Welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. This is Gofore's second-half and full-year results presentation for 2022, starting live now. My name is Mikael Nylund. I'm the CEO of Gofore Group, and as always, I have Mr. Teppo Talvinko, our CFO, here with me.
Hi. Nice to have you.
What we'll do today is, first, we'll look at the highlights from last year. After that, Teppo will take over and guide you through the financials. Then we'll go back to me, and I'll go through the outlook and our targets together with you. Last but not least, we will have a look at our board's dividend proposal. For questions during the presentation, you can type them on the streaming platform. Emmy from our investor relations will then take them over from there, and we'll see them here on our iPad, and we'll take your questions at the end of the presentation. Go ahead and ask your questions during the presentation.
We'll be able to take them at the end. Okay, let's dive in. As many of you probably have already seen when we released the numbers, it's been an excellent year for Gofore. Gofore is a growing and profitable digital transformation consultancy, and we've again, and very successfully for the year 2022, demonstrated a growing and profitable part. We took huge steps forward and ended the year with around 1,300 employees in 19 locations across Europe. Our growth and profitability improved both for the full year and for the second half of the year. We are extremely happy about the year that has passed.
As said, we continued on our growth track, a very good track record we have from the last 10 years, and I'm so happy that we can again show you that everybody, we have the ability to be consistent in our performance. Especially, of course, for the 2022 year, we want to highlight the excellent organic growth at 32%, a very good improvement over the year 2021. Profitability improved towards our target level of 15%, and that's of course important in many ways for us, demonstrating our operational model's scalability and so forth. We'll dig deeper into the specifics of the profitability very soon in the presentation.
Yes, of course, we are looking to continue growth, and for this year and after January, our last 12 months' net sales are at EUR 160 million, which is again a good leap forward, driven by the eMundo acquisition that we did at the start of November and the continued organic growth that carries over from the good last year. The highlights for last year, in addition to the growth and profitability, are that we were so successful in recruitment. We demonstrated, I think, very well that we are able to, in this bigger size class, also keep up the organic growth in terms of recruitment, in terms of our strong employer brand, and operational excellence in recruitment.
Our profitability relies on customer prices and salaries going hand in hand with development, and in those terms, the year was very good for us. I'll guide you a little bit deeper into that next. For 2022, of course, two important events for us were the acquisitions of Devecto from the beginning of the year, which has developed very well and as expected. Of course, the big step in the German market, in the DACH area market for us, was when we acquired eMundo in November, as said. Next, I'll dig into this a little bit deeper, and as said, then we'll go over to Teppo and look at the numbers in more detail.
For us in the consultancy business, of course, the changing environment in terms of inflation, which is nothing new for us on the salary inflation side, but other cost inflation is something new, is something that we needed to keep a good look at, and customer price development is something that we have been paying a lot of attention to. I think you as investors will do that too. We had a good year. Customer price change on average was 3.5% over the year, a little bit over what we had set our targets and expected. A very good year. The average salary change was +2.9%, much lower than the year before.
Here we have to remember that the average salary change can be divided into two parts, basically. It's about salary raises for the people who already work at Gofore. We want to be a good salary payer, and we want to be attractive as an employer, of course, and salary is a big part of that. Our salary raises for the people we already have on board were at a healthy level, I think, 6.2% during the year. The other part of the equation of average salary change is the new employees, and that's where we did a good job. The hiring kept the average salary change at a good level compared to the customer price.
In terms of billing rate, we've had a pretty good, steady year. No big bumps along the road there. That, of course, also very much supports profitability, and something else that supports profitability is that even though the subcontracting share grew a little bit, we also managed to improve the subcontracting margins by a couple of percentage points, which was a very good number for us. All these parameters behind the profitability developed positively and in a good direction. That's why profitability was at a better level than the year before. On the customer side, there are a couple of noteworthy things on this slide.
Our strategy of developing bigger, deeper customer relationships, becoming a strategic partner for our customers, in terms of numbers, again, took big steps forward. Our customer size grew significantly. We again had a good number in returning customer share of net sales, even with the very high growth numbers, 82%. We have managed to keep customer satisfaction at a very, very high and above-target level. Our brand has gained awareness among our customers, which is, of course, also an important part of the equation. Private sector customer net sales growth was 64%, whereas public sector customer net sales growth was at 33%.
