Good morning, everyone. My name is Mikael Nylund. I'm the CEO of Gofore Group. I want to warmly welcome you all to Gofore's Capital Markets Day, which is actually our second Capital Markets Day ever. Two years ago, we had our first one. We've been a listed company, public company now for five years, and maybe it's becoming somewhat of a tradition to have these capital markets days every two years. It's very nice to see some of our audience here present today, not the usual setting for today's investor presentation, but also, of course, we have a lot of people online listening to us today. Welcome to both groups.
Today, we are going to talk about where we Gofore as a company are today, what we have achieved during especially the last two years, we also want to tell you where we are going, what we see how we see the future and what we want to do in the future. To do that today with me, I have some great people. First of all, we have a couple of guests to make this a little bit more different capital markets. Today, we have Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from our customer, Elisa, who we will talk with about what customers expect from a company like Gofore. We have Juhana Huotarinen, who is the founder and one of the founders and CEO of one of our group companies, Rebase Consulting.
With Juhana, we are going to talk about what the talent market looks today and what role companies like Rebase Consulting play in that talent market. We're gonna dig a little bit deeper into what Rebase Consulting is later on. Of course, we have our own team or part of our own team here today, the excellent people that together with me have been working on the Gofore story.
We have Riikka, Sanna, Ville, and Teppo here today, and it's really great to have especially Riikka, Sanna, and Ville who are not always present in our investor presentations here to be able to present themselves and give all of our investors an idea of what kind of team we have working on Gofore. Today's agenda looks like this. The important thing at this point is that we are going to have three separate occasions where we're gonna have a discussion with you guys, these Q&A sessions. First one is before the break at 10:40 scheduled. Please, let's make this a discussion. Let's hear your questions, let's hear your thoughts and what you are especially interested in.
We want to try to answer, of course, all of your questions in the Q&A sessions. You're gonna have the chance to ask questions on the streaming platform, especially, of course, those that are not present here. We are going to take questions from the streaming platform. And those that are present here today, we also are going to have a microphone, for you guys at the Q&A session. You can choose, either you want to use the platform or you want to use the microphone to ask the questions here. Hopefully, you can be active and we can have a discussion today.
Otherwise, the agenda is that, I'm gonna give you the, big picture here in the beginning, then Sanna will continue with people-related issues, of course, something that's really important for Gofore. Riikka will take over after that with customer-related and our strategic industry focus teams. Ville and Teppo in the last part of the day will talk about M&A and financials and delivering shareholder value. After all of these sessions, we'll have the Q&A. With those words, I think let's get going. In this first part of today's session, I will guide you through what Gofore has become, what we are today, and what we have achieved over the past couple of years.
Then we'll have a brief and like a high-level look into what our strategy, which was released in December, what it's about and the big themes. But first, I want to talk about our slogan, Pioneering an ethical digital world. Gofore is a digital transformation consultancy, which means that we work with digital technology. We work with things related to digital technology and the very transformative power that technology has. It is technology that can and will change the world. For us at Gofore, it's our mission to make the world a better place.
In this context of digital technology, for us, that means that we are here to make sure that this technology is used for the good of everybody. That's why we have adopted a slogan like Pioneering an Ethical Digital World.
We want to be the explorers, the pioneers of what this digital world will mean for us all, because it will be a different world than what we are used to, and we want to make it different in a positive way. If we look back two years and at the last capital markets day that we had, we are in many ways, of course, the same company, a similar company, and we have, we are still working on the same things that we were talking about two years ago. We are on the other hand, also in many ways a very different company. That's probably most obvious by looking at the numbers.
Compared to two years ago, the numbers are pretty much double from what they were. If you look at number of employees, if you look at revenue, if you look at other things, we are pretty much double what we were since the last capital markets day. That's a big change for us as a company. That's why we feel it's good that we are here today to discuss these things.
A lot of the same things that we have discussed two years ago, but with a new twist that comes from size, and especially something that I want to highlight here when we have the map picture here is that, of course, the German area, or actually the DACH area with Austria also being now in the mix. We've taken big steps. In October, we announced the acquisition of a great company in Germany, Austria, called eMundo, and those are now part of the Gofore Group, and of course strengthens very much our local presence in the DACH area and allows us to build on that for the coming two years.
Based on this, the messages that we want to convey to you today is, first of all, that we want to remind you of our strong foundation and very good track record of things with steady and profitable growth for a long time now. We want to talk about our updated strategy that builds on the strengths that we have, very much builds on the strength that we have and adds a few things to that. Of course, the upgraded financial targets which many of you are especially interested in and give some color of why we have decided to make some changes and raise our ambition level with the long-term financial targets.
We also always talk about Gofore as a growing and profitable digital transformation consultancy, and I think this picture highlights that very well. We have been doing a good job being making growth happen, being profitable, and that's very much true for also last year. Very strong year for us, a lot of growth. The numbers for organic growth and also adjusted EBIT are for Q1 to Q3, so not the full year numbers yet, but we have something to look forward to with the full year report still that we're gonna update those numbers. A strong year. EUR 156 million in net sales pro forma for the full whole year.
Something, a good momentum going into this year and going forwards, and this is of course something that we. Our ambition is to keep up. The big things during the year were the acquisitions of eMundo, which I already mentioned, also in January, feels like a long time ago, a year ago now, Devecto, which is a company that has very nicely and kind of easily integrated into the Gofore platform here in Finland and given us a good base to build on our new customer segment of industrial customers that we have decided on to focus on now with our new strategy.
Other targets that we have looked at, and if we look at the strategy update that we did two years ago, we were looking at three growth levers there, growth in Finland, international growth, and disciplined M&A. I think we have shown now that these have become true. We're looking at the long-term targets that we set then with 20% total annual growth and looking at last year, which was released on Wednesday when we put out our December numbers, we have 43%. Of course, very much outperformed what we set out to do. The organic growth part, we look to have at least half of our growth in annual growth, so around 10% or at least 10%.
With the latest quarter in Q3, that number was 32%, so we are in very good place there, very good momentum there. We wanted to grow the portfolio of big customers and have a special focus on private sector customers. As you know, two years ago, Gofore was pretty much known as the public sector supplier of digital solutions. Hopefully, we are that still today, but we have done what we set out to do and built a very good portfolio of also private sector customers, mostly in industrials, which is why we are now focusing especially on those customers. With 64% last year growth in private sector customers, a number that we are of course extremely happy with.
We also set out to increase our presence outside of Finland and work on building the international business from outside of Finland. If we look at the numbers from last year now and include eMundo for last year, you know, and look at the pro forma numbers, we are now at 14% of net sales coming from outside of Finland. We're in a good place also there in terms of momentum. 76% of our organic growth from outside of Finland last year. The momentum is there. That's now something that we see happening, the internationalization also in terms of customers and business from outside of Finland. things that I want to talk about what Gofore is today, beginning with the market.
We are positioned in a market that is, of course, extremely favorable. The world is changing at an accelerating pace. That transformation is driven by the development of technology, that development is not going anywhere. It's just accelerating. That technological change is, of course, what drives companies to invest into what we nowadays call the Digital Transformation. These are drivers that, in the long term, are megatrend kind of drivers, and this is not something that will go away. We have a strong market. Depending on who you ask and what market you look at, different researchers talk about 10% annual growth, 15% annual growth, or like in this one from IDC, Gartner sources, 16.3% CAGR for market growth.
Very strong market to work in. Important point here related to the market is the second one. We have built an offering that is strong and it's 100% relevant for the digital transformation market. It's also comparing to our most or closest peers, it's a differentiating factor. We have a offering that is broad. End-to-end is what we talk about, where we can address the customers' digital transformation issues on a broad, very broad spectrum. This is something that I think shows in the success that we have, and also something that we want to build on going into the future.
Digital transformation is driven by technology, looking from organization that is working on its own digital transformation, it's not just technology. It's a lot of things that are like not necessarily technological issues like change issues and those are the things that we want to help our customers with. Third point we want to highlight is that Gofore has always been, and will always be a very people-first company. This is a long time basis for success for us and something that we see, of course, it being also in the future.
We started with working in a people-first way and talking about company culture, building a new kind of company culture already before the fight for talent was as evident that it is today. Of course, nowadays everybody sees that the fight in the market is not only about customers, it's also about the talent. In many cases, it's more about the talent fight. That's where we want to be, need to be strong. We have a culture that is something that supports this. A culture of growth, I would say. I don't talk about just business growth. I talk about individual growth, learning, going somewhere together as a team, as a company. This is...
I cannot stress how hugely important this is in today's market. You need to be attractive, you need to have a strong brand. You need to engage all employees in being successful in the talent market. The other side of that coin is, of course, the customers and the market there. What we have basically done to simplify it very, very much is that we have worked towards longer, more strategic, more impactful, and bigger customer relationships. These are numbers that are shown on this slide, not only the strong NPS on the left-hand side, but the numbers on the right-hand side that show that our customer portfolio has developed as we have aimed it to develop.
We have a stronger portfolio of big customers. We have strong returning, strong revenue from returning customers every year. Of course, the special point still about Gofore is that 60% of the net sales comes from public sector customers, which during the uncertain times that we have gone through the different levels of crisis are important things. They have helped us go over the crisis situations easier than only having private sector customers. The fifth point here is that we have shown from 2017 and going forwards that we have a strong understanding of what it takes to grow inorganically, growing via company acquisitions.
We have a good ability to do M&A, and I think we have developed very, very well there during the last years. These are things that, of course, help us in renewing, in reaching the targets that we have set for us. For example, expanding our position into the DACH area, into Central Europe, strengthening our capabilities in various things related to the digital transformation, broadening our offering, in other words. A very, very important part of the track record and history of Gofore.
Finally, what I want to highlight, of course, the result of the five aforementioned, is that the track record we have of growth and profitability is not only steady and, like, good in that way. It also compares rather well, I think, to the closest competition. We place nicely when looking at long-term growth and profitability compared to peers. You know, we are, of course, in this picture, we are placed in a group where we have very international, global, successful companies that compare to us. That's something that we are very, very proud of. Basically that's where we are now as GoFor, what we have worked on during the last two years.
Next I'm going to look at the strategy update and some highlights for that. We raised our strategy update in December, which was around two years after the last strategy update. This has become like our strategy process cycle. We work on a continuous strategy process with a two-year cycle. We, if nothing special happens, then we'll be here again in two years and talk about the next update to the strategy. This is something that works well for us. We have a strong foundation. We have strong... We have strengths that we can build on, and we don't need to change our strategy basically in a radical way. We need to add to it.
