Hello everyone, and good afternoon to this Capital Markets Day of Admicom here in Helsinki, Finland. We are very happy to host a hybrid event, so we have a presence here at Helsinki at the Flik Studios, and then we have people on board watching this virtual event. Very nice to be here and very nice to be presenting here today. My name is Petri Kairinen. I'm the CEO of Admicom and here with me are several other presenters, which I'm sure mean something for many lawyers, and after that we shall continue with the actual agenda. These are the three topics that we will be talking today.
We will be talking about the strong foundation that Admicom has created along the years and what it gives us as a platform to build on for growing from the core ERP solution to a wider construction technology solution provider. That's the number one topic and sort of first message that we want to give you during these three hours that hopefully you will be spending with us here today. The second topic is the drivers for growth. We have today announced our strategic growth targets, they are stating that we are aiming to be a fast-growing company, profitably growing company, and we want to highlight the growth drivers that are behind these trends and where they will guide us. There's a huge growth potential in construction technology or ConTech, also in European scale.
That's the topics that we will be talking about. Lastly but not leastly, we will be talking about measuring success. Saying that what does this all mean to our financial position, and why do we believe that this is doable? What are SaaS metrics and, how will they carry on through this growth period? These are the three topics that we will be talking about and giving you more depth as we go forward. Now I'm happy to present the people that are here with me today. Like I said, my name is Petri Kairinen. I'm the Group CEO since last June, quite new to the company. Therefore I'm very happy that I have a very experienced crowd here with me today.
We have Petri Aho, the group CFO and Deputy CEO, who was also acting as an interim CEO during the CEO change. We have a sort of our product representation. We have Joni Haapamäki, who is a Sales Director for our ERP Solutions business unit. We have Jari Kangassalo, who is the Business Unit Leader for project management solutions. We have Mikko Järvi, who is the Business Unit Leader for the documenting solutions. They will be presenting themselves in more detail once their part is when we go through the growth foundations. This is the crowd that is here with you today, and I'm very happy to have you here.
The one topic that we would like to now give a voice is also the voice of our clients because it is a very important message in our strategy refresh as well that we want to focus on the client experience. Also in this Capital Markets Day, we thought it would be very nice to hear some client voices. Next we will see a client video about Adminet. Happy Adminet client. Thank you, our client TEP Group, for giving us this very nice presentation. Not showing here live, but we will see a few of these client videos during this event. Very happy to have our clients here with us today as well. I will be now talking a little bit on the foundation, the strong foundation.
As mentioned earlier, where are we coming from, what is the sort of the solid growth story that we will now carry on and continue with our renewed strategy focus? How do we'll do the next growth leap? That's the topic for me. Maybe something personally about me before continuing. As you know, I started as a CEO last June, it's been about seven months, seven busy months, seven very interesting months as well. I've been able to meet a lot of clients, lots of Admicom employees, of course, and a lot of you investors as well. I've been sort of overwhelmed with the experience of interest in Admicom, the strong roots, and also the employee satisfaction and client satisfaction that we are having.
At the same time, of course, it's clear to understand that there is a very strong platform, there is a very strong growth story. Now of course we need to think that, okay, how do we take this growth story to the next layer? What is that layer and how do we execute it? That's actually what I will be talking about today. Maybe sort of from a personal note, my background is of course not from, not from construction. I used to work for a cybersecurity company, Nixu, for 15 years, as a CEO the last eight years there. My only connection to the construction comes from my personal, maybe you could call it a hobby.
We completely renovated or acted as a orderer for the construction of a rivitalo row house here in Helsinki. Have to say that as fascinating as that project was, it also gave me a quite a good understanding of the challenges that the construction providers are facing and also that maybe there is some things that could be done better and where software could help them to really gain some efficiency in that work. I think all of those really hold true in what we are also now thinking and going forward.
In case that you are first-time listening to Admicom is a focused SaaS provider, software as a service provider, and has grown from the roots of focusing an ERP solution to specialty contractors in the construction field. Plumbing, electricity, that sort of construction providers, focusing their focus to an overall constructors and also to a manufacturing industry in 2017. Now with the strategy change, which I will be talking later today, we are focusing back on the sort of construction technology field again, and that is the main topic that we will be talking today. We have a widespread and predictor revenues, we've been growing profitably and following the Rule of Forty and actually exceeding the Rule of Forty for many, many years.
We are currently based only in Finland, but we have about 240 employees in six locations in Finland and are very, very heavily present here and are sort of household name for many of the SME clients that we are serving in construction. This is a very impressive growth story that Admicom has been doing along the years. Of course, we need to give a lot of credit for the people that have been there from the beginning and have been doing this success and building the success. You could say that there are five different zones of time in that development period. It's good to note that there was a very long period from 2004 to 2010 when the software was developed, you could say, in stealth mode.
It wasn't on the market yet, but it was developed and there were huge investments done, of course, to the software base at that time. I think the sort of the main great idea that the founders of that time had was the focus on a specific niche industry, the construction, and really, really, you know, aiming the software to that use case. That enabled that once the go-to-market phase started, having that niche client focus and also being a true cloud software at that time was a really, really, change-making process. That led, of course, to the scale-up phase in 2014 forward, when the growth started picking up speed.
In 2018, 2020, before corona, the sort of the main growth years happened, and obviously also Admicom did the IPO in 2018. That was a very heavy growth phase. Also in that time Admicom started thinking about widening their client focus and then brought up the manufacturing industry as a third segment into the client area. There were some M&A also associated with that, so buying new features to the software. Until, let's say, beginning of 2020, Admicom was still a company that was purely focused on the Adminet ERP solution. It was a one monolithic solution, and that was being sold to the clients, SME clients, in the Finnish market.
In 2020, Admicom executed its first sizable M&A and bought a other construction technology company called Tocoman. Jari is here talking more about that offering. The sort of the next phase, a growth of solutions suite via M&A started, which was during now the last two years, 2021 and 2022. We've been growing then also inorganically. The organic growth has continued. Of course, the corona time was a hit to the growth period. The sort of the growth has continued the whole time. Now of course, we are in a position where the company is very much different company than it was in the time of the IPO when everything was centered around one software stack.
Now we have a solution suite. Of course now we need to think that, okay, what's next? How are we going? That is actually the whole main story today. What are we going to do and then how are we going to do it? It's clear that this sort of foundation, this sort of profitability levels give us a very, very solid positive track to be building on the next growth leap. It's maybe good to note that it's a next growth leap. It's not the same growth leap. We can't like just keep on doing what we've been doing and wish that, you know, those years from 2018 to 2020 would just carry on. We need to be doing something different in order to tackle the market and drive that growth.
That's exactly what we are talking here today. That maybe brings us to the new purpose and vision. These are the first fruits of our strategy refresh that we have been doing this fall and around this new year. We formulated a purpose statement, why are we here? That's of course like purpose statements many times are, is a sort of an abstract stating. Stating that we are building sustainable future together. That comes from the thought that as we as an Admicom are able to increase the productivity of our clients, as we are able to increase the productivity of those customers who are constantly being pressured into a lower prices and are in a sort of between the rock and hard place when you consider that they are the small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.
They are between the rock and hard place between their cost, rising cost and the kind of the demands from their main contractors. How do we increase their productivity? If we are able to increase the productivity, then they are able to invest into quality. Once they invest into quality, that means that there will be sustainability in their operations. There will be sustainability of the construction industry as a whole, and that of course should lead into increased productivity as well. There we find the sort of the purpose and kind of giving a sense of meaning to many Admicom people that what do we want to be doing.
I think also in this larger frame of sustainability in the world and CO2 emissions and so on, I think this is a very, very appreciable purpose, I think we are quite happy to be driving that forward. Of course, any good purpose should have a nice vision to match onto that as well, we formulated our vision statement as being the first choice of partner in the European construction software ecosystem. That means, of course, first choice is sort of ambition, that we want to be the number one to be considered. The partner means that we want to be partnering much more. We want to be partnering with our clients, we want to be partnering also with other relevant players in the value chain, in the ecosystem of building and construction.
Also we want to state European construction software ecosystem, so it means that we don't want to stay only in Finland, but we want to grow abroad. Where does that thinking come from? When we were evaluating the strategic options or. I think I'm quite happy to say that when we were evaluating the options together with the board of directors, you could say that we were in the luxury situation that there were abundance of options. There were quite a lot of routes that we could have taken. There were quite a lot of different pathways that we could take. Of course, that means that you need to focus on different things. You can't pick everything at once. The route that we took was this construction software ecosystem.
The idea was that when we are now in the sort of the light gray area, being a multi-sector ERP software provider in Finland, that is a sort of nice position as you can see from our finance sales. We are able to dominate, and we could even grow the manufacturing industry segment that we currently have in our portfolio. It definitely means that there would be a limited capability for international expansion. At some stage, the kind of growth room or white space or whatever you want to call it, that would be limited. At the same time, our product suite had already grown. We had acquired new companies like the Kotopro in June, and we were like heavily leaning towards the construction sector already.
We felt that, when we go to that pathway, when we choose that pathway, and of course we evaluated all the different options, but when we chose that pathway, it meant that we want to wider the offering, but at the same time focus. We want to focus in a sense that we focus on the construction technology and the building ecosystem. We want to know who our clients are. When you are seeing the client videos here today, they are about builders. They are about construction yards. They are about the different tasks that they are doing at the construction yard. They are not about manufacturing factories and so on. That's a very important topic. When, when you are providing mission-critical software, the client needs are very different.
You can pretend that you are focused on a certain client niche, but you ultimately are not unless your client focus is very, very sharp and kind of focused like we said. What we want to do is we want to narrow into the construction technology with building ecosystem, and in the first phase, we of course need to do that in Finland. We need to look at our comprehensive portfolio. We need to integrate better. We need to focus on the data flow and insights from data. That topic, the data topic, maybe I want to touch now a bit because it's of course a very hot topic right now, and not the least because of the AI hype.
The video that you saw in the beginning about Admicom, there was a music on the background, and that music was actually created by AI. We wanted to do it because of that, because it's free. We don't need to pay any royalties, so we can pay more money to our shareholders. No, not really. I guess we could have invested in the music. I guess it's to show you that there are magnificent things that an AI can already be doing. The really fantastic thing about us is now that we have about 3,000 clients, and those clients have a abundance of mission-critical data that is in our systems already. Yet we are not really utilizing that data. We are not really providing clients insights about that data.
We are not really connecting that data and providing valuable analysis along the whole value chain. We believe that in that area, and with the machine learning and AI tools that are now on the market, there is much more that can actually be done in that area. That actually is an area where you need to be a sector-focused comprehensive solutions provider in order to provide that sort of focus into data. If you are a point solution provider, you are barely able to integrate the data flows, but you are not able to draw any meaningful analysis from that data. I think we have a really wonderful position to really analyze that data, and we will come back to that later.
The third step going forward to the dark gray area is, of course, following the same pathway. Going into construction technology for building ecosystem, but doing that internationally. Of course, we are coming from the SME focus. We have most of our clients are SME size companies. We've typically been saying that a sweet spot client is about EUR 5 million revenue, 30 employees, entrepreneur who does have a few people at the back office and most of the people are busily on the client side. It's good to note that these clients are, you know, they are building, of course, new builds, but they are also renovating. They are building infrastructure projects. They are doing all the things on the construction side.
They are also in a various parts of building ecosystem. It's not a, like, one-size-fits-all even there. Also when you are considering our CFO, Petri Aho, will touch this later, but when you are considering the sort of the difficult financial situations and is construction going to see problems, it's good to know that it's not like, you know, construction provider who is focused on building new apartment buildings, for example. We have those as well, of course, but it's only a sort of marginal part of the whole client focus that we are having. Going back to the international focus.
If we bring our SME focus and we go into the sort of the international playing fields, I think that gives us also a very nice challenger position to the big global players in the market. I will touch the competition later, but I think coming from an SME field and going then towards the bigger ones gives you a nice possibility for really being a surpriser because then you tend to create simple enough software and not sort of too complex solutions that really don't serve any one client good enough. From the past slide, you could also already see that there is some phasing built into our strategy and this is exactly how we want to think about this.
We want to create a two-phase strategy. Actually, we need to create that two-phase strategy. There's been a bunch of M&A done in the past few years. As we are aiming for internationalization, growing international, we need to do strengthening of the platform. We need to tie the products together. We need to really think that what is the edge that we are doing. We need to focus on the client value that we are providing. Also do the cultural integration operating model. This is the time that we are now calling for focus for growth. Meaning that we want to get the growth going, but in order to do that, we need to focus. That's the part that we are now doing.
I will touch what we have already done, but it's about focusing now and then gaining growth through the focus. We see that once we are ready, somewhere around 2024, I believe, we move into the accelerated growth phase where we start to gear up the growth phase and, once we do that, we believe that we are also then building up that internationally, so not only in the Finnish markets. I will also touch that later on, what are the ways, possible ways of becoming international for us. Internally, we've been talking about the North Star. Being a Finnish company, I think that's very, very kind of speaking of us.
We come here from the Arctic North, we've now defined as a North Star where we want to be aiming for. In our North Star, we have stated that financially in 2030, there is a EUR 100 million RR come together. I would be happy if that's sooner than that, but we need to give our team also the understanding that it's not only incremental growth, but we really want to make a growth leap now and really get us into the next league. In order to do that, we of course need to provide some tangible benefits to our clients. We have thrown the challenge that our building ecosystem customers need to be quarter more productive than their peers, 25% more productive than their peers.