The strong growth was in part driven by our strategic target of deepening our relationships with private sector customers, especially. 2022 was also a year when business outside of Finland grew faster than business in Finland, which is something that we've been looking to achieve, and we did it a bit ahead of our own schedule last year. We saw 77% growth from outside of Finland, which was mostly organic growth because the eMundo acquisition was so late in the year. In the report that we released this morning, we have a couple of good customer cases and references that I urge you to take a look at. We won't go through them in this presentation.
Organic growth was high, very strong, and for us to be able to achieve that, we need to excel in managing our human resources. We need to be attractive employers, both to external candidates to ensure successful recruitment, and to our current employees to minimize attrition. We were successful in both aspects. We recruited 377 people during the year, a significant improvement over 2021. Our attrition rate decreased from 17% the previous year to 12%, which is closer to our target of being below 10%, but we still have work to do.
Both of these are, of course, affected by our employee experience, measured by the Employee Net Promoter Score, and the employer brand that we had—we won awards for it during the year. Very good development here. Next, I'll hand over to Teppo, who will take you through some more numbers from 2022.
Thanks, Mikael. Growing and profitable, that's what we have been for at least 20 years now, and it's good to keep it that way. What are the key factors behind the excellent growth that we have been showing in recent years? Of course, on the demand side, we are in the right market. The digital transformation market is growing really fast, and that's our home base. Taking a look at the, let's say, more internal things, I would say that we have the right kind of offering: an end-to-end offering that we have been building through recruitments and acquisitions, from, let's say, change management in Lead to quality assurance in Verify. All these things are important.
They give us, they bring us opportunities, kind of a cross-selling platform. Of course, subcontracting, which is an ecosystem thing for us, giving us flexibility and in this kind of a market situation, scalability. When you have good demand, the ability to respond. We were successful there. We were able to respond organically. As Mikael said, a strong employer brand helped us in being very successful in recruiting. Also, we had a really efficient onboarding process. All these were supporting organic growth. If you take a look at the right side, the table there, you can see that private sector growth has been really rapid.
I would say that it's pretty much because of the latest M&As that we have carried out. CCEA, Qentinel, today it's Verify, Devecto, and the latest, eMundo. All these are boosting private sector sales and giving more opportunities in end-to-end offering and cross-selling. Internal sales have been growing rapidly, and I would like to point out that the number of big customers has increased, and that has also happened with our international customers. It has boosted international growth and, of course, the latest acquisition in Germany, in Austria, the DACH area, that will further our international business. Some takeaways from sales distribution.
You can see that the private sector has increased its share. Going back a couple of years, we had a share of 26%. Now it's 40%. Still, we have been able to keep a strong position in the public sector. That's really delightful. Top five customers. I would say that it's a positive trend. We have come down from 42% in 2020 to 30%. As Mikael said, the number of big customers has increased, and that's giving us broader shoulders, more opportunities, and supporting top-line growth. Growth does not always bring profitability along, but in our case, it has.
We discussed the top line, we discussed the big customers and success there. If we look under the hood, I would highlight some things. I think the efficient onboarding in this situation, especially in 2022, has been a really key factor here. We had a really short lead time from, I would say, door to the customers, and that helped a lot. We have a lean operational model. We have a really good understanding of the customer needs that we have, especially since the public sector is really strong, so that has helped a lot.
We have been successful in M&As and seen a really positive trend throughout the year in billing rates. All these things have supported the really good development on the profitability side. As Mikael pointed out, the good balance between customer prices and salary development has nicely balanced each other, and that has also been one of the key factors in terms of profitability. Also, I would like to highlight that the last quarter, Q4, was operationally very strong. Adjusted EBITDA was 16.5%, a really good number. Okay. A few words about the quarterly performance.
There is a certain seasonality in our business, and that's good to keep in mind when looking ahead, as not all quarters are alike. We have a Christmas season; usually, January is a slow starter. We have a summer period, and August is typically a month for restarting. It's good to keep in mind that all these things affect the seasonality we experience in our business. Anyway, you can see that there is a really positive, really good trend in organic growth, starting from 8% in the first quarter of 2021, going up to the 30% level. This year, January, that was...
I would put it in a way that was an okay start to the year. Of course, February brought winter holidays in Finland, and March was a long month. It's really exciting to see what kind of figures we have ahead of us. Regarding financing, you can see that the cash position was extremely strong, and that comes along with the really strong cash flow. It's generating a quite nice, strong balance sheet: negative net debt, interest-bearing debt, and a really strong equity raise.
