Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to Gofore's very first Capital Markets Day. I'm Nina Pavén, and I'm the Investor Relations Lead at Gofore. Some practicalities before we kick off the event: We will have, in total, four Q&A sessions after the presentations. Please note that you can submit your questions at any time, but we will address them in these dedicated slots. Please use the chat to submit your questions. Today, I will be the moderator for the Q&A sessions. So jumping into today's agenda, first, some opening remarks and introduction to Gofore from Mikael Nylund, CEO. Then Juha Virtanen, together with Mikael, will deep dive into our updated strategy for growth. Elja Kirjavainen, Aki Koikkalainen, and Miika Nurminen will tell you about our differentiated offering. After a short break, Kristiina Härkönen will continue with another key pillar, sustainability, and how sustainability is driving our business.
Before the closing remarks, we will have a closer look at the importance and priority Gofore gives its people, culture, and ecosystem. Finally, our strong financial performance will be presented by Teppo Talvinko, CFO. With these short words, that's all from me for now. Enjoy our story and today's presenters, and looking forward to your questions. Mikael, please, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Nina, and welcome, everybody, on my behalf also. I'm really excited to be here and have my great team here with me today, and that's because this is Gofore's first Capital Markets Day. Now in January 14th, 2021, we're gonna have our first Capital Markets Day, and it's gonna be great to try to give you all listeners an insight into what Gofore is about, how we are doing business-wise, and where we are heading in terms of strategy. So my name is Mikael Nylund, as Nina said. The rest of the team will be presenting themselves when they come up on stage. I have a long history with Gofore.
I have been with the company for ten years now in various executive positions, and as last position, I have been setting up Gofore's mergers and acquisitions practice and have been responsible for the mergers and acquisitions up until now. Since December, a little over a year ago, I've been CEO, and as CEO, it's a great pleasure to be here today and talk to you investors and stock analysts. So as I said, what we want to do today is give you an introduction into what Gofore is, and especially, of course, we want to go deeply into how we are doing right now and where we are heading.
As Nina pointed out, we're gonna take questions during the presentation, and I hope you have good questions because we would really like to have this conversational and engaging to you people, and provide you with the most meaningful insight that you need to understand Gofore and Gofore's business and Gofore as an investment opportunity. So please write your questions in the chat during the presentation, and Nina will be taking them in the questions and answer slots. Okay, this is what we want to talk to you today about, about Gofore and about Gofore being a growing and profitable digital transformation consultancy.
We, the Goforeans, are professionals at digital transformation, and our business is helping our customers in their journey in digital transformation, which means, for us, a lot of things. We are our customers' best advisors in how they should tackle the digital transformation problem, which is not just technology. It's a lot about how they will turn all of their business, all of their operation, their organization, and their people into the digital world. We are also the ones building the new digital services for our customers, with our customers and, as you will see later today, also providing the necessary quality assurance that the business that our customers are turning digital will also be running 24/7 and provide them with results around the clock. We are a pure-play consultancy.
We don't have any legacy services or IPRs or so forth. What we do is we sell our expertise. We sell our people. We sell the teams that we have. This is very much a people business. Digital transformation is, of course, about the world going digital at an accelerating pace. On this slide, we have a lot of evidence about that. This evidence and these numbers are from pre-COVID times. What we've seen during the pandemic is that all of us as consumers, as workers, as businesses, and as societies have very much changed our behavior, I think. COVID pandemic has shown that digital is the only way to go in the future, and this is something that will...
That can only accelerate what, what we already have on this, this slide as evidence from, from pre-COVID times. I just want to pick up one point from the second, second point from the left. By 2024, over 50% of all global IT spent, IT money spent will be on digital transformation, on innovation, on new digital services. That means that if you look at the IT sector as a whole, digital transformation, digital- new digital services, is the part of the market that is the fastest growing, and this is where Gofore is providing our customers with help. So talking about digital, what, what kind of things do we do?
We take very much pride in the things we do together with our customers and how we have an impact on society, on people's everyday lives, on businesses' everyday lives, and so forth. Some examples of what we do. We have been digitalizing the National Service Architecture in Finland. This means, for example, that we have built the services for all Finnish citizens to be in contact with the governmental agency. We have built AI-based systems for the employment market, revolutionizing how jobs and job seekers find each other, turning that process into digital. We are working very much with the education sector, helping schools, teachers, school children, families, parents, to communicate more effectively and to make the learning experience better for our children.
What we also see is that when working with digital technology and digital solutions, increasingly, we are involved in working to prevent the climate change with environmental issues. Some examples: building the charging network for electric vehicles, the backbone for the charging network for electric vehicles, accelerating change the electric vehicles. Protecting the Archipelago Sea is something that is very dear to us, as Finns, from pollution. We will increasingly, I think, see a crossover between digital and environmental and climate change issues. That's something that we're gonna talk later about today, or Kristiina will tell you about Gofore sustainability, the strategy. The other thing that we are really proud of is our growth and profitability and the history that we have.
We have a really good track record of growth. We have a really good track record of profitable growth. Up until 2017, we were a private company, growing for the last decade in a very fast, over 50% annualized rate. From 2017 on, Gofore has been a public company enlisted on the Helsinki Stock Exchange, First North list, and kept on the fast growth in the last four years also. What we have also done, beginning 2017, is, in addition to our organic growth, gone into company acquisitions and boosting our growth via mergers and acquisitions. We are going to look more deeply into these acquisitions also during today's presentation.
Today, we released our net sales and other key indicator numbers for December, meaning that we have now reached EUR 78 million in net sales for 2020. In the last quarter, a nice 40% growth year on year to 2019 last quarter. In addition to being growing and profitable, in terms of strategy and where we want to go, these are the things that we always want to be. We want to be constantly renewing. In this acceleratingly changing world, in order for us to be relevant to our customers, in order for our expertise to be relevant to our customers all the time, we need to renew constantly. We never want to become the legacy IT systems provider that we see a lot of in the market.
This is something that we approach from a very bottom-up, bottom-up kind of strategy, and something that we will look a bit more into in the after the break in our people part of the presentation. I said we are really proud of the positive impact that we have on society, on what our work really means for people's everyday lives, for our families' everyday lives, for businesses' everyday lives, and so forth. And responsibility means a lot to us. This is something that's very much built into the Gofore spirit, and we have also a new slogan that we want to be the pioneers of a digital, ethical future. And this is something that we see as a really important issue.
As said, Kristiina will come back to that in a later part of the presentation. We want to be international. We are, of course, a Finnish company, and as a Finnish company, we have only taken the first steps on our path to become international. We have international business. We are gonna explain it to you later in the presentation, but that's something that we want to, in the long run, use as a basis for our future growth. Not only in terms of customers and business and sales, also in terms of being an international community.... We value diversity a lot, and international community is for us a very important part in that. And all this while offering exceptional customer and employee experience.
And for us, for the history that we have, being good at offering our employees an exceptional experience has been a very important thing. During the last 10 years, we have been working in a job market that you could call a war for talent, and the employee experience part is something that is really, really an important part of us being successful. So in short, that is what Gofore is about. And next, I want to talk you through a few highlights that we want to especially for you as investors highlight about Gofore and what we are about, what are the things that sets maybe us apart from a lot of the competition. Firstly, about the market and our position in the market.
If you look at the IT services market as a whole, how we see it is that it's two-part. There are the traditional IT services market, first of all. Slow cycle, development cycle, IT systems supporting business in business strategic goals. Very traditional kind of ERP systems, IT infrastructure, and so forth. An area that, of course, has been growing for a very long time, and still is growing, but not as fast as the other part that we are seeing in the market, the new digital services market segment inside the IT services market. The fast-growing, the digital business-focused, agile, with a technology as a competitive advantage, technology as providing new services, as providing new customer experience, and so forth. This is where Gofore is.
This is where we natively have always been. For the last 10+ years, we've been advocating agile development, development close to our customers, fast development cycles, using the very latest technology, and so forth. So we have always been in this market segment. And now we reap the benefits from that. This is the fast-growing market segment, and this is where Gofore is natively located. Secondly, what sets us apart from our competition is our offering. Over the years, we have built a comprehensive offering that's different from a lot of our competitors. For us, we look at our customers' need for digital transformation, and see that it's not only about technology, it's not only about implementing the digital services, it's about a lot of things.
And transforming that organization into something that is a digital organization requires a lot of help from us or some other consultancy, and that's why we have built an offering that is comprehensive. From the left, our advisory business, how we advise our customers in how they should take technology, digital technology into account when setting their strategy, how they should implement that strategy, how they should transform their organization, have their people follow that strategy. In the middle, the very basis of what Gofore is, the technology part, the implementation part, where we build the digital services for our customers, and together with our customers, using Agile models, using customer-centric ideas, service design, using the latest cloud data and analytics technologies.
On the right-hand side, our latest addition to the offering, which came with the acquisition of Qentinel Finland that we announced in August last year. A very critical part, we think, in our customers' journey to become really digital. When all of their business relies on software, when all of their business relies on digital technology, they need to have the quality part sorted, and this is where we can help them now. For us, systematically building an offering like this is not a target in itself. What we want to do is be long-term strategic partners with our customers. And if we look at our customer portfolio today, I think we have succeeded quite well in that.
A little over 70% of Gofore's business is with the public sector, and we are working with all of the major public sector organizations, I would say, in Finland. We have a lot of strategic partnerships with those organizations, and as we saw in the examples of what we have done together with our customers, we are very much in the center of Finnish society, especially turning digital and making it a digital society. From a business standpoint, that means that this has been the fastest-growing customer segment for Gofore. Ninety-four percent... Excuse me, 45% of sales growth during the last 4 years. ...