We believe that with our software and services solutions, the clients can gain that advantage. There's the comprehensive data platform with AI. We really want to build in AI and machine learning capabilities and harvest the data, and of course, make sure that the data flows are coherent. I think I will talk about that later as well, but I think in the construction technology, the problem is that the data flows are not coherent right now. First, get the data flows coherent across the stack, and then make sure that we provide benefits from that. We want to be present in numerous markets where we can find synergies between the markets from operating procedures, ecosystem and solutions.
We might not be having the same offering, exact same offering stack across every market, but as we as a company are focused in this field, I think that gives us advantage as well. Of course, finally, the growth comes from the people and we need to be the best workplace for our people. The sort of angle that we have chosen is that we want to be, and Admicom traditionally has been a place where people have been rising from within and there's been a lot of training and learning on the job and that is something that we want to continue and keep focus going forward. Finally, of course, all of this should lead into superior customer experience that is the result of seamless connection of software and value-add services.
We have currently value-add service as well, and we feel that that's important piece, not maybe in the scalability of our business, but in the superior customer experience for our clients. We have defined three principles that guide us towards the North Star. The first is the winning customer experience. Like I mentioned earlier, it's also part of our North Star. We need to have the winning customer experience. During this first phase, Focus for Growth, we need to build the customer centricity as a strategic advantage. Unfortunately, that a bit means that we need to shift from a product focus to a customer focus. We've been a very product-focused company, and good as this is because it has given us a great growth leap.
At the same time, when we are a SaaS service provider and we are relying on recurring revenue where the clients need to keep on buying the, you know, software every year, we really need to bring the client to the front. That also means that when we can bring the client into the front, we can also cross a lot of solutions and services to the clients and get a much bigger share of wallet from the same clients that we are currently serving. That's the idea behind this topic. Once we move into the Accelerated Growth phase, we need to bring the ecosystem to the client. We need to be an ecosystem provider that finds the right partners in the ecosystem and connects those to our software stack. Then the closeness is provided via value-add services.
Those of you had that followed Admicom previously know that we have a quite sizable accounting team in Admicom, so who are utilizing the Adminet ERP solution and providing the accounting services to our clients, the SMEs clients. That's, of course, a very valuable value-add service that they get, that it's a full service to the clients. Also for us, it means that as we are providing that value-add service through our own personnel right now, we can continuously automate that process. We can find efficiency from there. That's actually what we have already been able to do. We have built in a lot of efficiency in there, and it's actually quite a profitable part of our business as well, the accounting services as of now. That's the winning customer experience principle.
There's the simple innovations that goes into the idea of our R&D and then the core of our products. Admicom has always treasured the idea of being an innovator, building up new solutions that even the clients have not been able to ask or have not known to ask. Admicom has provided that solution to the clients and shown them that, hey, once you take this way of use or take this procedure into use, you are able to be much more efficient. Hey, take our software, it's standardized. We will not tailor it to you, but believe us, you will gain efficiency once you take it that into use. That's something that we want to really be doing.
We also want to be simple, and that's maybe something that being too product-focused, we have maybe lost a bit of that touch. How to create simple innovations? How to create software that is easy to use where the user experience is really top-notch? That we want to bring there and, you know, create a really simple to use and as automated as possible user experience for our clients. That means that we need to increase the speed and agility in our product development and also in the product management. We need to take that into sort of next level in order to continue to grow. Once we have taken that into next level, then there's, like I said earlier, the data-driven portfolio is there, and then we can gain competitive edge from our scale.
The third principle, Transparently Agile, is of course, quite typical for any modern software company. we need to increase our clock speed. We need to gain speed from the focus and transparency. of course, there is a cultural work that we need to be doing in order to connect the acquired entities and the teams to whole Admicom family. of course, that work continues. We plan to continue with the M&A. we need to be having a very solid cultural stack where we can bring on new entities. in that area, we are also seeing our operating model. the organization, like we are now organized, is in the business unit models, and then each business unit, for example, has their own separate sales teams.
As we are going forward, we need to evaluate that what is the next operating model where we'll be going. Do we have a combined sales team, for example? Do we have sales teams for separately for SME and for enterprise and so on. We are evaluating that, and it's sort of continuous path forward as we move forward here. As we are growing international, we need to have strong procedures and concepts that can be applied across the markets. Those are the main three principles. What we have done already. We have started the Focus for Growth phase in beginning of November when we made the first announcement about it. It means, like I said, strengthening our base. We have already clarified the operating model. Let's say version 1.0.
Also the governance model. We have simplified the governance model within the company quite a lot. There's been growth investments in the joint operating practices in the areas of sales work, marketing, human resources, software development, to name a few. From the software development part, maybe it's worth mentioning that the R&D investment that we are making this year is about EUR 1 million. That's of course, investment that we kind of committed already in end of 2022, sorry, end of 2021 when we acquired the Aitio Software Development Services. During last year, those people were still doing quite a lot of client billable work in their own fields, but now this year we are now transferring more and more of that capacity into our own R&D.
We feel that that is now kind of a investment that they need to be doing again to push for the growth lever going forward. We also believe that if we as a company are investing EUR 1 million more to R&D, there's not many. In the Finnish scope, actually, there is no company in our field that is investing as much totally into the R&D in the construction sector, I believe. That's sort of what we are topping. That shows the kind of the devotion and true focus that we are now having to really make this happen. In order to focus, we also made two other decisions.
We de-invested a non-standard accounting clients from a Lakeus accounting company that we acquired in the summer of 2021. Then we also made the decision to look for separating our manufacturing industry branch. That is the third segment that we have been having, and last year provided about 5%. The software sales were about 5% of our revenues. Of course, those clients are still there. We are still serving them. We are providing them the service, but we are looking ways of separating that into its own entity and then that entity driving its own growth going forward. Admicom maybe staying there as an owner or then completely divesting away from it. Of course it's—there's a good business there as well, and there's growth opportunities.
From our perspective, we need to focus somewhere, and now we are focusing on the construction technology part. What will happen during this year going forward? We are now starting a process working on our brand. Thinking about what is the Admicom brand going forward and how all these Tocoman, Kotopro brands fit into the picture and how does that show value to our clients. Of course, that is very tightly connected to our internal cultural work as well. How does our cultures work and what is our value promise to employees and then to clients going forward? We are also now investing into moving into fully agile model in our R&D practices and really getting the clock speed up to speed in that area as well.
Sales and marketing need to be working heavily together. They already are and the teams have really nicely come together and hold their joint sales teams and are toss-tossing client leads to each other and so on, but we want to also take that step going forward. We have already initiated and are hopefully happy soon to announce a nomination of a chief growth officer to our leadership team. Bringing in a new sort of head of sales for the whole Admicom Group. Of course, the improved customer success, especially in the Adminet software stack. We need to provide a better service to the clients.
First to get our salespeople focused on the new sales and not like serving the old clients, also make sure that the old clients do get the service that they can appreciate and also get bigger share of wallet from them. We have also initiated our first new product for years in the whole Adminet. We are building the minimum viable product of that. We are not going in depth in there yet. We want to do the minimum viable product and see what does it bring us. That should be a software that is again tying together the offering that we are having. During this year we want to create the first, or let's say create the international go-to-market plan.
Maybe not do the actual go-to-market, but we want to create the international go-to-market strategy on how are we going to execute that. Of course, it's fair to state that we are still in the beginning of our growth journey and the beginning of the growth leap. We don't have the answers yet, everything. In a rapidly changing world, we might never have all the answers, but we are still going forward. We plan to have a next Capital Markets Day in a year or so, where we will be able to iterate the process on how we are going and also definitely about the internationalization. We'll then be able to discuss more at that stage.
The team that is currently most visible, externally, I guess, is the leadership team, group leadership team that we have here today, myself, Petri Aho, and Jari Kangassalo, and Mikko Järvi. Then we have Anna-Maija Ijäs, our Business Unit Director for ERP Solutions, having a flu today. Tuomas Raahelma, our CTO and Business Unit Director for Software Development Services. Used to be the CEO of the Aitio company that was acquired in 2021. Actually this leadership team, Mikko Järvi came from the Kotopro deal in summer of 2022. Tuomas came in December of 2021. I joined in June 2022. The Petri, Jari and Anna-Maija have been at the company longer, and three of us are sort of newcomers.
I feel that this is actually quite a nice balance, having sort of new thoughts, new ideas, new fresh blood into the whole group, and then also still maintaining the, sort of the understanding of the old practices and old procedures. Clear to state that as we have this foundation that we were talking about, it's such a magnificent path that there is no need and definitely we shouldn't be changing everything. We shouldn't change things just for changing it because there is so many things that are creating fun-wonderful results. We just need to build on that and truly understand that what are those things that we can be building on and what are those things that we need to be iterating all the time going forward.
Like said, we are now looking forward of having a chief growth officer joining this. During this year we also hope to implement a chief product officer to drive the whole product management of the comprehensive portfolio going forward. That should be a sort of the leadership team going forward. There's the board of directors and there's actually also quite a lot of new fresh blood in the board of directors since the AGM last February. Petri Niemi has been the chairman of the board since February 2022. Henna Mäkinen, CFO of Supermetrics, previously CFO of Wolt, so two very, very rapidly growing Finnish international companies, is providing us a financial backing and also audit committee chairperson.
Marko Somerma, a former CEO of Siili and now CEO for ARKO Architects, is now giving us a industry background from the design perspective and Marko also has a very extensive M&A experience from Ruukki Construction Company, a steel producer here in Finland. Very good experience from there. Olli Nokso-Koivisto, CEO for LeadDesk, a leading a rapidly growing software company based here in Helsinki. Pasi Aaltola, who is coming from the academic background, is a professor in University of Jyväskylä, and he's been at the board of directors since 2017 already, gives us the sort of understanding of the past and understanding of the thinking from there.
With this board of directors, I'm happy to say that we have a very nice governance structure in place, and we have a sort of solid corporate governance that we can be happy about and having independent board members at the board guiding the strategy execution. This morning we published our targets for the strategy period, like said earlier, we have a two-phased strategy, the Focus for Growth phase. During that period, we placed our target growth to 8%-15% growth per annum of comparable organic recurring revenue, so meaning that it's not the full revenue, partly because we have this IT or software development revenue that is now being more placed into the internal usage, so we don't feel that that's sort of kind of comparable.
At the same time, we want to note that we are a recurring revenue company. We are a SaaS company, we feel that that's the sort of the revenue that we should be driving for and getting the recurring revenue growth there. In the Accelerated Growth period, we want to push for over 15% per annum growth rates. Of course, you could say that I'd like to see an even bigger number there, and that's what we want to do, but let's be cautious what we are promising still here to the market. Sort of final ambition in 2030, having an ARR of EUR 100 million revenues.
In M&A growth, that will be added on to those organic growth figures, so we will continue M&A strategy and we'll discuss that later on as well, what does it mean? Finally, of course, getting a presence in several European countries. While we are doing the Focus for Growth phase, there are several reasons why the profitability is going down a bit. Of course, you need to use money to make money. I guess that's the old wisdom. What we are aiming to do is to boost to have the EBITDA margin still on the 35%-40% range of our revenues, which I think is on the peer comparison and also in the general stock exchange rates, I think we are on a very, very nice levels even with that margin.
When we get into Accelerated Growth phase and sort of the biggest investment phase is over and the scalability picks up again, we want to boost the EBITDA margin back over 40% band rate. Of course, if we are able to keep the EBITDA margins on there and also get the growth rates going, we should be clearly exceeding the Rule of Forty the whole time as we are going this track forward. Petri Aho, our CFO, will touch the guidance specifically for this year, 2023, later on his presentation. This is the sort of the overall go-targets for the strategy period. I'm quite happy that we have stated them and quite happy that we are going forward and getting the next growth leap going.
With that, it looks like that I have two seconds left in my presentation, so I'm right on time, and we are able to proceed to the Q&A section. We will have the Q&A now, and following the Q&A we'll have about five-minute break before we continue. Any questions from the audience? There's something in the audience. Do we need a microphone for the audience, I guess? Petri, would you like to join me here if there's questions where I need fire support?
Yes. Thank you. It's on?
Yes.
It's Veikka-Pekka Silvasti from Danske Bank. Thank you for the presentation. Maybe first question around this kind of structure of your different strategy phases and the financial guidance in there. Can you just explain the background of how are you going to be able to accelerate organic growth and expand margins at the same time after 2024? Just looking at Efecte, the LeadDesk, Basware, and Talenom, for example, it's quite apparent that investing in like, growth within Europe, it takes a lot of costs and burdens margins. Can you give some background on this?
Yeah, of course. We will actually now touch. Maybe I should have mentioned that we will have three Q&As. So, this is the first Q&A for this sort of foundation part. We will have the drivers for growth, there's a Q&A following that. For the financial metrics, there's still a Q&A. So, we might push some of the questions forward in order to get there. It's a good question. We will touch the drivers for growth in the next phase, what comes into sort of scalability. I think the idea is that now we need to do some excess investment right now, but we know that the kind of the operating model that is there behind is able to provide a quite sizable profit margins for us actually.
That should give us, once we are able to kind of, let's say, linearize, or what is the right word for that, get those investments level and at the same time grow, of course, there comes the kind of the investment scale from there. I think additionally, it's good noting that there might be changes if we do acquire an international entity. Let's say very sizable international entity that doesn't have the same operating margins that we are now running. That's of course a change, and then we need to evaluate that what is the right EBITDA margin at that point. This from, let's say, from a going concern principle, this is the target that we are aiming for.
Exactly. This is an organic margin target for you then. Clear. Maybe, I guess we're gonna touch upon this as well later on, but you are talking about going to be active in multiple European countries. Can you open up a bit? Are we talking about Nordics or the whole of Europe.
Yes. On the next, a fter the break.
Okay.
Pass the mic. Thank you.
T hank you, that's all for me.