We need to develop with our own growth, and of course look at what happens in the operational environment and react to that, continuously evolve and change so that we are relevant also in the future. It's not a question of making a huge change, making changing direction completely. If we start with the long-term financial targets, as said, we have raised our own ambition level a little bit here. If we start with the profitability target, that remains the same. I've many times said that when we build Gofore and when we make decisions about what kind of company we are building, we always think about the 15% profitability target.
Our structures are built so that 15% is something that is achievable in a good year, the company is built it and structured in the way that it is achievable. Profitability in consultancy business is not something that is very complicated. It's about basically three things. It's about the gross margins. It's about customer prices versus the cost for providing the services, mainly salaries. That's simple. It's about being efficient. In consultancy business, it's always about the utilization rate, the billing rate. That's what sets good consultancy companies apart from the maybe not so successful ones. Thirdly, it's about the least important of these, I think, is to see that the OpEx are on a scalable platform.
Teppo will talk to you a little bit more about these components in his speech. There's growth target. We have, as said, raised ambition level a little bit. That goes to show that we are quite confident in what we have done. We have a momentum that, of course, even exceeds this target. We can be confident in that way. We are also confident that our strategy is working. We have the customer base there that will allow us to grow 25%. We are going into a year of uncertainty for sure, and nobody knows for sure what's going to happen. We are rather confident about that.
Especially in the midterm, the long term, the drivers are there. That's clear for us. We want to grow with the market as fast as the market. The drivers for growth in the market are there. We have not changed our dividend policy. It remains the same. Teppo will talk a little bit more about also capital allocation in his speech. The big picture for what we do in terms of strategy is that we always in our strategy process, look five years or so into the future and start building from there. Our ambition is high there, where we are going.
We want to be the most significant digital transformation consultancy in Europe, so That means that we are, of course, broadening the reach from not only Finland to also the rest of Europe. From that, we have looked at what are the themes that are especially interesting for us in terms of looking at 2027. We have found four themes there. Those are the future of work, industry approach, sustainability, and international. A little bit different themes that we have then built our strategy based on these things. We have today Sanna, of course, talking about the people side of things. She'll address the future of work part of the strategic themes.
We have Riikka talking about the industry approach, so that's what she'll address. I'll quickly look now at sustainability and international in my part of this. What we did is basically look at 2027, set the objectives for us there. In a nutshell, I guess you could say that we strive for European-wide awareness, recognition, both on the employer side, we are a very appealing and well-known brand in Finland. We have work to do in other markets. We want to be known by customers as specialists in the strategic customer segments that we focus on Digital Society and Intelligent Industry.
We want to position our brand also from the sustainability point of view, as I said in the beginning about the slogan that we have adopted, pioneering an ethical digital world. Basically, what we've done then is map this to what we need to do now, what will get us there, and what we need to build, what kind of enablers. I'm not going to look at this in detail. You can find the material afterwards also, and we can discuss this in the Q&A part. What I want to do is talk a little bit of how we at Gofore think about sustainability issues. This is something that for a company like ours is really important.
The people that work for Gofore on average are extremely interested in where the world is going and how we can build a sustainable world. That is why we have, for a number of years now, or you could say, always been very aware of our corporate responsibility and our footprint in the world. That is not something that we can do hugely to change the world to the better, the footprint part. We are aware of our environmental responsibility, we are aware of our social responsibility, and especially on the social side, I think we also have done things that, especially in the Finnish market, have changed how work-life is done. We have our own collective agreement.
I have been one of the pioneers to build a new kind of agreement thinking between employees and employers and have been pretty open and vocal about that. So what we want to do is change how Finnish work-life functions, and of course, make that also something that affects not only Finland, but a larger market. Where we see the big things happening is on the handprint side of things. We work with customers who have their own sustainability challenges. We work with organizations that build a Digital Society. How is that society going to be equal and accessible for everyone? We work with customers that build machines, basically.
How are we going to help those customers build machines that are environmentally friendly and carbon neutral? That is the area where we have a lot of things to do and need to be better in the future. We also want to be active ourselves and promote action. We have, in our strategy, release also talked about our plans of setting up a Gofore Impact Foundation that will work on promoting digitalization, promoting the positive side of digitalization. On the handprint side, our idea is that in five years' time, probably 50% of what we do together with our customers, in some way will have to do with those customers' sustainability related targets.
They can be very different depending on what kind of customers those are, but here are some examples of that. We have a big momentum going on in the green and digital shifting, and that's relevant especially for our Intelligent Industry customer segment. They invest heavily into green and digital solutions technologies, and that's where we want to be part of the solution. For example, in heavy machinery where electrifying machines is a big trend, that basically always goes hand in hand with also digitalizing those machines, adding a lot more software, adding connectivity, adding digital user interfaces and so forth. So a huge change going on there.
What we have done for years now is, build a Digital Society and the digital services that all of us use. We want to make sure that we can help our customers in making those accessible for everyone, inclusive, and so forth, so that the Digital Society is for everybody, not only for those that are somehow able to use the services, but for everybody. Our offering includes ethical design methods and those promote the inclusion, accessibility, and social innovation.
Something that all of our customers also bring up, Green ICT, ethical data and AI issues that we'll see in the coming years that will have a bigger impact on all of our customers. A few words about the foundation that I mentioned, the Gofore Impact Foundation. This is a plan that we have worked with the board to make happen this year, and the idea is to have a foundation as a platform for projects that impact the market in the long term. We want to promote the positive sides of digitalization.
We are aware, and we want to show that we are aware of the tensions that relate to digitalizing society and our everyday life, social tensions and environmental issues and so forth. We want to find solutions to those tensions. This is the idea with the foundation that we have. We are going to have this proposed to the annual general meeting later this year to get this going and have our first projects with a long-term impact, we hope, in the market during this year. Very important thing that I'm myself, I'm extremely inspired by. The international part I also promised to talked about.
We are not going to change a lot of things here with this strategy update. Basically, the geographies that we look at are pretty much the same. We want to have a focused internationalization strategy, and that means that apart from our home market in Finland, we put a lot of focus into the German market, into the DACH area market as mentioned. We have done things to get us further along the road there. If we look at the DACH area market, if we look at it from different viewpoints, from a business and customer side of things, we do see that as a market where there is huge opportunity for things that we have done in the Intelligent Industry area with our customers.
Riikka will talk more about that. We also see that that is a growing market for public sector projects, public sector customers. Germany is investing into digitalization, coming a few years behind the Nordic countries, as we have discussed with many investors over the years, and we see things happening there. From a people point of view, the German market is where we want, need to build recognition and awareness for the Gofore brand as an employer, promoting the Nordic work culture idea that we have, something that is differentiating to some extent in that market and that's what we are working based on that differentiation.
On M&A side, we have an active pipeline now that we have built during the last couple of years, both of course in Finland, that's a, that's a longer-term thing, but also in Germany and the DACH area, working with company acquisitions there. In a way you could sum the strategy up in our three avenues to growth, which are that we want to build on the success that we have had over the years in the digital society area. Leverage the leading position we have in the Finnish market there. We want to challenge in the market of Intelligent Industry customers. We have a good customer portfolio there.
We have a good chance of increasing our share of wallet and building bigger customer relationship in the Intelligent Industry area, both in Finland and also in the DACH area. We want to support all of this by M&A activities like we have done before. Basically, that is how you could sum up the strategy update that we have done. Next, we'll have Sanna talking about the people issues and make like a deep dive into those things, something that, of course, is very much at the core of what Gofore is asset.
Good morning on my behalf, too. My name is Sanna Hildén, and I'm the Director of People Operations at Gofore. I'm really happy to continue the story started by Mikael, as he said that it's our people-centric culture that has been driving our talent attraction and retention, which clearly are very crucial to achieving our growth targets in the future, too. It might be a good idea to start from the results, so how we are doing right now. I would like to point your attention to the figure of 377, which we are relatively proud of last year recruitments. We had an all-time record in 2021 with the 240 new joiners through recruiting, but still the last year was 76% higher. That was a good result.
That is supported well by our strong brand and reputation. As you can see, there are a couple of awards and recognitions that we've received. Just to mention the first one of the listed companies and our best reputation as an employer of the listed companies in Helsinki. If we like to understand how this strong brand and reputation is built, it's good to realize that in Gofore it has always been about concrete work-life actions. A lot about what the Goforeans tell about us and how they tell about our story. Therefore, we will go back a bit later to what makes Goforeans so proud, why they tell the story, how do we get this very strong basis for building the reputation.
Before we go into that, we could look at the challenges already mentioned by Mikael about the future of work, how things are changing. Probably the first question is the same that it has been, and it's the most crucial one, how to attract and retain the right talent. There are new questions, and these are probably not even the only ones, but still the first there, refers to the fact that now that we are doing work a bit differently, we are talking about hybrid work and full remote work and different forms of work in many ways. We really don't know what will be the implications to us as human beings, like the impact of working fully remote.
We know that we are discussing how people perhaps should be more at the office to really feel well, and what it does to the organizations as social systems when people are working differently than they have used to. This is question that we don't know what's gonna happen. The second question there refers to the fact that we probably know that the diversity of needs and preferences of our experts, they will get more diverse. We want to be able to speak to all of this valuable talent, how to do that with smartly targeted investments. There is a risk that if we want to be attractive to everyone, that it's not gonna be too efficient, but how to do it smartly.
The fourth question relates to the fact that the so-called fight for talent and even lack of talent is not going anywhere. Therefore, as an employer and us as employers, we need to be very responsible and take good care of the talent pool that we are sharing. That means that we need to take the juniors on board to work life as quickly as possible, and we need to upskill and reskill people along their careers. We need to take care of the well-being of people so that they can maintain long and profitable years of work in this industry. Just as well, we need to ensure that the senior experts can find flexible ways of working, and in that sense, having longer careers.
As an employer, we can also have an impact to the talent pool that we all are sharing. Some of the questions related to how the work is changing. Now looking at our response, what are we going to do as a people strategy? Here we have three themes in a way, but also a title that could refer to two seemingly opposing targets. We are going to be one, and at the same time, we are going to be many. The three ideas here, they are building that in three different ways.
The first one refers to the diversity, how we can transform our growth and our broad set of capabilities based on our offering, how we can transform that becoming international, gaining deeper customer understanding, building even bigger strategic partnerships with the customers, all of that deepening, broadening world, we are going to transform it into the most desirable expert community. That's the basis of us being the one and the most inspiring for expert. On the right-hand side, we are talking about the diversity in a way that people want to be seen as individuals. They want to get very personalized service if possible. That's what we are going to go for.
It's an ambitious goal, if you think about our size, that we are making a promise to offer even more personalized opportunities in professional development, but in many other ways also during the employment. We'll come back to that a bit later. The third theme is something that reflects, in a way, our other value. We've had two values from the beginning for 20 years, and thriving on customer success has always been there. During the past couple of years, we've sort of come even more aware how important it is to understand how much pride and how much inspiration there is for our experts in really being able to help our customers.
