topic, and we promised that we will update everyone in the market to explain how we're making progress, both in our own operations, but what we're seeing in the market, so that everybody can understand and see how the AI is developing in the construction tech industry, and what sort of steps we are making in this progress as well. We also announced in the Q1 a share buyback program where we initially commenced a buyback for a maximum of 2.5 million of our own shares, and we were able to close that first program. Now we have also launched and decided on an additional 1.5 million program that will commence tomorrow on the 15th of April.
We believe that we can conclude this program in a fairly short time, but latest by end of June. Also we announced a change negotiation where we are accelerating our strategy execution. We are addressing the competence needs and requirements that we feel are necessary in terms of accelerating our strategy execution, and I will cover some of the topics around that in the presentation. Like mentioned, we had a great event with close to 300 registered participants from the external audience. We had many of our customers and construction industry professionals coming together discussing about the future of the construction industry.
I do believe that we are starting to establish a platform for the construction leaders to come together and really share the best practices and help each other to build better. We had a great response from the participants, and also we had a very active social media posting from the event, during the event and post-event. We're very committed in continuing with the Nordic Construction Forum, also in 2027. Of course, customer cases are important to us. The customers are what we're here for, actually. One Q1 highlighted case is called PC-Saneeraus Oy, who returned back to Admicom after being a couple of years with a competitor. They have a very high demand for high-performance systems and also systems to support their daily operations.
They want to have a consistent and unified user experience for those key requirements and functionalities, and also they want to have a reliable support and clear guidance from their partner who they're partnering with. The chosen solution is a very typical nowadays solution set that we see our customers taking advantage of. We had Ultima ERP as the core system. We had Estima in the cost management, cost calculation. We had Tempo and Vision in helping them to better manage their site operations, documentation, and scheduling. Also we were able to get our business services into the customer with our accounting and payroll services. Our differentiation based on the customer was that we had a very clear Ultima ERP core business logic that is helping the whole company to perform better.
We have been making some improvements in the user experience, what they felt like was necessary and very welcomed from the past experience, and also they liked our broad capabilities throughout the portfolio. We also shared with the customer our upcoming development roadmap, and they mentioned that they are very well aligned with their future needs and wants. Also what they felt was important is that they were able to see a good value add and benefit from removing from a separated software stack. They wanted to replace a multi-tool competitor setup with a more unified set of capabilities from Admicom, and they also saw an additional value from that.
These are very typical comments that we get from the customers, and this is also well highlighting our strategy in terms of our product and portfolio strategy and how we want to make sure that we deliver customer value for our customers. I'm also very pleased to announce that our Leadership Team is now taking its final shape. We were able to announce our new Growth Leader, Jesse Pärnänen, joining us in May and bringing a lot of strategic understanding and expertise from the SaaS business, really having a strong track record in leading growth and growth operations. Jesse is a very, I would say, very analytical, data-driven, and high-energy person to lead our growth. We're very happy to have Jesse joining us in the team. Let's do a quick recap regarding the AI positioning. I want to repeat, first of all, our mission and vision.
Our mission is to help our customers to build better, and we do it together with our customers and with the different ecosystem partners in the industry. We want to become the partner of choice in the European construction software ecosystem, which indicates that we also want to make a more international footprint for our business. What I have been highlighting is that it is regardless of the technology we use for helping our customers to build better, or whether it's services that we bring to our customers to help them to build better. Our mission is to make sure that the customers can take a benefit from the systems we bring to them, and also that they're able to see the measurable benefits to their business.
That is what they're actually paying Admicom for, and not to pay for a piece of software or a piece of technology, but they are paying for the value-add that we are able to build to their business and also get the benefits and validate them together. The construction technology landscape is quite unique. It has quite a few complexities into it. It has a lot of construction domain-specific workflows that are not easy to replicate and not easy to just build with, let's say, a software product. It requires multiple different functions to work together, share data seamlessly, and connect the different stakeholders and user personas in the customer side. There's a high value in system of records, so we build systems what the AI agent can depend on.
