Hello everyone, and welcome with us to follow Gofore's results presentation for full year and second half of 2021. Actually being here today does not feel at all like the right time for us to be presenting our results presentation. You all know what's happening in the world. We, as everybody else, strongly condemn the actions of the Russian regime and their cowardly invasion and attack on Ukraine. It's good to see a united Europe and the whole world taking action against this. We at Gofore stand with the people of Ukraine in this war. The gentleman with me today, as always, is Teppo Talvinko.
Hi.
Our-
Nice to have you here today.
Our Chief Financial Officer, and Teppo will be presenting the numbers for last year for you. My name is Mikael Nylund, and I'm the Group CEO of Gofore. We'll do this so that I'll start with presenting highlights for last year to you. Teppo will then take over and present the numbers in more detail. We'll then have a look behind the numbers a little bit, explaining certain important things behind the numbers. We'll look at targets and strategy, and lastly, we'll look at the outlook for this year and beyond. First of all, we'll start with a very short wrap-up of what Gofore actually is.
As many of you have seen before, we always start these presentations with saying that Gofore is a growing and profitable digital transformation consultancy. A consultancy, meaning our product is our expertise. We have no other product than the expertise of our consultants, our experts. Digital transformation, meaning that we are helping our customers and societies and industries at large to use digital technology to their benefit and cope with the very big transformation that is related to the breakthrough of digital technology. That, in a nutshell, is what Gofore is. Growing and profitable being one of the things means that we want to be a company that can consistently deliver on growth and profitability.
Looking at these numbers, we can both present a good track record of that and also show you that also last year, 2021, was a good year in this regard. We actually overachieved our growth targets and we also increased on the profitability. We have now also added, and we'll come back to this later in the presentation, but we also added to our material and slides one number that we haven't used before in this investor presentation, and that is the last 12 months pro forma net sales number that you can see on this slide.
That is there to illustrate where we are going actually in our growth strategy, which of course, as you know, is based on both organic growth and inorganic growth in the form of company acquisitions. Looking at the number with January included now, we are now at EUR 118.5 million in net sales. That's basically where we start the year from here on. Our aim is always to be growing and profitable, as discussed, but also constantly renewing. We want to be on top of the things happening in the world in terms of digital transformation and technologies and things related to that. We want to be always impactful and responsible.
We want to be international, develop more and more into a more and more international company. Last but not least, we want to offer our customers an exceptional customer experience and our employees an exceptional employee experience. As you all know, this industry is very much about how relevant as an employer you can be, there being a shortage of good talent in the market. That's something that we are of course always investing into and also that happened in 2021. All of this we want to one day become one of the most significant digital transformation consultancies in Europe as is our vision. I wanted for this presentation to just highlight the part of sustainability, of the impactful and responsibility part.
We have done big things also in 2021 in this area, improving on our responsibility as an employer, on the ethical environmentally sound work, and also being a good corporate citizen. All of these areas have improved on. As we have also said earlier, the most important area of sustainability thinking and ideas at Gofore is what we can in the long run achieve together with our customers in terms of using digital technology, digital solutions to build a more sustainable world. Fighting climate change being the prime example here. This is really something that we at Gofore value highly and think is important.
Now for the highlights of 2021, we'll start by some numbers. Of course, we are extremely happy about the organic growth that we managed to do during the year. Something that we improved on along the year quite nicely. Teppo will go more in detail into those numbers, but 13% over the whole year and 18% for the second half, really strong numbers for us and bearing in mind that it was a really difficult year also for us and for the whole industry in terms of growing and recruiting, this is a really good number and I think we have done extremely well there.
During the year, we did two successful company acquisitions, or actually the second one is at the beginning of this year and January 3. First of all, we acquired CCEA in March 2021, and then, as said, January 3, we acquired Devecto, and together these company acquisitions have helped us build an offering that is more relevant to the customer segments that we are targeting, and of course, also brought some growth to us. As said, we are now at the last twelve months number, including January at EUR 108.5 million in net sales.