Therefore, we sort of want to remind us that even though sometimes in people operations, we might tend to focus a bit inside, that actually for employee experience, there is a lot of power inside this focusing on the customer. Not to mention the healthy business that will enable us to make good investments to people and bringing joy also in that sense. These are the three things that we will get back to, but let's go back again to our numbers, how we've done. Here we have some examples of how we are doing in EX. We have been investing in employee experience, of course, for probably from the beginning.
During the couple of years now back, we've sort of understood that the most valuable thing is to be able to find what makes people really proud to be Goforeans. We have really put a lot of effort in those things. It means the meaningful projects for the experts, but it's also the caring and supporting community. You can see that we have good numbers in how people feel that they get help and support for their own success from their colleagues and also from their people leaders. Focusing in a way on this question of being proud, we've also got good results in our eNPS, which has climbed from 30 to 43 during about 12 months. We are going for 50, surely. This is a good track.
Attrition rate was challenging in 2021, we all know that. We've been able to drop that to 12%. Actually, 9% would be even more accurate. We are changing a little bit about this metric since for it to be valid metric for understanding our retention and our capability to keep people, it's better to exclude the cases where there is, for example, a retirement or a fixed term contract ending or a dismissal, which is not a sign of failure in our retention. 9% is the unexpected rate of leavers. Good progress here. I mentioned already that this question of being proud is important, and one of the things that our people are really proud of and what also brings us attention from outside is our promise of building ethical digital world.
Actually, this ethical capability that we have been building for our organization, it also means structures and skills for people to have these ethical considerations for the support of our customers, but also in the way how we operate internally. This is something that creates the sort of frame, how we think about social sustainability, how we think about our goals in diversity and equality and inclusion. The strive for being ethical means that you will automatically take care that all of the different perspectives and life situations and voices are included when planning almost anything. That's the sort of core idea of well-working community with fair opportunities. Once again, this sort of guiding thought is bringing good results.
As you can see, we have the relation between women and men on very good level compared to the industry averages. We have 33% women. As you can see, the salary development last year brought the average salary of women very close to men's. We are in 99%, so almost full equality. Those figures there that 91% can be their authentic selves and 85 feel that we have fair opportunities, those are also very nice grounding feelings for us to have a fair, good community. If we go a bit back to our strategic themes, there was this goal of embracing diversity. Our concrete results in this already, how we have been experimenting and building this is, for example, these companies that we are having on our platform. We will get back to talking with Juhana about Rebase.
Sleek is the same kind of company. These are the sort of new kind of opportunities responding to diverse needs of experts. We can see that they grow a little bit faster than our sort of core operations. Even though the core is doing really well, we get an extra boost for our growth with these a little bit different twists in our models. The same goes for these questions of office locations. Along the hybrid and remote work, we've noted that we probably should be open-minded in opening new locations since actually we see again the higher growth relatively in those areas. Looks good, and we might want to expand this a bit.
The same opportunities probably can be even used in our international offices now to consider whether the same sort of medicines could work also in growing in the challenging markets like DACH. Using the diversity for supporting growth, this is an example. One clear example is using partners and offering the possibility for experts to become to the Gofore Family through not employment, but being a partner. This is an area where we have huge potential since the amount of our partners in our network that's growing, but we really haven't put a serious effort what it means in our terms to really understanding how we could actually serve the partners, providing better partner experience, understanding the different kind of partners and their needs. Here is a lot that we can do.
A lot of potential in this form of diversity, not being employed, but being strongly enjoying the Gofore company and our customers. Still on the strategic themes, there was this mentioning that fueling the joy of succeeding together with the customer. This in concrete terms means, for example, our compensation models, where we have been quite, let's say, successful and innovative. Our local salary settlement has been proven in a way to be a very good tool because it seems to provide nice salary development for our experts. At the same time, since it's dependent on our financial success, it's also a safe way and a managed way to allow our salaries to develop. General raises are, of course, only the half of the truth, there are personal raises involved.
We can see that also the personal raises, they are providing people good compensation progress while we have been able to keep our average salary development nicely in line with the customer price development. This is a well-managed entity. For the experts, it's very important that we have the competitive base salary, topped with nice benefits and health services, but also different kind of salary extensions in a way, the flex parts that are dependent on our company success or even the personal success as it is in Rebase and Sleek and also inside the group otherwise. The third perspective here is very important, and it's the possibility for experts to own the company. CrewShare is our tool for that, and we are really happy that about half of Goforeans are owners through this program.
Gofore is supporting the ownership by providing extras. All in all, these all models are basically having the same guiding idea that we are sharing the common success, and we have an incentive to be really interested in how we are doing and understanding how it's bringing these fruits in this way, in concrete way for our experts, but also providing the safe and financially stable platform to continue. Now, I also mentioned that we are having this ambitious target of personalized services and development paths. We have digital state-of-the-art tools providing opportunities for our experts to sort of flag what they are interested in, to what direction they would like to develop their skills, and matching them with what the customers need.
We also have a tool that is sensing what customer needs there might be, and a person can build an own map of his or her skill profile and map that to the customer needs. Many different kind of ways to use this digital capability to provide this more self-organized way of finding the right paths. Our way of measuring employee experience is changing towards more coaching type of service, where the tool itself gives hints and points to find the right solution.
There again, we are supporting the self-directiveness while still having a very close link to our people leaders and the community support. Just to remind that even though we are building a lot of our capability on our digital strengths in a way, we have been putting a lot of effort lately and let's say in two years' time to strengthening our leadership service. The single most important goal of our leadership service to people is to ensure the personal success of the person. Now this is the sort of grounding of providing the personal-personalized service where the diversity and all of the possibilities that our broad and deep organization can provide.
Just to recap what we've said here, I'm gonna say the same thing as Mikael already said, that we have a very strong basis. Probably we can just add this couple of new opportunities. They are ambitious. They are not easy. We have a very good starting point to start pioneering this very sort of inspiring expert community while having a personalized service. What it will lead to is that we're gonna be the most desirable community for experts to work in and for the customers also to work with. We are going to do it also with nice operational efficiency as we have been doing, but just remembering that it's always the people that will provide the next excellent results. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Sanna. Very good presentation of what we do in terms of people, things that Gofore and what we are good at and what we want to be even better at. Welcome Juhana to discuss with us. Before we go and let Juhana a little bit tell us more about himself and Rebase Consulting, I want to now remind you that this is the situation where you should be asking questions. We will take them from the streaming platform, and we'll take also questions here locally from people that are present. You that are following us on the streaming platform, shoot away. We'll have the questions here on the iPad here. Okay.
Juhana, you are founder and CEO of Rebase Consulting. Could you start by telling us in your words what is Rebase? What does it add, like, to the digital consultancy market as a company? How is Rebase different from, let's say, traditional consultancies?
Hello, I'm Juhana Huotarinen, I'm CEO of Rebase Consulting. Rebase combines elements from a typical consultants company and bring some freelance and freelancer side to there and combines those two together. From the consultants company side, Rebase offers simplicity and safety. We are working the same project with other co-friends, and our people have opportunity to work with those projects. At the same time, they have employee rights, so holiday bonus and premium healthcare and so on. This is the one side. The other side is that we are bringing some freelancer elements to the package as well. Maybe the best example is that the salary is not fixed. The salary depends on how much What is the hourly rate and how much the people work.
That is maybe the something that is coming from the freelancer side. Then putting those together is something unique and things that we can offer. That's the thing.
Basically combining the positive sides of being employed and on the other hand side of being a freelancer. Sanna, you already talked in your presentation also or mentioned Rebase and Sleek. We should be mentioned that we have two of these companies in the group. Why do you say Gofore involvement in Rebase as a good thing? We are the majority owner of the company after all. What's the, like, the positive sides there?
I think we have discussed that we like growth, so in that sense Rebase has been an excellent, and Sleek too, at showing the extra growth for us. There are clearly two sides to the Rebase being a strength for us and that's the customer perspective that we have the possibility to attract different kind of talent profile for the Rebase kind of work. We've seen that. Also more specialized perhaps skill profiles, which is good for the customer that we can offer a little bit different kind of skill profiles. For the experts, as Juhana described, that they like to have the opportunity to be in this between mode between the freelance and employee. This fits very well to our diversity strategy.
Yeah. I guess you could simplify it a little bit, but the more like seasoned and senior the expert becomes. It seems that at least in this situation in the market, the more interesting these kinds of opportunities become for the experts. So for us, a channel to find the senior level expertise. Juhana, about the talent market, we have seen that changing over the years. How do you see the talent market today? What do you highlight as the biggest changes in the last few years, and what are people now when you look at it, looking for in terms of a good employer, interesting working place?
As you mentioned, yeah, the talent market, it is insane indeed. There are people who are looking this kind of like a typical workplaces and ordinary places to work, and like for them, this kind of like fixed salary and benefits, are a good option. There's a group of people, and they just want to focus the project work and get good compensation for that. For these kind of people, I think Rebase is a good option. We have seen that, as you mentioned, those growth rate and so on. Rebase is a good option for those people.
Certain kind of maturity to the talent market also. It's not that many years ago that things like pool tables and stuff like that were seen as the important thing. I think the market has matured and people are looking for like more, how should I say? More important things than just the polishing on top. We often get the question when we discuss these concepts of Rebase and Sleek that aren't they competing with Gofore in the talent market? In principle, they are. Juhana, what's your experience on that on the competition between Gofore and Rebase in the talent market?
On the other hand, Sanna, you are, in the end, responsible for the recruitment numbers, which were good, by the way. Have you seen a problem here? Do you see Rebase taking away from Gofore recruitment? If Juhana starts.
I believe that it's like a, as I mentioned before, so there's different kind of people, and they're looking different kind of options. I could see that like Rebase can offer this kind of like a simplicity and like it's just process, project work. For those people, I would say it's like a good place to work for. They are different kind of people that are looking something else. I think that's kind of like, as a Gofore, as a group, everybody will win because we can have different kind of options for different kind of people, what they are looking for.
I think it's fair to say that in the beginning, we might have been a bit jealous even about your strong growth pace. We've surely learned to understand that we can do cooperation, and we can use this as an advantage for both of us. Now we are sharing information and probably building even better cooperation. Our new strategy definitely will create needs for perhaps more specialized talent. Again, this variety, what we can offer at the phase where a candidate is approaching us, that there are different kind of paths and also that, which is important to underline that the paths go to different directions. It's basically okay to start from the core, Gofore, then go to Rebase, and if you like, then come back.
It's depending on the life situation and the preferences of people. Not a threat anymore.