We build the foundation on top of which we can build the AI agentic workflows. We have a lot of fragmented and real-world data that we're connecting to the platforms, so it is not only about using workflows and publicly available data. There's a lot of proprietary data and third-party data that we're able to connect into the platforms. We also integrate into the physical reality. As an example, our asset management solution, Trackinno, has physical tags that we put into different equipment and devices that we can then real-time monitor how they're moving about, and we're kind of connecting the physical world to the digital world. This is not possible by only building AI-based solutions. You need to have the functionalities and the systems that actually connect the physical world into the platform.
What we have seen is that during the AI-based era in the software development, we have more need in understanding the customer's environment, understanding the customer's problems worth solving. We need to be very specific with addressing the bottlenecks in the AI agentic software development life cycle, and we need to add and embrace the customer understanding. We also want to connect the human oversight and human in the loop into the systems. Also, construction is very networked. We have from tens to hundreds of different participants in the large construction process. There is a lot of networking effect that we need to build upon to make sure that our systems are being used and the value is being delivered.
If some of you have not seen the webinar that we hosted around the future of SaaS and how our positioning to the AI is, I recommend you to go to our investor pages and listen to the webcast. We're very committed in delivering our product strategy and our platform strategy, where we have a lot of emphasis in building the AI agentic connectivity to our existing tools, build the bundles of software and capabilities to help customers to address those critical needs and problems, and we're building the AI agentic workflows to help the customers to take advantage of the technologies and have access to the data across the platform. This picture illustrates the combination of system of record capabilities with the AI agentic workflows. We have many different sources of this, I would say, authority data that you need to have reliable cost estimations.
You need to have reliable project timelines that then the AI agents can analyze. They can analyze, for example, resource availability or timeline progress. AI agents can make changes and monitor the progress in real time, and then also in the future, recommend updated plans or different scenarios that the people might choose to deliver better outcomes. It's a combination of system of records, data platforms, agentic workflows, and through that, we are able to deliver meaningful results and business outcomes to our customers. We have first capabilities out in the market that we also demoed in the webcast. We very much encourage everyone to go and listen to the webcast, and more will come in the near future. Our key positioning statement was that AI will not replace Admicom, but it will strengthen us.
We believe that agentic use cases will start to increase the use of our system of records systems, and also we believe that our position is very good in terms of delivering the AI-based value to our customers, and also we are going to play together with the many different ecosystem players and system and service providers to make sure that the value is being delivered also across the different actors in the market. A few words about the change negotiation and what we're aiming to do with the help of renewing and accelerating our competence base and our required skills to deliver the strategy outcomes. Just as a reminder, in December, we hosted Capital Markets Day, where we updated our strategy, and it's called Let's Grow Together.
It's very much a growth-focused strategy where we say that we want to return back to 15% organic growth, and we want to be above EUR 60 million in ARR by end of the strategy period, in end of 2028. We want to return back to above 40% adjusted EBITDA profitability levels in our current businesses, taking into consideration that, of course, some of the M&A and inorganic growth opportunities or expanding the new markets might temporarily dilute some of the margins on the Group level. In our current businesses, we want to return back to above 40% adjusted EBITDA levels. We're very committed in delivering the platform strategy that I mentioned before and also to accelerate the AI development.
We want to grow our footprint to broader market in terms of addressable market, and we want to triple that so that the markets where we operate actively, we want that to be triple to the current market that we have today. We want to build one winning team to deliver all of this, and, of course, change negotiation is a lot about building this winning team. We have continued our aspiration in becoming a more than EUR 100 million ARR company, but this strategy period is now the milestone against we're doing our next steps. Just as a reminder, we are now focusing on executing our strategy through these five execution streams, and they have been progressing very well in all the different stream areas.
Like mentioned, we are now seeing that we have some competency gaps and needs for more resource allocation to make sure that we can progress in all of those execution areas. We have definitely big demand in terms of AI and data skills in our research and development. We have been delivering the research project in the AI, and we're seeing some bottlenecks in our ability to accelerate across our portfolio with the AI native development life cycle. Also we have identified some new bottlenecks that we need to overcome in making sure that the development overall is progressing as we want.
The question is not about coding as such and the speed of coding, but there's a lot more that we have to address, meaning understanding the customer problems and the industry trends and problems, being able to deliver to the AI agentic development capabilities, the context and the definitions, what we want to deliver. The coding, of course, needs to be AI-assisted like it is today in all of our product teams, but we want to accelerate that. In our go-to-market, we want to develop more opportunities and multi-channel go-to-market capabilities because today we're doing a lot of sales through field sales, so we want to start developing other channels to the market. In international expansion, we are actively now monitoring both the opportunities for organic growth in the different markets, but also opportunities for inorganic growth through M&A.