All that good profitability and strong cash flow make us a good partner in the financial market when they want to finance us, or when we probably need financing for further acquisitions. Basically, we have a really good situation in terms of financing. Today, when money has a healthy price, I would say, when the interest rate has increased from negative to positive figures, I would say that's actually good for us. We have a hedging rate of 70% of our loan amount. What does this mean?
It actually means that we are well hedged against any changes in the interest rate market. In the annual figures, we have booked EUR 0.7 million positive in OSI. It's a valuable asset, but of course, we want to keep it because it's hedging the positioning. If you take a look at the financial expenses in the profit and loss statement, you probably wonder why the financial expenses are EUR 0.8 million. Keep in mind that half of that, EUR 0.4 million, is related to non-cash flow calculative interest arising from the earn-outs in our latest acquisitions. What does this mean? It means that we are well hedged against any changes in the financial market.
Thanks. Great. Good. I want to remind you, if you have any questions, for example, on the financial, you can already type them on the platform, and we'll take it at the end. Now I'm going to go through the targets and the outlook that we have on the market for this started year and beyond, of course, also. Before doing that, I want to take a little bit of a step back and look at the targets that we set for ourselves at the end of 2020, when we came out with our growth strategy of then and the related targets.
What we said then is that we want growth in Finland, we want international growth, and we want to continue what we already then called our disciplined M&A practice. That's exactly what we've done. That's. The targets that we set back then, we have outperformed. We had a annual total growth target of 20% last year. I said we did 43%. We had a target of around 10% organic growth. Last year was 32% actually. We have a old figure on this slide. It was 32% actually.
We set out to build a good portfolio of customers in the private sector market, duplicating the success that we had already managed to achieve with our public sector customers, becoming a strategic and long-term partner for them. The growth numbers for the private sector reflect this. We also wanted to increase the amount of business we do from outside of Finland. If we look at the pro forma figures for last year, it was already at 15% at the end of 2022. We have taken very significant steps in that direction as well, and of course, we look forward to continuing that.
Partly because of this, and partly because we outperformed our own targets, we had the confidence to announce our new targets and hike them a little bit, even though there's a lot of uncertainty about the market outlook. What we did was hike our growth target and our long-term
Financial targets are now set at 25% annual growth, with 15% profitability measured in Adjusted EBITA. Our dividend policy continues to be the same: we want to pay out at least 40% of our annual net profits in dividends. To do this, we have also devised a new or updated growth strategy. There's no need to come up with something totally new because, as is evident, the strategy that we have is basically working. What we want to improve on is that we want to have a stronger industry focus in our work. We want to build on the strong position that we have built in the customer segment that we call Digital Society.
The public sector and all those private sector players also play a part in building that digital society for everybody, for every one of us, for a more digital and a better everyday life for people, for all of us, and for businesses. We want to especially strengthen and keep developing the offering that we have for the customer segment that we call Intelligent Industry, and become a viable strategic partner for those customers, those big customers in that strategic customer segment for us. You can learn more about our strategy and the other parts of it by watching our Capital Markets Day stream from the beginning of this year. You'll find it on our website.
The third avenue to growth deserves to be mentioned. We will be continuing work with mergers and acquisitions, something we have learned quite a lot about and improved upon. For that, of course, it's very important that, as Teppo explained, we have a strong balance sheet. We have the means to do more in that area. Looking back at the M&A track, especially last year, Devecto and eMundo both developed in terms of growth pretty much as expected. Last year, Devecto grew 30%.
eMundo had a chance to grow 17%, something that we hope we can together improve on by finding synergies in customers and other parts of the operations for this year and especially beyond. Outlook-wise, the situation is a bit tricky. This is something that we, of course, have said for a number of years now for obvious reasons. A year ago, it was a situation where a war had broken out in Europe, something that, of course, everybody still suffers from. The year before and the year before that was the pandemic. Now it's the macroeconomics that give us some concern, of course. The good thing here is that the outlook for digital transformation consultancy in the mid- and long-term, we think, remains extremely strong.
If anything, it has been strengthened by these crises that we have gone through. In the short term, on the other hand, we have the macroeconomic climate that does give us some uncertainty, and that is something that will affect demand to some degree. That's, I think, the overarching trend that we look for during this year, and it will affect the other areas of our outlook, of course, accordingly. I'll go through the public sector outlook, the private sector outlook, and the talent market outlook separately here. To begin with the public sector, sometimes people ask, "Isn't digitalization already very far ahead in Finland?"