Yeah. now is probably a good time to have some questions. Anybody? Jaakko has a question. Everybody has a question. Good. Joni.
Okay. Joni Zsukov from Inderes. I have three questions on the international business. Firstly, you mentioned impressive 76% organic growth in international business. Could you elaborate or explain a bit, is this driven by the private sector, local expertise in international business, or is this also driven by your Finnish know-how in the public sector and the international deals that you announced last year? Second question is on the international public deals. If and when you are doing them from Finland as well, how is the pricing compared to the Finnish level? Is it profitability enhancing or how should we look at this?
Thirdly, on the international strategy, can you explain what's Spain's role now in your international strategy and how has that developed in recent years? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll try to remember all the three parts of the question and, starting with, what is driving international growth. As you said, 76% was the organic part of the growth last year. As you suspected, that is driven by private sector demand. Not only that though, we have had some success also in finding public sector customers and working for those. On the other hand, for the delivery model, there are both the German market customers, which are a growing part of this, but also customers that we serve on a primarily remote basis.
Customers from, let's say, Sweden or the U.S. or, and so forth that are looking for remote teams to work together with them in their challenges. It's a little bit of everything. You could say that at the core of it is the German market customers and how we can combine local presence and then a bigger delivery team from Finland or whatever location delivery center that we have that is suiting to that customer's needs.
That's also what we are going for and what the, like, the sweet spot for us is, that we can combine these elements, that we can be there for the customer locally, but use a delivery capability from other sides. That might be then in terms of price or cost a little bit lower cost point than the local German expertise in a similar situation would be. Your other question was about profitability and margins. Of course, when we look at the European market or the market outside of Finland as a whole, the price range is much broader than we are used to in the Finnish market.
We have everything from offshoring pricing to, of course, very premium pricing. It's different. We are learning to find the niches, the pockets of the market where our cost structure is relevant. Those are not on the low end of the price range, but more in the, let's say, higher half of the price range. The work that we do for German clients is typically on a little bit higher customer price levels than we are used to in the Finnish market. Your third question was about the Spanish operation.
Spanish operation in Madrid and during this year also in Malaga has from the beginning been primarily about delivery and finding talent there. That's what we have been building there, and that's what we offer for, of course, Spanish people, but also other people that might want to spend some of the, for example, long Finnish winter in the sunnier parts of Europe in Malaga. That's what it's about, a delivery center, basically.
Thank you. Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. I have a couple of questions. Can you first discuss the rapid increase of your company size and the employee count? How can you remain nimble and manage this, I guess, admin cost burden of heavier, more international organization in the future? Maybe reflecting on the fact that you will be growing more rapidly in the future according to your growth ambitions.
This is maybe a question where, Sanna, you also can chip in a little bit. A very important question. I would say, as I said in the intro speech, this is kind of a driving principle for us that when we develop the organization, it needs to be balanced so that we are able to do the 15% EBITA margin that we are targeting. That is. A lot of that is about how we, like, structure the company, and it's about the ratio between people that do actual customer work and people that are admin, which is of course at the heart of your question. This is something that we are constantly very aware of what we are doing.
About the ways that we make that lean, make that work, that equation, I think one of the parts is the something that Sanna a little bit touched on the digital platform. Things that traditionally might be the role of management, of middle management and so forth, we try to digitalize those. We try to automate the matching between customer needs and expert skills and of course, also what Sanna mentioned, what experts want to learn and what they are interested in, what their own career path is about.
To automate that matching, and that is of course at the very, very heart of what we do and to have the digital platform working in that area is something that gives us scalability. Growth as such is also like a contributing factor to this. When we grow well, which we have done during the last two years, it's kind of easier to manage this challenge of balancing non-customer work with customer work. When the business grows faster than the administration, that's where we are, like, in a good place. Good customer demand, good growth is also a contributing factor there. Anything that you would like to add maybe?
You said a lot already. I agree that when in a way leading the people operations, their profitability and the growth, they are very hand in hand, and they are considered in our lean organization all the time, so on daily basis. We take very good care of that, so both are very much in our backbones. Just as a note that if we look at the amount of experts in our enabling operations, meaning the admin people, the relative number hasn't grown at all, so we are in good shape regards to that.
This is very difficult, I guess, from the outside to compare companies in this sense that what their structure and how heavy on the non-customer side, the admin side companies are. For us, when we talk about utilization rate or billing rate, the important KPI for the whole company is the utilization rate for the whole company. We don't just talk about utilization rate for individuals or utilization rates or those that are supposed to do customer work. We talk about the utilization rate for the whole company, and that gives a strong signal of what we are doing. We need to keep that number structurally.
That we can achieve a good utilization rate on the company level.
All right. Thank you. I guess my second question is about the compensation and incentive models of the Rebase and Sleek. The growth is evidently higher, but are there any differences to Gofore, you know, general margins and potential scalability?
Do you, Juhana, want to comment on, like margin and, like profitability-
Yeah.
sort of thing?
Yeah. Yeah. Actually last year, we haven't of course published our numbers yet, but, like, our profit has been around 15%-16%, for example, it's a bit a good level. As I mentioned that this kind of Rebase model is something that they focus only the project work, and there's not so much extras, That's why we can keep our cost flow as well. For example, we don't have office buildings and we have only little small office building and so on.
That's not really from a group standpoint, that's not the only, like, viewpoint, but it's of course difficult to open up on the whole. That's the most important thing that Juhana said that the companies are responsible for their own result, and they build their operations in a way that they are profitable. We of course then have the group subcontracting margins that are added on top and so forth. Yes, it has scaled well and the guys have done a very good job in that sense also. Juhana is very active on social media. You should follow him. He tells you also about how the company's progressing in terms of numbers.
You can find us.
Yeah.
All right. Excellent. My final question is, what's your current latest take on defining Finnish IT service market size in terms of the public sector and private sector, and what is the Gofore's current market share on the public side?
Well, we talk about an IT services market of around EUR 5 billion, but the public sector side of that is rather, like, more easily defined, and it's been over EUR 1 billion now since 2011, 2019. We don't have exact numbers of what the growth has been, but there has been growth and there's structural reforms in the public sector market in Finland, for example, and especially the social and healthcare reform we've had that's also added to the market growth somewhat. I'd say somewhere between EUR 1 billion and one and a half billion in the public sector and the rest in the private sector.
For public sector, our market share might be like an interesting metric already around 5% or maybe even a little bit more. We should understand that there are no players that have like over 10% market share in the market. It's a very, very diverse market with a lot of players there. On the private sector side, well, let's say then 1%, it's not really relevant for us. We have a market where there's so much room to grow that that's not like a relevant metric for us, how we look at the market. We have room to grow both in terms of market growth and taking market share from competition.
Hi. Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. I could continue on the, on the talent side. Because you've been so successful now this year or last year on the recruitment side, have you analyzed where you're winning this talent from? Is it coming from the small peers, very close peers, larger peers, from customers or universities? What is the split of the incoming talent?
You Sanna.
Actually, I don't have any clear figures. I think that there is a lot of movement now in the talent sector, and we know that we are getting people from our direct competitors, but also from probably elsewhere. The fact that we are, it's not a big portion from, directly from universities in Finland, even though that's a way of recruiting which seems to be functioning rather well in the DACH area, for example. But I don't have the exact figures. Would you happen to remember?
No, not really, but it's a mix of all of those that you say. We are on the winning side if we talk about people that move in the consultancy industry, obviously, because of the growth. So we are on the winning side there. But it's a good thing. People are moving. People are moving from customers to consultancy side. People are moving from us to the customer side. Of course, in the big picture, I think all of this is also very, very, like, positive. We can transfer knowledge, we can understand our customers better, we build a network of people that know Gofore and how we work also on the customer side. These are positive.
When looking at how people move from competitor to another, we of course want to be on the winning side of that. Not in every individual case, we are not, but on the whole, we are on the winning side. Sanna touched on that we should in... That's the IT industry and in general. We should be much better in Finland, solving the a little bit self-made problem of having too little expertise. We should be better at bringing in the university students, bringing in people from other industries and reskilling, upskilling those people. We do as an industry and also as Gofore too little for that.
That's something that for the coming years for Finland to be successful, we need to address. We do our share. We could do more, and we will want to do more. That's for sure. For Finland as a whole is an important question.
Perhaps a follow-up on the traffic between the consultancies and the customers. A few years back, there was a kind of a discussion or risk that all the consultants would like to go to the customer side. Has there been any changes in this trend over the past year?
Yes, there was and probably still is somewhere a discussion about that. We don't feel that that is a threat to Gofore, to put it bluntly. That is not a threat. We can find a lot of positives if people move from Gofore to the customer side. That can be very beneficial. I'd say we also see the benefits in people moving from the customer side to us. The customers probably not always see the benefits there. Anyways, I think it can be beneficial.
This is something that we have, like, strategic discussions with our customers, more and more, I think, about the value that we can provide to our customers being the most attractive workplace and having, like, a strategic relationship there. Using also, the customer's brand to attract people because that is a problem that we share. For the customer, it's important that they get the expertise that they need. If they are not able to recruit it in-house, which often is a problem, then we can cooperate on finding that talent for Gofore and then working for the customer problem.
I think we have like, at least with many of our customers, we have like found each other in this sense. There's, there are strategic discussions that are based on a win-win situation there.
Good. Thanks. Perhaps on the, on the high organic growth target. Does the high target tell more about your view on the, on the future market growth, or is it a more Gofore-driven thing?
Well, both are reasons why we are confident in our a little bit higher ambition level there. I think it's obvious that we have shown that our operations are capable of making this kind of growth happen, both on the, and especially on the people side, but also on the customer side of the equation. About the market and where that's heading, mid-long term, we are extremely confident there should be no reason why the market wouldn't grow fast. Short-term, sure, there are uncertainties and that's why we call the targets long-term targets, of course, that we look at the long-term development of the market. This year is especially uncertain in many ways.
We don't see the uncertainty in order intake. We don't see the uncertainty in customer discussions, at this point in time. We are following it closely.
Final follow-up on the short-term view. It's a year of parliamentary elections here in Finland, and last time, we had the parliamentary elections, your growth was a bit perhaps slower that year. How have you prepared for this year and the elections? What are your expectations?
We could return, we should return to this question when Riikka is also here, up here after the next session. Shortly answered, I think for us, for Gofore the important thing is that we learn from things that happened in the past. We have learned from the last parliamentary elections, we look at the market on a like a longer timescale. We've seen and we've realized how important the tenders that are out there already a year before the parliamentary elections are, because those are the defining ones that will take us over the parliamentary elections. I think we have done a quite a good job there. The parliamentary elections are interesting, important in two ways.