In Business Services, we have been doing a lot of, I would say, basic accounting and payroll services, and now our aim is to develop higher value-add services with more complexity, which also then requires a higher level of skills and competencies. In Future-Proof Operations, we are streamlining our business processes, we're upgrading the core systems, and we're strengthening our capabilities to support the scalable growth and also international footprint. Also, the need for acceleration comes from the operating environment where we operate. This prolonged downturn in the Finnish construction market is definitely pushing us to further accelerate the international market expansion.
It further pushes us to develop the multi-channel go-to-market so that we're able to get to more customers more effectively, so that when the market is not seeing a pull, we need to be able to find our ideal customer profiles through multiple different channels and make sure that we are addressing the highest potential in the market, even given the tough economic cycle. We're now looking into maybe accelerating a little bit our organic growth opportunities outside of Finland. Of course, a lot of this acceleration is also due to opportunities that we see with applying more of the AI capabilities. We have been doing good progress, and now we want to accelerate that even further. We want to make sure that the whole lifecycle of our product development is using AI in the best possible way for improved productivity.
We also want to make sure that our internal operations are supported by the AI capabilities. This requires a lot of new type of skills and competencies, and we will make steps in ensuring that this competency is available for us through recruitments of new skills and competencies, developing our own people, but also then relying on some consultancy support to get things moving faster forward and to make steps in the right direction. Also, there are changes and consolidation in our competitive landscape, and we see this as an opportunity. We see that the competitor market is now a little bit in flux, and we have many opportunities like the customer case I mentioned before, where we are seeing that the competitors are not maybe able to move as fast as we want to move in the market.
We have been able to demonstrate differentiation through our broad portfolio and with our steps also in the AI development. We want to stay ahead of the game, and this is why we want to accelerate our development activities. We feel like we're in a position where we can also make room for further investments and accelerate the pace of development. We see very positive feedback from the customers regarding our product strategy and also regarding our steps in the roadmap. Also this customer which we won, were very pleased to see what sort of roadmap items we have in the progress and how well that is meeting their needs and wants in their productivity improvements and how they want to run their business.
Like mentioned, in this whole AI agentic development, the understanding of the customer needs and the ability to deliver the value for the customer is paramount. It's so important that we make sure that we have the opportunity and we have the capabilities to make sure that we understand the needs and wants that we can then develop into our portfolio. With the AI capabilities, we can do it quicker, but we also need to have the right people and the right sort of processes in place to ensure that the customer actually get the value. This is one of the areas of investment for us. We will have some new customer-facing roles that will be focused on understanding the customer problem and ensuring that the customer will get the benefit and value from our products and services.
Acceleration will be around ensuring that we address our strategic execution priorities and also we're responding to the recent changes and trends in the operating environment. This change negotiation is almost taking into consideration all employees at Admicom. We have a few functions that are left outside to make sure that we have continuum in our operations and we're not disrupting our business. Other than that, we're very much focusing on looking at all of the critical functions and units in our business to ensure that we are looking at the competence requirements we have to accelerate our strategy execution. What we have now planned is that we have measures that can lead having some changes in up to 65 current roles. With the changes, we have planned that maximum 45 can lead into redundancies.
We have also planned for significant new recruitments and new competencies that we need for the business and we will also, in the short term, be able to use some external support in accelerating the change and accelerating the execution speed. With this change negotiation, this is also helping us to meet our midterm profitability target, like I mentioned in the beginning. We have estimated that this will have approximately EUR 500,000 positive adjustment into our costs for this year. Satu will go through a little bit the longer-term potential impact. We will start the negotiations next week, Tuesday on the 21st of April. We're estimating the negotiations to take the minimum three weeks. We will do a good open dialogue with our employee representatives to make sure that we do the change in accordance with law and with respect to our people.
All right. With this, let's go into the Q1 financials. Satu, I'll hand it over to you.