A significant step for us was in March when we transferred to the Nasdaq Helsinki main list, and in conjunction with that, did a directed share issue, collecting EUR 19 million for the company to reinforce our growth strategy, and also managed at the same time to diversify our shareholder base quite nicely. What our objective was to increase the number of owners from outside of Finland and we managed to do that actually very nicely. Important highlight, which we will also dig into a little deeper during this presentation is that private sector customer net sales increased by 82% during the year.
That's a really good number. That's goes to highlight that we have been successful in the strategy that we've been pursuing and have managed to at least take the first steps to build an offering that is relevant for the customers that we are targeting in the private sector customer segment. Customer satisfaction overall was at a high level with customers valuing especially Gofore's customer orientation, reliability, and cooperative mindset, all extremely important things for us. On the other hand, we did a lot of work, as said, also, in the area of being a well-known and valued workplace. I think we managed quite nicely during last year here also.
Gofore was selected as the Employer Brand of the Year in 2021. Very important thing for us. We invested in many things and continued the development work on our employer brand and employee experience to support our talent acquisition and retention of talent. We did, for example, one of the first technology sector company-specific collective agreements, and that's something that we are looking to build on also for the future to make Gofore an even more different and diversified workplace from the competition and make us better in every way. That's something that we did together with the employees, of course.
We are also creating Finland's first ethical capability building model in the technology sector. That's something that is very important in terms of corporate responsibility, and corporate responsibility requires that we ensure that the whole work community has the competence, support, and daily working conditions needed to act in an ethically sustainable manner. This is something that we think that the industry and workplaces overall will need to also invest in in the future, and that's something that we want to be one of the first ones to do.
We also, during the year, continued to develop the infrastructures, for example, the IT systems, the ERP systems, and so forth, the leadership models and structures to accommodate growth and ensure that we are scalable into the future. This is not something that we see as a one-time investment. We see this as something that we as a growth company must invest in continuously and continuously try to build a company that is ready for what we will be in two or three years' time. I think we've been quite successful at that also during the last year. With these highlights, we can present the numbers for H2, the second half of the year, and as you can see, numbers have improved across the board.
This also does mean that the fourth quarter of the year was our strongest quarter, both in terms of organic growth and profitability. That's something that Teppo can now take over and explain to you in more detail.
Thank you, Mikael. If we go further on the figures, please. We can see here a top-line development. Strong growth continued. You can see on the right, sales CAGR, that's total figure over 27% from year 2018. I would like to highlight that the organic growth, when it comes to whole year figures was 13%, which is well above our long-term target, having a 10+ organic growth. Actually, the organic growth was improving from quarter to quarter. After a bit slower pace in the first half, the second half landed on a level of 18% in terms of organic growth.
That, as Mikael said, just it was driven by the extremely strong last quarter, Q4. Also, I would like to point out that the private sector growth, it has been rapid too, CAGR of 28%. If you look at this as a whole, all in all, we were quite well-balanced. All components in CAGR were over 20%. If you go a bit deeper down to net sales distribution, you can see that, by sector, 35% of the net sales came from private sector, and it was actually increasing near 10 percentage points year-on-year basis. Very, very positive private sector growth trend. That's actually resonating quite well to our strategy.
Our latest acquisitions, Qentinel, CCEA, and now in January, Devecto, all these are strengthening our presence, especially in industry sector. Going further, you can see that 2021, 35 customers were actually delivering over half a million EUR in net sales. Taking a look at the top five development here, we can see that we actually came down to 37%, 5 percentage points. That is good because the number of significant big customers increased. We have now broader shoulders, we have a better grip, a better traction in our customer base. That's a good platform to continue. On the right, you can see subcontracting, and that's an ecosystem for us. It was bringing in 19% of our net sales, which is vital for us.
It's enlarging the offering, it's enabling the rapid growth, and it's also giving us flexibility. Not forgetting the new trends in the labor market where freelancing and entrepreneurship they are gaining ground, so it's important tool for us. More about profitability. As Mikael just said, it was a strong year and the second half of the year was even stronger. What was driving the growth? What was driving the profitability? Of course, the really positive development on our top line. Driven by acquisitions and also driven by organic growth. And also price development, 4.6% increase year-on-year basis. That was helping us to offset the hot labor market and giving us more boost to profitability.