We also have quite a lot of good key customers in the private sector, both in Finland and increasingly outside of Finland. And that's also been a growth area for us and something we want to in the future look more into how we're gonna grow that. We're gonna talk about it together with Juha Virtanen from our sales team today, a little bit more. Thirdly, what Gofore is about is also an operating model that we feel is quite unique or at least special. On this slide, on the left-hand side, we have tried to describe what is the culture, the human-centric way of doing things at Gofore.
On the right-hand side, what goes hand-in-hand with that culture, for it to scale into the size that we are today and what we want to be in the future, the data-driven management model that in essence is the technology part of how we operate this business. The culture has always been a key thing to what Gofore is. We are a very low hierarchy, very professional organization that values self-organization, that values courage, values that our people take responsibility, work with the customer to achieve excellent results. But that's something that, in order for it to scale, we need technology. And that's why we have invested quite a lot of time and money over the years into building our data-driven management model.
In essence, a technology platform where we collect all of the data that comes from our daily operations, analyze that data, and provide that data to our people, both on the management side and everybody working for the customers, for them to understand where we are. And what we have achieved by this is, for example, a very lean organization. We have an 11-to-1 ratio between the customer-facing people, the people actually working with the customers, for the customers, billing, in business terms, to one person in sales and administration and so forth, not working with the customers. And we are very happy, and we are diligent in keeping also that organization model so that we can be lean in the future also.
And also other benefits that we reap from this special operating model. One thing that's extremely important, in which culture, organization culture, Gofore culture, plays a big part, is our employer brand. As I mentioned, we are in a market where there is a constant demand for skilled people. We want to have the best people. We want to have the most people working for Gofore, and that's something that's really supported by the culture, and the culture being a really big part in our employer brand, so that we can be the most attractive as attractive employer for the skilled experts, and that's a huge competitive advantage for us. The fourth highlight is our customer portfolio or client base.
And as I said already, 70%+ of our net sales comes from the public sector. What that means, in essence, is that we have quite long contract lengths with our customers, 3-5 years average contract length. What we've seen during COVID year, last year, is that this customer base is also very, very loyal and something that will not go away even though we have a pandemic. We had some smaller projects canceled during the pandemic, as did everybody else, but most of our projects, or I should say, almost all of our projects continued as they would. They also managed to start new projects as we have planned together with our customers, and this makes our customer portfolio, in situations like this, a very resilient one.
Also, the long contract length makes it easier for us to plan ahead, to have a high utilization rate of experts working for those customers. In the middle part, you see that 93% of the revenue is time and material-based billing model. That means that we bill for our experts' time, hourly, daily billing. And that also means that, from an investor standpoint and from a business standpoint, we have limited execution risk. We don't take that project risk for our customers. We only have very limited execution risk. Fifth highlight is about our financial profile and how that compares to the industry in general. We have managed almost 15% EBITA margins over the years, and that's really strong compared to our closest competition.
If we look at the comparison, the closest competition here in Finland cannot manage as high profitability as Gofore can. Growth, we already talked about, during the last four years, almost 30% growth, and that's something that also sets us apart from the closest competition. And as we see from the comparison, Gofore compares well with global or international very well-performing companies like Netcompany from the Danish market, which is an important benchmark for us in many ways. We also have a good cash conversion and our strong cash flow has given us and will give us in the future also a good position doing company acquisitions.
So to sum it up, our long-term targets, over 20% annual growth, of which around half will come from organic growth, the other half from company acquisitions, and continued 15% EBITA margin, and at least 30% of annual net profit paid out as dividends due to our good cash flow. And this is something that the board updated in December. Other things that we updated in December, and some of the reasons why we are here today, and why this Capital Markets Day is today, is that we have an updated strategy that we communicated, and that's something that we want to talk to you next, together with Juha.
Our main list transfer, the Helsinki Stock Exchange, is progressing well and will be done during first quarter. And then the last presentation today will be from our CFO, Teppo Talvinko, and he will tell you more about our IFRS transition. We will not take questions at this point. Instead, we will continue together with Juha, my long-term colleague and very valuable member of our management team, and we will talk next to you about Gofore growth strategy. Would you like to introduce yourself, Juha, at this point?
Thank you, Mikael. Hi, my name is Juha Virtanen, and I'm the sales director of Gofore, and I have been in various positions at Gofore for almost 14 years now, mainly in business development sales roles. It's very nice to meet you all.
Okay, so about our future growth. To reach our targets that I just told you about, we see three main avenues where we will find the growth. Those three avenues are: continued growth in Finland, in a marketplace that is very much growing and where we have room to grow. We haven't reached any kind of ceiling in the Finnish market yet. There is both room to grow with the market and taking market share from traditional players. International growth. As I said, we are taking our first steps on this path, but this is a path that we, in the long term, want to go along with, and really need to do also.
Finnish knowledge and know-how in the digital technology sector is very valued outside of Finland, so that's something that we can leverage when going on the international market. And of course, in the long term, growth opportunities in the international market will be a really important thing for Gofore. And thirdly, a disciplined M&A strategy, which will be a continuation of what we have already done. We have a good track record of doing disciplined M&A, and that's what we are going to keep on doing, and we'll look a little bit deeper into what that will mean to us in a minute. But now Juha will take over with the growth in Finland part.
Thank you, Mikael. We naturally expect strong growth in Finland, our home market, in which we have been very successful in recent years. And when we look at the Finnish IT market and its development, we see that no growth limits have been met, and the Finnish IT market brings us a lot of opportunity in coming years. Especially, there is a need for, as Mikael said, there is a need for next-generation consultants who are able to help with digital transformation and building and creating new digital services. That market, in which we are, is growing over 10% a year.
And yet there are differences between the sectors, public and private sector, the development, ways they are buying, and also in our strategy in these sectors. I will tell a little bit more about those differences in following slides. So let's start from Finnish public sector. We want to be the leadin digital transformation partner for our for Finnish public sector organizations, and also be involved in the most significant projects in Finland, digital transformation projects. And when we look to Finnish public sector market and our position there, we see that we have been growing quite fast, almost something like 45%, in recent years.
We don't see any problem why we cannot continue at the same growth rate also in coming years. So we can say that our development in Finnish public sector has been very convincing, and we have been brightest rising star in almost 10 years in Finland. And also we have played out both the international IT generalists and also our direct mid-size competitors in Finland from many key projects in Finland public sector. So we are already a significant player, but we want to be the biggest and most influential service provider. And I'm sure we have great chance to do it.
We know very well what is going to happen in Finnish public sector coming years. We have excellent offering and also organizational capabilities adapted to those public sector needs. All right. Let's look private sector and our strategy there. We also want to be a strategic partner for Finnish top 50, top 10, private sector companies when they are digitalizing their operations and creating whole new digital business in coming years. When we look our development in private sector, it has been very good. Not as good as in public sector, but we have reached bigger projects and have become more important partner for our customers recent years.
I believe that through the exceptional customer value and widening our offering to these customers, like we have already done in public sector, we will have bigger impact and greater impact on these clients in coming years. According to studies, we see that Finnish private sector market is EUR 3.3 billion, and it's growing, and digitalization is at top of these companies' strategy. I'm sure, at the same time, they are building their own capabilities, they need an agile, local partner for digital development and who can quickly deliver a value and who has almost the same capabilities and services than big IT generalists have. So I'm sure, we are the good match for them.
When we think of the background, our international growth, I think our story is quite fascinating. As international studies shows that Finland is the most developed country in the EU, we Finns are often quite little modest, and we don't want to make a big noise about this great thing. But we at Gofore, we want to raise this great issue on everyone's mind and also that fact that we have played a key role and a major role to creating this great thing, this, how to say, digital miracle of the North. Let's next see how we will do it. So what is our strategy, how we become more international? Let's start from grow with international clients.
In the coming years, we will serve customers with the most international potential in our current customers. Clients who are looking international opportunities, growth opportunities, together with us. And who we are able to serve from Finland, also abroad. Sometimes also sending some rapid troops abroad also. Our amazing customer, Japanese Sumitomo, is a great example of such a private sector company that we have been able to serve quickly, open-mindedly, sizing the potential from private customer to international customer. In a year, it's now some project with 150 consultants. That happened when they acquired our Finnish customer MyLender , with the MyL to accelerate and internationalize their business, and we have been honored to helping them with that mission.
Expanding our public sector business to international business plays also a key, major role in our internationalization strategy. We are already involved in many international ecosystem development projects, such as X-Road Community, which has brought us a lot of international opportunities. And one example is the cloud strategy, which we have formed with the Government of Iceland. Actually, we are currently working on it. Yeah. Mikael, would you like to continue? Yeah, sure.
So as Juha explained, as of today, most of Gofore's international business is basically location-independent. We are serving our international customers from Finland, from our other bases of operations, also outside of Finland, but mostly from Finland. But what we want to do in addition to that is to invest in expanding our presence on the German market. And this is, of course, in order for us to be closer to their potential customers, to the organizations that we want to serve in the large German market.
So, what this will mean or has meant already, and what we will continue to do, is that we will invest in sales and business development activities, and building an expert presence also in Germany, around our offices in Munich and Braunschweig. From a Finnish perspective, the German market is, of course, a huge opportunity in terms of size. If you look at the charts here, you'll see that German market is basically 10 times bigger than the Finnish market, and that, of course, is an interesting opportunity for us Finnish companies. In many ways, the German market is less mature than the Finnish market.
Of course, the German market is huge, as said, there are forerunners, there are laggards, there are all kinds of customers in the German market. But on the average, you could say that the Finnish know-how and the Finnish way of doing digital business is a little bit further on than the German. And that's something that we want to use, and that's something that we have seen that the German customers also value, that they can learn from what we do here in Finland. A good example of this is from the industrial sector, which we will be targeting priority one in the German market, is Voith, our first and long-term customer in the German market.