Thank you, Simo. First of all, good morning or good day to everyone also from my behalf. Let's kick off the finance section with a short market update. Since our previous financial reporting in January, the market expectations have unfortunately taken a turn for more negative. The latest economist views suggest that especially for new residential construction, the downturn will be prolonged. In Finland, currently, the new starts in residential construction are extremely low. Although we are seeing a lot of factors that could support the market recovery, there are also many factors that are currently hindering it from happening. For that reason, the growth expectation from the economists have been lowered from 3.5% this year to 1.5% in the recent months.
Of course, we have built our financial models and expectations for the strategy period on a slightly more optimistic market expectations, but we're definitely not willing to give up on our targets and the growth ambition. For that reason, we are also going to use that as a consideration for the change negotiations that we are now starting. We will be assessing our capability to speed up growth in other markets outside of Finland. Other Nordic countries, European markets, they are already seeing much more positive development also in the construction sector than we are in Finland. Of course, I think it would be wrong not to mention the additional risks that are around.
Of course, the latest geopolitical and economic development, they are increasing the risks related to the market, and therefore we plan to be even more focused with our own strategy, more focused with our ideal customer profile. Our goal with the change negotiations is to ensure that we have the right competencies needed for all the critical areas. Let's go into our Q1 results. As the headline of our release states, and Simo already commented, we were not satisfied with our growth rate in the Q1, but profitability development was solid and there were two factors mainly impacting our growth. First of all, if you look at the customer churn rate for last 12 months, so the rolling number, we have increase in that number, so 7.4% currently. Churn was definitely elevated in the first quarter.
Majority of the customer terminations which actualized as churn in first quarter, we already knew about them at the end of Q4. When publishing our Q4 results, we commented about the high number of customer terminations at the end of 2025. Majority of the high customer churn is related to those. In addition, we had one larger bankruptcy in the first quarter, and on top of that, in the current market environment, the insolvency-related churn remains high. There's also one interesting characteristics that we are seeing now that the market downturn is prolonging, and that's the fact that we are seeing more than ever before. We are seeing also churn related to mergers and other types of company restructurings. In the short term, these are negative news because they can increase churn.
If our customer company is bought by another company, it typically means that our MRR lowers. As Simo already mentioned, we see also a lot of opportunities from this development because we are seeing larger groups being formed also in our own customer base, and that creates a new kind of an opportunity for us to have our solutions selected for and used by multiple companies at once. We have already started discussions with several groups whose aim is to consolidate and unify the systems also that they are using. In this era of AI being sort of a scary topic for SaaS companies, I also want to mention that our churn does not include any indications of AI disruption. The second factor impacting our growth in the first quarter was sales. We had inconsistency in sales within the quarter, even with very strong March results.
January and February fell short of the targets, and that has impacted the start of invoicing within the first quarter. The sales that we made in the first quarter, those will realize as revenue and as MRR in the coming months. In the comparative period, recurring revenue and revenue growth figures, we also have inorganic impact from Bauhub acquisition. If we exclude the inorganic impact from the comparative numbers, our revenue growth and recurring revenue growth exceeded the comparative period growth rates. Adjusted EBITDA was 28.1%, and that's almost three percentage points higher than a year ago. We met our targets with profitability. What's good to also note is that we actually capitalized less R&D expenses than before. Even with that, we met the profitability target.
If we look at the profitability improvement a little bit more closely, I think this table shows the improvement quite nicely. Adjusted EBITDA grew almost 15% from comparative period of Q1 2025 and adjusted EBIT by over 20%. For us, the majority of the difference between EBITDA and EBIT comes from goodwill amortization. We report under Finnish accounting standards, meaning that unlike IFRS companies, we amortize the goodwill generated in the business acquisitions. When comparing against Q4, we had a slight increase in the cost base. The biggest drivers for the cost growth were marketing activities, for example, Nordic Climate Forum, which was already discussed, and also we had a few exhibitions in the first quarter. We also had higher bonus provisions in Q1 than in Q4. Against Q4, we also capitalized less R&D expenses in the first quarter.