Going further, you can see that the billing rate, that's key KPI, key driver in the short run in our business. That was well above the 70% level, which actually helped us to push down the personnel cost net sales ratio to more effective level. OpEx net sales ratio that decreased two percentage points down to 10.7%. It's good, it tells us that the model is scalable. There was throughout the year talk about the new IFRIC amendment for SaaS implementation cost. That had a minor impact in our 2021 figures.
If you take a look at the quarterly development then, we can see that it's kind of a V-shaped picture of the year. The first half was not so rapid growth, but we managed to improve significantly after H1. You can see here that the Q3, that's a holiday season. After that, the speed was really good. As Mika said, Q4, the last quarter, that was very strong. Adjusted EBITDA 16%. We had a very solid demand, but we were able to gain organic growth of 21%. A really good achievement, really good development. Of course, that was improving the efficiency and billing rates and leading us to really strong last quarter.
You can see here selected, let's say, balance-based closing figures for 2021. We have a strong balance sheet, and that's actually reflecting the ambitions of growing Gofore with the solid positive cash flow. As you know, we closed the Devecto deal. It was EUR 21 million. 70% of that was a cash consideration, and we of course financed part of that with the debt. The board of directors are proposing a dividend of EUR 4.3 million to be paid. Putting this all together, we have a really solid balance sheet. We have a good balance sheet for further acquisitions, and we are actually well prepared for the coming year. Thanks.
Yeah, excellent. At this point, actually, I want to remind you, which I forgot in the beginning, that it's possible to ask questions already now on the platform. Anne here from our investor relations team will be looking at your questions, and we'll take them at the end. You can ask questions at the end or you can already now start putting questions on the platform. So please do that if you have anything that you want to clarify. Okay. Next, we'll look a little bit like behind these numbers about explanations and drivers about things that we feel it's important to understand about Gofore business and what happened during 2021 especially.
We'll start with the pretty difficult year that we had. We did excellent organic growth during a year that was not only difficult for Gofore, but for the whole IT services industry in general. That's in terms of keeping hold of your people and recruiting new ones. As said before already, we worked on these issues during the year. We also got selected as the Employer Brand of the Year. We were first in the tech sector to publish a collective agreement and so forth. We've been all the time working on things that are, of course, related to attracting new talent and retaining old ones.
As a result, our net addition for the year was almost 20%, which we are quite happy with. We are especially happy with the amount of new joiners that we had, up 77% from the previous year. We are not at all happy with the too high attrition number that we experienced during the year. Our target is under 10%, and at 17% we are, of course, nowhere near that. That's not something that is relevant only for Gofore. As said, it's been a difficult year for all of the industry. That's what we managed to do during the year. Not happy with that and want to improve on it significantly for next year.
We have experienced somewhat lower attrition towards the end of the year that promises that we might have a good direction for the year that has now started. Other things that we do in terms of attracting and retaining talent, we have group companies that work closely in our ecosystem and are owned by the group, majority owned by the group, like Rebase Consulting and a new company that started actually at the beginning of this year, Sleek, where we are transforming also our model of employing people to the expectations that people have for like another kind of work model, more of a freelance type of work model.
We are working on that. Of course, the subcontracting network and the whole ecosystem that we have there to help and produce value for our customers is really important. Subcontracting, as Teppo said, was at a 19% level of net sales for the whole year of last year, a little bit higher than the year before. The other thing that we want to look at is something that, of course, I already mentioned at the beginning, and Teppo also talked about the private sector customer portfolio. We have earlier also discussed and talked about how in Gofore strategy this is something that we want to achieve, strengthening our position with private sector customers.
2021 was, after a very COVID-impacted 2020, a year when we made good improvement in this area. The improvement is a lot of it is organic, building relationship with important customers, but it is also, of course, inorganic. That's why Devecto and also Qentinel Finland from 2020 have been good additions as companies in the group and providing us with an offering that we feel is really relevant for the private sector customers. As we can see from these selected examples of customer logos here, especially if you know the Finnish market, this is a customer portfolio that is especially strong in manufacturing intelligent machines and so forth.