First of all, the election as such, means that we have like a period of going from one governmental program to another, and that will mean that there is a slower period in the market. The other is of course what kind of program the new government will then pursue, and that's interesting to see. We don't feel that there's much risk this there. We see that the things that are driving investments into digital are seen by all from all political sides and there shouldn't be any like big political risk in that sense. We'll see.
Excellent. Thank you.
We'll have a break at this point in time, and we can... Matt, you'll have a chance to ask your question in the next Q&A if is that okay, because we need to take our a break now so that we don't fall behind schedule. Thank you for the good questions. We'll come back shortly and continue with Riikka's part of the program. Welcome back. We'll continue with the program, and the agenda looks like we have two parts for the afternoon sessions. First, Riikka will have a look into our strategic industry focus, so the customer side of things. Then we'll have Ville and Teppo talking about M&A strategy and delivering shareholder value, the financial side of things. Very interesting presentations coming up.
The important part here is to remind you that you'll have two chances to ask questions from here on. First, we'll have the Q&A together with Riikka and Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from Elisa, our customer, after Riikka's session. Then we'll have a final session after Ville's and Teppo's session where we can then take the questions regarding future M&A and more of the financial side. Please, let's continue with the good track from the first Q&A and make this a good discussion. Without further ado, Riikka's turn to come up on stage.
Hello, everyone, on my behalf also. My name is Riikka Vilminko-Heikkinen. I'm the Director of Sales and Customer Value at Gofore. I will first talk to you about our customer strategy and industry focus, and I will be very excited to also invite one of our customers, Elisa, a bit later on stage with us. First, before we move on to the industry focus, I would like to talk to you a little bit about the evolution of our account portfolio. We've been building our portfolio around large strategic customers, for the last two years about. We've been succeeding in this quite well.
If we are looking at the numbers that you can see in the presentation on the right, you can see that the number of accounts with more than EUR 1 million in revenue have grown in numbers from 14 that it was in 2020 to 31 that it was last year. The size of our customers has definitely grown. Earlier we were also following the number of how many accounts that we have over EUR 500,000, but nowadays we feel that the account category of EUR 1 million accounts is more suitable for really kind of describing the evolution that we are having in our customer portfolio. We are now helping our customers in large, significant digital transformation projects that also have a very strong impact.
We are really succeeding also in the building deeper partnerships in ways that we are also expanding the end-to-end offering in the accounts, and we have wider collaboration in terms of our offering with the customers. I would also say that we are really building the trust and kind of the mutual targets for reaching the full potential of digitalization. The large growth really comes from the returning customers. Again, as you can see on the right in the presentation, when we're looking at the share of the net sales last year, 82% came from the returning customers and then again only 18% from the new customers. This is actually something that we estimate that the number for the returning customers will be even bigger this year.
We still feel that we have the share of the wallet, but small, and there's a lot of room for the growth in our account portfolio. We are also on the right path when we are looking at the customer satisfaction that we have. The NPS is 43 at the moment in our recent customer satisfaction survey that we conducted last fall. The overall satisfaction number is on a very good level also in 4.1. It has been on a very good level for many years already, and that's something that we are very happy with, of course. Some of the kind of recurring topics that our customers raise in the satisfaction survey results are that we seem to be exceeding their expectations. We offer a very diverse expertise for them.
The collaboration seems to be very smooth with us, and we're trustworthy. These are all things that we are very proud of and definitely want to maintain and also see that they are kind of the preconditions for the growth that we are still looking for. Our brand survey states that we are in a very good path. We are the preferred company out of the 15 peer companies that were included in the brand survey last year. This is also a very good sign, we feel, to take the customer portfolio also forward. We will maybe look a little bit deeper into the customer portfolio in terms of the public sector and private sector. As you can see, we have a very diverse and very strong portfolio in many ways.
Also the international aspect is interesting. Definitely the share of international accounts is also growing. If you're looking at the public sector side, the growth has been very stable, and something that we are very happy with, of course. Also there are some new names in addition to those very long-term, very beloved customers that we have for many years already. One example of a new account is Deutsche Bahn, which is something that actually the acquisition of eMundo brought to the account portfolio. That's a very interesting opportunity for us in the DACH area, of course. If you're looking at the private sector side, we are also building a very good portfolio at the moment. It's a very interesting mix of different companies that we feel offer a great deal of opportunities.
We also have very solid relationships in the private sector side. Of course, the growth has been very strong, and the private sector has been growing even faster than the public sector. Few more words about the public and private sector. The public sector has been a very steady base for us for many years, and it has definitely been a very kind of resilient and good base for us during the uncertain times. For example, COVID, of course, but also other uncertainties that have followed after that. We believe that it will be also such for the future years as well. We have a very strong contract base, and we are always making sure that we always have a very strong contract base.
The question about, for example, the election this year, we feel that we've been growing the contract base in terms to kind of make sure that we will be always able to, you know, make sure that there won't be any troubles when we know that, for example, the election will definitely affect the public tenders to some extent, at least. Like I said, the international account portfolio is expanding on the public sector side also. Many very interesting opportunities internationally, in Europe and also in Germany and in DACH area. I will be talking a little bit more about those later on as well. Now, when it comes to the private sector, like I said, we have a very good mix of the customers. For example, the global industry companies.
This is something that we feel that it's very good to build on. We've become the established player. We've called ourselves as challengers for a long time when it comes to the private sector, but that now we feel that we have already established very good customer relationships also on that side. The organic growth and acquisitions that we made have really enabled the birth of Intelligent Industry. This is also the industry approach that will take us forward, and I will move on to that topic. We're talking about the industry approach. In other words, the Digital Society and Intelligent Industry. We are really thinking that the deeper partnership and customer understanding requires industry expertise, and that is the reason why we're really investing in building this forward.
Before going in detail on the Digital Society and the Intelligent Industries as these growth avenues, I would surely like to tell you about what we want to achieve with this. We definitely see a lot of growth potential on both of the industries, and we wanna grow both of them equally. We also want our brand to be very strongly associated with both of the industries, and we want kind of the Gofore name to be a guarantee of quality when it comes to these two. When it comes to numbers, here are some ambitions that we have when it comes to the industry approach. We are really looking forward to those bigger accounts still. Our estimation is that we could have 12 more accounts that are over EUR 1 million in revenue this year as well.
We are looking for those really big accounts. Our ambition is to have accounts worth over EUR 25 million in five years. That's the direction we are really striving for those big accounts. We are looking for a bigger growth in DACH area in %. We really want that for customers working with Gofore to equal to succeeding in very big, very complicated digital transformations. Few words about our strategic industries, Digital Society and Intelligent Industry. We no longer talk about a public and private sectors. We're talking about Digital Society and Intelligent Industry. The Digital Society is really built around services. It's about those organizations and companies that offer those everyday services for the citizens, such as, you know, booking your doctor's appointment or get a compensation from your insurance.
It's not about the public sector organizations only, it's about all of those that are offering the services. About the Intelligent Industry. It's about those industrial companies that are really striving for the, you know, effective operations and harnessing the technology to become more efficient, sustainable, and productive, and human-centric. Also the sustainability is a very important angle on both of these. Here are some examples also from the customers, from the public, sorry, from the Digital Society and also from the Intelligent Industry side. As you can see, very familiar names, and also both are kind of in the core of the industry approach, in our opinion. About the steps on our growth journey. How are we gonna do this?
We really need to scale our business, you know, have the bigger customers, like mentioned, become the trusted partner. We want to build the trust especially because we feel that's kind of the precondition to really build the partnership forward. We want to have more responsibility for our customer success. These are all of the things that we want to do in, in, you know, with the international accounts as well. In terms of sales, we have to have new models to monetize. We have to have larger solutions to offer to our customers, do solution selling, take advantage more of the service approach. We want to be the thought leader in both of the focus industries. We don't want to kind of see the leaders where they're going.
We want to be one of those leaders, that's very important aspect for us. In terms of offering, this is something that Mikael also showed in the beginning of the presentation, about our digital transformation offering that is based on the generic digital transformation capabilities. We are building upon this, so we already kind of have the building blocks that we have, and the industry-specific offering really builds on these generic capabilities, but answers the industry-specific customer needs. I will, a bit later on show you an example of the Digital Society, Intelligent Industry. Before that, let's look a little bit about the growth opportunities that we have on both of the industries. For Digital Society, we absolutely feel that we still have a very strong customer portfolio that creates a lot of growth potential, definitely.
There are also a lot of opportunities in this market, otherwise. For example, the social services and health reform that Mikael also mentioned a bit earlier is a very big growth opportunity for us still. We feel that the digital transformation is just beginning in that field. And also the private companies that are operating in the proximity of Digital Society, those still have a very small share of wallet, and we feel that there's a lot of room to grow. Maybe even the interesting angle is the international markets. Germany and DACH is something that we are really looking into, and Germany is really striving for this very comprehensive digital transformation in a very short period of time.
They rank below the EU averages at the moment when it comes to the, for example, the DESI index, and where Finland is actually number one last year. We have really kind of this really great, solid foundation to really export our expertise also in Germany. Digital Compass, which is the European Union's digitalization accelerator, is something that definitely accelerates the digitalization in Europe. We are already involved in some of the EU initiatives, such as Real-Time Economy. These are something that we feel that have really a lot of growth potential to also have interesting aspects in Europe.
Then there's also the recovery funding post-COVID at the moment that has a very strong effects on budgeting on digital transformation, and we see that that is also something that really grows the potential. Here's a very quick example of the Digital Society offering. I won't go into details with this, but this will be shared in the material later on, so you will have an opportunity to see it a bit more closely. The idea is really to build on the customer need. We are using the offering that we already have, but building on that. Some growth potential also for the Intelligent Industry. We feel that the Intelligent Industry has a lot of growth potential in home market in Finland.
Like said, the share of wallet is still very small on our customer portfolio, a lot of growth potential there. As I said a bit earlier, we have a very interesting mix of customers, and here's an example that we have actually, 50 biggest companies in Finland, we have 27 of those in our current customer portfolio. That may be, shed some light on the potential that the current accounts have actually. You know, a few things favor us. For example, when we're looking at the key trends in Finland, for example, cloud, data, and AI and cybersecurity, this is something that our offering responds very well to. You know, the digitalization is at the top of strategic agenda, and there's a lack of talent. That is something that also favors us.
When it comes to the Germany and DACH area, again, the key trends in there, such as AI, cloud, big data, IoT, and machine learning, our offering responds very well to those. Industry 4.0 is definitely one of those driving forces in the DACH area. We have a lot of upselling opportunities in eMundo customer portfolio also. Very shortly, I will also show you the Intelligent Industry offering. Very similar in a way of visuals in when it comes to Digital Society, but when looking closely, very different, and this is the strength. Here we can really see the industry approach and the differences between the Digital Society and Intelligent Industry. Again, I don't go in the details right now, but it will be shared in the material. This was all from me.