We had couple of development projects that were completed, and for those, we have now ended the capitalization. In case you're wondering about the increase in other operating expenses in our P&L, I guess I could open that up a bit. Majority of that is very technical accounting stuff. Before we merged all the Finnish subsidiaries, quite large share of the capitalizations was netting the other operating expenses line item. Now that all our employees are under the same legal entity, Admicom Finland Oy, we recognize majority of the capitalized costs against personnel expenses. That explains majority of the difference in other operating expenses line item. Against Q4, our ARR dropped by 1.5%, and we basically already went through the reasons behind that decline. If we look a little bit closer at our ARR waterfall, here you can see the high amount of churn.
EUR 1.2 million decline in ARR due to churn. On the positive side, our new sales was ahead of the comparison period level in Q1. In the first quarter, annual adjustment fees, so those that we still invoice on an annual basis from some of our customers, they were minimal, but they were still EUR 100,000 less than in the comparative period of 2025. This year is a transition period for our billing model change for Ultima and accounting services. Last year, we transferred approximately half of the customers to the new monthly adjustment model where we base the revenue-based fees on the rolling 12 months revenue.
So that basically means that the annual adjustment fees are billed to fewer customers this year than in the previous years. The monthly adjustments that we currently invoice for approximately half of the customers, those are included in the upsell and downsell elements of the ARR waterfall. For whole of 2026, we expect quite high decline in the annual adjustment fees. When we published our guidance for this year, we estimated that the annual adjustment fees will drop by EUR 500,000 - EUR 900,000, which means that after Q1, we are still expecting EUR 400,000 - EUR 800,000 negative impact from this to be realized. And majority of this negative impact is expected in the second quarter, but some also in the third quarter.
About the transitioning of the remaining customers to the new billing model, that has progressed well, and last week we have sent out communication to the next batch of customers who will then transfer in June. We will first bill or invoice the annual adjustment fees for previous year and after that, immediately they will be transferred into the new monthly billing model. Finally, let's have a recap of our financial guidance for this year. We have decided to maintain the financial guidance unchanged. When we first published the financial guidance, we made a note that reaching the high end of our growth guidance would need more rapid market recovery or a small M&A happening this year. Of course, the market recovery at this point seems very unlikely, but our M&A pipeline has been developing well. Of course, there's now the valuation challenge that we're facing at this point.
The publicly listed companies' multiples have dropped quite dramatically with the whole SaaS apocalypse. The private companies' valuations have not yet followed. There's a discrepancy between those, and that makes it more challenging now to acquire companies at reasonable valuation. We trust that the problem will decrease over the upcoming months, and when we can find the right target with the right valuation, I think that we will be ready to move. The themes affecting our growth and profitability this year, we have kept them unchanged. Only the new factor related to the profitability has been added now that we have published the change negotiations. In our release, we commented that we expect a positive EUR 500,000 impact on the adjusted expenses this year from the change negotiations.
The net impact of EUR 500,000 comes from the redundancies that will happen first, and then we will gradually start recruiting into the critical roles that we have now identified. Of course, recruitments can take time, so we cannot wait, at least in all areas. For that reason, we have also reserved some funds for external advisory and consulting so that we can bridge the time between now and when we get the right talents joining Admicom. In the longer term, of course, what analysts and other investors are probably most interested about is the run rate. How will the personnel cost run rate look like into the future? It's maybe too early to say for definite at this point, but I would maybe expect a small positive impact on the run rate of personnel expenses.
Of course, we will time the recruitment correctly so that we are already seeing also the growth happening. For certain, the growth rate of our top line will be higher than the growth rate of our costs going forward. I think that concludes our presentation today, and I can see that we have a lot of questions in the chat, so maybe we go to those next.
Let's definitely do that. I will take the questions a little bit in different headlines. First of all, we have some questions regarding the churn. First of all, there's a comment about a large bankruptcy affecting our Q1 churn numbers, and there's a question that whether this kind of concerned directly our customer or had some kind of an indirect effect. It was a direct customer that unfortunately went bankrupt, and it was significant in the MRR. Also, we still see the insolvency-related and bankruptcy-related churn to continue in this very challenging market situation. There was also questions regarding churn or regarding also this AI-based development now when a lot of the market speculation is that through vibe coding you can just create your own solutions. Are we seeing this happening in the market and are new competitors entering the market?