Hi, it's Felix Henriksson from Nordea. I'll have a few questions. I can go one by one, and you can choose which questions to postpone to the later ones. First, related to your current software offering, could you just perhaps give a bit more color on in which areas do you see the most potential for-
On the next part.
cross-selling and upselling?
Yes.
In the next part. Okay. A question on your accounting services business. I just wanted to hear your latest thoughts about that. How is this sort of, still sort of core for you in a, in a sense? Could you just explain the rationale of having this business versus perhaps using partners or third parties to offer your clients such services? Could you also perhaps disclose how large share of your customers, your software customers as of today do use your accounting services as well?
Yeah. I think Petri will be going into details of the revenue mix and where is that coming from. If I give a sort of short answer right now, I think the idea comes from the client experience thought. Once we are also providing the value-added services, the connection with the client is much, the relationship with the client is better than if we would be just providing the software. Then it's good to note, like I said, it's quite profitable services, so it's good money as well. It's not like, you know, something that we are just doing for free. It's good services.
Maybe thirdly, it's good to note that those services are provided with our own software, with the Adminet, and not, you know, every partner is willing to, you know, choose that they will be providing that on the Adminet. We do have some partners as well who are doing that, but we've seen the value of having our own stack there. You know, actually I'm maybe I'm getting a little bit out of hand right now, but I see the possibility of providing some other value-added services to our clients as well. Maybe not from a, you know, gaining lots of profitability and scalability, but from the relationship perspective. How can we help the entrepreneur that is our client? How can we provide sort of stickier glue to that entrepreneur?
I think that is a sort of very big, very big question. It's a different game than providing just a software, you know, some non-localized software to anybody in the world. This is still a sort of relationship game that we need to be playing.
Are you willing to comment on the margins on that business, accounting services?
I don't think we split those margins, but you will get some flavor from the later stages of the presentation to that end as well.
Okay. I got one more. In terms of your leadership team, given that you're sort of looking for international expansion in the coming years, do you feel like your leadership team needs additional strengthening with that sort of an experience, or is that a criteria you're looking for in your chief growth officer, hiring process?
Do you think that our leadership team needs now that you've seen, j ust wait. No, I think we need a healthy balance and of course, we need to, you know, bring on some competencies, and that's of course one thing that we are looking at the chief growth officer and I think also the chief product officer that mentioned is a possibility to hire somebody that has sort of more international flavor and so on. Whether we will start hiring somebody from, you know, States or, you know, Silicon Valley and so on, maybe not, but of course there's still a healthy balance of internationality that we want to bring into the company at this stage.
We have already, Silicon Valley experience in Mikko Järvi here today.
That's true. Yeah.
Got it. Thank you.
Yes. Hello, thank you. Emil Immonen from Carnegie. I had a question about the research and development investment. The EUR 1 million, is that going to be every year EUR 1 million or is it, was it a kind of one-off for 2023?
Yes. I think we have had, online similar type of questions here.
We take those in New York.
Yeah. I think we can take them later, but here I would like to maybe say that it was at this stage just to give you a feeling about that, you know, it's not insignificant investments that we're making at the moment, and we have the kind of a scale already to make quite significant investments to R&D. I don't think we want to start separating those numbers each year and most of the R&D invest there continues. When we create a new product, it doesn't stop there. It's only kind of the first stage, and then we have to make investments over the years. Of course, the initial investments are always the biggest ones. The mentioned EUR 1 million, it goes mostly at the moment for the new product development and enhancing the current products. There's also an element where we upgrade the current offering.
Maybe of course it's good to note that maybe it's a tricky question whether it will continue or not, because like in any business, any investments you need to be considering every year, and then you need to consider your products, and you need to consider which products live and which don't and so on. It's a continuous evaluation of course. Maybe it's fair to state that we are stepping up the sort of the R&D game a bit from what we have been doing lately.
The R&D is mostly on new products. It's not only on upgrading, for example, the old.
No.
-software?
No. Yeah.
Someone else?
There is, yeah.
Hi, it's Atte Riikola from Inderes. Maybe just one question at this time. If you look at your 2030 target to reach 100 million ARR, I think that assumes that you're expanding internationally pretty well. Is there any internal target how much of your ARR will come from international markets at that point?
We haven't stated that out loud. Like I will discuss on the next part, kind of the internationalization go-to-market is not clear yet. We felt that it's, you know, unfair to be now stating some ambition before we have sort of laid our plans. Maybe the next capital market stage you will have that target.
I guess it will play especially at the end of the period, significant part of the RR business. How much of the ARR it is, we don't have the answer yet.
All right.
Maybe it's the additional EUR 50 million on top of that goal. Oops, sorry. I think we have a maybe one question here from the audience that we could now answer, and the other ones maybe we'll carry on later in the Q&A. There was a question from Max that can we, "Can you break down the investments in R&D, how much towards current platform and domestic clients, how much for international expansion, etc.?" Also just to clarify the EUR 1 million increase from 2022. Yes, the EUR 1 million, to give roughly a number, is an increase from 2022, what we are now budgeting for this year. Maybe we discussed that question as well, that it is to the current products, but it is also for the new products.
Of course, you know, how much is for the domestic use, how much is for international, we'll touch that on the next phase as well. You can't really separate, because some of the things are straight applicable to international markets, some things are more like maybe platform changes in the, in the domestic market only and so on. I think it's going both ways. That's, that's maybe fair to state now.
Yeah. Later on in my presentation, I will give out the kind of R&D expense of total revenue. There you can then do the calculations yourself, how much of that is the EUR 1 million mentioned here.
There's one question from Janne asking, "What is the advantage of scale in data usage? Thank you." I think the kind of the advantage of scale, what I meant there is that we have a very sizable amount of data already. We have in the Adminet, we have more than 1,500 clients that are heavily utilizing it, and they have of course gathered data into the systems. That's the advantage. We have from the Finnish perspective, of course it's not like, you know, gaining us international advantage, but from Finnish perspective, we have very sizable data mass that we can already start analyzing and providing answers to and insights to our clients.
Then that's maybe as a comparison to some newcomer who is now coming to the market with a new software, maybe very fancy software and then sort of very, you know, creative software now, but lacking any clients. How much insight are they able to provide when they have only a handful of clients? We have the sort of the clients there already, and if we can immediately start applying machine learning to that data, that gives us the advantage.
To add to that, we already have especially in project management business where big part of the competitive advantage of the product comes from the data usage and how it is utilized through the software.
Good. Hey, maybe we'll have a five minute break here at the site right now, and we'll continue, well, 2:00 P.M. Helsinki time. Those online, grab a cup of coffee, take a bio break. I think here we have toilets somewhere hopefully, so you can find your stage there. Thank you for your attention so far. We'll continue with the drivers for growth soon. Hello again and welcome back. Back to the studio here in Helsinki. Looks like that we didn't lose any of the live audience, and I do hope that you're still on board, that the virtual audience are still there as well. I have to congratulate the studio for providing myself also with this very nice drink, which I don't know what it contains, but happy to have it here with me.
We can now actually pick up speed and continue to the drivers for growth. This next topic, we will be talking about that what enables the growth, what is the market opportunity, and what is actually the portfolio, what are the products that we are selling, and to who are we selling those products? Or maybe I should be saying that who are buying the products? What the clients and why are we able to make the growth happen? Why do we believe in the growth? Actually, I'm happy to say that here today at the audience, we have eight of our or seven of our top sales people here present as well, watching this show. After the show, we will continue to have a very nice dinner.
These are the sales people who made the most sales goals last year. Happy to reward them. I was asking them on the break that, okay, how do they feel about these growth targets that we are now setting, and I didn't see anybody fainting yet, so I guess that's a good sign that we are going forward. Okay. Hey, with no further ado, going forward with the challenges in the construction industry. There are quite a lot of productivity challenges in the construction industry. There is labor and skill shortage, there's complexity and variability in the production methodology, there's limited collaboration and communication, safety and health hazards, weather and site conditions, lack of standardization, fragmented supply chain, lack of technology.
A really, you know, good set of challenges which actually are separating the construction industry from the car manufacturing industry. Funny enough, actually, these were the answers given by the ChatGPT artificial intelligence when asked that what are the biggest challenges to productivity in the construction industry. I'm showing this to you again to highlight that the AI is making quite a lot of progress. You do get very good data from there, and the usability of those models is really good. Again, we come back to our future, and okay, what can we do when we are utilizing these commercially available models in our toolkit?
Also these challenges are very clear and right ones, and also applicable here in Finland, but also applicable in the European and in the global scale as well. Actually, the construction is not so different in different countries. The kind of the backgrounds and the regulations and rules might be different, but the things that you actually do at the construction site tend to be quite similar, and how do you construct your value chain and so on are also quite similar. That gives us an edge when thinking of going international. Like ChatGPT is saying and advising us that when these challenges can be overcome by implementing new technologies, streamlining processes, and improving collaboration and communication among all project participants. This is exactly what we aim to be doing.
We will be helping these clients to implement new technologies, new software stacks, provide them with a process of usage with these softwares, so training them on what is the best way of utilizing it, bringing new ways of working, and then improving collaboration in the value chain, connecting those different providers that many of them are already using some parts of our stack, so we have a way of connecting them as well. I think a wonderful opportunity. This is actually more, let's if you could say, more reliable data, so the overall megatrends in the building ecosystem. We are now using the construction industry and the building ecosystem as a little bit, you know, both words into use, and what we mean by building ecosystem, we mean that it's a little bit wider term than the construction industry.
The building ecosystem also includes the maintenance of real estate, for example, and the maintenance operations done there, and the management of real estate and so on. Especially with the Kotopro tooling, that's an area where we have a nice advantage. We are not only in the construction phase, we are there for the whole life cycle of the building, and that's the building ecosystem and the different providers of the ecosystem. Sustainability and green building, very important, and when you need to meet sustainability goals, when you need to be reducing your CO2 emissions, for example, you need software to be able to do that. You need software that is able to calculate on what you are using and what are the CO2 emissions there, and also reduce the waste in the whole process.
Prefabrication and modular building, also a very important trend. How do you sort of, change from craftsmanship into a more industrial way of producing things? How do you pre-plan, how do you pre-construct, and how do you build those right time to the construction yard? Again, something where you need software to really makes the scheduling work. It's not only a man and a hammer, it is the whole value chain and process in order to get that right. Smart cities and connected buildings of course means that by itself, the cities and buildings will have a lot more digitalization built into them. Again, those providers that are building that digitalization, they need to be digital themselves in order to provide that connectivity.
Technological advancements, obviously, that's what we are talking here today, and the shortage of skilled employees. I think that's also a very valuable message. The construction industry has been battling the shortage of skilled employees globally, everywhere, and that's also a necessity for increasing the productivity. When you have those skilled people, they need to be able to do more. How do you help them to do more is, of course, by the use of digital tools and a very good planning, reducing, again, waste from their time spent, and then also maybe ways of training those new employees. How do you train them into the work? How do you give them a sort of a clear pathway that this is the way that you are going to build it?
Again, the things that you can achieve with the software. Very interesting parts. Then maybe also interesting to note here is the change of generation in the employees, because this is one topic that when I've been meeting our clients and discussing that, okay, how do you feel about having a digital tools at your work site? We know that you're already using, for example, Adminet at the back office, so how do your constructors feel that if they would have a smartphone and do things with that? What they are telling that the younger generation is anyways having the smartphones there already, so they would be happy to do that as long as they have easy-to-use solutions and sort of solutions that can be immediately picked up.
There's of course this older generation of you know, construction workers, but they are going to retire soon, and the sort of that will give a tone change into, okay, how can you utilize toolings at the construction site as well? This is a graph that is highlighting the software adoption lag in the building, buildings and construction field. There you can see that in the top end of the curve is the ICT, media, and finance and insurance sectors, and then the buildings is there just slightly ahead of agriculture, but the second least software-adopted industry. It's also one of the largest ecosystems in the world globally, and it has been slow to adopt innovations. How can we unlock the productivity?
Is by combining the building modeling, the sort of the work that you do at the site, and the 3D models with the financial information that you are having. That sort of thing, somebody's calling it 5D BIM, Building Information Model, 5-dimensional Building Information Model. If you can bring in the financial information into the actual construction planning, then you can really unlock the potential there. Like we are going to discuss later on, that's exactly what we can be doing going forward with our comprehensive suite. This is just on the courtesy of Raymond James. This is a picture of the construction software ecosystem. It's a little bit blurry picture.
You don't need to be reading all of too, but it shows you that the different phases from design to the recycle and construct phases, you have lots of different areas where you have niche software providers. You have software providers for these different niches. Some companies are of course more overlapping in these areas. Most of these areas you have a niche softwares. That of course means that when you have a niche softwares, you are very fragmented in your work and data flows, and that leads to inefficiency.
I was discussing with a client who is working as a site construction manager at one of the largest Finnish construction companies, and they said that they had counted, and they had about 160 different applications for their use at their work sites generally. Of course, the smaller ones don't have that amount of applications, but the larger ones do. That of course means that when they are more advanced in taking digital applications into use, then they have adopted lots of niche solutions. What we aim to be doing is to start from the small end, which doesn't yet have that many, but bring in a very comprehensive suite.
They don't need to have 160 solutions, but they need to have a few that are very well integrated and where the data flows through the application stream. Actually, I do believe that if we are able to achieve that, if we are able to bring a very data-efficient package, easy-to-use package into a smaller end, I think the bigger ones would also be very interested in getting that package into their use, because I do know that those employees are really dissatisfied with their current stack. This brings us to how our portfolio is looking right now. How is this value chain looking from our perspective? There you can see on the left-hand side the design planning scheduling part where we haven't been that heavily.