And what we did together with them was bring a team of experts that could help the customer to both understand and develop on their digital strategy. What would it mean that a very traditional industrial player, like Voith will go into digital business? And also, combined with that, see the results of that at the same time or quickly in a fast development cycle when we built the IoT platform of Voith, basically. And that was something that they hadn't seen before, what they... They've been working with partners like the Big Four consultancies before that, and that's a capability that those partners could not provide. And that was very valuable and interesting for our customers.
So that's something that we want to capitalize on and use for our other customers as well. The public sector spending in IT in Germany is, of course, bigger than in Finland because of the market size, but it's still small. And what we expect in the future is that also public spending on digital projects will be bigger and accelerating in Germany, and that's something that we want to be also in position to capitalize on when whenever that will start happening, which we expect to be gradually and acceleratingly soon. So those are the things that we want to do in order for us to grow internationally.
Find more international clients, serve them on a basically location-independent operating model, expand on our presence in Germany to be close to those customers, to be close to that big market, where we see a lot of potential in the future. Third avenue of growth, mergers and acquisitions. Since 2017, Gofore has done a selected amount of acquisitions boosting our growth. We started with Leading in 2017. Leading gave us state-of-the-art design capabilities, understanding what users really need from their digital services, and this is something that is extremely valuable for our customers: understanding the end user, understanding the end user needs. Leadin was also the starting point of Gofore's international business.
In 2018, we acquired Solinor, software development team from Helsinki region, where most of our Finnish customers are, and that really strengthened our footprint in that market, both in terms of customers and especially in terms of being a stronger player in the talent market in the Helsinki or the metropolitan region of Finland. In 2019, Silver Planet joined Gofore Group. Silver Planet was very respected partner, or still is as part of Gofore Group, very respected partner for the Finnish public sector in advisory business. And that's why we now consider us the clear number one in digital transformation advisory for the public sector in Finland.
2019 also, we made our first acquisition outside of Finland, a very small one, though, but still outside of Finland in having Mangod esign Team in Germany join our German operations. And the latest one, Qentinel Finland, which I mentioned already, in last year, which we announced in August, adding the missing part of our offering at that point, digital quality assurance services to our portfolio. And in all, these acquisitions have added EUR 30 million in net sales to our company over the years.
This is something that we have learned a lot from, and this is something that we want to build on, and in the future also, build the shareholder value through acquisitions, as we see on the next slide. We will have at least the same acquisition speed as we have done—have had until now, and that will boost our future growth, as it has done from 2017 onwards. And what we want to achieve by this, in addition to growth, is, of course, develop further on the Gofore offering around digital transformation. It's not complete yet. Interesting offering parts could be, for example, cybersecurity, different technological solutions like cloud technology consulting.
The human side of change is one interesting area we are looking at. But whatever it will be, it's something that always needs to fit the Gofore financial profile. We, together with the acquisition target, must be confident that we can together grow that business and together grow Gofore's business as a whole, and have synergies from that acquisition. And it must be also profitable and support Gofore's profitability targets. And I said we will keep up the historical pace here also in mergers, acquisitions, so that's the target. And speaking in terms of geographical areas, Finland will continue to be the number one area and where we look for available acquisition targets.
But we are, have also started to more actively look for targets in the German market to boost the presence we have there. So that's something that in the coming years, we expect to reap the benefits from. We have done the five acquisitions during the last basically four years, so we think we have learned a lot from that. And we have also managed to build a platform that really supports bringing on new businesses. So we have seen what could go wrong, we have seen what the important points are in doing company acquisitions. And we have, because of that, a good expertise in finding those customer synergies that we feel are the most important ones.
If I give you an example, with Qentinel Finland, they had a strong customer relationship with the Finnish tax authorities, and that's a customer that Gofore had been working with on a smaller level, also before the acquisitions. But via the acquisition, we acquired a good customer relationship and could build on the comprehensive offering that Gofore, via the acquisition, had built with that customer. And that has made the Finnish Tax Administration a top five client of Gofore. Other parts where we see our platform as very ready to take on new company acquisitions are our group business platform, including digital services and the data platform that I talked earlier about.
But not the least, our, our culture, our very human-centric culture, that is something that is, interesting to, to the, the companies acquired by Gofore and, and interesting for the people that are, acquired by Gofore. That's why we have seen quite limited attrition due to, due to, company acquisitions up until now, and that's, that's something that we see as, as a very valuable thing. So three avenues of growth: growth in Finland, international growth, and disciplined M&A. That's basically the, the growth idea of Gofore going forward. At this point, we'd like to take some questions, if we have any.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Miika and Juha, for the presentations. We actually have a number of questions. So-
Great.
... So, let's go through them, first come, first serve basis. Firstly, about COVID, a question from, Joni Grönqvist from, Inderes. COVID has changed ways of working, which changes do you think will be permanent?
That's a good question from Joni. Yeah, and something that, of course, none yet knows, and something that we have been thinking a lot about also. I'd say two things: first of all, what I talked you through already earlier, COVID only will make the digital transformation accelerate. And then that's something that will mean more customer demand in the mid and long term for companies like us. The second one, we didn't discuss yet, but that's something that the forced move to remote work might make possible. Everybody, both from Gofore and our customers, went into remote work mode, basically overnight. And it was a huge success, I think. I couldn't expect it to be such a successful transition.
And what that, of course, in principle, shows us is that this work that we have done mostly and a lot near the customer, together with the customer in physical presence, we are ready, maybe for it to be a remote presence. And that's something that will open up, of course, a lot of opportunities, namely in the talent part, where we can find experts, find talent all over Finland, and find talent also outside of Finland, and keep working with the same agile mindset, agile methods that we do together with our customers, and have the same results. So that's something that's gonna be an extremely interesting development in the future years.
Moving on to our service offering, another question from Joni: Is there any offering that you still think you need to add? If so, are you using that as subcontracting currently, or is it more the international business that you look to strengthen via acquisitions? There's another question, kind of, you know, regarding services as well, so I'm just gonna read it out for you as well from Panu Laitinmäki : How do you see pricing of your services in the market? Is there price pressure? Are you able to increase prices in line with salary inflation? Any differences between public and private sectors?
Maybe you have-- You can take the pricing question, but if I try to answer the first one from Johnny first. So, company acquisitions will certainly be a big part in how we also renew and broaden the offering of Gofore. And there are a number of parts that fit the digital transformation consultancy offering that we are looking into. To name a few that I already named earlier, cybersecurity services, which we have in-house, which we use subcontracting for today. That's an area, of course, of big growth and also importance and will be a bigger importance in the future for our customers.
Rising technologies and accelerating technologies like still the cloud transition going on, that's of course a market that is interesting. And also what I mentioned was looking a little bit broader at what digital transformation as a change for our customers is, and looking at how that change might be about changing the people's behavior at our customer organization. Not just changing how things are, but changing also how people behave at the customer organization. That's an interesting area also. So yes, company acquisitions will play a big part in how our offering will develop in the future also. Maybe you take the question about customer pricing.
Yeah, I can at least start. If you go back last year, COVID year, when COVID hit, there was a lot of pressure for customer prices, but I think that is a normalized level, and customer demand will increase in future post-COVID world and so on. So the customer prices will rise. Very important thing is, of course, our billing rate and huge volumes for our business. And that's where we get the most profit. But of course, we are also looking our service portfolio all the time. Is it possible to find that kind of services, which we can put premium price and so on?
And we are organically building those capabilities, and also, maybe we are going to acquire something, that kind of business also.
Maybe a little... To add to that, what we are doing, as we said, systematically building an offering and an attractive offering for our customers, for them to see us as a long-term strategic partner. And that's always going to be an advantage when talking about pricing. We have seen, yes, competitive situations in the- in terms of pricing, especially during last year, but that's-... Oftentimes, that is when talking about individual experts that the customer needs. And when talking about larger offerings and larger projects, then the price, the importance of pricing is not that big for the customers.
Okay, we have several questions about the private and public split in business. Again, Joni Grönqvist from Inderes. You know, what, what's our Gofore's main competitive advantages, in your view, in the public sector? And what is your latest view on the public budget development for 2021?
Maybe if I start, and you fill in, Juha. Yeah, Gofore's competitive advantage for public sector customers is our understanding of what public sector digital transformation is all about. It's not just about looking at what it means for one public sector organization. It's about understanding it as a whole, and that's something that I think nobody does as well as Gofore. So that's a huge competitive advantage, I think, compared to other players that don't have that experience and don't have that understanding of what the public sector is facing in terms of digital transformation as a whole. Joni also asked about budget issues, and that's, of course, always an issue when talking about a customer portfolio like ours, with 70+% of the customers from the public sector.
We will, we don't expect any budgetary constraint, constraints. There will always be constraints, but no lowering budget for this year and not for the future. We have seen a lot of public money also coming in with the aim of investing into digital technology to make our society work better, to make our society future-proof. We cannot continue working without the digital tools that the public sector is developing. So in that sense, I think the public sector has been wise and has understood that situation. And we expect to see an accelerating amount of investment into digital transformation for the public sector.
No, I don't have nothing to add. I think that was, that was the right answer.
Okay, a few question about the organic growth target and organic growth in general. From Joni Grönqvist: "Your organic growth target is 10%, of 10% looks conservative compared to market growth and your capabilities. Could you please tell us the bottleneck for growth?
Yeah, well, when our board gives out the long-term financial targets, we are talking five-year time period. That's what we, on the average, want to see on the five-year time period, the 10% organic growth. Could be that some years we grow faster than 10%, could be that some years 10% will not be achieved. Of course, we are looking to grow as fast as possible, even though that is our target.
Okay, related question from Joni Grönqvist from Inderes, about the split, organic growth split. How much is growth in current customers and how much new customers?
Yeah, I can answer.
Yeah.