Customers who are looking to leverage digital technology like 5G embedded systems and so forth to improve their products and develop their business model. That's the customer segment that Gofore is really targeting now and where we're building an offering that we feel is relevant for these customers. As a result of all this, the development during 2021 resulted in a 65-35 split between public sector customers on the other hand and private sector customers on the other hand.
The cumulative growth over these years is very similar, but the private sector growth has become much stronger in recent years or actually last year especially because, as said, 2020, even though we made progress there in terms of offering and so forth, it was a very COVID-impacted year. So that of course had a big impact on the growth of the private sector customer portfolio. Third thing we want to discuss are the drivers behind the, let's say, profitability and the operational efficiency.
There's been a lot of talk in the industry and understandably about salary inflation and what we now saw during 2021 was that we had a positive customer price development that offset the salary inflation. We had an average salary cost increase of 4.9% compared to a larger one in 2020. You could argue even that the salary increase of 4.9% was not enough because, as said, we saw a lot of attrition during the year. Maybe we would have find an even more optimal solution with a little bit higher salary inflation or salary increase number there. We're happy that it did not get out of hand in any way.
We are extremely happy with the balance of what Teppo also said, the customer price increase of 4.6% compared to the average salary of 4.9%, which of course means that the customer price increase is, considering all things, bigger actually in terms of profitability and bottom line. Other positive development, subcontracting margin went up a little bit. That's of course small numbers, but the direction is right and Teppo already commented on the operational expenses that we also managed to squeeze down a little bit. What will always affect our profitability for a whole year is of course the utilization rate.
On the right-hand side on this slide, you see an illustrative graph of how the utilization rate changed during the year. As we see at the beginning of the year, we had a small, let's say, some kind of softness during 3-5 in 2021. This is something that we discussed in detail also in the H1 results presentation. As we also see, you shouldn't look too much into the July figure, but because, as we know, it's the holiday month in Finland. After the holiday and after the summer, we did really strongly also in terms of utilization rate.
That's something that's very positive for the year of 2021. We don't give exact numbers or percentages for utilization rate because they are extremely difficult to compare between companies. This illustrative graph tries to give you an idea of how it developed relative to what it was from the beginning of the year. The fourth thing about the year that we had is about customer satisfaction and, as a result of that, long-term relationships with customers continuing. Of the graphs on the right-hand side, the one on top is about recurring revenue and that being at a number of 87% is really good for us and that's something that we are happy with.
Teppo also explained this in his slides that we have also had a good trend in the amount of big customers that we have been serving during the year. A 1.9 multiple for this four-year period which is good, we think. This is something that we, of course, want to continue on this trend in order for us also to be able to grow.
Why this is happening, it's really a lot about customer satisfaction, which we managed to have on a good level during the whole year and with the reference group, NPS numbers on an average, I think, are between 30 and 40. We have been placing very good, so placing Gofore among the top ones there. That's about numbers and trying to explain why the numbers became what they are. Now we're going over to targets and strategy. This is something that we released in December 2020, our long-term targets to continue our rapid and profitable growth.
That means that we are targeting at least 20% annual net sales growth, of which organic growth accounts for approximately half. Looking at the numbers we just presented, of course, we have managed to nicely go over our own target numbers. Profitability-wise, our target is at 15% adjusted EBITA margin. We are not quite there yet, but I think the direction is right, and we have a good chance of still achieving that. That's what kind of company we are building. We are thinking about that, let's say, every day when we make decisions about what kind of company we are building.
We are looking to build a company that is capable of at least 15% EBITA margin level consistently. To achieve these targets, our strategy includes three main avenues of growth. There's growth in Finland, and we are working both to improve on our position in the public sector, which is strong, and we still have work to do there, but we are already a top, let's say, top five, top three player there, but still room to grow there, and especially becoming the strategic partner for the private sector customers. That's something that, of course, we have now tried to highlight during this presentation that we have been quite successful at during the last year.