Next, we will continue with Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from Elisa to discuss these topics a bit further. Elisa has been our customer ever since 2014, so it will be very nice to have a long-time customer here with us. We'll be back shortly.
Okay. Next, possibility for you to ask questions and, really use this opportunity since we have Riikka here now, and especially have JP here from Elisa, you can ask the viewpoint of the customer to Gofore this business, not something that is, maybe the usual setting in a capital market stay like this. Hopefully that will be valuable for everybody listening. Thanks, Riikka. Good presentation, and especially thanks, JP, for being us here today. It's very important for us to have the, like, a customer perspective for.
Yeah.
for this kind of event. You are, Vice President at Elisa of e-commerce and digital services. In Finland, we know Elisa, of course, household name in mobile networks, but it's much more, isn't it? Could you, like, tell us shortly about what Elisa is?
Sure. Thanks, Mikael. Thanks, Riikka, for inviting me here. It's really nice to be here and also present our approach to partnership for Gofore, and of course our approach, how we see our partner strategy in a way, of course, quickly tell something about Elisa, of course. Today is about Gofore. Happy to bring the customer approach here. First of all, quite many of you, at least here on the site knows Elisa. Of course, people online might not have that quite good knowledge. First of all, Elisa is the Finnish market leader in telecommunication services and digital services. We are over 104-year-old company. It doesn't make us slow.
We have always been interested in technology, how to use it, new ways of using it, creating value for our customers. Of course, we are known especially for our quality, customer experience, and our continuous learning. That's a part of our culture in a way. We have over 5,300 employees in over 20 countries. We have been growing also outside of our home countries. We are serving over 2.8 million customers in Finland, Estonia, and of course, internationally. Yeah, as I said, consumer customers, it's about telecom services, devices, subscriptions, fiber, 5G, super important for us and our customers. Then for B2B customers, it's about IT, automation, security services, consultancy, of course, telco services, of course, for big clients and smaller clients also.
In our international digital services, we are operating in industrial software, like the Industry 4.0 relates to that one. Of course, telecommunication software. We have a lot of clients and partners. We are providing them software to manage their networks and optimize my staff. Last but not least, we're also in the virtual collaboration business globally. We have quite good focus when it comes to digitalization per se, and of course, some similar topics that I have been hearing today from you.
We share a lot of, I think, thinking together with Elisa. You are a much older company
Yes.
agile and interest for technology and renewing yourself...
Yeah.
doing new things.
Definitely a lot of, like, familiar phrases and words and terms from Riikka's presentation that we're also looking, especially how we operate, for example.
Okay, Riikka, you mentioned that we have worked with Elisa since 2014. If we look at what kind of services and what we do together, what are those? On the other hand, then, JP, maybe you could comment on these. Are these the things that you use partners for? Or what's, like, your strategy then to use partners? What kind of things do you need the partners for?
Well, maybe I can begin that we are definitely doing a lot of collaboration in terms of quality assurance.
Exactly.
Yeah. For example, test automation and DevOps.
Yeah.
Probably one of those very big is the Elisa's online store.
Yes.
which is, of course, quite important for you as well. Maybe that's one of those key collaboration topics.
Sure. Exactly. When it comes to test automation, we are partnering with Gofore. They're providing us professionals. And for example, it's not only important for me because I'm representing the e-commerce here for the consumer customer, but also for our customers. Our e-commerce is growing really nicely. The whole digital services side, self-service, whatnot we are providing there is super important.
In a sense, you could say that you mentioned 2.8 million end user customers, those, all of them are benefiting from what Gofore does with Elisa and, benefiting from a quality service in the digital part of the service.
Yeah. As mentioned, quality is key for us. Of course, you know, quality is key when it comes to digital services, e-commerce, of course, everything needs to work and function as per se. No problems on Black Friday, for example, on our e-commerce side. Happy about it.
Yeah. What do you expect from a, like, a strategic partner? What do you think, like, makes an excellent partner for Elisa?
First of all, when it comes to, like, strategic partnerships, so we expect that the, our partner understands our strategy and knows our business. Those are the key as you're supposed to be. Of course, when it comes to partnerships, so we want to augment the skills and knowledge that we have or that we might not have. Of course, working with the partners and vendors who can bring us skills, knowledge, good professionals in a, in a way. That's like the basics. Understanding strategy and business is super important for us because that's a good way to build healthy and long-term relations. For example, we are using multiple different partners.
We have like short-term project, kind of getting the resources in place and professionals in place. For example, with you from 2014 already, long-term partnerships and also growing the partnerships and understanding where Gofore can help Elisa to thrive in our business and especially on digitalization side. That's, that's one thing. Skills, professionals, super important for us because it's not only like bringing resources, but it's also learning from partners. Like, that's one key element for me when we are talking about strategic partnerships. Like, what are the skills that the consultants can bring to us? That's also something that we have been working with you, for example, consulting side when it comes to Agile, DevOps, all these kind of things. Say Scaled Agile on that side.
Strategic partners want to also build this kind of win-win situation. That's easy to say, sometimes hard to do, but of course, that's interest us that everybody benefits from us, from that and of course, then our customers get the value. That's super important. Flexibility. Of course, all the contractual terms needs to be there. That's taken. If there's a need to go extra mile. Let's say something happens, good partners can react really super fast. There's no, like, contractual, okay, this doesn't fall under the SLAs or stuff like that. Understand that, hey, how we want to build this? Speed, flexibility, super important. You mentioned about the smooth operations also. That's about it.
Not only like lean and agile in software development side, but lean and agile also on a governance side and the partnership. That's key there. Of course, the ecosystem that partners can bring. Like you said, you have been growing nicely. You are taking this industry approach. What kind of skills, knowledge, professionals, ideas you can also bring that, hey, we said, okay, we have a need for this kind of things. This might be something new that we might not know too much about yet. Usually partners that have a larger ecosystem also helps us and brings the speed and flexibility to our operations. In a way, that's a key kind of thing. Not last but not least, cultural fit.
That we share the similar values, ways of working, so I can't emphasize cultural fit enough. For example, Riikka, you mentioned about the sustainability. Sustainability is a key for us. Our mission is a sustainable future through digitalization. How we can work together on these important topics.
I have to say that even though we have a very long and very good partnership, still, I feel that we have a very long way to be a strategic partner.
Mm.
For Elisa. Nice tips. Thank you for this.
You're welcome.
maybe few words about Elisa more so. Elisa is probably mainly known as a tele operator, still, I know digitalization is very center in your strategy. What does digitalization mean to you?
It's a great question. As you mentioned, we're mainly known as a telecom operator, especially here in Finland. Of course, like everything that we do, we're a technology company. We have been in it for 140 years in a way. It's in our core and it's many things. For example, video entertaining services, streaming, all these kind of things that we are also working a partnership with Viaplay there. Our Vile Premium service are something that is not part of like your traditional telco kind of thing. Of course, it's about devices that we provide to our customers, both consumer and corporate customers, consumer IoT, smart home.
We are providing tracking services for pets, for example, and learning new kind of things on a consumer IT, IoT side. It's many kind of things. You think about like networks nowadays, it's all about software. We're talking about cloud, all things, kind of things. Digitalization is overarching for us, and that's also important how we develop our ways of working, what kind of partners, what kind of ecosystem we are building. Not mention our international digital services there, for example, the industrial IoT, telco software, all these kind of things. It's everywhere. It's of course like how we develop our customer experience, not only for the consumers, how it's smooth omni-channel, mobile.
Of course, we have different customers that expect different kind of relations with us. It's everywhere. I would again say like the sustainability as set, like a sustainable future to digitalization. Of course, environmental sustainability is key for us. From 2020 we have already been carbon neutral operator first in Nordics. It's also about, okay, how we can tackle these like quite hairy and big problems through our activities, services, products. Sustainability in social aspect, how we keep everybody in the loop when it comes to like societies digitalizing, as you mentioned in your speak, Riikka.
Of course, how we can support like the economic sustainability of, for example, Finnish society, how we help entrepreneurs, bigger, smaller companies, SMEs in a way, of course, digital sustainability. Quite a important topic in today's world, how we secure connections for our customers, consumers and be the leader also there. Digitalization is like everything we do, of course we have our focus there.
Great. Thanks, JP. Hopefully everybody can hear the same kind of message that also Gofore is talking about. We are very similar, I think in many ways. Let's take some questions from the audience at this point. When Anne is giving the mic, just the question that we had from Jaakko earlier about people moving between customers and Gofore, I think you heard the question, I think you heard the discussion. Do you have any like viewpoints on that? Is that something if, and I'm not saying when, I'm saying if a person from Elisa would move to Gofore or the other way around, would you be happy or sad or?
It's always like happy and sad kind of thing. Of course, you need to as a leader in a organization you develop your teams and people. Of course, there's always this kind of like want to say like revolving door between customers and partners in a way. Of course, there is a positive kind of effects. Of course, we want to people come and join also Elisa. We have this happening all the time. People left, especially on software side, and come back because we want to build the culture, best culture for our people and also be super attractive company to work for. Yes, there's cons, there's pros. It's not a big problem for us.
We have also strategy to insource developers, but as discussed here, we are working with you, and we'll be working with you on a specific area. I'm quite neutral about it. It's our role, of course, make sure that the culture and the problems that the IT or digital professionals want to work, that we can provide those and build. There's benefits working for consultancies, as you know, variety of customers. We have a lot of like partners who are providing professionals just working with us. It's in a way, they're more of a Elisa workers in a way, part of our teams.
In the end, it's both of our like problem and challenge to make sure that we have the right people working for the challenges that you have.
Exactly.
At Elisa.
Exactly.
That's. All right, Jaako.
nen from SEB. Given that there are quite a few medium-sized digital service providers in Finland, from a customer perspective, how Gofore differs from its close peers?
Go ahead.
This is a great question. Of course, from practical point of view, what we are especially using here is like test automation and these kind of things on my like day-to-day job, so I can see that, okay, here's a good partner. They have a good understanding, good people. We can trust them. Of course, I can say that we are working with multiple of Finnish IT and digital consultancies. From my point of view, Gofore is really good brand name, can trust that.
No problems in a way, but especially like, okay, for me, test automation, DevOps consultancy on how to lead like scale Agile, these kind of things. It's good to know that, okay, I know they have a good professional on this side. Of course, we have software developers from Gofore also, as well we have from other agencies. Great question. It depends always that, okay, what are you building and how we are doing. Especially, for example, here, the industry approach, it sounds great fit from that perspective. Of course, it's important for the consultancies and agencies to diversify or differentiate also that it's easy. It's not only that, okay, who wants a software developer? We have CVs here.