Historically, it has been, so when we look 12 months ahead, we see that in our forecasts 90% comes from current customers and 10% from new customers. And when we did that same forecasting, actually last week and also this week, I think the share is almost the same. So 90% will come from current customers and something like 10% from new customers. That's the forecast at the moment, at least.
Again, linking that to what we said earlier, that's what we want to do. We want to build strategic partnerships with our customers, and our tool to do that is to have an offering that is something that provides the customer with what they need, and we have all the capabilities that they need. And that's gonna result in us having a large number of returning customers and numbers like you had just explained.
That's, that's the most important thing in our customer strategy, to have big, big accounts which, which we deliver great customer value year, year, month to month, year to year, and so on. Yeah.
All right, a question from Mikael Rautanen from Inderes. "Software platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Microsoft, et cetera, are often integral part of the digital transformation. What is your strategic take on the big technology platforms?
... Yeah, I can start if you want to fill in then. Mikael is right, I think, and this kind of technology and ecosystem platforms that have grown during the, let's say, last 10 years, will play an important part in for any customer, I would say. Up until now, what we have seen and what have been relevant to all of the customers that we service, of course, the infrastructure platforms, the cloud platforms that the biggest ones, of course, are from Amazon, the Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and Google growing quite quickly.
But of course, we expect to see these platforms that Mikael mentioned, also in the same company. And that's something that we want to and need to build capabilities for. That's not something that Gofore historically has done. We have been extremely agnostic of the technologies that have been used, and that's been a success factor for us. But the world is changing, and these things that Mikael mentioned, like Salesforce platform, of course, will be important in the future.
But we like to be technology independent, and we like to bring to our customers the best value and what they really need. So if they need Microsoft ecosystem, we can offer that, or if they need Amazon ecosystem, public cloud, and so on, so we can also offer. So of course, we have also cooperation with Amazon and Microsoft and so on.
All right. Maybe, maybe we have time for you- for a few more questions. Jaakko Tyrväinen, do you expect the midsize IT service market in Finland to consolidate in medium term?
That's an interesting question. For us, the importance of that question comes from the fact that our strategy is based on us growing fast and having the muscles independently to provide our customers what they need in terms of a broad offering, in terms of being a strategic partner. So for us, that development probably will not be that important. I could very much see examples from outside of Finland maybe support that idea that there could be some consolidation in the midsize IT services market in Finland in the coming years. Yes.
Okay, moving on to M&A, from a question from Joni Grönqvist from Inderes. Yeah, you said that you will do acquisitions. Can you comment on the M&A market and especially current valuations? Also, if you could comment on the structuring, do you want to buy the whole company, or do you still only, do you still have only majority ownership in your toolkit?
Okay, valuations and structuring of deals. If I start with valuations, COVID was, of course, a factor that kind of brought something new to the valuations. And I think in the beginning, nobody knew what it will mean, but what we've seen in the big picture is, of course, that equity capital has even stronger than before found the technology sector. And that means that companies like Gofore, companies that oftentimes are the ones that we are also targeting as company acquisitions, are interesting targets for others also.
So, that will probably drive valuations up, and that will probably, in some cases, of course, be an issue, and all of the acquisitions that we would like to do will not be possible because of that. I expect valuations to go a little bit up, yes. Structuring of deals, our experience and the way we have done things is that buying the whole company gives us the whole toolkit of integration, the whole toolkit of finding synergies with the acquired companies. And that's something that we see as really valuable and important for us. Having said that, every situation is unique, and in every situation, we need to look at things from that unique situation's perspective.
So, nothing—no kind of structuring—is like a no-go situation for us. But I would expect a lot of future deals also to be of the structuring that Gofore will be buying the whole company.
Okay, no more, no more questions for the first Q&A session.
Excellent. Thank you, everybody, for your excellent questions. And this is what really makes this valuable and engaging, that we get questions from you. So keep that up. And after the next section of the presentation, we will also have a chance to take questions from you. So keep it up, and Nina will take your questions from the platform, as she did today in this session. But next is about Gofore's differentiated offering, and we're gonna have our guys that are responsible for our business units. There will be Elja and Aki and Miika talking about our offering on a more deeper level, and welcome, guys. You can introduce yourself when you step up here.
Thanks, Mikael. So I'm Elja Kirjavainen, responsible for our digital transformation consulting. I joined Gofore about two years back through Silver Planet acquisition, and prior to that, I was working for Capgemini close to fifteen years. So I will start the offering part, and as Mikael said, digitalization is booming, and technology is everywhere. IT and business needs to play closer together. Strategy and digital development should be more connected. Digitalization is really a top priority of our customers, proven by many researchers like Gartner, and all this is our sweet spot. Our magic formula is unique combination of technological expertise and top talent in modern management consulting, and this is exactly what our customers want and what we offer to them. Okay, how we differentiate? First, we develop our customer capabilities.
In our customers' operational environment, pace of change is increasing and predictability is decreasing. I think corona is a good example of that. So the kind of traditional three-year plan thinking doesn't work anymore. Constant changes is really needed in our customers' world. And together, we build right capabilities for our customer, customers to be successful in this, let's say, new operational environment. So building customer capability is the first differentiator. Then the second is our unique, holistic end-to-end approach. So we combine management consulting, software development, and quality assurance, and this is really the differentiator if we compare to our competitors, the local ones like Siili, Vincit, but also more global ones like Tieto, CGI. Some of them, they don't have that strong management consulting capability, and some others miss, for example, the quality assurance part.
With our unique offering, we are able to create large client partnerships. We are the kind of digital allies for our customers. It also means that our sales operations is efficient. Basically, the cost per sold euro is low. It's also creating demand. For example, if we build the cloud strategy to our client, then the natural next step is the kind of development plan and the implementation. So holistic end-to-end offering, that's our second differentiator. Then the third one is the kind of agile way of working. In the market, there are global consultancies with one-for-all approach, and then there are consultancies with really kind of tailor-made approach, and we combine the best of these two worlds. We have our own developed tools and methods. We use also the best practice in the market, and this makes our operations efficient.
Then we look at the customer need, we customize our offering, and based on our understanding of the client needs, and this creates really the perfect fit. Then with our top talents, with the Agile, self-directive approach, we can really make it happen in real life, concrete results with high quality and also the high value for money to our customers. So the third differentiator, Agile way of working and also the Agile way of combining the customer needs and our tools and methods, and also the knowledge how to use these tools and methods because they are developed by ourselves. Okay, then we deep dive to first differentiator, this capability thinking. And it describes the capabilities needed for successful digital transformation from customer perspective. And why it is customer perspective?
Because we love our clients, and our clients are really important for us, so we think it's important to understand the customer world. And everything starts from the strategy. Basically, strategy needs to include digital transformation aspects. It needs to be understood by employees and by end customers, and that's not easy. Then, you need to understand the current situation, where you are, and when you have all this, you can identify the capabilities, what are needed to make this strategy real and make the transformation happen. We have identified some core capabilities. We have data and AI, we have cloud, we have employee and customer experience. There are many others, but these as examples.
It also needs to be managed in the high level, so basically, you need to understand the starting point, you need to understand what are the priorities, and then you need to continuously develop all that. And then to make the transformation happen, to execute the change, you need to have Agile digital development, you have to have strong project management, change management, and also the quality assurance, and then the continuous development related to all this. And I had a discussion with one of the senior leaders of the biggest or the big retailer in Finland, and we discussed about this approach, and immediately they said that this is what they have been going through and thinking, but they don't have the ability to make it real in their organization.
They said that if you have something more concrete than this one slide, we will start tomorrow, and that's exactly what happened. We started from the corporate strategy, we developed the transformation plan, identified the capabilities, and started to work together. Okay. Second differentiator was this, our holistic end-to-end approach. This is what we actually do and what our customers want from us: to improve the capabilities described in the previous slide. I will start from our digital transformation consulting offering. We do digital and cloud strategies, different maturity level analyses related to those. We do leadership and culture development, capability consulting. We use design more or less in everything what we do. We do data and AI consulting, for example, governance models in that area.
We help our customers in ICT tendering processes, and we do this project and change management, make the transformation real. Another example, City of Espoo, one of the largest cities in Finland. We started about three year back. We defined the digital strategy based on the corporate strategy, then we created the development plan, and then we have been working with them more or less in all these areas, which I mentioned earlier. So good example of this kind of by-the-book done digital transformation, where you start from the corporate strategy, and then you basically make the transformation and really close partnership. But then, with some other clients, we start, for example, from ICT tendering process support, so we might be the partner in that area, and then we expand to some other areas.
So this is another way to do cooperation. Okay, this was the digital transformation consulting offering part, and now we will move on to Gofore Create, and I will hand over to Aki. So please.
... your turn. Good. Thank you, Elja, and hello, everyone. I am Aki Koikkalainen, Director of Digital Services here at Gofore. I joined Gofore around 2.5 years ago, when Gofore acquired a software development company called Solinor. And before Gofore, I worked as a CEO of Solinor. I will continue with a quick walkthrough of our Create services. And in a nutshell, Gofore Create means developing and delivering world-class digital services for our customers. Let's start from the Create Foundation phase. This is the phase where we typically lay the preliminary groundwork for future bigger software development projects. Service design is a human-centric method of gathering better understanding of how end users... What are end user needs, and how do they want to interact with computer systems or real-life services, or combination of these both?
During this phase, our aim is to define in a greater detail, like, what are the actual customer needs the service needs to fulfill, and what would be the interactions for the user, and the service chain. In practice, service design can be mapping and designing user journeys, customer interviews, or observing customers when they interact with services, and so on. In many cases, we utilize kind of agile and exploratory methods, like trial development or prototyping, to gain even better understanding and validate those findings that we have from service design phase. We can produce low-cost versions of software that are still, interactive, so that users can, you know, tinker with them and see how the kind of user flows would feel like to them, and we can get the feedback from that.