We want to achieve international growth. That's not maybe that evident for the last year and of course COVID pandemic hit the international customers international operations at large more than they did for our operations in Finland. What we had during the last year, we have done some great progress with some of our bigger customers. We have done some things to export the understanding we have of the public sector digitalization and digitalizing society that we have gathered in Finland to export that. That accounts to a quite a little bit of the international business that we have as of now. We are still looking to improve on that.
Now that we have also managed to acquire and go together with Devecto, we have, I think, an offering that is even more interesting also for international customers. Of course, that's something that we need to see results from during this year. The third avenue being disciplined M&A. Yeah, again, a couple of, I think, extremely good pieces of evidence that we have done that. CCEA at the beginning of last year in March, and now Devecto this year. Extremely good companies and extremely good additions to our group and to our offering and how we can serve our customers.
That's what we can see also on the next slide, the track record of our company acquisitions. Devecto now being the biggest acquisitions to date, with net sales of around EUR 11 million and a little over 100 people there. What I want to highlight on this slide actually is that all of these company acquisitions have had a strategic logic behind them. They have all taken us forward on our path in, not just in terms of growth, which is, of course, also important, but also in terms of what we can offer our customers and how we can work with the customers.
We'll now look at Devecto, the latest acquisition, in a little bit more detail and what we see the logic behind this acquisition. As a little bit touched on earlier in the presentation was that we have a certain customer segment, certain customer need in mind when we consider what Devecto can add to the group. That's what we call the Intelligent Industry offering. These are the customers that are working on usually some physical products that they have and are you know increasingly in a quick manner adding digital technology to those products.
Be it a tractor, be it a harvester, be it an elevator, being some kind of sensor equipment, a lot of different products that will include increasing amounts of digital technology. That's something that those kinds of customers that we are now targeting with the joint offering that we can provide with to them together with Devecto. In the picture you see a tractor, of course, and that's something that Devecto has been working quite a lot with, and they have extensive experience in that area with heavy machinery and customers in those areas.
What we want to provide our customers is to be the digitalization partner that they need when they are digitalizing their business that traditionally has been about physical products and that without question in the future will also include a lot of digital technology. Be it software, embedded software, be it connectivity, 5G technology and so forth, or be it data gathering from the field or from a fleet of machines, for example, and using that data to develop your business into something that is more and more valuable to our customers' customers.
This is the area where we want to improve together with Devecto and of course also the earlier acquisitions with Qentinel Finland who have all contributed to the excellent offering that we can now provide these customers and being a partner for them, being a partner with an agile mindset. I think that's something that all of these companies that we have together now have in common that we work with an agile mindset. We want to provide that also to our customers and help them also find the agile mindset that we think is extremely important for them when they go through their digital transformation.
If they cannot do it in an agile way, they probably will not succeed. Some facts about Devecto. I'm not gonna go more deeply into this. Around 130 experts, of which 15 have been working as freelancers, subcontracting partners, solely for Devecto, and the rest are employed. Strong understanding of embedded software and model-based design that are good additions to what Gofore already has expertise in. Customer base including, for example, Ponsse, Valtra and ABB, big customers in this customer segment that we are targeting. Very strong employee satisfaction also for them, which of course for Gofore is an important thing when considering what kind of companies we can acquire.
Happy people make happy customers and that translates into good financial performance also, which I think Devecto has showcased very well. The integration part for Devecto in Gofore will be similar to earlier company acquisitions. We are bringing Devecto right now onto our platform, our growth platform, Gofore growth platform that includes these enabling services, and we will be aiming to help Devecto in their growth as part of Gofore Group with these services.
We have a wide group of common customers, which we of course will try to serve in the best possible way and provide additional value with this combined offering and we also feel that we are a lot stronger in acquiring new customers in this customer segment we have been talking about. Internationally very promising discussions going on also outside of Finland. That's about targets and strategy. Last thing we'll look at, the market outlook. In addition to what's now going on in Ukraine, there are no big changes in this. The COVID pandemic is accelerating digital transformation everywhere across the board, in both public sector and private sector customers.