Actually, the Tocoman software is there not on the design part but in the planning and the cost accounting phasing. We do have a presence there, mainly in the enterprise and middle-sized clients, but there we can move to the sort of smaller scale clients. In the middle, in the building and renovation, and the management and admin of the construction work, that's of course the core of Admicom, where Adminet and the different tools are most effective and are solving that problem very well already. In the right side, there's the maintenance property management, where we haven't been with the previous stack, but Kotopro is actually very well present there. This sort of room in the value chain has already extended with the acquisitions that we have done.
We see that there are arrows pointing to different paths that we can actually even move further on. That of course means that the total accessible market is growing even within the construction field. Even as we are narrowing focus in the construction field, but within the construction, we are able to widen up the client scope and again provide a full visibility into the vertical. In the bottom, you can see the different job titles of the people that can be using and are using then our solutions. If you look at the competition landscape, you can see that there is a lots of different partial solutions, niche solutions there, especially in this sort of middle area, this dark gray area where we are.
From our current perspective and, you know, few years before the sort of the partial ERP systems that are only providing the sort of the workflow management and, then are integrated with an accounting software, that has been the sort of the main competition for us. The difference for our solution is that Adminet actually combines both of those two. You have the ERP component, and you have the accounting built in, so you can do the whole pipeline. From the, let's say our inputs or, things done on the work site into the actual paying of salaries and paying of bills and invoices, and you get the visibility and you get the data flow. We have a sort of integration advantage to our competitions or competitors already.
When we are widening the field, there is a best-of-breed softwares in all of those areas. Of course, in the enterprise levels, when you look at the global field, you have large companies like Nemetschek Group, Trimble, RIB, SAP, Procore in the States, that are doing similar things in their niches and of course have a very comprehensive platforms, have a very comprehensive suites. This is sort of the area that we want to challenge. I think it's also healthy for a company to be a challenger. I think in Finland, Admicom has been sort of market leader for many years already, and I think it's time to change that.
Let's bring in a challenger mindset and think that, "Okay, what can we do on the global scale to challenge the big players and do that in a simple innovative way?" I think there is a lot of room, like discussed earlier, what we can be doing when we are combining that package together. That brings us to sort of the total accessible market. This is the sort of the going concern type of thinking, that if we would be only staying in Finland, if we would be utilizing this strategy that we now have in Finland and considering the total accessible market of both the software and then the services associated with those, mostly with the accounting services perspective, we see that the total addressable market only in Finland is EUR 320 million+.
We are now last year about EUR 30 million revenue. You could say that we could easily grow to the sort of the ambition ARR only in Finland, if we would like. There is market for that. I believe that in this market, if you are able to be the market leader, you can actually reach, say, a very high market share position, especially as you are ecosystem player and, you know, the more and more companies have in your ecosystem, the more you tend to gain into the game. As you can see, we've been widening the TAM with the core ERP solutions, adding the project management solutions, adding the documentation solutions that ends up gives us this sort of TAM.
I'm not so worried about the potential market size and of course, when we are talking about internationalization, I'm even less worried about the market size. Of course, there are other things that you need to be worried about. If you want to drive a growth strategy, you need to be doing certain things right. These are the sort of the five strategy imperatives, how we see that, what is the growth demanding from us. Of course, we are a product company, we are a software company. Even if we are more client-focused than product-focused, we still need to have a very good product.
We need to have a solid solution platform for the building ecosystem because at least in the short term, we need to be growing with cross-sell and of course upselling across the clients. At the same time, we need to be transforming to go-to-market game, meaning that how do we sell needs to be changing a bit. Of course, we need to be beating the competition with hunger for new sales. It means that we need to have a sales force that is really ticking for the job and like I said, we need to be transforming the go-to-market game, so we need to widen from a traditional relationship modeling, selling mode into a product-led growth in the more simple solutions. Of course, there you need to understand that solutions are different.
If you have a very comprehensive ERP solution, the clients are not changing those every year and when they are changing, it's sort of a really mission-critical decision for them. That's of course acts in our defense, but also makes of course the sales work quite complicated. There you need to have the relationship there. You need to build that relationship. You need to build the trust to the client. You need to have good references in place. When you are building more, let's say, these spearheads into the suite, there you can do much more product-led growth. I think Kotopro has been doing that already nicely, providing trial periods and so on.
I think in that area we can give much more advantage to our sales forces by giving such tools that can be easily adopted even without having any relationship with the company yet. Comes the international go-to-market. I will discuss that in a few slides. There we need to widen the total accessible market. We need to increase the growth rate. The fourth is the fit for purpose M&A. We see that it's not sort of consolidation game as such that, you know, just buy everything that moves. We want to make smart strategic M&A where we can enter new markets and gain new customers, or we want to acquire technology that is augmenting our existing product suite. We need to be smart on that.
Finally, of course, everything needs to lead to the winning customer experience, and that's of course, the minimal churn is the final goal there. How can we minimize the churn from our current stack? There are a few thoughts about the possible pathways to international go-to-market. Like I said, we are just starting this planning this year, so there is nothing definitive yet. If you think on where we are and what we have, these are the sort of the starting pieces that we are looking into. If you want to do a organic growth route, you could look at our solution stack and say that there are certain things which are point solutions without localization needs. Kotopro in our current stack is a good example of that.
Once you transfer the language, you don't need to do much more localization. There's the sort of the next level, where is the point solutions with local flavor. For example, Tocoman stack, where you need to add some local flavor in order to match the local markets. There's the localized point solutions with integrations for the given market. In order to sell the software, you need to integrate in the infrastructure in behind. You could think that our Hillava ERP, for example, is a good example of that. You need to have the integrations ready, that ERP software is actually quite ready to fly. There's the comprehensive solutions like our Adminet, which has a very deep integrations to local digital infrastructure.
Of course, in our case, it's the Finnish digital infrastructure where actually we do have an advantage because Finland does have a very advanced digital infrastructure which the other countries are still lacking, especially in relation to construction. If and when we decide that we want to go abroad with Adminet, we could actually look at the markets which are just, you know, bringing onto their local digital infrastructure same services that Finland has already adopted a few years ago. Of course, we need to do the R&D investments into Adminet to kind of tap into those local requirements. If we do, we could actually be a first mover in those markets in that field, we believe. Like said, nothing's decided yet. There's a different complexities associated with this.
Then there's of course the non-organic growth routes where acquiring market access via spearhead entry is something that is a very sort of, I guess, normal way of becoming international. Which I, of course, think that we will be doing anyways, even if we start with organic growth and so on. We will at some stage probably execute a market entry. Then comes to question that what sort of technical solutions do we get from there and do we play in that market with that technology or do we bring in our technology and so on? Like I said, too many moving pieces to give anything affirmative yet. I think the chances are there. It's again here the way of choosing the right way going forward.
That of course, talking about the total accessible market, that gives us this nice figure that if we, you know, look at some European markets and we consider their total addressable market sizes in comparison to the Finnish market size that we showed, it's easy to say that when you are coming from Finland, which is a small market, pretty much any market that you go is already a sizable, more sizable than the Finnish market. There is an, there is a opportunities there. The kind of the message that I want to give you is that, you know, once we start internationalization, you of course need to be worried that are we able to execute and are we able to win, but you shouldn't be worried whether there is enough TAM.
I think there will be enough TAM. That's not the problem. Our solution suite. What we have today is a very nice set of tools that are already partly integrated, that are moving more and more together, and they are not going to be combined in one, like one monolithic software, but it will be a suite of software that is the best fit for SMEs and well integrated there. Additionally we will have best of breed solutions to selected target markets. For example, certain Tocoman solutions that are already household names in the enterprise sector, we are not going to throw that away. We want to have that hold there and maybe provide a possibility in the future going forward in that market.
It's good to note that with the 50% user organizations growth that we saw last year, thanks to, thanks to Kotopro and PlanMan coming in and our new sales, we have now over 3,000 user organizations and only a few of those are already using, or very few of those are already using several solutions from our stack. There's a huge potential in that overlapping client perspective. Hey, with no further ado, I want to give a voice to some other faces and our clients and we'll start with ERP solutions and Joni Haapamäki. Please, Joni.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm glad to meet you all. My name is Joni Haapamäki, and here today representing our ERP solutions, Adminet Lite, and Hillava. I'm happy to start here too within our business segments, business verticals with our enterprise resource planning softwares, where also the cornerstones of our company are cast. Our ERP business provides solutions for our customers in the construction business to operate their daily work with tools such as HR management, construction site management, regulatory filing and reporting, and financial reporting and forecasting. All in all, we provide software and services for a construction company to operate in the most efficient way. Our solutions are based on pioneering foundations, which gives us our competitive advantage today and will keep us as forerunners, front runners also in the future.
The solutions are based on this core idea why our customers also love us, which are based on these elements. Our solutions combine all the key features for construction site management, but also the financial management all in the same integrated cloud-based software. Some have even started to call us as an ERP plus service provider. Why do we build an ERP plus software? When we combine all the features in this fully integrated software, we have the opportunity to automate otherwise manual operations. Usual scenario with our inbound customer is that they are stuck with at least two, but maybe even 10, or as Petri said even more, separate software. That it leads to a point where our customer, where the customer's key figures are split into many different platforms.
With Admicom's solutions, the data is solid and reliable, which helps the customer to keep up with their key figures in real time. Our customers have reported that they have been able to clear their vision to their financials. They have exceeded their savings goals, but also made a lot of profitable business decisions. Of course, always it's easier to work with only one partner than to cooperate with between several service providers. Later, our CFO will talk about the cyclicality of our customers' business and how it reflects on our business model. As these are somewhat turbulent times for a construction company, actually, this is the point where I believe that we can really add value for them. For example, our transparent data can show our customer where they should invest, where their money comes in, when, where it might drain out.
Our automation in the software will keep us, for example, our customers' pricing up to date. They can also run their operations every day without adding, for example, extra employees with the most effective way. These, of course, can be sometimes somewhat sensitive topics for our customer, which is why traditionally, when we acquire new customers, we like to meet them face to face. Also, during the last few years, when we have gone through some sort of generation change in our business, we have been able to implement new ways to interact with our customers and keep us as frontrunners in the future too. I'm very excited about our new in-house Admicom Sales Academy, where our sales professionals can train their skills and take their work to next level.
Earlier, our CEO highlighted that building a solution as comprehensive as this wasn't an overnight job. It took a lot of time. It took a lot of determination and faith in our vision to automate manual processes that gave us the competitive edge we can enjoy today. From my point of view, I feel like we have just started. We have plans to roll out several new updates this year that will take on our existing functions even further and hand out new functions also. The updates will also prepare us all, for all the possibilities that future technologies will provide us. Along the way, we have dreamed of extending also our technological technologies wider in our customer's value chain. Maybe two of the most requested topics have been revolving around offer and cost calculations and digital on-site reporting and documentation.
I bit is happy to see that in the past year, past three years, we have acquired new siblings in our group. We have grown. United together with them, we are, for our customer, we are, we make a perfect fit as a one-stop service provider. Even in the next few weeks, the next updates will take our first steps on the path of huge opportunities on the cross-selling field when our software will link stronger together. That will benefit mostly our customer with another level of experience. For personally, I cannot wait that we unleash all that potential. Earlier, we saw a video of one happy Adminet customer, and next, we will meet another ERP customer of us using our Hillava ERP solution. I will thank you on my behalf and hope you enjoy the rest of the show.
Hello everyone. My name is Jari Kangassalo, I'm Director of Project Management Business Unit. I have worked for the company over 10 years in different positions or roles, such as Sales Manager, Customer Experience, and Sales Director, and now Director of this unit. Over 30 years, we have developed software solutions for construction companies. Main user group is contractors, calculation engineers, site and project managers. In this section, like Joni, I want to answer four questions: what, why, where, and how? Let's start from what kind of solutions we offer. Our solution holds three important softwares that link together. One thing that I want to emphasize is the right data that is formed inside our software and is moved through the value chain and the process.
First, quantity takeoff, where you can calculate straight from 2D blueprints or by using 3D building information model and digitalize cubic meters, square meters, kilograms straight from the blueprints. These units we transfer into cost estimation part, and inside the software, the quantities are transformed automatically in the cost estimation by using our proprietary cost database. With this highly accurate cost estimation, you can do budget, offers, post-project calculations. Through integrations, you can shift data, for example budget to Adminet and cost control software. In scheduling software, contractors can also use data from cost calculation to know exactly how long it takes to build and what is the most efficient way to use their resources. Instead of predicting how long it takes, for example, to build a wall or foundation, they actually know it. Why customers choose us?
Simply because we are pioneers. Not only we have developed softwares 33 years, we have managed to impact the whole industry. We have changed the way of doing things. We have created new processes. We have created new standards. Estimations have to be done. Proven fact is that with our softwares, companies will improve accuracy, transparency, and lead time efficiency. Simply, they will win more bidding contests. Budget must hold. Again, when contractors uses right data and when knowledge is passed on from earlier calculations, they know exactly the price tag of their building project. Time is money, as we all know. With our solution where information is accurate and based on data, contractors have minimum waste time, material waste, and they know what happens and when it happens on their construction site. Our watchword is building on information.
If your calculations are incorrect, your schedules are not holding, I promise you, contractor's budget will fail. It's probably because they lead their projects and people with assumptions. Our software and services provide the right knowledge to the right people at the right time in the right place. Where are we now? We've been a household name for the large and largest companies and construction companies for decades. We already have market leadership with cost calculation and scheduling software. Every large construction company in Finland uses our scheduling or cost calculation softwares in their biggest building projects. Our product fit is designed for new and renovation construction business. Focus has always been our key to be the best in this field. Customer-oriented mindset and answering the needs for our customer is our strong suit and the core of our business.