When we have existing data available, for example, from older existing systems, we offer our customers data and AI consultancy. And this gives us yet another approach, like kind of data perspective on the services, how they are used, what is relevant, and what is irrelevant, and so on. And lastly, we provide our customers with cloud and ICT infra consulting. Basically, nowadays, this means selection between one of the big public cloud platform providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. In some mission or security critical cases, obviously, we can still think about kind of traditional solutions, like data centers or on-premise hosting, but most of the times, we are talking about cloud here. And the services we offer for our customers are kind of helping them to select the right platform for them.
We resell the cloud capacity and also build the proper infrastructure to the cloud for our customers. So let's move to the next stage, the execute change in our SPARK model. More often than not, things that we do in the earlier phases of the, of our service creation chain, they lead into the development of new digital services, new software. In almost all cases, this means custom-made software, where the user interface will be your mobile phone or your web browser, and we call these mobile and web services. Agile software development is still kind of the core of our business, and the project sizes range from hundreds of thousands of EUR to several or even tens of millions of EUR.
As a whole software, agile software development consists of different areas, like proper project management, design, user experience, user interface design, and the actual hands-on coding. The end products are new digital services, either to help our customers kind of with customers' internal productivity or help them to come up with new ways to serve their customers, and usually it's both of these. Quality assurance also plays a big part in our offering. It can be building test automation or kind of continuous quality monitoring systems, and Miika will be telling about our quality assurance business a little bit in a little bit later. And finally, if we move to the last stage of the SPARK model, we also help our customers into running and operating the services that have been built.
These services include things like running and operating, constant monitoring, reacting to anything that might happen, service desk, and also finding kind of new things that needs to be changed in the services and doing this iterative development, even after the services are in production. So let's take a deeper dive into one of our interesting service areas, the cloud. The shift into running digital services in the cloud is definitely one trend that is accelerating our growth. Last year, Gartner estimated that by 2024, over 45% of spending that goes to IT infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software, and so on, will transition from the traditional solutions into the cloud... And we see the same shift happening in Finnish public sector.
In 2019, Ministry of Finance basically stated that cloud should be the go-to solution, go-to solution also for government sector when it provides kind of proper service level and service guarantee, and this most often is the, or basically always is the case with the cloud. And as an early adopter, Gofore is positioned really well into play a big part in this transformation. We are already a certified partner for all of the three big public cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And we also have a really nice track record of references, both from the consultancy and from the implementation side.
In 2020, we advised Ministry of Finance in the formulation of kind of public sector support package on how cloud should be utilized, and also kind of giving advice to public sector procurement on kind of what kind of solutions they should look for, and what would be the selection criteria. We just recently won a new two-year deal worth EUR 2.5 million-3 million, covering cloud expert and architectural services with Valtori, which is the Finnish ICT center. Finally, what can we achieve when we implement the SPARK model in the customer context? Let's go through a case study. Job Market Finland or Työmarkkinatori is a huge project, and it's a huge service, where we are renewing the way Finnish employment market is being managed and used.
In short, Työmarkkinatori is a service that offers tools for unemployed job seekers, companies and other parties looking for workforce, and also government officials facilitating that process, also including things like payments of unemployment benefits and so on. Työmarkkinatori replaces a lot of existing systems, and some of them date all the way back to 1990s. And really, our job here is to bring modern, usable tools for all the parties involved. The actual customer behind Työmarkkinatori is KEHA, the Finnish Development and Administration Center. We originally started cooperation with them in 2016, and just recently signed a new frame agreement worth EUR 40 million-EUR 60 million. And how we are able to achieve that is being able to deliver kind of true end-to-end digitalization service to our customers.
In this project, we do, excuse me, we do pretty much everything from management consultancy to service architecture, design, data and AI, coding, and running these services. So we are truly a partner for our customers, that we can do it all and deliver it in high quality. One important thing to note is when we are working in a project with the scale of this size, and we have a lot of stakeholders, we have a lot of targets, and even the legislation can change when governments come and go, so it's really important that we have really agile and efficient ways of working, that we can adapt in such situation and still deliver good quality output to our customer every day. And above all, this is truly a recoding society project for us.
Our work is affecting hundreds of thousands of Finnish citizens, from job seekers to companies to government officials, like end-to-end service delivered in high quality with agile, efficient approach. I will now hand over to Miika, who will tell you more about our quality assurance services. Thank you. Thank you, Miika. Thanks.
Thanks, Aki, and good afternoon on my behalf also. My name is Miika Nurminen, and I'm in charge for the quality assurance, digital quality assurance services at Gofore. I joined to the Gofore group last year, and before that, I worked with an internationally operating software and consultancy company in various management, sales, and consultancy roles for past 20 years. And as Mikael already told, as a result of the Qentinel Finland acquisition, Gofore became one of the most important digital quality assurance and test automation providers in Finland. So let me give you a little bit insight about Qentinel Finland first.
Qentinel Finland is a professional IT services provider specialized in digital quality assurance and test automation services with more than 100 employees already. Our clients consists of major private and public sector companies like KONE, Konecranes, Elisa Telecommunications, and Finnish Tax Administration. As you already know, the everyday life of people is increasingly dependent on information systems and digital services. And as a result of that, non-functional requirements, like quality, security, reliability, accessibility of the digital services are more important than ever. On the other hand, digital change means more complex business operating environments to our customers that are changing at an accelerating pace at the moment, and we ensure that our customers' software is running as flawlessly and smoothly, and creating value to business.
Our specialty is to accelerate our customers' software development and improve the end-user experience with robotic testing. As you can see on the right side, we have grown profitably, and we will continue to do so by providing scalable quality assurance and test automation services to our customers in an agile way. Software quality market itself is a significant growth market globally, so let me tell you more about that. On the left side, you can see that the software testing market size exceeded $40 billion already in 2019. And the compound annual growth rate of the software testing market is over 6%, and the global market value is estimated to reach $60 billion in 2026.
We have also, also estimated that the software testing market size is more than EUR 150 million in Finland, so we will, we still have a lot of growth potential in our local domestic market also. I would say that the growing digitalization across retail and banking, insurance, and manufacturing sectors is driving the demand for high-performance software applications, and there is a need to make work more productive and an efficient way. One key driver related to the growth figures of the software testing services market has been increasing a need of mobile testing.
The simple reason for that is that there is an increasing demand for mobile application among us, among consumers for purchasing, money transactions, and for example, entertainment. That requires continual upgrades in applications to enhance the end-user experience. Other market drivers include Agile software testing services and test automation services, because initiatives like DevOps requires effective test automation to succeed. And having said that, companies are really focusing on Agile testing methods to deliver high-quality application and reduce time to market. On the other hand, the rising demand for efficient and cost-effective actions to detect software errors and bugs is predicted to drive the software testing market globally.
Digital quality assurance and test automation services of Qentinel Finland complement Gofore's existing professional services offering needed by customers in their digital transformation, like you have already—like you have already heard. And on top of that, the Qentinel's quality assurance expertise improves Gofore's ability to act as a principal provider within large-scale transformation projects. And at this point, I would like to ask both Elja and Aki to join me, and we will have a QA session regarding our offering.
Thank you, Elja, Aki, and Miika, for the presentations. For the time being, we don't have any questions.
Mm-hmm.
So a reminder to the audience that please keep sending us your questions, use the chat feature to do that. We still have two Q&A slots to come, so there's still plenty of time to ask us your questions.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So good afternoon, and welcome back to Gofore Capital Markets Day. My name is Kristiina Härkönen, and I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer at Gofore. So before I start, I would like to remind you that you can leave your questions any time during the presentations, and we will answer your questions in the Q&A sessions later. So, first, a few words about myself. I have been working in Gofore for 18 years now, so pretty long time, almost from the start of this company. And I think I'm very happy and honored that I have had the opportunity to see the growth and change and success of this company. So I've been working in many different positions, but my current position, it is Chief Sustainability Officer. So today, I'm here to tell you about sustainability in Gofore and our corporate responsibility work.
In the beginning, I would like to emphasize that even though, of course, we think that sustainability is a very important thing on itself, we also like to link it as a commercial opportunity. We see sustainability as a thing that has potential to open new markets for us. Digitalization is here to solve the world's challenges. The biggest of these challenges, and most urgent today, are the ones that are related to sustainability. Maybe the most urgent challenge is climate change. It has been said that we might have only 10 years time left until we need to find solutions to climate change, find ways how to mitigate it, and how to reduce climate emissions. There is huge potential in digital solutions to do that.
It has been estimated by World Economic Forum that even 15% of the current climate emissions could be reduced if we used the existing digital technologies, which mean the technologies that are widely used currently in many different industries and many areas, but right now, they have not applied in their full potential into things like fighting climate change. This is exactly what we Goforeans want to be doing more and more in the future. Some examples of the tools that can be used to reduce climate change or fight another sustainability challenges are things like big data usage, storing big data, sharing it, and processing it further. Digitalization has potential to create new ways of thinking that can help to create more sustainable future by using, for example, technologies like artificial intelligence.
Digitalization can help to create new operating models that are more sustainable than the old ones. By digital tools, we can create more efficient information sharing and channels, which is vital. In short, I think we need to create better systemic understanding if we want to solve these huge systemic problems. A systemic understanding, in the wide sense, can only be accomplished by using digital technologies and processing of data. As I said, I think this is also a business opportunity. Digitalization can help us to create new business models that are more sustainable. It's important enabler behind circular economy and platform economy. Digitalization can help to make production processes more efficient. By digital tools, we can help organizations to develop more sustainable.