In the public sector, we are seeing a steady continuing investment into digital solutions. In Finland, the Social and Healthcare Reform is an extremely big operation that's going on now and since also an opportunity for companies like Gofore. I think we are doing rather well there. In the private sector side of things, I think digital investments have become a very high strategic priority for a lot of the customers. For Finnish companies, we see a positive order situation as of now, and especially for the export industry, which is where the companies that we have shown in the Intelligent Industry customer segment. Of course, there are some challenges also.
EU recovery fund is further there to support investments. We are going to see during this year also a challenging labor market and continued competition for talent. That's not going anywhere, not this year, probably not next year and not the year after that. That will also include that kind of structural changes in the job market, that people move more and more into freelance kind of jobs, and that's something that we need to be prepared for. As presented today, we have also done a lot of things to achieve during last year. Of course, war in Ukraine has come with a substantial amount of new uncertainty here.
We want to stress that Gofore has very limited direct exposure to the war and those areas and the sanctions. We have no employees, customers, or subcontractors in Ukraine or Russia. Having said that, we do expect some level of indirect impact for our business also through our customers who might have more exposure in those areas and might have a bigger impact into their business and therefore also an impact on their ability to invest into digital technology. We'll see. We're expecting some kind of indirect impact through that through our customers.
Latest development with the numbers for last year, we also released January numbers, something that we are pretty happy with, a strong start of the year in terms of capacity growth. During February, we reached a quite nice milestone of 1000 Goforeians. So we are now a company of over 1000 people. Some discontinuations in customer projects will always happen at the turn of the year, and that's something that is very typical of January. So that's something that we also see in these numbers to some extent, but nothing alarming. COVID, and especially the Omicron variant, did affect these numbers, because we had a slight increase in sick leaves during January and also going over to February a little bit.
That's something that we have at least for now seen a turn in now, and now we are on a decreasing trend there. Good start of the year. A good addition of capacity that of course we are very happy with and we'll need to find good work with our customers for these new people to do so that will result in a good organic growth also. Financial guidance for 2022. We have updated our disclosure policy, and that update says that we will no longer be giving financial forecasts related to the financial period in this case, for 2022.
I want to stress that this is not something that is because of the war in Ukraine. It has nothing to do with the uncertainty that the world is now facing there. We just want to highlight that our investors, our shareholders, and potential shareholders get a better view of where we are going by looking at the actual numbers that we release monthly. This is where we want to improve also on the reporting.
We will add, let's say, pro forma for the last 12 months to our monthly reports, and we will also be reporting organic growth as an own number for every quarter for this year. We feel that that's going to give you a better idea where we are going, a better idea than the financial forecast that we can even provide for the whole year. We want you to see the real time situation. We have good people working on commission research for Gofore at SEB and Inderes. That's something that also, of course, will help you understand the monthly reports. Lastly, dividends.
EUR 0.28 per share for 2021, and an increase from the year before. We wanted to bring you also the history of dividend development, something that we have over the years always wanted to do, to have an increasing trend on dividends, and that's something that we also could do this year or last year, which we think is extremely important. Now it's time for the questions. I have them on the terminal here. Joni Grönqvist from Inderes is asking, Your billing per employee per day jumped to a new level in H2. Was there something structural supporting this level, or was it purely billing rates driving this?
If you look at, let's say key performance indicators behind that, there's of course billing rate as Joni notes, and there's also the positive customer price trend that also drives this. Those are the KPIs. Behind those things, I think there's a lot of work and for us to be able to scale and showcase continuously good billing rates, we have done a lot of things that are related to the IT systems, the infrastructure we have there, to the leadership and to the structure of the company.
I think that's something that we have succeeded in quite well during the year and that is now seen as high billing rates for the last year. Of course, what you need there also is a good customer demand which we saw there. Joni is also asking, your recruitments were very strong in 2021, especially H2. At the same time billing rate seems also very high. Can you comment on the customer demand and need to recruit in 2022? Yes, as we shown in the market outlook, we think the start of the year looked very promising where and we are very optimistic about that.