We have not seen a significant increase in this sort of AI players to emerge. Like mentioned, we follow our churn and terminations quite carefully, and we always do customer interviews on the reasons behind that, and we have not seen any churn or terminations to happen because of this. When having discussions with the customers, it's great to see that construction companies are looking into benefits of AI capabilities, and they have reaffirmed our strategy and message that they want the AI solutions to be easy to use, integrated into the solutions that they're using in their core business processes. They also want those solutions to be safe to use. They need to be productionally reliable, and this is the reason why we have been developing our capabilities with this in mind.
We want to provide capabilities where the customers can rely on them as well as they have been able to rely on our other products in the future. And then there was a question that how much of an impact this one big bankruptcy had in the Q1 numbers? We don't disclose a single customer impact, but it was larger than, I would say, our usual bankruptcy-related single customer. So it was big enough for us to mention this in the churn numbers. Let's go into the competition. There was a mentioning about the changes in the competitive landscape. So what we have seen in the past couple of years is a significant consolidation in the Nordic construction technology market. And this has led into companies being in different situations. So we have quite a few competitors who are undergoing fundamental technology transition.
There are Nordic platforms brought into the market. There are technological next-generation platforms being introduced or products being introduced. There are quite significant price increases that we have seen, especially with the companies who are maybe more privately owned and private equity-backed companies. These may pose us an opportunity. We have heard from the customers that not all the changes in our competitors are seen positive, and this is of course showing us an opportunity. Of course, we're paranoid optimistic, like Risto Siilasmaa likes to mention, that we're continuously monitoring what is happening in the market and in the competitive landscape, and we want to stay ahead of the development curve.
This is one of the reasons why we want to accelerate our product strategy, accelerate the AI development, and make sure that we have the right competencies in place to understand the customer problems and needs and wants, and also to make sure that we can deliver the value from our solutions and services. Maybe touching upon the AI topics, there's a question that in what areas of our operations have we seen benefits from AI? I can see that how I would mention is that we see many first signs of significant benefits in the different areas of our business, namely, mostly in the R&D, of course. We have our all product teams starting to adopt the AI agentic software development capabilities. We have been significantly improving our abilities to use AI and automation in the product testing. We're generating more code through AI agentic solutions.
Also we see that we're only getting started, and we want to really accelerate the changes and accelerate the speed and the effects in the productivity. We have also started to measure the productivity in our R&D function. We want to make it quantifiable that what is the speed of development, what is the speed and the productivity in the progressing the pull requests and the whole life cycle, how we are able to make it more faster. We see that there are different bottlenecks that we need to address to make the whole life cycle faster. We want to put more emphasis into understanding the customers, the industry. We have roles like product principals who are the specialist in construction industry, but also understanding the technology opportunities. We need to further improve that competency.
Also we see that competencies like user experience and design are being now highlighted. There are areas where we clearly see that we need to add resources. In the internal functions, we see a lot of positive signs from using AI in terms of supporting our analytical capabilities, really processing things faster than before. Now we're developing and building our future application landscape for our internal use, the whole system landscape. AI is a big part of that definition of what the future internal system landscape looks like. There are definitely benefits that we're trying to get around the AI, also in the internal operations. There's a few questions about the international expansion and the M&A, the situation in the M&A market. We have been now building, like Satu mentioned, we have been building now the pipeline of the M&A targets.
We had it for pause for a short while we were crystallizing our strategy and where we want to focus, and now we have been starting to ramp it up again. We do see that there are a lot of interesting players in the M&A space. There are companies who are similar to ours, but operating in other markets. There are technological complementary capabilities. What's interesting to see is that there are less AI native players out there still. The AI development in this domain has still been fairly limited, and many targets that we have been analyzing, they are quite significantly behind our own development. I would say that we're being very cautious with the valuations.
We are seeing that there is a discrepancy between the public and private market valuations, and we want to hold on to our criteria for the M&A so that they are helping us to accelerate the new market entry. They are complementary to our product portfolio and the valuations are value accretive for us, even in this current valuation of our own share. Regarding the market expansions, there's question of, have we already defined what direction we want to go? That work is done in parallel with evaluating the M&A pipeline. We're also doing and conducting the market feasibility study for our existing products. Also, we're looking at the different markets, the market maturity, and the potential they contain. We have a, I would say, a certain kind of a top list that we're evaluating at the moment.