And I think very inspiring thing here is that everything I just said, and all this is in the core of our company, because from the very beginning of this company, our mission has been to change the world for the better. So in this picture, is illustrated how we in Gofore see the layers of ethical work life. In the base of everything is our company purpose and our ethical foundation. And our purpose is to radiate goodness around us. And this means we want to radiate goodness to all of our stakeholders, not just our customers or employees, but to the whole society in general. And I think this is something that really differentiates us, because this is so strongly built in our company culture from the very beginning, and we have also been very strongly value-led all the time.
Gofore has two very basic concrete values: We are a good workplace for everyone, and we understand that we thrive on customer success. These values are very strongly interrelated. If we are a good workplace for everyone, then we can have the best talent on the field, and we are able to keep these people, and we are able to keep them happy and motivated. And we strongly believe that happy and motivated people are the ones that can create innovative solutions that help our customer success.... Then we have our code of conduct that acts as our moral compass. Our code of conduct tells us how to treat partners, how to treat customers, and how we should treat each other. Code of conduct is divided in three different themes. It tells what it means to be a responsible business.
It means what we need to do to build a culture of communality, and it also tells how we are going to act so that we can create positive impact to society. Then based on this code of conduct, we have more detailed guidance, things like our environmental guidance, and it tells us in more detailed way, things like how do we make procurements, how can we save energy, and things like that. And based on all this, is the individual action of every Goforean in their daily work. And in my opinion, I think very important thing here is that we need to give sense of meaning to everyone who is working at Gofore.
I think that most of the people are not motivated only by their paycheck, but they are motivated of the feeling that they are doing something impactful, that they are leaving a trace to the world. And this is very important thing for us, and it has been all the time. So as I said, I have been working in Gofore for 18 years, and when I started, this was just a very small group of very passionate young people on a mission to change the world for the better, and also, in the same time, create good workplace for themselves. And I think, it's great to say that these things haven't changed so much during the years. So our value base, our purpose, our mission, they have been pretty constant all the time, and this—I think this is very important thing that is behind our success.
So in Gofore, we have recognized four most important sustainability teams that guide our work. The first one being handprint through our customers, which means the impact we can create in our customer projects to the society or to the world or environment. And this might be the most important thing that we can do in our aim to solve global sustainability goals. Then there is responsibility as an employer. I think behind this is recognizing that our employees are our greatest asset. There would be no Gofore without Goforeans. And we also have strong responsibility to support everyone's personal and professional growth while they are working with us. Then we want to be ethical and environmentally sound all the time.
This means we don't want to leave any negative trace on our operations, and we are committed to do continuous improvement on these areas. The fourth one is good corporate citizenship. This means we see Gofore and companies in general as a part of society. Their relationship is interrelated. For corporate to be successful, it must be part of successful society. This means we need to be able to give back in every society we operate in. Next, I'd like to give you an example of a project where we have been able to fight climate change together with our customer. Our customer, Virta, this Finnish company that is creating next-generation charging services for electric vehicles in 21 different countries. We have been a key partner in their journey for many years, and we have provided them many different services.
We have helped them in their ecosystem mapping and definition, doing business design and service design and user research. We have been their partner in technological development, doing technical consultancy and also software development. And then we have helped them to create their user experience, doing user interface design and web and mobile application development. So I think, this impactful project is very important to us. And next, I would like to tell you more how we are developing our capability to understand better the impact we have. So for recent years, we have seen a huge customer need for solutions that can measure its sustainability impact. And our answer to that, that is called Gofore Good Growth, which is our own method that ensures our clients' business embed sustainability in everything they, they do. So aim is to do sustainable digitalization, design.
So what we are trying to do is to enable customers to make the principles of sustainable development a central part of their business strategy, strategy, work, and innovation. And behind it is the understanding how sustainable development creates exciting new business opportunities for our customers, and this is something that we can, we need to be able to help them in, and it also creates business opportunities for us. And also, this applies also to public and private sector. So what this means in practice, it means that in the beginning of each project, we need to set concrete sustainability targets that can be based on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or they could be based on the individual customer's own sustainability strategy. And then based on these targets, we create tangible performance indicators that can be tracked throughout the life of the project.
This also means collaboration between experts from different areas, because we understand that it's impossible to reach these sustainable development goals without interdisciplinary collaboration between experts from different areas. Then the third one is footprint of digitalization. There has been some worrying estimates about how this footprint of digitalization in environmental sense is going to increase in the future years. I think this is really something that companies like Gofore and other companies in our field really need to pay attention to. So it is our responsibility to find ways how we could reduce the environmental footprint of digitalization.
The methods of doing this is finding ways how to create software that is more energy efficient or finding infrastructure platforms that are energy efficient, and also to use those platforms that use energy that is produced in a carbon neutral way. Then I would like to give an example of our charity work. Baltic Sea Action Group is a Finnish NGO that is protecting Baltic Sea, but also it is promoting carbon sequestration into farmland by regenerative agriculture methods. We have been their partner a little bit more than a year now, and from last autumn, we have been member of their Carbon Action Network. Carbon Action is network of Finnish companies, mostly from food industry or retail store chains.
But what we are doing, as a member of Carbon Action Network, we want to pre-bring our expertise in designing and developing, data and data-enable-enabled technologies for regenerative agriculture. I think the great thing in regenerative agriculture is that it is multi-beneficial. It not only mitigates climate change, but it also helps to protect biodiversity and waters. We want to be continuously improving our ways of working. We are committed to reach carbon neutrality this year. And one way how we are going to accomplish this is that all of our offices in Finland and also abroad, are going to be certified on World Wildlife Fund Green Office Certificate during this year. So we are truly committed to put work and effort on things related to sustainability and corporate responsibility, because our aim is to be forerunner of corporate responsibility on our field.
So, as I told you in the start, I have been working at Gofore for a pretty long time now, and I think it has been very inspiring to see how our societal mission and our focus in sustainability has become, year by year, more important for us as our business grows. So thank you. That was my part. And next, I think Mikael will join me and tell more about our culture and ecosystem. Thank you.
Yes. Next section about people, culture, and ecosystem. But before I go into that, I think it's really what Kristiina just told you about sustainability and how we see sustainability at Gofore. I think it's something that is deeply embedded into the thinking of an average Goforean, that we need to be sustainable, we need to be ethical, we need to be responsible in every way and not the least in the environmentally sound way. But seeing that in the future, on an accelerating pace, this could be and will be embedded also into the work that we do for our customers, our consultancy work, our digital transformation consultancy work.
That is something that is really exciting and something that we're especially looking forward to seeing. But okay, we have, and I think several points in this presentation touched on the subject that this is a people business. And I think that should be very obvious now. This is a people business. People are what makes Gofore up. People are at the heart of this business, and that's, of course, why I, as the CEO of this company, feel very strongly about this people, culture, and ecosystem section of this presentation. When we talk about Gofore, we can say that Gofore is an IT company. We can say that Gofore is a digital transformation consultancy, and that would be very accurate.
But we could also, and I think that would be equally accurate, say that Gofore is a modern, agile, company with a unique culture. Describing Gofore from a culture perspective, and that I think embeds a lot about what culture is. Culture is a very defining thing for companies and especially for, I think for Gofore. It is an abstract word, of course, and as such, it maybe doesn't mean that much. But basically, what we mean by our culture is that it's about how we do things at Gofore. It's about people, it's about behavior that people show. It's about management, it's about everything.
And of course, what attributes that we combine with Gofore culture is low hierarchy, high trust, self-direction, a lot of things like that. And that, I think, in the end, is a huge competitive advantage, and is a huge part of why Gofore is successful. Because in the end, the culture that we have defines what kind of value we can deliver to our customers, which in turn is what this business is about. Talent attraction is an area of people operations that's something that it is really important for our growth and success.
And when we have looked at what kind of companies people looking for new places to work value, and where they want to work, we have found that there are basically three things that are important, and three things that we want to highlight as the Gofore employer brand. First one of them is the impact that we do. That the work we all Goforeans do has a positive impact and is very has a direct impact on what people's everyday lives are. And that's what I think we can provide our employees with by especially because 70%+ of our business in the public sector, and that is what is what touches all people in society.
The second thing that is valued is doing new things, constantly learning, being state-of-the-art, and that's of course a very typical thing for, I think, a technology company. And that's what we also want to provide to all of our employees. The third one is the community, the culture, the people. Do you enjoy working for Gofore? Do you think your voice is heard when you have something to say in the community? And those are things that are... All of these three things are things that really define what Gofore is and what we want to convey on our employer brand. And this is something that for our growth is really important.
I think we have been successful at it, and we are an attractive employer brand. In addition to how we are branding ourselves as employers and what kind of message we convey, of course, recruiting and actually getting the people on board and being effective at it is really, really at the heart of the growth that we do. Our business scales via the experts that we can attract. So recruiting and talent attraction as a function, as a process is really, really important for us, and that's something that we have been, I think, successful at in developing over the years.
Some things that I think are that describe the Gofore way of recruiting and talent attraction are that it's a very common effort. As it says on the slide, over 100 Goforeans participate actively in recruiting in various ways. And that's really important because that both for us as a community and for the applicant that is coming to work for Gofore, that gives a very honest picture of what it will be to work for Gofore. And that's also a very effective way of really getting the best fit of talent for Gofore. A very large amount of new recruits for Gofore come through the various networks of our people that already work for Gofore, from Goforeans' networks.
That's really important, a really important thing for us, and that's something that we actively promote and actively reward people for if they can get their friends, their acquaintances from their networks that they know are good additions to the Gofore team to work for Gofore. Constantly renewing learning is of course the thing that companies like Gofore need to do all the time. Technology is developing at an accelerating pace, and keeping up with the new technology, with the new methods and so forth, that requires constantly learning new things.
And that's, of course, also what the people working for Gofore need and want and value highly, that they can develop themselves as people, as consultants, and feel that they are going somewhere with their development. On the other hand, also, the company is completely dependent on what the people working for the company know, and dependent on their expertise. That's why at the... Well, one of the very, very or most important functions of our people operations is facilitating this learning process. And what we feel is the responsibility of Gofore as the company, is to provide a platform for people to learn on. We can't learn for the people.