That is something we must hold on to. Where do we want to go? We need to grow. Our growth will come when we keep serving our existing customers. At the same time, we have to start delivering the same added value that we deliver to large companies for small and medium companies also. In the future, we have to expand our solution covering more fields in the industry of construction, for example, HVAC, crown works, specialized construction markets. We also have to bind together more interest groups and cover the whole value chain. By doing that, we increase productivity for the whole industry. How do we do it?
By new innovations, whether it's CO₂ calculation, HVAC quantity takeoff, cloud scheduling software, or usage of AR, AI, data analytics, or integrations. We just have to ask the right questions from the market. Integrations with group's products is also one important focus area we are developing. Increased data usage through automation will be our competitive advantage now and in the future. Like said earlier, at the moment, we understand benefits of our technology for our customers, and we help them how they should use our products. Through understanding how we create more value for customers' business, we will make an impact for the whole value chain. Most importantly, we have to go beyond the customer-oriented mindset, and we have to understand that when customers succeed, we succeed. Next, a client video of Tocoman.
Pajala Yhtiöt on, tota, rakennusliike, joka keskittyy asuntorakentamiseen uudisrakentamisen puolella. Tuore yritys on, ja muutaman vuoden aikana nyt on porukka ehtinyt kasvamaan kovastikin. Nyt on homma saatu kunnolla jalalleen. Meno on kova. Olen tutustunut Tocomanin tuoteperheeseen useampia vuosia, ja siihen päädyttiin. Se soveltui meidän, tuota, käytettäväksi parhaiten. Tocoman laskennassa on todella hyvä puoli hallita kokonaisuuksia. Elikkä hankkeen monimuotoisuuden haasteet pystytään hyvin välttämään tämmösillä ryhmä- ja alakohde- ja sijaintilaskelmilla, ja pystytään helposti tarkastelemaan sitä dataa, mitä on laskettu. Myös rakennekokonaisuuksien hyödyntäminen on, niinku, Tocomanin valtti minun mielestä. Joukkomuokkaus on todella suuressa arvossa. Näkisin, että tuossa on jo nyt tullut aika säästöä ja toki myös sitä kautta rahallistakin säästöä, että meidän, tuota, laskentaan liittyvät palaverikäytännöt on kehittynyt huomattavasti nopeammaksi.
Datan tarkastelu Tocomanin ominaisuuksien puolesta on sitten aina laskentahankkeessa huomattavasti nopeampaa kuin aikaisemmin, ja tällä saavutetaan myös sitten hankinnan ja laskennan ja tuotannon ja suunnitteluohjauksen yhteistyötä palvelevia toimintoja. Tällä hetkellä yks parhaimpia ominaisuuksia Tocoman laskennassa on mielestäni se, että se on jatkuvasti kehittyvä tuote ja siitä pystytään rakentamaan käyttäjälle todella hyvä työkalu, joka palvelee pitkään. Voisin kyllä suositella Tocoman laskentaa kaikille, jotka rakentamiseen liittyvää laskentaa suorittaa. Oli kyse sitten isoista kokonaisuuksista tai vaikka pienestä omakotitaloprojektista, niin näkisin, että tuo ohjelmisto sopii vallan mainiosti.
All right. Nice to meet you, everybody. My name is Mikko Järvi, and I'm responsible for running the Admicom documentation solution business. Basically, this is the business that Admicom acquired in Kotopro last year. We're the new kids on the block, but very happy to be here. In the next few slides, I'm gonna give you a brief summary of what Kotopro is, what we're doing now, and what we're planning to do next. In a nutshell, Kotopro is a tool to acquire information from the work site, construction site, and buildings and properties. To give you some background, it was founded by our founder, Samuli Suomala and Maisa Suomala in 2010, and they were doing consulting and inspection visits to construction sites.
They wanted to make their work more efficient, as they were using paper and pen and digital cameras. They wanted a tool they could finish that report on site and send it to their customers to get their money paid quicker, and also enabled them to do more visits. Consulting is still a big part of our customer base, but we've expanded to other stakeholders in the industry. We now work with planners, developers, main contractors, subcontractors in all the different disciplines, so HVAC, electrical, flooring, but also increasingly on whatever operations go on in the buildings after it has been built, so landlords, maintenance, owners, and even insurance companies in some cases. And renovations obviously now it's a big, big part of our business. What then makes our solution so unique?
As Petri and my colleagues here mentioned, Kotopro is quite a bit different from the existing solutions. Our job is to be very simple to allow our customers to gather information from their sites. Everybody wants to increase efficiency, increase their quality, increase their productivity. We feel like if you wanna do that, you have to have a tool to collect this information. We've been trying to solve the ease of use and easy to adopt part of the problem. To give an example, when we ask our customers on what do you like about our solution? The first answer we always get is simple.
As an example, if an excavator operator receives the link from our application, he has to be able to complete the documentation or report on his job, even if he's never heard of Kotopro or our application. On the left-hand side, one of the bullet points is we feel like if you wanna increase all these things, you have to be very transparent. Everybody has to have access to the software or the application. Also, it has to be very easy to share. You have to be able to share the documents or the reports even to a third party who doesn't use the software yet. Another thing that our clients comment when we ask them how is it useful, it clearly saves them time and money.
One recent example is one of our customers that was doing renovations for a big hotel in Estonia that had over 500 rooms and bathrooms, and they told us they saved 70% of their time when documenting the job before and after, so inspections. Another clear benefit is ensuring co-compliance. When you know you have to share your work, you usually do a pretty good job. This also gives whoever's in charge some sense of control, so you can be remote offsite and see exactly what's going on in real-time. We don't wanna tell our customers how to do their jobs or how to run their operations, so our customers tell us that our solution is really easy to implement into their existing processes.
In this last slide, I've been telling you a lot about how easy this is to use and how easy this is to adopt. Just give you some color on where we are right now. We feel like we made a big breakthrough in the Finnish market. 2020, we got about 2,000-3,000 pictures per day uploaded into our software. Today, we're roughly in the 20,000-25,000 pictures per day, so roughly a 10x increase there. We're pretty happy with that. Obviously want to keep growing in Finland, and we feel like there's a lot of room for growth. A no-brainer, obviously, is cross-selling to all these existing Admicom customers who don't yet have our solution.
We built the solution to be scalable, so we're very excited on trying to expand into other markets outside of Finland. How do we do it then? There's been some slides on what the strategy could be. Obviously, one thing going for us is Kotopro already has about 20 customers who have operations outside of Finland, in the Nordics, in Baltics, Germany, and a few in the U.K. This gives us some real feedback on how they feel about what's missing or what should be added in the product when we explore the product-market fit. We feel like keeping it simple is pretty universal, so we will keep investing in easy user experience and a very good user experience as well.
As mentioned earlier, Nordics is somewhat ahead in adopting digital tools, so we feel like we're in a good spot to leveraging these learnings from the Nordics as we plan on trying it somewhere else. The last thing here is we also wanna keep our customers in the middle. Obviously, if we keep solving problems for our customers, we'll do all right. That was my part. I believe we have a Kotopro related video next, so thank you very much.
Kotopro's ominaisuuksista meidän yrityksessä käytetään eniten TR-mittauksien tekemiseen, erilaisten vaiheiden dokumentoimiseen, asuntojen loppukatselmoimiseen sekä kaikkeen mahdolliseen, mihinkä vain ikinä keksii. Dokumentointi työmaalla on helppoa ja monen toimijan eli työtiimin ja alihankkijoiden johtaminen onnistuu pelkän kännykän kautta. Dokumentointi on käytössä niin työnjohdossa kuin asentajilla, ja pystymme pilvipalvelun ansiosta tarkistamaan milloin ja missä vain, mitä työmaalla on saatu aikaan. Kotoprosta löytyy valmiit pohjat, joita täydennetään kuvaamalla, videoimalla, puhumalla ja kirjoittamalla. Tiedon saa helposti pilvipalveluun ja Kotopro tuottaa raportista yrityksen logolla varustetun PDF-tiedoston, jonka voi tarvittaessa tulostaa. Dokumentoinnilla saadaan ristiriitoja minimoitua, eli mikäli projektiin tulee poikkeamia, löytyy Kotoprosta lisä- ja muutoslomakkeita, johon voidaan merkitä asia, uusi aikataulu ja hinta. Asiakas käy allekirjoittamassa muutokset, eli kaikki osapuolet turvaavat oman selustansa. Henkilökohtaisessa työssäni Kotopro:n dokumentointi helpottaa työmaan laadun seurannassa sekä vähentää stressiä. Rakennusalaan liittyy paljon kiirettä ja laatukysymyksiä.
Me näytämme asiakkaille, että rakennamme laadukasta jälkeä, sillä kaiken voi tarkistaa jälkikäteen dokumenteista. Tämä tuo turvallisuuden tunnetta tilaajalle ja terveitä, ihania ja laadukkaita koteja asukkaille. Me seisomme ylpeästi rakentamiemme talojen takana vielä vuosikymmenten päästä.
Thank you. Thank you Mikko and Kotopro. I'm sorry to cut our clients right out of their words, I guess they were about to say that building a sustainable future together was their key message. That is actually what we are doing. Helping to increase the quality of the work and actually add to the productivity of our customers at the same time. This was a overview into our product suite and thank you Joni, Jari and Mikko for giving that. The gentlemen will be available for the Q&A shortly. I have a few more slides that I want to go through before getting there. I think sort of what I want to say here is that now we have the sort of the building pieces in place.
We have the foundation, we have acquired these fantastic softwares and, quoting one entrepreneur that we visited a couple of weeks ago, we were in Lahti in our leadership team offsite, and we visited a construction site of our client, and they were utilizing both the Tocoman and Adminet softwares there and were thinking of getting Kotopro there. Obviously, they were not like heavily integrated yet, and they were not utilizing them, but they were so happy with the softwares and they were saying that they are getting so much benefits already and now they can just wait that, okay, what can they then get then once they are integrated.
The sort of interesting part was that they were not able to say that, "Okay, what is my need?" They knew that we are able to bring in something that will add benefit to them and give them a sort of pace in their work. Like the gentlemen here, nothing of the growth could be done without a great team. Internally, we have a habit of calling the Admicom employees as Admi community. The Admi community is finally the team that is making the growth happen. I'm happy to state that we have a quite high employee satisfaction already.
The latest ENPS, Employee Net Promoter Score, counting from fall of 2022 was 35, and that has been steadily on those levels above 30, which I think on the employee satisfaction is quite high number and, that's really good. Traditionally, we have also had a quite high employee ownership, so that was the part before getting the IPO. The employees were often offered shares in a employee share issues. Now we have also continued that tradition in 2022 with starting a personal fund where the bonus money for the employees goes into the personal fund, and the personal fund is investing that money into Admicom shares.
Now actually we are kind of implementing the first input into the personal fund, I think pretty much 100% of Admicom employees are now Admicom shareholders as well, again, with this, with this implementation. We feel this sort of accountability and ownership is a very important part and value in the Admicom employees. We will continue to build the winning team, and there were already questions about that. We need to bring on, of course, additional expertise, but we also want to grow in the people that we have within the company. There is lots of underlying competencies that we already have. Of course, some that we need to bring in. International competence is one part that we need to be bringing in.
For example, Mikko there has worked for several years in the, in the Silicon Valley area for an American large company and then for the Firstbeat here in Finland as well doing international growth and so on. There is a lots of interesting backgrounds. Personally, I've been at that Nixu cybersecurity company doing the internationalization of Nixu outside of Finland to several countries and have done my part of mistakes during those times as well. Maybe next time I can be more careful in some areas. In product management, R&D, especially in the data and AI industry expertise, we need to build up new capabilities. I think we have sort of the right platform there in place.
If you look at the 340 employees that we have, there is about half of them are in the services part, and that sums up the sort of the value-added services, the accounting services, and then so-also the sort of the international internal services towards the clients, solutions support, customer success and that sort of services. The second biggest part is the R&D, which here as 28%, calculates also the software development services. There is still a people, software developers, who are now doing billable work towards external clients, and they will be doing Some of those will still be doing that during this year. Overall, if we take the head count, it's 28%, which I think is quite nice amount of capabilities within the R&D.
16% is working in the sales and marketing, then 7% in the business success, aka administration and overhead, like the batteries here present. That part, of course, we want to keep as streamlined as possible. The three others are truly adding a lot of value. Of course, business success. Those of you at the business success who are listening, you are also adding value. Don't worry about that. I'm the only overhead around. Okay, back to the building sustainable future together, which is the purpose statement to us. Obviously it links quite nicely into the ESG contribution. What is Admicom doing on the ESG part?
Like the gentleman here, I want to touch this on the how, where, and how can we improve parts. How we make impact? I think this was the key thing for us when starting to consider the ESG contribution of Admicom. I think when you consider all things taken together, there's, let's say, two things. There's our own social responsibility and governance. How do we act as a company? What is our governance structures? How do we treat our employees? So on. You know, if we are honest about it, I don't think it really matters how much electricity and water are we using in our offices. We can, of course, always reduce, and we should be reducing, but that's not making the effect, the impact.
Actually the handprint, not the footprint, but the handprint of Admicom comes through our customers. What is the environmental impact of construction? How much waste is there? How much CO2 emissions are out? Then, of course, what is the governance of Admicom customers? There we can state that we are actually on that handprint side. We are really in good place. We have good practices there in our software already for the Admicom clients governance. The Admicom software provides real-time accounting and including tax payments. You don't really have gray economy on an Admicom user. If a client is running Adminet, they really can't be doing, you know, off the record type of business. It's all there and it's real time. I think that's very, very impressive in the construction industry.