Something we cannot really forecast at this time is the impact of the war in Ukraine on the whole year. That's of course an uncertainty that we have, we now have to live with. We think other than that, all the drivers behind there are really strong. We have started the year in really optimistic manner. Panu from Danske asks, can you increase billing rate further in 2022 from the level achieved in 2021? What is your expectations for salary inflation in 2022? How do you expect the employee attrition to develop in 2022 compared to 2021? And how much potential do you see for price increases in 2022?
A lot of questions there in one question. Billing rate for the last quarters of the year last year were, if not at a maximum, they were close to that. Of course, the higher the billing rate we are showcasing and can work on, the less upside there is. There's not a huge upside there, but we think that if we can keep the billing rate at the level that we achieved in H2, it will be also for a whole year a significant improvement over 2021. The other question was. Can you, Anne, help me remember the questions or can you move it back to my screen? Yes, thank you. Excellent.
What are the expectations for salary inflation in 2022? First of all, let's comment on that shortly, because that's something that we have built into our collective agreement, which is now the collective agreements for most of our people in Finland. We have a salary increase model there that is connected to Gofore Group growth and EBITA. The most important performance indicators that we have, and the better we do, the higher the salary increases will be. I don't expect there to be a huge change compared to 2021, but as also commented during the presentation, salary inflation, salary raises are also kind of the other side of the coin when we talk about attrition.
We need to balance that, and find the most optimum solution there. Higher salary increases might result in lower attrition, which might be a better optimal solution compared to 2021. How do you expect employee attrition to develop? We are expecting it to come down. We are targeting a 20% decrease for this year compared to last year. Not directly under the target level of 10%, but we are targeting a decrease there. I think seeing the start of the year, there's some positive signals there, but it's a difficult job market. Let's see. How much potential do you see for price increase in 2022?
Well, basically the situation is similar to 2021, except that 2021 comparison year, 2020, was the year when COVID pandemic price decreases hit hard. Probably not. Might be that the end result will not be as good as 2021, but we are targeting price increases also for 2022. Bear in mind, of course, there's inflation that needs to be taken into account for a lot of our customers that work within the intelligent industry customer segment that we talked about. There's pressure there, but we feel that we are in a strong position.
Joni also asked that, "Can you comment on the situation on international expansion, where you are now, and is the Ukraine situation affecting your willingness to expand now?" Not as such. We have had no plans to expand in the areas directly affected by the war. There might be an indirect effect, but we don't know yet. We want to see how the market develops. As we've said earlier also, we are very much focusing on three areas. We have private sector customers internationally, many of them might be companies with operations in Finland or from Finland and expanding with them to international markets.
We are also targeting a growth in public sector projects for the international, mainly the European market. Thirdly, we have the German market where, of course, we are now in the early stages of developing operations. What we said earlier also is that we are looking for company acquisitions if they could be done in the German market. That's something that we might see during the year if that works out. Jaakko from SEB asks, pricing: "Your average hourly price was up 6% in H2. How much of this came from different mix? And what is your understanding on the competitors' actions in pricing?
Are the market prices increasing as well?" Well, we are keeping our eyes on the ball. Don't want to comment too much on what competitors on the market there does. For the second half of 2021, you need to remember that the comparison period there is the second half of 2020. For a lot of our private sector customers, 2020 being the start of the pandemic year was a year where the prices decreased for the second half. From a lot of customers, we got indications that we need to decrease prices for the second half.
I think as a whole Gofore was not that affected by the price decrease compared to the market as a whole of course because of our big exposure to the public sector but we were and that's something that's also in there in the 6% increase. Jaakko is also asking, "Your Q4 was strong. Is there still room to improve the utilization rates from the level seen in Q4?" Well as I answered I think it was Joni's question the higher we perform the less upside there is. That's true. I'm not saying that we are operating at a 100% perfect efficiency not at all. There's always room to improve.