Yeah, we need that kind of thing, but more we can have this kind of win-win partnership. It's better for both of us.
Generally speaking, when you do tenders, how much you give weight on the value of the vendor provided and how much you set weight on the pricing and where you are? I'm not asking Gofore specifically, but are you seeing the vendors hiking prices currently?
Depends of course. Yes and no on the last questions. Of course, we have a good relations with our vendors. Yeah, somewhere we can see prices going up. Somewhere we don't. They're keeping flat. That's also about, like, the strategic partnerships. In those kind of situations that we have a lot, for example, longer relations, we partners are keeping their prices in a way, in a flat. Depends. Great question. Maybe sometimes when we are looking for, like, some project or really, like, well-defined problem or development plan, then we might look more into the cheapest price in a way. Of course, important for us is the value for money.
In a way, it's not as you might know, in the IT digital world, the cheapest is not always the best. Of course, we are cost conscious. We are hard negotiators. These things are important for us. Like I mentioned, the speed and flexibility is also key, especially more. The faster you're on the market, the less you have, like, the cost of delay kind of thing. There are multiple things to look into. Yes, sometimes, price super important. Usually also in these kinds of relations, quality and this in Finnish hinta-laatusuhde is super important.
Just briefly, can you measure those quality and value aspects?
Yeah. Yes. Yes, you can. Of course, sometimes hard to do. When you are looking in the longer term perspective, you can. Of course, this is about the people who are working and building these services. You know that, okay, for example, this partner can deliver. They have the good people. They're knowledgeable, and we can learn from them. Also we are learning for example, the quality, velocity, whatnot you want to measure is going up.
Super. Thanks.
Maybe we can take one more question and just briefly comment on JP's answers here. I think that's the other side of the equation when working with big clients and building strategic relationships. You said that you are tough buyers, and you should be, and that's part of your job.
Mm-hmm.
That's what we see every day. Of course, we need to provide the value that we can motivate the prices that we have.
Exactly.
With Elisa, we've had the price negotiations for these years. I think we hopefully have good solutions for everybody. Do we have any more questions for this? No? Okay. Great. Thanks. Okay, one more.
Okay.
Just one question quickly. Daniel from Danske Bank. I guess Elisa is a very good example of a very defensive customer. What about your industrial, more likely cyclical, customers and their motivations to invest in the digital transformation during more uncertain economic times?
That's a good question. Maybe Riikka, you want to chip something in here also. I'd say that when we look at our customers, they are facing uncertain times for sure. They are this year is not going to be their greatest in terms of order intake and customer demand. Many of them are facing uncertainty there. On the other hand, they have done well over the past few years. On average, it seems that for these kinds of customers that we work with that in the export industry, they have a good order backlog, and they...
If we can hope for a shorter economic downturn, I think that velocity will take them over that. That's why we haven't yet seen any significant, like, budget cuts or cuts in spending on, for example, product development, which we work with many customers on. Something that you'd like to add, Riikka, to that or?
The customer demand seems to be in a very good level still, but perfect answer.
Thank you. Great. Thanks, Riikka, and especially JP. This was a great discussion. We'll go onwards in the program. Next up will be Ville Hurnonen talking about our M&A strategy. Thank you.
Hello, everybody. My name is Ville Hurnonen, and I'm telling you about M&A in Gofore. This is our M&A timeline. First of all, I have to say that we are also doing this M&A with people first and human-centric way. There were quite nice touch points in previous presentation, and maybe I can come back to those. We have done so far eight acquires and acquisitions, and I enlight you a couple of those. This Kenttinen Finland, you can see in 2020, we were lacking of quality assurance and test automation, just what was mentioned in this Elisa case. We had this software development skills, but the test automation was missing. Okay.
Centinel brought us that skills and capabilities and, of course, also customers. It formulated us this DevOps and later DevSecOps offering. It was bringing something new. CCEA, KEA, 2021. We noticed that our customers really like to have this digital transformation to happen, and we offered them technology, and we offered them software development. The people, the human being is also needed in the change. Actually it's really in a center of change. KEA was doing this change management advisory consultancy, and it was a great add to our offering.
the beginning of year, we will choose this big customer strategy and very good at Digital Society side, but this Intelligent Industry side was a little bit missing capabilities, customers and experts, especially. Devecto was doing that, and they were specialized to embedded software development, IoT and Industry 4.0. It was adding that missing part. Recently, eMundo, we have chosen this DACH area as our one of focus market. They had big customers there and software development experts, so wonderful fit again. This kind of enlarging our offering is the main point in our timeline. Why we are doing this M&A.
As I already mentioned, and you have heard many times during this day, our big customers are asking from us different kind of services. They like to receive and get more and more wider selection of offering from one provider. Makes them life easier. That's one reason to enlarge our portfolio and acquisitions is very nice way to do that. We are growing, and the growth rate is high, and the demand is high, and also there are difficulties to recruit experts. M&A is also solving that problem. Just now we have a special purpose for this M&A, and it's supporting this Digital Society and Intelligent Industry strategy. We maybe in the future, we can add some offering especially focused and helping those things.
Then when we are buying, what are our criteria? That's very important thing. There should have this cultural match. Again, similar thing with the, with the strategic customer partnership. There should be business synergies, so big customers, and cross-selling possibilities, and especially very good new challenges and jobs for our experts, so that they can learn more, they can create something new one, and we can create some bigger impact. Very special thing is also that we should feel excited when we are buying. We are all the time believing, imagining the headline when we are discussing with the target. What would it look like when we announce this deal? That should be excited headline. Where are we buying these companies and trying to acquire?
In Finland and in DACH area. Those are our two geographical areas where we are looking at targets. Then M&A principles, how we are doing these things. I started with this human-centric attitude and approach. It's based on our culture and diversity of thinking is very inside Gofore, and we are respecting each other's opinions. When we are now discussing with the target company, we try to understand their thinking and try to feel the similarities and also respect their different kind of point of views and try to learn that, okay, could we combine something new and more together? Our integration philosophy is I think, quite unique.
I often describe that as a gentle hug, we are close, we are friendly, but of course, we want to do something together and like a dance together. That's every time it's unique. We have noticed that when there is a growth and profitability available so that we can grow together. People are feeling good and there is really much potential in the air. Our way to do this with this general hug is that we don't have a unique really strict format. We have a concept, and you will hear that in next slide. Every case we plan together with the target how to do things, and then we follow that joint plan.
Every time it's, it's a unique way. As I said, we acquired to win-win situation and, if there is a growth, there are good potential for jobs for our experts and, we can enlarge our share of wallet in our big customers, cross-selling and things like that. It will be a great fit then. If there are not these things available, we are not going to buy, that's sure. Many times targets are saying that it's great to have these wider shoulders, and they really, many times we see that that's really the case. The target company is at that kind of situation that they really enjoy and need these kind of wider shoulders, what we can offer to them.
This is our growth platform and how it's supporting the same day integration. Growth platform is all our softwares, information systems and processes, which we are developing all the time. It's evolving as a backbone of our operations. It's also helping our M&A integration. In a platform side, we can choose which softwares we will integrate and when, how. We have certain flexibilities there. Then, integration of customer portfolios and cross-selling with this Hohto tool, for example, we can match customer needs and our skills and talents from of our experts easily and accelerate these kind of cross functions. Then, cultural integration and learning. We are talking about self-development, for example.
Again, our platform can help and support individual experts to develop, find their communities and do things together and learn vice versa. That's very important that we are learning from the target company, and they can learn from us. All these are then ensuring in the long run that these targets will expand our digital transformation offering and of course, create more value to our customers. Financial results and growth will follow. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Ville. Great presentation. I think we have a quite solid M&A story and strategy. I'm Teppo Talvinko, CFO of the Gofore. Nice to have you all on board today. We have created a great shareholder value during the recent years. I think this is a great picture. It tells a lot. You can see that we have been outpacing the peers, the OMX market during the recent years. What drives the shareholder value? It's the profitability and it's the growth. This is quite familiar to the analysts with their cash flow models. In our case, what are the basics behind these drivers? I would like to highlight 4 of them. First, it's the market. Digital transformation market.
Our market it's growing fast, faster than the legacy IT market. We have a really good position in Finland in our home market. Secondly, I would like to say that our people-centric culture that Sanna was presenting, that has enabled a really strong organic growth. We've been successful in a very tough talent market. Third, disciplined M&As, like Ville said, I think they have accelerated the growth. They have supported the profitability. Fourth, last but not the least, I would say that the lean, data-driven operational model that we have in place, it's scalable, it makes easier to integrate the acquisitions. It gives us transparency and visibility to the business.
It helps us to respond in customer needs that are arising from the growing market. Organic growth has accelerated in the last two years. We have been able to outpace the 15% organic growth target level over the cycle. Key factors here. On the demand side, order intake, that has been quite robust. We have been really successful there, both in public and both in a private sector. We understand that there is a certain uncertainty when it comes to macroeconomic outlook. Still, the development has been robust. On a supply side, the talent attraction engine, that's in a good shape, enabling the organic growth.
Our strategy, that highlights the importance of M&As, together with focus on deepening the presence in selected industries, that's our industrial approach, and good position in talent market, as well as our agile platform. All these are giving us a really good position also in the future organic growth. Regarding the really good track in profitability, customer prices and salary development, they are the really important drivers in our industry. I would say that there has been a really good balance between these components, these two factors during the recent years. Other things to mention, efficiency.
We come to billing rate, that's our key KPI, that we are really closely following up and it has been increasing. Really good results there too. We still see that there is a room for improvement when it comes to billing rate. Non-client facing race, that has stayed at a low level and it gives us some operational leverage. With fast-growing business, both organic and through acquisitions, scalability is really crucial. It's important. With our growth platform, we have kept us and the scalability and be able to integrate M&As to support the positive profitability trend.
A few words about our dividend policy and you can see that growing and profitable, our track record that has created many years of really positive trend when it comes to earnings per share, when it comes to dividend per share KPIs. We say that we are going to pay at least 40% of the net results. That's what we have been delivering throughout the years. We really want to keep it like that. For the future years, we, of course, aim to keep the increasing DPS trend. Let's take a look at the balance sheet. Strong operative cash flow, that brings along a strong balance sheet. On the right, you can see the key KPIs on the balance sheet. That's the Q3 figures.
How we want to use the strong cash flow? Of course, we want to continue acquisitions like Ville pointed out and boost the organic growth. We also want to deliver decent dividends also in the future. We want to maintain a healthy balance sheet to be able to react and take care of the opportunities. All in all, I would say that we have a strong basis to keep on going with our new growth strategy. Thank you. I leave it back to Mikael and for Q&A and wrap up of the day.