Isn't this something that is almost done? That is not by any standard, I think, true. We have just taken the first steps in digitalizing society here in Finland also. There will be a market. There will be a growing market there, also looking forward. Looking at it short-term, we have good momentum from last year that carries on to 2023. There are a lot of big projects and a lot of development that carries on. We do have the parliamentary elections in Finland in April 2023, as we have mentioned earlier. Learning from experience, it's fair to say that it's very expected that there will be a slowdown.
We think that the slowdown period has already started in tendering activity during the election time, and that is something that is normal. It will not, however, have an effect on ongoing projects and development. It will only have an effect on newly starting projects. A slowdown in the whole digital transformation or IT services market will have some kind of effect also in the public sector market, especially short-term, with a higher risk of price competition when supply is moving from the private sector side to the public sector side, if that happens. Structural reform, especially in social and healthcare services here in Finland, continues.
The regions that were formed for this reform have taken over the services since the beginning of this year. We have a strong position there, but that's still like a game that hasn't been played out to the end yet. We have a lot of customers with whom we need to build long-term framework agreement situations, something that we put a lot of effort into. We also have one bigger customer agreement that is coming to an end this year and will be put out to tender during this year, something that we are of course extremely interested in and are, of course, looking at.
The effects of that tender, whatever the results are, will be visible to us in any major way next year, not this year. Most of the work for this year is already covered by the framework agreement as it is, leading to a slightly slower effect there. There are concerns about public finances that are under pressure a little bit due to deficits and, of course, interest rate hikes. Our expectation is for that not to have a huge effect on investments in digital development. We'll see, and that's of course up to politics to decide what kind of investments are to be made.
On the private sector side, however, the situation is, of course, a little trickier in the sense that it's more cycle-dependent. We should remember that last year, our growth here was 64%. Our customers, even with the perhaps darker clouds gathering towards the end of the year in the macroeconomic climate, continued to invest in digital development. That is, I think, what we expect to happen during the year also, and that's the big picture of it. If situations become worse for our customers, we don't want to say that we would be in any way immune to that. This is something that will also affect our order intake. We are optimistic.
Our customers seem to be quite optimistic, and there are market drivers that are also positive for the short run. We hope these things will carry our customers over the more difficult times. I think it's fair to say that in terms of customer demand, the year 2023 probably will not be as strong as last year. However, it doesn't mean that it will be negative. It just isn't as strong as last year, which was, of course, a record-strong year, as you can see from our performance. All this is also affecting the talent market.
Short-term, as I just mentioned regarding customer demand for this year, I think we can see a situation where the bottleneck of our business and our growth is expected to shift from talent availability to customer demand. However, I want to stress that this is a short-term situation. This will not change the big picture in the talent market, which will remain extremely competitive. There will also be a shortage of talent for the coming years. So, it doesn't mean that we don't have to do the things that we would do anyway in developing Gofore as an attractive employer, as a very operatively strong recruiter, and onboarder, as Teppo Talvinko said, and being also able to retain our people.
These are all as important, even more important than they have been for us for our success in the long run. While I'm talking about the shift of the bottleneck from talent availability to customer demand as an average phenomenon, there are areas where customer demand will continue to be strong and talent availability will be the bigger bottleneck. You could take, for example, cybersecurity as an example of those capabilities that will still be in this situation.
We've updated the risk assessment that we've shared with you investors for some time now. At this point, it's only worth noting the same thing that I said from the market outlook perspective. The macroeconomic situation is the big unexpected factor here, where things can happen that will then reflect on customer demand, especially on the private sector side. Those risks are the bigger ones. We've also highlighted the M&A risk there. Of course, we took a big step last year in acquiring a bigger company from the German market with eMundo. That's basically a first for us.
We might have some things that we don't see yet in that area. At this point, we are extremely happy with the acquisition, and we're so glad to get to know our new colleagues from eMundo and get to work with them that it's really been a great success up until now, at least. These are the things about the outlook for last year, and again, if you had any questions about these, type them on the streaming platform. We'll come back to them in a few minutes.
Shareholder value compared to peers, Gofore has been strong for the past two years, and this is a good introduction to our dividend proposition that the board will propose to the annual general meeting. We are so happy to be able again to improve on the dividends from the previous year, and there will be a EUR 0.34 dividend per share that will be proposed to the annual general meeting. We hope to continue this trend of annually rising dividends even if that's not something that we've written out in the targets. That's something that we look closely at and take pride in that we have been able to do. That's basically all that we have for today.