For us as a company, of course, we have now a solid corporate governance in place. I think we have good practices on social responsibility, inclusivity, but we can really improve in formalizing our ESG practices. There we need to be honest. We don't have, like, documented policies on the ESG. We are running good things, but we have not put those on the paper, and maybe that's the next step that we need to go forward. Again, from the impact perspective, I think the impact comes from building sustainable future together, adding CO2 calculations in our software stack, reducing waste from construction processes, improving quality of construction altogether. I think that's the thing that should be really moving us and giving us focus.
Before Q&A and break, I want to conclude this drivers for growth part by kind of concluding the things that we have discussed. If we look at what has been our offering vision in the past, what is it currently at present, and what it will be in the future. From the product perspective, it's pretty clear that in the past it was ERP software, period. It was Adminet, period. Currently, we are a software suite. There is a different products. They still have different names. There is interconnections, but it's not a comprehensive platform. That's where we want to go. We want to build a comprehensive platform that can go and conquer the world if need be. There's the industry focus. In the past, it was the building technology contractors, a very niche sector that enabled the fast growth.
Currently, we've grown into sort of multi-industry area with the manufacturing industry as well. Now we are sort of coming back to the roots. We are again focusing. We are focusing in the building ecosystem, widely understood. That should actually give us more room to grow than narrow our market. You know, how funny is that? That's the fact of life. The customer size used to be SME very heavily. It still is, but with the Tocoman we have a limited Tocoman and Kotopro, we have a limited enterprise clients. In the future, we believe that the SME is still the key, but there are spearhead solutions for enterprises. Maybe at some stage, we are enterprise ready as well. Let's see. Geography, Finland. Currently Finland, but with clients abroad. I think very good points.
Both Tocoman and Kotopro have international clients already. We are sort of outside of Finland already. In the future, presence of several European markets. Use of data, in my opinion, as you can see from the, from the slides, and use of AI, I'm most excited about that part. How can we make the, you know, the kind of the past was seamless data flow within the ERP. Now we have already limited integrations in play, but how can we have seamless flow of data in the comprehensive platform, and then also bring in AI and analyze that data and provide true insights to our clients? Very interesting, I think things that make our R&D to really tick. I think our sales people would be happy to also be giving those tools to our clients.
This concludes this part of the presentation. We now move into the Q&A. Let's see how late we are. We are not. We are actually one minute ahead of our time. I'm sorry for that. We are running quite nicely. Let's take Q&A and then five minutes breaks. Now to the Q&A.
The growth now. First of all, vision being number one in Europe, so can you just give any color on how many markets are we looking at, maybe in by 2030? Are we talking about just a few or over five, or the whole European Union?
I guess, like answered earlier is that we haven't made any goals or statements on that as we still lack the internationalization strategy. We have a determination, but we haven't said that yet.
Okay. Clear. Then you showed some countries like Germany, France, and Spain. Those are the biggest ones, obviously. How are the kind of digital readiness of those countries? Do they have the, like, let's say, taxation and e-invoicing and so forth in place for you to go with your ERP systems there?
That is a really good question. This is of course key into sort of planning the go-to-market strategy. Of course you could say that, yes, Finland is quite advanced. The sort of the government eco structure, e-government is stronger than in many other places. Then we have lots of tooling in place that we are now tapping with our Adminet tool. I think the overall digitalization in construction in Finland is quite high. I was actually when creating these materials, I was browsing through the Autodesk materials, and they had this BIM, Building Information Model adoption in Europe or in the whole world actually, and Finland stood out with sort of different color than any other European country.
We have already adopted the building information model higher than any other European country, which I think speaks about the sort of the level of the digitalization there already. We have to kind of the edge there, and then the question is that, okay, do we want to go into the other markets that are already as advanced, like the Nordic markets, or actually do we look south into the sort of the Eastern Europe, or do we go into the bigger markets like Germany and U.K.? Those are the questions that we really need to have right answers. I don't believe in the just, you know, rushing somewhere. We need to study that a little bit deeper and understand, and then make our pick. You know, it's going to be hard anyways, that I know. But let's choose the best path for us.
It sounds like there is no categoric, kind of hindrance for you to move to Germany, for example. Is it possible for you to go to Germany?
You know this Finnish saying about Germany, I think that's the only categoric.
Understood. One quick question on regulation. I would have thought that you would have talked more about regulation. What kind of driver do you see this to be for the construction industry and Admicom in the future?
I think that's a really, really good question. We also all know that in Finland there is a new law on construction coming in, the Rakennuslaki 2024, so Construction Law 2024. That adds lots of requirements. That adds this digital model of building, this building information model. It requires the CO2 emission calculations and so on. There's quite a lot of regulations that is already. There's more coming and there's lots of regulation that is already there. I think Mikko mentioned the sort of quality and compliance reasons why the clients are adapting Kotopro. I think in that area we could also be doing more, having more specific solutions for certain compliance reasons where the clients could be utilizing Kotopro, for example.
Okay. Clear. Just very quick questions for each of the heads of different products. Firstly, or for the head of ERP, how much money and time would it take to get this kind of Adminet plus the services to another market, on top of Finland? Any estimation on this?
Yeah.
I'm working.
Yeah, maybe I can have some help from you, Petri, for this question.
I see.
Yeah. I think, I think that's of course a really, really hard question. Sort of the bigger answer to that is of course that there are sort of these underlying connections to the local e-governance ecosystem, We haven't yet calculated that, okay, how much would it cost? Because of course, first we would need to know that which e-government do we want to adapt. I guess, you know, saying that it means that it will probably not be Adminet as our first product which we take abroad. That's, that's pretty clear.
Okay. Clear. The head of Tocoman, how ready is the Tocoman software for international markets? I understood it needs some localized flavors.
Yes. We have web-based cost calculation software, and we are developing our other on-premise softwares now to be the web-based in a web-based technology. I think that is one key to utilize a little bit more this modern technology. I think the localization is a little bit hard for us because the local way of calculating quantities and doing cost estimation is our way and we know how to, how to do it. In the Nordics, it's a little bit different. We have to use our existing customers that use our products in some form abroad and ask from them.
Okay. Sounds like quite a lot of work to be done before Tocoman can be sold abroad. Finally for Kotopro, I understood that you have already piloted Kotopro in Germany, for example. Can you just open up the main learnings from this exercise and maybe why it didn't fly well?
Yeah. When we did it, we were separate company, so we were small and I got involved after it had already started. The main learnings were it was very easy to localize, but I think the previous management didn't maybe understand how difficult it is to go to another country. It's not just changing the language, and construction industry is quite localized. Also, like Petri was mentioning earlier, there are some hard drivers and demands, like legislation. Some things are mandatory to document. You know, have to know those differences. Yeah, the main learning was it's quite straightforward, and it looks like buildings are built the same way everywhere. It was too expensive for a small company, so we ran out of breath.
Thank you.
I guess to add on to what Mikko was saying is that of course for a small company where you can grow the fastest, the cheapest is the key. There, the kind of Finnish market was still the one where you could do that. That was also partly the decision there.
Hi. Felix Henriksson from Nordea. A question on the cross-selling aspect of your business. Can you give us any color on how many of your customers approximately are using more than one of your solutions? Where do you see the biggest, let's say, low-hanging fruits in terms of cross-selling and upselling? Is it basically Kotopro to Adminet and clients or something else perhaps?
Do you want Joni?
Yeah. Maybe I can add on to that.
Yeah.
Rough numbers, I could say around 10%-15% have more than one solution. There's a huge opportunity to grow our customer base on by the means of cross-selling. The next updates are linking, for example, our Adminet and Kotopro products together, which we have been talking with our customers already for the last months, and then They have been expecting it a lot. There's a huge opportunity to link the construction site operations and the documentation on the construction site, the financials and the documentations into one place so it's one easy-to-use service.
Thanks. That's extremely helpful. On your total addressable market in Finland, how do you sort of estimate this to be growing from the current, what, EUR 323 million level, and what do you see as being the current, you know, ERP penetration rate on that market approximately?
Sorry. Now I missed the question if it came to me. I'm sorry.
The question was on the, on the domestic Finnish market, how fast do you expect this to be growing in the coming years, and what's the sort of approximate ERP penetration rate on the current market here?
Good, good question. Of course, right now the sort of the financial situation is let's say having clouds on the sky, whether it will affect our capability to grow or not. We are still seeing, you know, good growth numbers towards the end of the year, and we are providing efficiency, so we believe that there's room. There are still clients that are switching from pen and paper, so we are not, like, on a, you know, completely penetrated market. There's a huge amount of more of companies that are running legacy systems that they have been running for many, many years, and they need to sort of switch on to the next one. There is definitely room to grow.
This strategy is not built on some huge success internationally, and that will be the thing. This strategy is built on a very solid fortress Finland type of approach where we can grow in Finland. We can several years continue growing in Finland. Like I said, I believe that we can still reach also the EUR 100 million RR-ARR in Finland. You know, if we are not able to do the internationalization, we can do that growth in Finland.
Okay. Basically, if I understood correctly, somewhat of an uncertain market growth outlook, and the way you aim to be growing faster than the market is through these sort of cloud adoptions from pen and paper customers as well as legacy systems.
Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly, yeah.
I don't think that this is sort of dividing the market because it's also a growing market in the sense that, you know, there are these totally new solutions that have not yet even been invented. If you look at the construction technology ConTech market, there is a huge amount of potential areas where digitalization will pick up speed, and there isn't even solutions for that use case yet, but there will be within the next 10 years.
Thanks. Then finally on perhaps on the international expansion plans, how do you consider sort of indirect sales channels as a business model for you there? I'm assuming it would be perhaps a bit more efficient than building up your own sales staff. Am I correct in assuming that your product in a sense would be sort of easy to understand for salespeople as well?
I think again, of course, different products are different, and the indirect sales channels might be a good choice for certain products. Maybe, for example, Kotopro could be there. For Adminet, I think that's might be a little bit trickier because it is, like I said, very mission-critical and quite complicated and kind of complex. I think there are different ways. As internationalization goes, that is part to be evaluated like I said earlier.
Thank you.
Emil from Carnegie. You talked a little bit about AI and machine learning. Do you have a concrete use case on where to see that?
Thank you. Thank you. That was a very, very good question because I had one virtually, and I was waiting when I can answer that. Exactly. What is the concrete use cases? Maybe one things that we have been discussing at least is the sort of the Just, you know, nothing fancy. We don't expect robots at the constructions as, like, next year. What could happen next year is already having a AI assistant going through the cost calculations for a project site and then sort of, you know, providing these insights that, "Hey, now this project is on a track which will not end well," and, like, "This project is now on a track which normally your projects are not going well if they end on this track," and so on.
I think there's a huge amount of data in the system already, but our entrepreneur users are not, like, able to distill that data from there. If you could have, like, your Windows Clippy there saying you that, "Hey, you know, this is the things that you now need to be doing," you know, "Look at this spot here. Look at that spot there," I think that would, you know, create immediate advantages to our clients.
Okay. That sounds good. A little bit related, you mentioned a MVP product this year, is that a completely new product in addition to Adminet and Hillava and Kotopro, or is that kind of a module in one of these?
I guess we can open that a bit so, I don't know if you, Petri.
I'm the closest to that project, it's an extension and a new generation product of Tocoman scheduling, first of all. Obviously it will be integrated to our products, but also it will have a significant own market we believe. That, that is one of those projects that we are commenting as being in a kind of a MVP or closing close to the MVP stage.
Maybe from a simple CEO perspective, the sort of the existing scheduling softwares that we have and the PlanMan that we acquired, they are, you know, they are very advanced toolings for a, you know, people that are dedicated to doing the scheduling. What we want to bring in is a very, very easy to use, simple innovation that can be used across all the parties on the construction site and tying together the sort of the construction way work. That's the part that we are now thinking.
Still a product that's sold separately from the others?
The business model is not yet fully set, so I think can be sold separately but is of course part of the, part of the portfolio and-
Yeah. One important part of kind of a, extending the potential is to have products which sole purpose have only to have give us reach to a customer. For example, these premium models could be very interesting, that we are there already before we contact them. They could be using some kind of limited version of our product for free, that helps typically the sales process significantly. There are many variations, which we are investigating.
We also believe that in international scope, many things might be different in different countries, but schedules and scheduling is typically, you know, it's quite the same, so.
Okay. Sounds good. On ESG, you mentioned that you don't really offer anything in that space yet. Is that something that your customers have been requesting?
I wouldn't say that we don't offer anything on that space yet. I think we I mentioned that we are offering quite a lot in that space actually already and, if you are referring to offering paper, you know, sorry to say, but how do you call it, silmänpalvonta in Finnish that you provide a nice bunch of paper for the ESG purposes. That we don't provide yet, but what we're actually doing is we are providing ESG. The clients are not asking for our ESG reports, so that's not, that's not the case. I think what the clients are asking is that we act sustainably. We help them to reduce their waste and so on. I think that is the point of ESG.
One concrete thing that will happen soon is with this Construction Law change, you know, these environmental issues will come to everyone's table in the construction indus- even for the small operators. There we can help them, for example, a lot with our systems.
Thank you. Then a final question. Where do you see the main challenges in growing? You had quite a wide range, kind of, for the guidance for 2023 as well, for 8%-15%. What do you see is the main challenge with the growth?
I think we will touch that in Petri's presentation later. Now we are a little bit over time. Thank you for really good questions. I think we'll take now a five minute break and continue here on the studio with Petri's presentation on the metrics for success and financial metrics. Thank you. Let's have a break.