Excellent. We are now approaching the final part of our capital markets day and the final possibility for you to ask even more questions. I'll lead to that with a few words about this year and how we look at the year. I feel that we have used the word uncertainty too many times already today. It is there. On the other hand, we have also heard good news in the latest weeks now. I think we've seen signals that the economic downturn might not be about a prolonged recession.
It might be a shorter-term economic downturn, and there are good possibilities that we are now turning the tide and it could be for our customers still a good year. Especially what we've heard in the news is that for our customers the investments that they expect to make this year they will be growing during the year. They will not be growing as much as last year, but that there will be still growth in with in investments. I think that's a good signal for also for us that they want to invest, and that will mean also investment in digital technology and digital development.
For us, for this year that has started now, of course, our first thing is to keep the good momentum that we have going at the same time maintaining the agility to react if there are problems in the market. We will be back to you guys with a updated market out-outlook in our full year report and look more into what we see coming up this year in February. Of course, we are executing the strategic action plan that we have talked about today, or the objectives that we have talked about today. We have, of course, a plan there that we will be executing.
The big thing there is implementing the strategic industry approach that we have been talking about, offering an operational model are key in supporting our growth in the chosen industries. We are, as we always do, keeping up investments and developments for our growth platform, for our digital growth platform. We have continuous development work going on there. Just now we are quite close to a bigger rollout of a new system again.
This is something that all the time happens like under the hood, not something that we necessarily talk to you, when these bigger developments happen, but that's there continuously to make sure that the platform that we have, supports not only the Gofore that is of today, but also the Gofore that we will be in two years' time. Of course, this is going to be a special year for us in putting focus on the DACH area business now that we have eMundo also in the group. That's something that will take some of our time and focus, and we want to see results, of course, during the year on that side.
Just to recap on what we've talked about today, maybe the most important thing is that what we are looking to do is grow. We want to grow with building on the success that we've had in the Digital Society customer segment. We want to be stronger in the Intelligent Industry segment, and we want to keep up with the M&A strategy that we have basically in the same way that we have successfully done up until now.
What we wanted you to remember from this day is our three key messages, good, strong foundation and track record, the updated strategy with focus on Digital Society and Intelligent Industry, and our upgraded financial targets for the long term with especially the raised ambition level in growth. Some questions maybe. Joni, at least.
Yes, Joni Zsukov from Inderes. Hi. last capital markets day, you focused your international expansion to the DACH area. My questions are Ville, starting to you, regarding M&A. You started looking to the DACH area market. Can you talk about a little bit what have you done during the last two years? What are your learnings? The second question related to this maybe, that Mika a little bit touched on in the beginning, he said a good pipeline also. Can you talk about the pipeline as well?
All right. Thank you. Our learnings from DACH area, for example, in my head, the most significant thing is that IT companies, consultancy companies is what we are looking for, looking at, and we have screened quite much. There are quite many of similar kinds of companies. The mindset, culture, human-centric, low hierarchy, agile thinking is there definitely. You can see from their web pages, and when you are meeting those directors and owners and so on, they are really talking about human-centric way. Similar, very similar culture that we are having. Of course, we, in the same time, notice that there are a lot of those companies which are a little bit maybe more old-fashioned.
Companies then, we see that there is lot of potential for us to attract experts to join Gofore in that area. That kind of findings, for example. Of course, the market it is huge. There is a lot of work for me to find companies. Then the other question was this.
On the pipeline.
Pipeline, yes. Yeah, it's like, in sales you have this sales pipeline, and we have the similar kind of pipeline for M&A. We are first important thing, is fulfill all the time the pipeline. We put new targets, new screening on then it's going down. Second important thing is to close the deal if it's hot and we see that as attractive. Then the third tier is this, taking care that they are flowing down. It's very similar work.
A follow-up on this area. Thinking about eMundo and integration, does this hinder new acquisitions in that area? Do you think you can do it now simultaneously? If not, then when do you think this integration is in so far that you could do new M&A in this area?
Integration with eMundo is based on this joint plant, as I explained already, that we are following our methodology here so that we have formulated a plan with them, and it's we are living along that. I don't see that it's any obstacle to find new ones. It's living its own life.
Basically what we've talked about it with Finnish companies, is true also, at least to some extent for German companies, that the integration approach means that we want to focus full time for, let's say, three to six months on the acquisition. We are like freeing up resources for the next one. That's maybe the good guideline to what to expect in that sense.
Matti first then.
Hi, it's Matti Riekkinen, Carnegie. A question regarding the pricing of the targets. We have seen that quite many growth companies have seen quite handsome declines in asset prices, and it should be applying also to the non-listed market. What kind of changes have you had so far, and do you think that there's still more room to grow or to go down in the valuations? Is it of any kind of concern time-timing-wise for you?
Maybe Teppo can also answer to this, but from my point of view, we start with the fit. If there is a cultural fit and we see the blooming future so that we can do together something bigger, it ends up the discussion to the situation where the price is not any kind of issue, not a problem at all. Then the target is also feeling that, okay, there is now really nice potential and possibilities for us, and we have been looking for this kind of possibility, and the Gofore is the right home for us, then the price is not another, you know, yes, problem. It's quite fast to find a suitable level.
Teppo, maybe you can elaborate this price level in general.
It's expected that they will come down, but of course every case is different. In that sense, it's difficult to say that which value is going down or up because every single case is different. We don't have a historical track regarding one case.
Sure. Thank you. One question related to some topics we talked about earlier, and that is related to acquisitions abroad and the admin part of personnel in those areas. How do you think that, what should be the right proportion of admin and billing personnel in the acquisitions? When you are kind of building ex-exposure to some country, do you think that it's easy to find the balance between non-billing and billing employees? I mean, often it's the challenge is that, when you acquire companies or building a presence, you have to invest maybe a bigger part to admin just to get everything done, and then you add to the critical mass and it becomes easier. The equation is more beneficial for you as a bigger company in one country.
Are you now big enough with the eMundo acquisition in Germany to build the platform so that it's easier to add up? Do you still have challenges in making the equation right so that the profitability of the acquired company and what they are collecting is?
say that that's why we want to concentrate on that area. So it gives us certain benefits and makes this easier for in terms of scalability. You are right that when making acquisitions, acquiring new business, you need also resources to integrate that. But that's why we have this growth platform. We are further developing it and to make it easier and keep the, let's say, the non-client facing ratio on a low enough level.
I think it's fair to say that our German and DACH area operation is not as lean as the home market. So there's work to do there, but that's what we are, of course, looking to do.
Maybe to Matti's earlier question about the valuations still, non-listed companies are quick on reacting on rising valuation. Valuations going down not so much. 2021, of course, was. There was a lot of interest on the sales side. And maybe looking at last year, there was some difficulty in finding the right kind of discussion partners because of the expectations. The sellers like the 2021 valuations better than the ones that were 2022. That's for sure a thing. Yeah, we need to be very patient and of course wait for them to realize the new normal.
All right. Thank you.
I think Ville had a question here.
Hi. Ville Tiainen from Evli Funds. This is like maybe a follow-up from Matti's question, but just to refresh our memory, should we consider eMundo as a platform acquisition in a sense that they might do these kind of bolt-on acquisitions on their dock area? Do you still kind of hold the reins or are on the kind of driver's seats when it come to this maybe smaller M&A execution in the kind of eMundo's turf? Thanks.
Yeah. I wouldn't say that eMundo, a great company, but as such, they are not a company that is capable of boosting the growth with acquisitions. Together with them, I'm sure that we can and will, during this year build a platform that we can add on, like using the strengths from both Gofore Germany operations and eMundo. Using strengths that we have learnings from building a bigger operation and using the strengths that eMundo has from the local market and understanding of the local market and understanding of what kind of companies and how to operate in that market. Yeah. Together we can build that platform.
Thanks. Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. You noted previously that you have sort of intentionally been growing your contract and project base to make sure that you have enough stuff to do during the maybe more slow election cycle. Is there a risk that you have maybe been too aggressive to get enough projects or customers during this time to sort of ensure the sufficient growth during the election time, and it would maybe mean some relative softness in the margins or maybe more project risk?
The usual situation , I think. I don't want to sound like too complacent or even arrogant, but the usual situation with projects is that resources are the bottleneck for projects. That's not an unusual situation at all. That's of course from a customer success and making customers happy and succeeding together with the customers. That's a challenge. During last year we showed so strong recruitment numbers, and we also managed to develop the partner network that I'm confident that this situation will not prove to be like especially difficult in that sense
All right. Thanks. A final question about the billing rate. Is there a difference between your billing rate in the private sector and public sector customers?
Let's say that in the public sector, the good thing with public sector customers is the long contract length and the long planning horizon that the customers have. It's not necessarily a month-by-month or a quarter-by-quarter planning. It's even longer. When we can get into the position with the customer that we are the strategic partner and we get into those discussions that look longer than a quarter forwards, then sure that is a strength with public sector customers and will translate into better billing rate.
We are trying to do that same thing with private sector customers to have the big customers, to have the long-term customer relationships, but for sure the private sector is always and will be and that's as it should be more like quarter by quarter thinking, and that's normal. So to some extent, yes.
Jaakko from SEB, your bigger size also means that you should buy bigger companies or alternatively increase the acquisition frequency. Which ones should we expect and also are you preparing for kind of different risks in possible larger acquisitions?
Most important thing all the time is the perfect match, as good match as possible. When we are looking at those targets, that's the. It's not the size. Of course, smaller companies are not maybe so suitable because the recruitment is working quite well. But after that, the size is not the first thing what we are looking at. If there is a good match, that's we start from that. Hard to say.
Yeah. Both are solutions to the same problem, to keeping up with the bigger size. You're right. I think like founder-led companies that we oftentimes have discussed with and seem to be good for our acquisition strategy. The size of 100 or 150 or 200, the founder-led companies become. There are less of them when you go like upwards in this in this size scale. That's a thing that we need to take into account.
Good. Last one, perhaps, for Teppo. What is your current fixed cost level as a percentage of sales? Putting it another way around, how much greater operation you could run with the current admin function?
I would say that the non-client facing ratio, it's somewhere between 6%-7%. I think that's relatively low in comparison with the market. I would say that we are quite efficient there. It is important that the share of the fixed cost remain on a decent level. I don't see too much burden there. Of course, the inflation is also affecting that. In our business, we have more important business drivers like the ratio with non-client facing and billing rate and all that efficiency.
That's why we are also investing in the growth platform that we can keep the fixed cost on a decent level.
Good. Thanks.
Okay. We are running out of time. We can take any questions offline afterwards. Thank you so much, everybody. You really made this a discussion, not just a presentation by us. Thanks a lot for that. Hopefully we'll see you soon again, maybe in two years' time in the next Capital Markets Day. Thank you.