We cannot force the people to learn, and we cannot, like, do it for them in any way. But we need to provide the best platform for people to really strive and learn as much as and as fast as possible. That is done by, for example, providing career paths, providing demanding projects and project rotation, teaching consulting skills, Gofore Academy, and last but certainly not least, by a very strong feedback culture, and having the tools, the digital tools, for company-wide feedback processes that... That's a really, really good way of developing people.
Diversity in the Gofore community is one of the things that we find really important, and one of the things that for the future is also an area where we want to develop and be better. Already now, we don't feel like we are only a tech company, only a computer science company. We have a lot of other people from different backgrounds, from different roles, from different educations, that add up to that technology hard core of technology and computer science knowledge that we, of course, have. But actively promoting diversity in this community, we feel is a very important way to make us more valuable for both the customers and for each other in the future. We...
Having a diverse community of experts is something that will benefit our customer, but it will also benefit our coworkers and help them learn new things, and help them learn new ways of looking at the world. Satisfied employees are the most motivated employees. Motivated employees make satisfied customers. That's something that we think is a very obvious and very important thing for us. One of the tools we use to create engagement is ownership in the company. Basically, we try to make Gofore the employees' company, and we have been rather successful at it. 57% of Goforeans owned the company shares in 2019. That number has probably gone up.
We have a continuous program, we call it the Crew Share Program, with investments into company stock. So that's a really important thing for us, and we think that's a important part also in keeping our people satisfied, which is, of course, at the very core of our business. When we talk about people, we shouldn't just focus on employees. Increasingly, the job market in Finland is changing, and we see that people, some people, prefer to work as freelancers, prefer to work for small companies, their own companies, instead of being employees at a bigger company. And that is a development in the job market that we are closely following and, of course, want to be part of.
Basically, the idea is that in the end, it doesn't matter who creates the value for our customers, which is the job of Gofore. Is it the employees, or is it the subcontractors or partners, or is it a team that is mixed of all these, these different kinds of experts, which most often is the case?... So when the job market is now changing, we want to be part of that. We want to invest in being not just a company that provides good employee experience, but also subcontracting or partnership experience.
And that at the core of that is both the culture that we have, we have a very honest and open communication culture also with our subcontractors, but also digital platform and digital tools that we can use to make it easy for them to join the network, the ecosystem. And make it easy for them to find the customer challenges that they find interesting for themselves, and can just hop in and join the team, and be part of the team that provides the value for the customer.
So in the future, we are expecting that this also, which has gone up quite significantly in the past year, the amount of work that we do via subcontracting will continue to go up also. And that's, of course, also from a business standpoint, that's an important lever for scaling or growing the business. Also, adding on expertise that maybe is more scarce and something that we cannot find inside the company at all times. Excuse me. The last part of our people presentation is the digital employee experience, how we have recoded employee interactions. And there are a few components that I want to highlight here.
First of all, one of them is that you see some pictures from... On the left-hand side is Hohto, our in-house built tool for, well, it's an ERP system, if you will, for Gofore. It's a tool for handling the talent, the expertise that we have in our people, and matching that with the needs of the customers. It's also a tool for identifying and making visible things that people want to learn, and match those with customer projects in order for people to be able to learn, as we discussed earlier. So that's a tool that is really, really at the very, very core of our employee experience.
On the right-hand side, there are pictures of some of our chatbots that actually have raised some interest also outside of Gofore. We have Seppo, the middle manager bot. He's—we like to call him the only middle manager in the company. He's the guy that reminds you of things that you, as an employee, need to do. He's the guy that brings you the information that you need for your... You being able to do your work. So, he's an all-around guy that sometimes is very annoying when he keeps nagging about things, but I think in the end, everybody at Gofore loves Seppo for the hard work that he's doing.
We have Gene, who is making certain processes, like our reporting or booking train tickets, easier for our people, automating those tedious processes that are something that people don't want to do. And we have Granny, the office grandmother that answers your other questions, if she can, and usually she can. The third part that I want to highlight of the digital part here is people analytics on a higher level. For us, it's very important to understand and work on the information about the health state of our employees.
So, understanding where we are, doing things based on that understanding, and having an analytics platform for that is really important for us, and is also something that we have invested quite a lot of effort into. So people, be they Goforeans, which they usually are, at least, for the time being, or partners that work in our ecosystem, those are, of course, at the very, very heart of our business. And that's what—why we also here at the Capital Markets Day want to talk to you about what we do with the people and what we do with our culture and the ecosystem. Now, we have a chance to take some questions and Kristiina will also be here to answer any questions that concern sustainability matters.
All right. Many, many thanks, Mikael and and Kristiina, for your, for your insightful presentations. We have a few questions, from, from Joni Grönqvist from Inderes. Firstly, in your view, what role does a sustainable and responsible brand play in recruitment?
Yes, I think it's very important thing, and I think it has been seen in our work recently than when we have put more emphasis in this and we have been more vocal in our thinking about sustainability and ethical business. It has really boosted our recruitment, so we have been connected from maybe some people that maybe are not the ones that usually connecting us, but they are interested to work in a workplace that really takes stand in this ethical standpoint.
Maybe just-
Um-
that this is of course a mega trend that we see, I think in society as a whole. If you look 10 years back, we wouldn't be talking about this, but something that could be seen maybe already 10 years back, and we talked about what millennials will value in the workplace. Now, I think that's mainstream. And if you look 5 years forward, that's certainly going to be mainstream. So I'm really happy that we are already very, very far with our work concerning sustainability at this stage, and that's something that's gonna benefit also us in the big, long run, I think.
Second, about the pro bono work Gofore is doing for sustainable and responsible customers or associations. What are we doing on that front, and could you more quantify that collaboration?
I think... Well, I don't have the strict numbers. It depends very much on the situation because we mostly like to do pro bono work when there is situations that our people might be between projects or something like that. So all the time, we try to make sure that people that are doing pro bono work, that it's not away from the, like, customer work. So I have to say, it depends on our situation and... But in general, I think pro bono work is very good thing in charity because I think in that way, we can help much better than just, like, donating money, because then we can give our own expertise. That is the thing we are best in.
All right. Thirdly, what is your thinking in terms of junior versus senior employees? Are you happy with the balance, or are you moving in some direction in the coming years?
I said, diversity is important. Of course, I think that the one asking the question also thinks from a business perspective, and that's of course, always also going to matter. But what we have built is from a diversity and expertise viewpoint first, and like a scalable cost structure second. Having said that, we are working for the market and the customers, and the projects that we are interested in to raise their maturity in terms of being for it to be for us to be possible to also employ more junior employees there, because that's not always the case.
The market has been skewed in a way, in that sense, that everybody wants the experts, the very, very experienced experts. And that leaves us with a problem in the job market, I think, and for younger people in their development, that they cannot always find projects. So that's something that's our responsibility to change and also educate our customers in that. It's also a good way, especially in this situation where expertise is scarce, to have projects and to create situations for also younger people coming maybe straight out of university and or just graduated, to find projects for them also.
Okay, moving on to subcontracting. A question from Jerker Salokivi from Evli: "Do you see any optimal share of subcontracting as a share of FTE, full-time equivalent, or will this share continue to increase or decrease as you grow further?
We expect the share to increase, and that is because of what I told in the presentation. People increasingly want other kinds of employment than traditional employment contracts. So that's going to be the natural thing, that it is going to increase. In principle, there is no optimal share between subcontracting and our own people. It's gonna, the job market and what people, what the experts value is the, well, the thing that's going to set that ratio of employees versus subcontractors in the long run. So it's gonna increase. That's our estimation.
Yeah, the last, last question about subcontracting from Joni Grönqvist from Inderes, about subcontracting in the short term. Do you expect the subcontracting to get back to October, November levels in January after the drop in December?
Not necessarily in January, but yes, during the first half, and probably quite quickly, yes.
... All right. That was the last question for this Q&A session for now.
Thank you again to the audience for your insightful, interesting questions. Next up, thank you, Kristiina, for your presentation. Next up is our CFO, Teppo, with the financial highlights. I remind you that also after that, with the closing remarks, we are going to have a Q&A session. So you can ask about all of the previous segments of our presentation at that point. And you can also already write the questions in the chat as you have up until now. But go ahead, Teppo. Maybe introduce yourself and then dive into the financial highlights.
Yeah. Thank you, Mikael. So, I'm Teppo Talvinko, CFO of Gofore, having plus 15 years experience from different industries, different businesses as a CFO. Now, joined Gofore team in May 2020. So that's briefly, and really nice to have you all here today. As discussed before, we have a people-centric, efficient, agile modus operandi. And so let's have a look at how all this reflects to our financials, and especially in net sales and profitability, cash flow, and balance sheet. So the following slides will open up our strong position to continue the profitable growth. Our aim is to grow faster than the market.
As you can see, the growth has really been fast. CAGR is almost 40% over the period. As discussed earlier, we have there two components: strong organic growth, and that is boosted by successful, well-fitted acquisitions. On the right-hand side, you can see main drivers. It's our home market, Finland, and a great success in public sector. What are the key factors behind the growth? As we have discussed earlier, it's our satisfied customers, our capabilities, know-how, and customer-friendly, agile model. They have brought value added to our customers and really strong position in the market. Okay. The past year has been quite exceptional. We have a COVID pandemic going on. COVID-19 has been an issue in the business almost a year now.