Okay, thank you. Great to be here today. Thank you for the colleagues for great presentations. Now it's time for the last part of the CMD, measuring success. My name is Petri Aho. I'm the CFO for the group, also responsible for the M&A and strategy parts of the company. This is my third year at the company. Before Admicom, I worked as an equity analyst for a long time, and there I was had a special interest in SaaS business models. Happy to say that I have found a home in one of the most successful in SaaS metrics, companies in the world in that respect. Let's go forward to the presentation, and I start with the kind of a ambition or maybe more like a promise of financial, financing department of Admicom.
First of all, the CFO and my team are here to secure that we sustain the strong recurring revenue growth that we have had in the past. I'll come back to that. It is very important for the SaaS company that the so-called unit metrics to SaaS metrics are competitive. That is very big responsibility of ours to bring that transparency for you as investors, but also inside the company that we know where we stand. Our business model is very scalable, and it's important to safeguard this. Meaning that when we make investments and we start to bring in scale, we are very careful how we use that benefit from the scale.
Very attentive cost control we have had, and we will have so going forward, and we will be disciplined in our investments. Finally, we are here to so that we have space and room to implement our strategy, it's important to have a strong financial position. Luckily, we have good cash flow generating business and that helps us to grow. Okay. Few words about our historical track record. You can see here on a revenue growth basis, we have outpaced our peer group here in the Nordics with a nice margin. Our revenue growth has been, for the past three years, quite evenly. Well, little bit more weight on the organic growth, but we have also utilized opportunities for inorganic growth during recent years.
What is the most important growth for the future and for our operating model is the recurring revenue growth, and that has been a little bit higher than the revenue growth altogether. In profitability side, as said, we have had a very strong historical track record. Now we are investing that strong operating margins a little bit back to the growth. As you can see, compared to the peers, we have quite a healthy business model in this respect. On a Rule of Forty basis, which is something that is closely followed in SaaS company scene, we outpace also the competitors, or have outpaced the competitors in Nordics. About our SaaS metrics.
First of all, I want to bring your attention to the top left corner, where we are talking about the recurring revenue base that we had at the end of the last year. It was roughly EUR 30 million. There we start building our story towards the EUR 100 million target before or by 2030. Our recurring revenue base is very profitable, the estimated gross margin there is 86%. Cross-churn last year was 7.7%. It has increased somewhat from the past due to the let's say less or a more uncertain market environment, as we have added different businesses, they have had a traditional little bit higher churn.
On the net churn basis, meaning that taking out from the cross-churn the part that we do or the sum that we do expansion sales to our existing customers, the level is quite good, so 2.5% last year. On the right side, we have some SaaS specific metrics that can be a little bit hard to compare across the industry, but these are our numbers, which we are very proud of. These are based on the Adminet business only. This is not for the whole group as we have had so many changes during last year, gives you also some kind of a direction of where we are as an overall.
Lifetime value to the customer acquisition cost, 45 times, and customer acquisition payback period, around nine months. Very good numbers, and we want to secure these. Of course, we have to be able to create value for the clients, and be able to stop churn, to be able to keep this up. About our revenue split. How is our business divided in revenue terms? First of all, 90% of our revenues are recurring. 70% of the recurring of the revenues are software recurring revenue, and then the 20%, the very integrated kind of service part in accounting services, which is recurring as well. On the right side, there we look at revenues split by business unit.
You saw the presentations today. ERP solutions, about 75% of the total. These are on a pro forma basis, so we have kind of estimated here the full effect of the documentation solutions, which is 7%. The project management solution, which was strengthened with the PlanMan acquisition last year was about 14%. The software development external sales, which we are kind of phasing down over the years, was last year, 4% of the revenues. On the operating expenses, where do we invest this? Because we are constantly doing investments to our business. First of all, our operating levels are excellent.
Most of our operating costs are personal costs, and at some 12% of costs are other operating costs and then 5% direct material and services cost. There on the right side, you see split by function then of this cost base. Cost related to the sales, meaning accounting service personnel costs, the onboarding personnel, consultation personnel costs, about 26% of revenues last year. Sales and marketing, 9% of revenues, and then R&D, 13%. This excludes the Aitio part, which was utilized for the external sales. Finally, the general and admin costs, which consists of not only the management layer, but also the group management layer, but also the facility cost and so forth. That was 7%.
As said, we have a strong cash flows, this cash conversion of our business is very strong. Every year it generates us a nice healthy cash flow, and we tend to keep this up. When looking at what this cash flow enables us on the investment side, at the year-end, we had minus 0.3x leverage, so basically we did not, we were net debt-free. Given that we would utilize this cash flow, operating cash flow, let's say in M&A by raising debt, we could see that we could easily take EUR 40 million more debt to finance these transactions. Little bit historical perspective on the M&A that we've done.
We've seen the presentations today, so what kind of a product and expertise did they bring to the company. I want to highlight what's the kind of a strategic objectives more carefully. First of all, when we do this M&A, we want to strengthen the expertise and competitiveness. That goes especially for the Tocoman case, where we expanded our kind of horizontal presence to a very critical areas in construction sector. With Kotopro, as Joni mentioned in his presentation, we brought a very requested feature and service to our clients in documentation solutions. With Aitio Finland, we got little bit different expertise. We got a very long expertise history in making tailor-made solutions to the same industry that we operate in.
Also a lot, we got much stronger R&D through this and new technological know-how. The second objective when we do typically when we do this M&A transactions is to expand the current total addressable market and the market reach. By reach, I mean that we can, we are kind of, reaching the clients different ways. Good example of that, for example, the Kotopro, where we got new sales channel in what you call this kind of a trial period.
Because it's hard to give a trial period for Adminet system, it's so comprehensive that you would not learn it in a few days or few years, and it has to be connected to different kind of systems before you can really utilize it. It is very important to have these tools where we can reach customer in different stages of their development and in different areas on the construction value chain. Then on Tocoman, as said, we expanded our position to enterprise type of customers, which is also useful for the expertise and competitiveness side as we learn how the experts do, that we can transfer that knowhow to the smaller clients then as well through our products.
Hillava, it did not that much expand our total addressable market, but it brought us a new tool to reach those clients. Especially with Hillava, we can connect that as in the client video, we can connect that easily to different systems in the ecosystem, and we can also tailor to customer needs the product which we don't do in the Adminet side because it is a very standardized product as such. We aim to secure the continuing and continuous development of the company through acquisitions. With PlanMan we got a market leading position in scheduling but the product is, let's say in a kind of a mid midpoint in its life cycle.
We can start on top of that foundation, we can start or have started already to develop a new product generation. We can then do it together with the clients. Again Aitio Finland obviously strengthen us in this respect and helped us to do a kind of generation change in our R&D department. This is maybe the most important aspect of course is that the support, the scalable growth and synergies. We're a growth company with big ambitions, so we want to secure scalable growth going forward and have synergies. This differences I think us from many competitors. We try to have as much synergies as we can from these acquisitions.
On the sales side, on the technical side, connect them with other systems and also on the strategic side help us to reach different type of customers in different type of time of their life cycle. Finally, the hot topic of today enabling internationalization, and as we have heard before, Kotopro is maybe the kind of a key in that in the short. There on the right side you can see some of the metrics on the acquisitions and the timing of those.
I think here you can maybe, apart from IT which was a little bit a special case in type of acquisition, you can get a sense of what kind of multiples are typically, or maybe where of course the market has changed a little bit, but we're typically talking about three to five times ARR multiples in the market. Another hot topic that we've been discussing with the investors lately, we are operating in a sector where our customers have a lot of cyclicality. As you can see from the graph, after the financial crisis there was a dip in the revenues.
These measure revenues or kind of nominal terms the growth of construction sector in Finland. There's been kind of this flat phases in the market, and there's been very high growth phases. Quite recently after the COVID, when the COVID started, we actually, the market was retreating for a while into revenue terms. Even during that time, our kind of business was able to operate well and did not really see that much negative effects from this cyclicality. Let's dig in little deeper to this, our point of view on cyclicality. First of all the market environment side.
Construction sector, it's not one cyclical animal, but it has many sub-sectors actually that creates altogether over 50% that have very low cyclicality. For example, the renovation. It's it has increasing demand in Finland, and as said, it consists already of over half of the total volume. We see that in these turbulent times it will actually increase, continue to grow. The second one which is not shown here is the building maintenance needs. The energy, for example, costs are rising that means the building maintenance and t hey are more technical the buildings. The building maintenance has to be done more often with experts. That it has a increasing demand all the time.
Overall, as we have highlighted in the earlier section, the mega trends really support growing demand for digital solution. This is the key point. The client sector might be cyclical, but in the long term we see that there's a huge growing demand in the sector. That fluctuation that we see now in the graph will be just a small bump on the way. On inflation, that's a little bit two-edged sword, because in a way it actually increases the revenues which helps in our business. Well, we have revenue-linked fees, so in a way it helps. On the other hand, that means that our clients have difficulties in handling their costs.
The inflation environment, when it's very volatile, it makes them difficult to run their business. Then again, also there we can help them to give this visibility. It's a two-edge word, sword. From our perspective, as said before, we offer business-critical solutions, efficient gains. It's not the first place where the customer wants to save. It's the place where they want to run when times are uncertain. 90% of our revenues are recurring, obviously quite good visibility going forward. Obviously we have certain termination periods in our contract, but nevertheless it's recurring. Like I said, some of our fees are linked to the customer revenues.
Historically this has, you know, we can go back to the start, starting days of the company, it has always given us still the positive in contribution to our revenues. This is not saying that it could turn in a kind of a quarterly basis on a negative and slow down our growth, but it's to say it won't stop us growing or it won't stop us making a profitable business. Actually this is quite typical business model anyhow in ERP because when the volumes of clients and the business grows, the benefits of using the system grow.
When the businesses come down the usage levels, they don't have to terminate the contract just because they have a slowdown for one year, or they don't have to cut the usage because they would cut the benefits as well. This is helping the clients as well. We believe it reduces churn over time as well. On the churn, it's fair to say it will most likely increase in a declining market or volatile market because our client industry, clients' industry is quite turbulent. They're very small players. The bankruptcy rates, for example, are quite high comparative to other sectors. There's kind of always a little, quite a lot of natural churn in our business, and this could increase.
Also this uncertainty, sometimes it's not best for our salespeople to go there when they have other things in their minds. In some customer cases, it might kind of shut their ears for a while because they have to handle other things. That's on cyclicality. I think we are very safe there, and we have a stable model which to build on. Finally then on the outlook, a little bit more specific on this year's outlook. We are guiding for this year 8%-15% growth in comparable recurring revenue.
We define the comparable recurring revenue as being last year it was EUR 28 million, and what we have taken so far of that revenue base is the Lakeus non-strategic business that we divested basically at the end of last year. Also we want to give this in comparable terms because we are, as said, also preparing to separate our industrial sector business to a separate company. We want to make sure that that will not also it will not change the guidance, so to say. It will not affect the guidance.
On the EBITDA we've said that we aim to have 35%-40%, giving us room for investments and in to prepare for the strategy ambitious growth phase. What are the growth drivers? As we have talked about here, we have a lot of cross-selling and expansion sales potential within our company, and it's good to have that in turbulent times. Hopefully we can utilize this as well as we can now that we are getting the technical integrations in place. More deeper, let's say, technical integrations. The Kotopro and PlanMan acquisitions will help us in organic growth in the H1. After that, especially Kotopro, we expect it to grow faster than the other parts organically.
The use of Aitio's R&D resources for the group's internal projects impacts the annual growth by -2% year-over-year, meaning that the external sales will in a kind of a rough estimate at this point it will decrease by EUR 700,000 this year compared to the last year. This will hopefully come back in growing our RR in coming years when we speed up our development. Finally, the Lakeus will have approximately -1.5% negative impact on the net sales. Yes. On the profitability side, where do we invest? The short answer is everywhere. We are strengthening the organization in customer success side, the R&D side, and the sales and market.
We are bringing or developing new products, and we are starting the strategy period, which means that we are also having strategic initiatives that can weaken the profitability in the short. On the structural side, I want to highlight that the M&A that we've done have had a lower relative profitability, and that continues to weigh on the margin side as well. Now I'll ask Petri Karinen to join me. He will kind of wrap up this part of the presentation with the investment highlights.
Thank you, Petri. Thank you, and great job, being our CFO. I like these financial pillars. I think our shareholders like those as well. Even though Petri was saying that we are investing everywhere, be certain that it will be under very watchful eye and Petri's solid financial look into it. Obviously, but when we are investing, there is two questions that we want to ask. One of them is that, how is it helping our clients? The next one is that, how is it helping our growth? Those will be the key questions that we ask any time when we are increasing costs somewhere.
Before getting into this, the sort of the investment highlights and coming back also to the three topics that we are discussing today, I think the kind of the things that we want to give to you as takeaways from this session today is that we have a very firm foundation to build on. There's been great work done by the founders of the company and Admi community in general. The growth has been admirable, the profitability has been admirable, and that's a pleasure now to build on the next stage. At the same time, it is a next stage. The kind of the old foundation is not applicable as such.
Now we are moving from ERP into the larger picture of construction technology, where we see a huge growth potential, and it's a long-term growth potential. As you could see from the growth curve, the digitalization is still on the very beginnings there. It's not like one year, next year thing. It will keep on growing. Also when we look into sort of the mid-long-term and this cyclicality thing that Petri was saying, there was a one managing director in the construction industry, providing a services and tooling to the industry. When asked about their view on cyclicality, they are a 150 years old company, they were saying that, "Well, building construction has never stopped.
It will always keep on going, and there will be always construction." I think that's exactly what we are looking right now as well. There the kind of the need for new construction is not going away. By increasing the productivity, there's a huge potential. We have the pieces in place. We have a very nice software suite already. It's not fully integrated. It's not integrated on the levels where it should be, but it can be fully integrated, and it can create a comprehensive software suite. As said, the M&A gives us new opportunities also in extending that platform and creating that platform. We also believe that it doesn't need to be the same platform in every market where we go.