Definitely they're including, I would say, the usual suspects of Estonia, the Baltic markets, Nordic countries, but then the Northern European and U.K. markets. Maybe, Satu, if you want to still somehow give a little bit of color to this change negotiation and the financial potential impact, if there's something we can still say about the employee reductions that we have communicated and the run rate and what we might expect in run rate. You already mentioned that, but anything you would like to add on that?
Yeah. There's a question about why is the positive impact of 45 employee reductions only EUR 500,000? The net personnel impact will be lower. The timing of the changes go so that during the summer we will probably have all the redundancies, so we will have the cost base reduction, and then we will start recruiting the critical roles which we have identified. Our expectation is that the new recruitments will also have slightly higher salary levels. As said, we also don't want to wait until we find all the right talents, but we want to have the opportunity to use external consultants, external advisory to speed up our progress in some areas, for example, AI and data and other critical areas.
This is the estimation that we have made at this point, that if everything goes as planned, that we get the redundancies or that the negotiations end up with the redundancies of 45 people, and then we do the recruitments towards end of the year. This would be the impact together with the external expenses that we would then have in our cost base.
Good.
I hope that covers.
Of course, we will give you more information as we move forward and we're able to conclude the change negotiations. There's a few questions about the market. There was a question that what was our original estimation for the market improvement for this year? Now with the confirmation of the construction industry in Finland has been updating this estimation to 1.5%. If you want to, Satu, share that a little bit.
Yeah. Of course, the market growth rate of 3.5% was behind some of the assumptions that we made for our own forecast for this year. For example, the customer revenue-based invoicing, we had an assumption of the market growth. The market growth, and especially the prolonging of the downturn, it impacts, of course, the revenue-based billing. It impacts the amount of users. It can impact the amount of employees that our customers have. It can have impact in multiple different ways. During the past month, we have also made a lot of analysis of our own customer base, and we're seeing that there's a huge amount of customers. I could maybe dare to say that over 50% of our Ultima customers are performing significantly better than the market in general.
It's not that straightforward that we would just have a sort of a cut from our forecast because of this market expectation change. I think what we need to do is to find the companies that are still growing, find the companies that have the economical capacity to continue their operations even with the prolonging downturn. Focusing our sales efforts and focusing our customer success activities on those customers will then help us bridge the decline that the overall market sentiment change has created for our expectations.
Very good. You also gave now a little bit of answer to the other question that we got that we need to make decisions on the right targeting of our sales. I would add still to this topic that in our December Capital Markets Day and in our strategy update, we said and mentioned that we have been now further focusing our ICP definition that which are the customers that we want to serve. This is an important strategic decision because we feel like if we are more specific with our ICP definition, we can create solutions that have more value for their operations than having a very broad definition of the customer profiles and going a little bit all over the place with that definition.
Now in our sales activities, we're trying to target more specifically this ICP that we mentioned in our definitions, which is basically small and medium-sized construction companies, both main contractors, subcontractors, and specialty contractors, and also to some extent the infrastructure construction companies also. We're trying to be even more specific with our ICP definition and target the customers where we know that with our current product portfolio and with the future roadmap development, we're able to address their needs and requirements. Like the customer comment was in the beginning from PC-Saneeraus. That's what it means in practice. Satu, if you still want to comment on the question about the Ultima billing model change, how is it proceeding? Have we faced any resistance and do we stay on the timeline?
Yeah. Our target is to transfer all the remaining customers this year. As said, the next batch of customers will transfer into the new model in June, and then after that in October and towards end of the year. It's going well. I think that last year we were sort of practicing how to do it and we have learned a lot from previous year about what kind of questions the customers might have so we have better capability to address those for this year. Last year we had I would say a handful of customers who were reluctant and wanted to understand the change in more detail.
Now that we have happily moved 50% of the customers, it's also easier for the remaining customers to be convinced that this is not a big deal and actually in the longer term will be beneficial for us and also for the customers because it gives a lot more predictability about the costs of our systems and also helps the customers plan their cash flow a little bit better. I think it's going well. No resistance and the timeline is intact.
Very good. Thank you everyone for participating. Thank you for your great questions like always, and thank you Satu for joining me and supporting in the presentation. We will return back to different topics latest in our Q2 release webcast. I wish you all a great spring and also thanks for joining the webcast. Thank you.
Thank you.