It has increased our uncertainty in the market, and that's also the situation in Gofore. However, going back to our business and our performance, as you have seen, there has not been any major impact to Gofore so far. Growth has continued and profitability has increased. You probably have noticed from this morning that we deliver our net sales figures on a monthly basis. So let's have a look at our monthly development. We have been able to outpace the net sales year-on-year basis, and the growth up to September has mainly been organic. We made an acquisition in September, Qentinel Finland, and that has, as you can see, given us a clear jump in sales from September onwards.
But let's keep in mind that organic growth during the first three quarters has also been double digit, so it's not only coming from acquisition. For the business in Finland, I think this is a great thing. From our net sales, around 90% come from our home market, Finland. This is very strong basis, creating a strong cash flow and profitability. By sector, the growth among public sector customers has been delightful. I think it gives us an interesting starting point to our international business, too. As an example, discussed earlier, X-Road Technology in Estonia, where we are a development partner. That is an opportunity to us in terms of technology, in terms of doing. The public sector has kept up good speed in their digitalization, despite the virus.
As Mika has stated earlier, so we see that the market is developing positively in the future, too. About our subcontracting ecosystem, that's important to us. Our aim is to bring value added not only to our customers, but also to our ecosystem. It's a tool for us to accelerate growth, broaden our offering, and also create partnerships. We speak about a subcontracting experience. There has been a decent and steady development in our EBITA. That is our main profitability KPI. And 2020, we are back on improving EBITA margins. The key drivers there have been steady growth, of course, but also we have been able to improve our billing rates, and that's through our successful capacity management.
We have a wonderful tool for that, Hohto, and also those tools that Mika just mentioned, Seppo bot and things like that. So you can see both FAS , our local GAAP, and IFRS figures for the last or the latest periods. So how is this affecting to us? Let's take a look at the transition bridge. Yes, this will certainly bring us some differences to balance sheet and in our P&L. And of course, there is no impact on cash flow. So main classification differences are, you know, considering business combinations, how goodwill or transaction costs are handled, leases, that's a big impact on our balance sheet, and of course, equity share programs, share-based payments. Those are the main items to affect on a baseline.
With the current business structure, new baseline is about 0.4 percentage points lower than the previous local GAAP. Our strategy is to growth, and I think we have a good position for that. It's organic growth, but it's also acquisitions. Our ability to generate strong cash flow, that's together with a strong balance sheet, we feel that it allows us to continue our growth with the selected acquisitions. So let me wrap up. So we are in the front line of providing digi consultancy. We have high customer satisfaction. We have a really efficient, agile, people-oriented operational model. That all gives us a solid basis for profitable growth, and we feel it will bring us a strong cash flow and balance it for further acquisitions, too. Any questions?
Thank you. Thank you, Teppo, for the good presentation. One question from Dave regarding the revenue billing per FTE, and how this compares to the industry overall.
Industry?
How it compares to the industry overall.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. You know, every company, they have their own style of measuring things. And in our case, when we talk about billing rate, that's the whole personnel that we have in place and counting that into our billing rate. So, it's hard to compare to business overall and make comparisons in that sense. But, we feel that even though we are in around 70% currently, so there is well room for improving billing rate, which is actually our key operational KPI. So we follow that on a weekly basis, and we are very, very aware of the importance of that.
There is still room for improving billing rate, which of course has a positive effect on our margin levels.
... to that, if comparing net sales per FTE, keeping in mind that in the industry, there are also companies that have other kinds of business model than the pure consultancy model might affect that. So maybe just keep that in mind when doing those comparisons. With 100% of Gofore businesses is consultancy business, so that's our position Okay. Maybe we could take a couple of questions, maybe also targeted to other presenters today. A question from Ville [Surname]
We are, of course, not experts in what Netcompany business is. We are using it as a benchmark, and what we have seen in their business model is that they have been highly successful in taking in junior experts, taking in people directly from universities, graduates, and being effective at employing those people in customer projects. So that's gonna be a huge competitive advantage for them, and that's something, of course, that not just us, I believe that many others also will want to look into and maybe try to do it ourselves.
But that it is a big difference between how most of our competitors and/or Gofore does things, and we believe that is a big factor in their profitability.
Okay. A question about the 15% long-term EBITA targets. Why? Why only?
Yeah, we get that question a lot. Yeah, it depends on what you want to compare with, if that is only or if that is a very ambitious target. We feel that our reference group are the Finnish companies that are in the same business as us. And 15% in that reference group is very good, and that's what we use as a main reference group. Of course, we are going to try to be better at that.
But with our history and with our business model and the structure that we have, we feel that 15% is a very realistic target, and if and hopefully when we can reach that, we also will feel that we have done a very good job and we'll be one of the more successful companies in the business.
Okay. Moving on, or actually maybe going back, about service or offering, a question from Joni Grönqvist from Inderes, about the competitive advantages in quality assurance compared to offshore low price suppliers. What is your view?
So maybe that's something that Mika would like to answer. It was a question about, is there a competitive advantage between nearshoring or offshoring providers and doing that work in Finland? I think it has an idea inside it that testing work would be something that is extremely easy to offshore, which we, I guess, don't agree with.
Yeah. First of all, I would say that we have really comprehensive subcontractor network. But the most important thing is that we have been able to scale up our quality assurance services in that way that we have a so-called professional services hub, and we can scale up the services from really kind of couple of hours testing task to sprints. So the same team is providing the services for many customers. And we believe that the value or business outcome that we can provide using that team is what our customers are looking for at the moment, not the pricing.
They really would like to see that we can provide the business outcomes for them.
Would it also be correct to say that, when we look at digital quality assurance, we see a continuing and accelerating change into automated quality assurance, not testing as such, maybe that Joni who posed the question, but was thinking of a very high-level expertise of which can be compared to software development work in automating of that testing pipeline and making it a fully automated and agile and quick.
Yes, you are absolutely right, because there is a method or ism at the moment called hyperautomation, and the buzzword behind of that is that everything that can be automated with an organization should be automated. So if organizations are automating their operating models, of course they are looking for possibilities to automate the testing. Mm-hmm. Exactly, yes.
... Yeah, maybe using that also as a kind of a bridge to our comprehensive offering idea. As just explained by especially Aki in the offering part of our presentation, we do software development work with Agile methods. And we have a good understanding and excellent understanding, the best understanding in Finland in quality assurance and test automation. Combining those two things and having an integrated approach to Agile software development, including the quality assurance, will give our customers a competitive edge in terms of quality, in terms of speed of development, and in terms of being able to ship ready-made code on a very fast cycle.
All right. I have a question about the operating leverage. So how much can we grow without growing the cost base?
Yeah. I would say that, what it comes to scalability, so, half of the OpEx is something that we consider to be scalable. So in that sense, we feel that we have a good setup and good scalability, when having a further growth and we are growing and making acquisitions. So we feel that OpEx is not developing as fast as our business otherwise. So there is a scalability. And of course, going back to that question, so we have this subcontracting ecosystem, which is very good.
It's a way, as Mikael told earlier, so that's a good way of boosting and accelerating growth. Of course, if you want to turn it backwards, there is a certain flexibility too. But it's a way of boosting a growth without having negative impact on leverage. And finally, as I said, so we have, we feel that we still have some, well, room improving our billing rate. So, those are the main components that we feel that we have a good grip on how to keep the level and improve our margins in that sense.
Okay. About our good profitability, Joni Grönqvist is from Inderes. You know, sent us the question: Which are the main profitability drivers of further improvement, since compared to the Finnish, our Finnish peers, we already have very good profitability?
Well, well, in terms of, Teppo can fill in here, but, but, I think it's quite, quite simple that the, the profitability factors are customer prices, it's, it's, salaries, and it's, billing rate that Teppo has been referencing, on multiple occasions here. And, and, then there are other, other components like the, the scalable OpEx, component, but, but it's those three components that will make up that, profitability, well, that will, give us the profitability rating. And in the short term, the big thing here is that, a profitable company needs to have a, a good rate of, of billing, billing rate, and, that's something that we can do. We are structurally very well built for that, and, we have a lean organization.
As we explained in the beginning of the presentation, a ratio of 11 to 1 between customer-facing people and, on the other hand, non-customer-facing people, like administration, sales, and other things that are, of course, needed in the company. But that, in turn, is a result of the operating model that we have. We have a extremely self-directive culture, and we have the digital tools to support that culture on a bigger scale.
Yeah. And we have a really good grip on our top line, so visibility of long-term agreements and that also gives us visibility, but it also gives us efficiency, which is profitability.
So, for now, we don't have any more questions from the audience. So at least for my part, I would very much like to thank everyone for your participation and for your very good questions. And I really do wish everyone a very nice afternoon. Thank you. Thank you very much.
And maybe just a quick closing remarks here. And I also want to thank both Nina and especially everybody who has been listening to our, as I said, first Capital Markets Day. I'm hoping we have managed to provide you with a better insight to what Gofore is and where we are heading. I'm especially happy that we have been able to present to you the very fine management team that we have, who are, of course, the masterminds behind where we are now, and especially our strategy. And they will be also the people responsible for delivering on that strategy and the daily operations.
So I'm very happy that we had the chance to present the management team to all of you listening to the stream. Maybe just reminding that there will be the Main Market switch on the Helsinki Stock Exchange during first quarter. Maybe something to keep your eyes on. And just remind you on the investment highlights that we went through in the beginning. And maybe it wasn't quite highlighted enough here that we just this morning released the latest KPIs for December. And that means that for the fourth quarter, we had a good continuation to the track record that we feel is really, really successful.
We had a 40% year-over-year growth for the fourth quarter, and that, I think, is good evidence that we are on a good track going forwards also. What we have for the future is the people, we have the offering, and we have the business that is set up for our customers' future problems and solving those. So when we come out of the COVID pandemic or maybe even before that, I think we can find that in that marketplace, the Goforeans and the expertise that the Goforeans have are needed more than ever, both for developing businesses and also for developing society and everyday life of all of us.
Thank you all for listening, and have a good day!