Of course, utilization rates are a combination of what kind of organization you build, how lean the organization is, how much do you have overhead costs compared to people working on customer projects. That's something, of course, that we need to for the future, not just for this year, but for the years to come also, be very diligent with that. We keep the lean company structure that we've had over the years. Yeah, we are. That's something that we are thinking about daily. Panu is then asking, "When do you expect the 15% EBITA margin target to be achievable?" Let's put it this way.
If we wouldn't have had the softness in utilization rates for the first half of 2021, I think it would have been achievable. From Jaakko, "How will Devecto impact your average hourly rates, average wages, and subcontracting?" Yes, this is actually a good, important question. Devecto is working mainly with product development organizations and whereas Gofore before has worked maybe more with IT and business development, Devecto has worked with the product development, the R&D side of the organizations and also in our customer, common customers. That's basically the split that we have there. Not 100% like that, but the big picture is that.
That means that Devecto's prices are actually somewhat lower, and that will, if you only look at average prices, counting Devecto in now will lower our average prices. I want to stress that, as you see in the slides and saw in the presentation, Devecto has been able to perform very good. They have a track record of doing very good, almost 20% EBITDA margins, and that's something that is, of course, a product of utilization rates, customer prices which are lower than ours, and salaries. These basic parameters have met in their business quite nicely. What we're gonna see or have seen is a decrease in prices, when Devecto comes in.
The interesting thing is there what the trend afterwards is and how they will develop into the future. We think with Devecto coming in, we have an even stronger or bigger upside there than we had before. The other questions was subcontracting, I think. Yeah. Devecto has used subcontracting. I don't have percentages, but it will not be hugely different from what we have had as a share before. They have worked with freelance type of people and continue to do so. That's something that we consider to be part of the subcontracting side of things. Jaakko asks that, "Devecto's headcount indicate that their growth is set to continue.
Could you indicate what was Devecto's growth in January or what was Devecto's sales impact on today's announced January sales? To answer it shortly, no. That's not something that we give out. Yes, Devecto's growth has been strong during last year and there's every reason to believe, except for the war conditions now that affecting the economy, that they will continue to grow also during this year. William asks, "When people leave from Gofore, why and where they leave? Any major new trends or themes there?" Well, over a longer period, we've seen changes there, of course. Earlier, with Gofore being a smaller company, we saw quite a lot of people moving to competition, to competitors, and to other consultancy companies. That's something that over the years has decreased.
We see people moving over to the customer side, which is of course something that is very understandable given the customers need to invest in their capability to use digital technology to do their digital transformation, and not always that bad in terms of what the end result is. We have, of course, by now a nice alumni network there at the customers also, which we think feel is important.
Maybe for the last couple of years, the biggest trend is that people are more and more moving to freelance kind of work, be it their own company or being an independent contractor or be it they move to the smaller companies which we then of course would like to keep in our ecosystem and work with to produce value for our customers also in the future. That's the big trend we've seen here. That's what we've also answered with, as said, companies in the group like Rebase Consulting and Sleek that's starting now for this year. Jacob asked, "Attrition rate was relatively high." Yes, it was.
It was at an all-time high, so yes, relatively high. "How has that developed in Q4 and early 2022? Secondly, could you give an indication for wage inflation for 2022 and how Devecto is impacting that?" We see signals that Q4 was not the biggest month in terms of attrition. It's early to comment on what this year will bring. We are slightly hopeful, but the evidence is not there yet really. This is not to try to tell you that we have evidence of lower attrition. We have some signals there, I think. Wage inflation, that's something that I think we a little bit commented already. It's not gonna go away.
We need to find also or try to find it. It's not a mathematical equation that you can find an optimal solution for, but find a better optimum between attrition and salary raises. We might see a bigger figure. We might see something in line with last year for salary raises. As commented, we also have a model in our collective agreement that sets kind of the minimum for salary increases, and that's something that we follow and you can find on the collective agreement if you want to look at that. Okay, thank you. A lot of questions. I think we are now done with them.
Thank you all for joining us in this results presentation, and let's hope for a quick and good resolution to the war in Ukraine. Thank you.
Thank you.