We'll go over to the questions, starting with the first question we have here from Joni Grönroos from Inderes. Joni asks if your recruitment in 2022 and January 2023 already provides a good base to achieve your long-term organic growth target. Can you tell us what kind of net organic recruitments you are aiming for in 2023? Let's start by saying that for our internal operations, we don't set annual fixed targets that we want to achieve. That would be against the idea of how we operate. We constantly monitor our situational awareness regarding customer demand, the numbers we have there, the direction of trends, and so forth, and we adjust our recruitment accordingly.
Really, it would be wrong to answer Joni's question directly. That depends on how customer demand develops during the year. We have a question from Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. Average wages were up 2.9%, but the average salary hike was 6.2%. Did you recruit more junior staff, and what was the impact of acquisitions? Follow-up: Do you expect similar wage hikes in 2023, and are you able to offset that with recruitments? For the year 2022, the difference between average wage development and average salary raises during the year is attributed completely to recruitment. Yes, as Jaakko puts it, we recruited more junior staff and at a lower salary rate than the average Goforean makes during the year.
That is what happened. In other words, how we put it, we managed the wage structure, the wage pyramid that our business is about in a very efficient and successful way. Yes, that is exactly what the difference there is about. His follow-up question was about, do you expect similar wage hikes in 2023, and are you able to offset that with recruitments? I think for the talent market as a whole, 2023 looks like the whole economic situation will reflect on the talent market in a way that there will not be as much over-demand for talent. That might also have an effect on wage inflation and wage development.
On the other hand, of course, we still have inflation in the economy. It would be a little early to suggest that average salary hikes would be lower than in 2022. We don't expect that. As I said during the presentation, it's also important for us to demonstrate to GoForians, to demonstrate to our people, that we are and can be a good salary payer. That's part of the attraction of Gofore as an employer, and that reflects on the attrition rate, of course. We are not, at least, counting on a big change there for this year.
We are most certainly targeting the same kind of effect with recruitment that we did during 2022, that we can offset and balance out the big salary raises to people by recruiting basically more or cheaper workforce. Okay. Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank asked that your share of operating expenses of sales increased some 1 percentage point year-on-year to around 11.6%. This is probably Teppo for you, and the question is, was 2021 unnaturally low for these costs, and what do you see as a manageable level at this point going forward? Do you see any items in this category having material cost inflation?
If you look at the OPEX development, one thing that heavily impacted OPEX in 2022 was our cost related to acquisitions. If we remove that from the figures, it actually means that we were pretty much on the same level, actually, one digit below the 2021 figures. To answer your question, cleaning up those transaction costs, the OPEX was, I would say, at a decent level.
We have scalability in terms of operational expenses. That's what we are targeting. Daniel's second part of the question was about inflation. Inflation is affecting pretty much all costs.
It's affecting all costs, and what are the biggest costs in our case? I would say that it's the office space that we have, and of course it's affecting that. Then, maybe you can see the highest inflation there. Otherwise, we still have negotiation power in the market. That's one thing which is keeping the OPEX inflation, I hope, at least at decent levels.
Okay. Matti Viljamaa is asking, "Are you looking for global funds in M&A financing and/or market development?" As Teppo went through in his part of the presentation, I think our balance sheet pretty much tells its own story. At the moment, we are set for the next two or three years in terms of financing, and the road map for us is also covered, I think, balance sheet and financing-wise. For market development, what we have said in our strategy is that we look to develop the market in the DACH area and establish ourselves there. That's what we are working on.
Yeah.
Eero asks, "You have grown very fast in the private sector, especially last year. Do you have networked individuals engaging large customers or a large network of competent people engaging SME private sector customers?" Our strategy is quite heavily leaning towards bigger customers—those customers that have significant potential to invest in digital transformation, digital product development, and so forth. That's where we are quite heavily leaning. From Tanya, "Are you evaluating your position as a consultancy among global consultancy house leaders?"
"What will be your focus and competitive edge?" In terms of comparing ourselves to established global consultancies and players, I think our strength is very much in what we are: an agile consultancy that can still provide the same end-to-end service that these global players can, but with a very different mindset. We are agile. We focus very much on results, not so much on the process, and give our people a lot of power in how they carry things out with the customer. That's been a strength of ours, and that's what we want to build on going into the future. One more question from Jaakko Tyrväinen.
"Commentary on eMundo's first months as part of the group. What has been the reaction from customers and employees?" That's a very important and good question from Jaakko. So far, at least, we have received really positive reactions. Both employees, who, of course, see their possibilities in a bigger company in terms of development and what they can achieve, and who view Gofore's Nordic mindset and Nordic working culture as a positive thing and something that is not a threat to what eMundo's company culture has been—a very similar one. They call it "New Work" in the German context. Very positive. Customers, on the other hand, have had pretty much the same reaction.