I think that's also highly likable, that when we go abroad, we might acquire a company there, and it, you know, some piece of the platform might come from that technology stack. It might not be the same software that we are offering in Finland going forward, for example. I think that's the name of the game. Which pieces can we integrate, which concepts, which ways of working we can, you know, grow across the borders? I think that's the main question. Then the sort of the fourth case is the solid financials. We have very strong foundation, and that's visible in the solid financials.
What we want to assure you is that we understand the wish for profitability in these turbulent times, and that is something that we have, and that is something that we want to keep on having. At the same time, we also want to make sure that this company is solid on the long term and is able to bring on long-term returns. That's why we need for investments. We truly believe that this will lead us in this vision of first-choice partner in the European construction software ecosystem, and we have a very solid base as a challenger there. We can compete, you know, against the bigger players in a very solid positions coming from the SME market and so on. We are not afraid of that competition.
This EUR 100 million RR is to state that we are not looking into just incremental increases. We want to, you know, make the big leap. I think Admi community needs to understand as well that we are aiming for the next bigger leap. That is the investment highlights. On the next slide, we have actually fresh out from our advertising agency, our strategy picture, which tries to put all this stuff together, what we are discussing. I think this is maybe a good background to start our. I will not repeat those things because we have discussed about the megatrends, sustainability, our three key principles of winning customer experience, simple innovations, transparency, agile.
Our North Star is there visible AI we've discussed, so maybe this is a good background to continue on the Q&A session, and me and Petri are here happy to answer to you and those online. Rest assured, we have read your questions as well, and maybe actually we should start from those because you've been neglected. There's actually If I start from the background going forward, there is a question here from Samu: How similar are European construction companies to Finnish ones? Is Adminet plus other solutions you offer relevant as such, or are some parts more relevant than others? Is a lot of R&D work required before you can enter the European market in a broad way?
I think this question, which came in the first part of the presentation, was partially at least answered in the drivers for growth path. Yes, I think the construction companies are similar, but the e-government infrastructure does differ, and that makes it hard for example, the Adminet platform to be integrated out-of-the-box type of thing. Like discussed, there are other solutions that can be spearheaded more easily, and then of course we can always do an M&A and then get an inorganic growth path into any market. I think there was a question from Tomas. Maybe, Petri, you take that one on the R&D investments.
Will the EUR 1 million R&D investment be accounted for as OPEX in the P&L and hence included in the EBITDA margin guidance? Yes, let's say half and half, rough split. Those will be included in the EBITDA margin. The second half as we are making a completely new product that we first then activate that cost. Then when it hits the market, so to say, hopefully running fast, then we start to do the depreciation on those costs.
If you're thinking of that EUR 1 million cost, I think only marginal part of that will be activated.
Yeah, yeah.
Most of that will be as costs. Yes. That we answered this question.
Maybe to add flavor to that with that mostly, and in historically we haven't activated the R&D cost, or let's say in recent years, and that will in a kind of a broad terms continue going forward. In a short-term, when we have certain projects, we might activate them, those costs.
There was a question from Jochen: In the slide with the competition, I missed SmartCraft from Norway. Where do you see the advantages/disadvantages versus SmartCraft? That's a good question. I wouldn't want to comment too much on the competition, but if you look at the SmartCraft materials, I think they are saying that they are coming more from the, let's say, from the construction side and tooling from that side, but what they are missing is the sort of the financial administration part, which is the side where we are coming more from. I think we are having a little bit different viewpoints.
Where I'd like to maybe praise our ecosystem is that we are already, let's say, wider, a bit wider in the kind of the maintenance part of the buildings and so on, so we have a wider reach from that perspective. Maybe people from SmartCraft know better their part, so I'm only focusing on speaking good on our solutions. What's the greatest challenge in the business right now? Is a question from Moritz. A really good question. In our business, I think the challenge, of course, is that, you know, the visibility in the world economy and so on is a really good question, and obviously that's visible in the questions from the analysts and investors and so on. I don't think that's related to our company or this industry.
I think that is the name of the game in any industry and any company right now that the visibility has decreased and that's of course something that we need to consider. The good part is that the foundation is so solid that we are not in a crisis. You know, it's not a thing that we need to consider that, okay, how do we pay our people's salaries or so on? We are solid on that. There's a question about the insiders and personnel share ownership as a percentage, as kind of round numbers. Do you want to, Petri, comment on that?
That was stated in the annual statement, but unfortunately I cannot remember the number at the moment, but a couple of percentage points at the moment.
I think from the leadership team, that you have seen here, I think Jari, who has been the latest nominated, is the only one who doesn't own any shares of the company yet, all of the other members do own shares. We have lots of these old shareholders at the company, but some of them have also departed the company later on, so there's been some generation change happening. Good.
Maybe see we should have questions here.
Yes, from the audience as well.
Yeah.
I think we've now gone through the ones from the virtual audience.
A question about your M&A strategy. Do you prefer using cash or your share when you're funding the acquisitions, and do you have some kind of potential target list in the Nordics or in Europe also? Do you have identified many potential targets?
There are some target lists. Of course, Admicom has even before my time has scanned the market and we know some of the companies. Like I said, we now need to do the strategic planning that, okay, where do we want to go and how do we want to go? I think the sweet spot in utilizing shares is to utilize some shares to kind of tie in the owners into this family, if you may say so, or suite of software if you use the other terms. Then of course, cash is might be also really good relating to the strength of our share and so on. I guess it depends a little bit on the timing as well.
It depends, yeah, of course, of the market environment as well. When it's very volatile, the share-based kind of a transaction tool might not be, kind of the best to use. Depends really much on the case.
Yeah, then a question about Kotopro's competitive landscape. Is there, like, any other similar kind of softwares or solutions in the Nordics? It seems like the Kotopro is pretty good, and is there any competitors?
Kotopro is the best. Really, really, really good. Yeah, of course. It's a universal need, and there are some solutions identified that are doing similar things. Then comes to ease of use and how do you get it in the market. I don't think that in these solutions there is nothing, you know, groundbreaking technological innovation that nobody else has thought about. It's really about the go to market and ease of use and experience and the strength of the whole portfolio. I think that will be the name of the game for us, that the client chooses Admicom portfolio under, you know, over some other portfolio.
Number one.
Yes. Very universal solution of pen and paper. Mikko was stating there. Very competitive solution. maybe not very scalable, but.
If you're very innovative, you don't even need paper .
That's true, yeah.
Y ou can write on your hand.
Exactly. Good. Felix there. Or there. Yeah.
Janne Wellen from Evli Funds. You talked about inflation especially affecting your customers. What about on your side and especially can you talk about I mean, possibility to hike your subscription prices?
Yeah. Of course we do price increases for our products each year on the Adminet ERP product that has been called so-called annual adjustment fees, the pricing, main pricing component which kind of reflects the revenue side. On that front, of course, when the material price and service inflation goes through the sector, it increases actually that components should increase. When the inflation comes down, it kind of slows down the growth of that. There are effects in that, but they should be positive this year, those effects. Next year, we don't know about yet. It depends on how the market.
On the customer side, like I said, it can be really difficult for them to run their business when there's a lot of volatility. Now we've seen signs, actually we have a kind of a real-time visibility the costs. The costs are coming down at the moment quite heavily on the customer side. That might actually. Hopefully it brings back the demand quite quickly to the market in construction because.
If I add to that point, I think this is also one good takeaway that you might not understand. That yes, we are providing our customers real-time visibility into their own costs. What are the construction materials costing? We are giving them this pricing which we get from our sources. We are, you know, compiling them things and that's gives a visibility and huge benefit to our clients again. What comes to our own price increases and so on, I think it's fair to state that we haven't been a sort of heavy-duty price increaser in the years because of this mechanism that Petri mentioned. This is something that we are now looking as inflation is running and we see lots of price increases.
We have already implemented first price increases during last fall, but I think there's room to do more as well. This is something definitely that we are looking into.
I would actually like to continue on that topic given that we know that the Adminet pricing has been sort of based on the sort of revenue-linked mechanism. What about the rest of the, you know, 25% of your sales with the Tocoman and PlanMan and Kotopro products? Are you sort of planning to introduce a similar mechanism to that or how does that work at the moment?
I think overall it's fair to state that this is part of the strengthening of the platform. Unfortunately, we have very different pricing mechanism across the products. We don't have a similar pricing mechanism as in Adminet in the other products. This is something that we need to also to solve during this year, that what will be the pricing mechanism. Do we move and can we move into a one, you know, universal pricing mechanism, or do those products still need some level of differentiation on the, on their pricing mechanism? This is one of those things that we don't have a clear answer yet.
Maybe this is now my part also to apologize to you and state that I think the CMD also proves this point of being transparently agile, which is our one of the foundations that here we want to be talking about the strategy, where it will be taking us, even though we don't have any clear, you know, not everything is yet answered, and we need to look for those answers. We want to be transparent in opening that process and what we are thinking, and then we come back in the sort of the next CMD and, you know, discuss those issues when the decisions and actions have been done.
I'd like to say it in my part that it has worked well for us, and it's very typical for the ERP part, this kind of a transactional-based, or revenue-based pricing. These are kind of a specialized products, what we have in documentation solutions and project management solutions. They have different type of pricing mechanisms traditionally also. More, more kind of a user-based pricing. And there we do kind of a then pricing adjustments that are typical for those businesses.
Thanks. Another question. You talked about some of the non-cyclical sub-sectors of construction, including renovation. Could you share how large portion of your revenue is derived from, let's say, renovation, and how much from something else?
Unfortunately, that is a question that I wish I could answer as well, but it's impossible to see it through , e ven though we have visibility to our clients' accounts through our system, I mean, the how they develop, but we cannot see in that split, unfortunately. Obviously, we think that we are quite big already, and we present quite well also the market. Traditionally, we have had more of these low cyclical clients than the cyclical ones.
It's, yeah, and of course, it's good to know that many of the small companies, it's not either one. It's either/or. They can be building new builds or they can be renovating, and now they are switching. On the sort of the positive side, I want to state that the last three clients that I have discussed with in past month or so, every time I ask them that, "Okay, how is this year looking? How is your order pipeline and so on?" Everyone has been happy. They have their sort of pipe full, and they are looking to grow their business during this year. I don't know where the recession is, but it hasn't been with those three clients. Of course, you know, it's not saying that there wouldn't be a recession and so on, but Based on that sort of qualitative glimpses, I'm not too worried right now.
Yeah
On that situation.
We got a last kind of checkpoint from the Statistics Finland just today actually. In December, the Finnish construction industry revenues were increasing over 7% still year-on-year basis. Still quite healthy growth there.
From the sort of the new builds part, of course, you can see from the architecture side, design side that how much is happening. What we've heard is that during the fall, there was sort of momentarily stop, that, you know, everything stopped and nothing happened, but then they started picking up gear again towards the end of the year. That means that at least somebody's planning to do something. You know. Again, I'm not trying to say that it's overly positive, but what I'm saying that it's not overly negative either. That's our feeling.
Okay. Thank you for the day.
Hey, one quick question from me as well. Veikko Silvasti, Danske Bank. Now reverting back to my first question of the day. How about, you know, how are you going to accelerate growth after 2024 with expanding EBITDA margins? Just trying to understand what you've had in this over 40% EBITDAA margin after 2024. Have you penciled in, for example, FTEs in new geographies there already? Should we just expect to see, let's say, a larger M&A in late 2023 or early 2024, and then you just, you know, give a new EBITDA margin targets, and then it's, it's lower? How should we see it? Is it actually so that you can also reach the EUR 100 million ARR only in Finland, or is it very heavily leaning on success in international markets? Thank you.
Thank you. Maybe, maybe you could say that it's the work of the analyst to draw your models and plan on that. Maybe I'll repeat my earlier answer that obviously, if we would do a larger M&A, let's say that we would acquire a EUR 10 million revenue doing company in some other market, and that would be only 20% EBITDA profitable, then obviously we would need to change the sort of the strategic guidance. The model is not implementing that sort of moves. Also, what it is, taking into consideration is sort of smaller ones with sort of reasonable profitability. Then we believe that the scalability will add up, and we'll meet those targets. I guess that's roughly enough.
Yeah. Maybe to add, we have done modeling, of course, going forward, not as specific as you think because obviously it's not possible even at this stage. There is, in that, there is room for acquisitions with dilutive effects as well. As said, if there would be major acquisitions at some point or something like that, then we would have to perhaps look at it again.
The final part about reaching this ARR of EUR 100 million, does it lean very heavily on international, or is it doable in Finland as well?
Like I've said before, I believe that it's fully doable also in Finland. Of course, right now we are thinking that it will include an international component as per our strategy.
Thank you very much.
We are a little bit over our estimated timing. Thank you for really good questions. Anything more on the audience? Anything more on the pad? I guess nothing here. Maybe if somebody's still thinking, what I want to say is that I want to thank everyone online, everyone present here, and most of all, I want to thank wonderful Admicom people, those presenting, and also those at the audience and the virtual audience. This has been, I think, the first actual capital markets day for Admicom, and definitely the first one on the English language. We are not, you know, we are a Finnish-based company, so maybe our English language is more of this Rally English in many times as you call in Finland. I think we did a great job.
Thank you, thank you for our presenters who were going into their uncomfort zone. As we continue doing the internationalization, I believe that there'll be much more uncomfort zones, but that's where we grow, and that's where we challenge. That's where we are going. Anything else? Nobody came up with questions, so we can conclude the session. Thank you very much. Thank you for being with us here today. Thank you.
Thank you.