The bigger, broader offering, and bigger shoulders that we as Gofore bring have been regarded as a positive thing by customers. eMundo's customer portfolio is somewhat similar to Gofore's, though on a different scale, of course. However, they have been focusing on the big customers in their portfolio, and that's something that suits us. We have also mentioned earlier that there are important potential customers there, such as Deutsche Bahn and BMW, as examples. Joni Grönqvist asks, "First time you mention uncertainty, what has changed since January? And is it more in the DACH area where you see the uncertainty?" I'm not sure.
I think I've been in many situations where I overuse the word "uncertainty" at times. I don't think this has been the first time we've mentioned that, I hope at least. Maybe we should clarify that up until now, we have seen no major postponements, cancellations, or anything that would have a direct effect on the projects we work on with customers. There have been some that can be attributed to the uncertainty, and some that can be attributed to normal situations. Customers do that; that's normal. They should do that when they reevaluate their development portfolio. I think some of them can be attributed to the uncertainty, but it's just a very small part so far.
What we see is still in our day-to-day operations, order intake and so forth, no changes in that sense. Daniel Lepistö asks, "Your growth slightly accelerated in January. What sort of momentum and customer activity are you seeing currently?" Well, as I just said, there are no big changes there. January as such is always January for us, and we did comment on that shortly in the release also. January does have some seasonal attributes that seem to be always there, which are related to projects ending at the year and new projects starting, and some slowness there. That's kind of a headwind that we always face in January.
But looking at the numbers, of course, we did make good net sales even though that's the situation in January. Joni Grönqvist asks, "Can you tell about the salary inflation and price increase outlook in 2023?" Yeah. I think we are expecting a similar situation to 2022. Depending on what kind of agreements we have with customers, the price increases can come in early, or some are delayed to this year. We don't expect price indices to develop heavily differently from 2022; no strong changes there. Salary-wise, maybe something that hasn't been mentioned today is that we have a company-wide and company-specific salary solution in place for Gofore, and that means that salary raises that are...
that everybody is enjoying are dependent on company performance in terms of growth and performance. We share the success, basically, also in salaries. When we do well, we have slightly bigger salary increases. When we do not so well, we have slightly smaller ones. If we are successful, you will also see that in higher salary development, which is good and which is what we are looking to do, of course. Again, to be sharing the success, to be the attractive employer that is so important for Gofore. A few more: Daniel Lepistö asked, "What's your ideal public to private sale split you would be aiming for medium term?"
"Is it 50-50 or something else?" Well, this is something that we get asked a lot. I think there is no optimum balance there. We do see that, in terms of the market, we have a much stronger position in the public sector, so the growth cannot reach the numbers that we have now reached. In the private sector, we have more of a challenger position. So that's one thing. We are not aiming for 50-50, 60-40, 40-60, or anything like that. We are aiming to grow as much as possible in both segments. Pekka asks, "Has the macroeconomic turbulence caused longer bench times and a lower utilization rate during the last 6 months?"
As the numbers suggest, not significantly, at least. That's something that when we recruit and onboard people—and I think it's best for new people coming in and for the company—is that we try to balance them out with customer demand always so that wouldn't happen. We can't be successful every time, but we try to be diligent in that. We are not trying to use the market situation to recruit people to the bench and invest in that way. That's not the definition of success for us. We don't try to do that. One more from Jaakko Tyrväinen: "Pricing impact of 3.5% in 2022, do you expect to see a larger number in the 2022 report?"
That is what the magnitude is in current contract negotiations. Well, first of all, maybe if we look at price change as a whole, it's two-part. It's about price changes for existing customers inside existing agreements, and it's about the normal, like new sales and new projects starting with existing customers or especially with new customers that affect the average price ratio. Both are, of course, at play here. There are a little bit different dynamics, the dynamics in these. But to sum it up, I think 3.5% was a very good number, and if we can reach that again, I think we should be very happy about that.
It's strong for the IT industry, and you cannot expect to exceed it, at least not by far. Mika Koski asks, "When is it time to split the share? By splitting the share, the share gets more sales by transaction and thus a more reliable price." Not something that we have considered for the time being. Good advice, though. That's all we have for today. Thank you so much for the many questions and the good discussion. Let's keep in touch. Thank you. Bye-bye.