Welcome, everybody, near and far, to the Capital Markets Day 2025 by Inderes, broadcasting direct from Flik Eliel event studio in Helsinki, Finland. It is an absolute honor to have so many of you partaking our key shareholder event of the year. My name is Eero Alasuutari, and I will humbly serve as your host for today's event. What an event it will be. We have an agenda packed with strategy, products, and, of course, amazing people. We will begin the day with a dive to our updated strategy. After that, there will be a short coffee break followed by a delightful session on our products. Finally, after approximately an hour and 45 minutes, we'll host a short Q&A session. In addition to the dedicated Q&A session, we'll be doing these rapid-fire interviews after each presentation, providing there's time for them.
Please keep your questions coming throughout the event, and we'll be able to ask them possibly also after the presentations. You can send your questions via the viewing page chat if you're participating online. Here in the studio, you can use the QR code found on the little cardboard house thingy next to you on the tables. You can also ask your questions live using your own voice by raising your hand, and we'll bring over a microphone. That's an option as well. Now, without further ado, I would like to invite to the stage our very own CEO, Mikael Rautanen, to kick off the jam. Welcome, Mikael.
Welcome to the second Capital Markets Day of Inderes as a publicly listed company. We announced a strategy update this morning, and we're going to walk you through that update during the next two hours, and also how we have set out to build the most investor-minded company in our industry. But let's first zoom out to where we are in the journey of Inderes. This company has reinvented itself multiple times in the history, and we are again in a phase where we are reinventing ourselves. We started off with building the equity research business. From there, we expanded the product portfolio to cover investor relations events, AGMs, and investor relations software, still keeping our eye on the investor relations as the buyer for our products. That was a really successful ride.
Soon we realized that if we want to continue to grow, we need to go outside Finland because we were running out of room to grow in Finland. We want to keep challenging ourselves to the next big challenges. The past two years have been really much for us about adapting and learning. In terms of adapting, we went from a booming market into a bear market. We had strong tailwind turning into headwind. So we've had to adapt to those change conditions. At the same time, we've been taking this business that has been very local into the international markets. So that's been a kind of like a learning journey for us. Some of the go-to-market hypotheses we set out two years ago, we figured that they don't work, and we had to reevaluate the go-to-market strategies we have for the international growth.
Now we are organized into three businesses that each have their own go-to-market strategies. We had the capital markets day here two years ago. It's time to give a bit of an update. What have we done and what have we learned? We've kept improving our financials even though it's been tough market conditions. We've kept investing aggressively into our product portfolio, which today you will see is stronger than ever. We've migrated the whole backbone of the Inderes operating model, the technology platform, into a new fresh technology platform. Miikka will tell you about that today. We've expanded our distribution network to reach an even bigger group of investors for our customers. The software business has shifted from the R&D phase to commercial scaling.
At the same time, we need to admit that two and a half years ago we did an acquisition in Sweden, and that integration has been a challenging one. It has taken, it took longer than we expected. If you look at our share of international revenue, it's roughly the same level as it was two years ago. We need to be humble that if we set out to grow internationally and in two years it's at the same level, we have not been successful in growing internationally. We need to redefine the go-to-market recipe we have. However, it has become clear for us that there is a niche and need for our solutions in the market. To tackle that opportunity, we are now organized into a new structure. This structure that we have, this is not something that we plan to do.
We have actually regrouped the whole organization to work with this structure. So we have three strong businesses: research, events, and software. Each of these businesses, because they are quite different business models in nature, they are in different development stages, they need to be taken to international growth with their own go-to-market recipes. We can't put everything into one basket like we did in our last strategy and try to go with the broad product portfolio. We are going with a new recipe, and you will hear more detailed plans of each of these businesses today. What remains unchanged is that we continue to democratize financial information by connecting listed companies and investors. There is a need for this type of platform.
We are going into the age of AI, more and more noise and content flooding into the markets, and investors face the problem: what information can I trust? Inderes is working as the trusted platform between the listed companies and investors. There's a need for that also in the future. There is a big need for this with our customers. This is an example of the typical customer of Inderes, the problems they are facing in their daily lives. We understand those problems as a publicly listed company also ourselves. The IR, it's a massive problem for the whole market ecosystem, lack of liquidity, especially in the small and mid-cap companies. How can you solve liquidity? You need better investor communications. You need to access the retail investors. Retail brings the liquidity for the stocks. IR can no longer ignore the retail.
Small and mid-cap companies are suffering from lack of analyst coverage. We have a proven model for that. The IR communications is moving from the closed cigar cabinets of the financial industry into the open digital world where you can serve all investors transparently at the same time. But the IR needs help with that, and we have the solution for that. Also, listed companies are facing increasing complexity and cost in running their IR operation. We need to make the life of being a listed company more simple and cheaper. We can say this as a listed company ourselves. If you look at those problems that I just explained, and then you look at the competitive landscape, who are the providers solving these problems for the customers, you find out that usually it's some kind of a generalist whose core business is not investor relations.
What we have as our core business is usually some kind of a side business for the other providers. We've identified that there is clearly a need for a player that has strategic focus in the investor relations category. We have strong competitive advantages to work on this category. This is the Inderes recipe you will learn in the other presentations that we apply in all of our products. We have deep expertise. We understand the investors because this company was born to serve the investors. So we understand the customer's customer, and we also understand the life of the customer, the investor relations. Our offering is integrated to a shared technology platform, and we have the reach to reach out in the digital world, the relevant target groups for the IR. At the same time, we're humble that this is not going to be an easy journey.
There's a lot of obstacles we need to tackle in our strategy. We need to transform this company into an international culture. We are not quite yet there. We need to build international brand recognition for this company. We have a really strong brand in Finland. We need to scale that internationally. We need to find the right go-to-market models for each of the businesses. This company has been always pushing the change in this conservative industry. We need to keep doing that and have also patience to push that change. To sum it up, today you will learn how for the next phase we have an excellent team. We have clear critical focus areas. We have clear competitive advantages. There's a need for our products in the market, and we have a proven business model to take on that opportunity. Thank you.
Thank you, Mikael. Before I let you off the stage, a quick question. Please tell us, what have been the key realizations upon crafting the new strategy with the team?
Yeah, when we went through the markets on the international level, we found out that there are not that many or almost none IR investor relations focused companies out there. Like Inderes with $18 million revenue, we are in Europe level one of the biggest vendors already, or even globally one of the biggest. So I believe that long term there will form specialized strong players, one or two, maybe three to this market, both in Europe level and globally.
Thank you, Mikael.
Thank you, Eero.
The next speaker will take us to, you could say, the original core of the Inderes value proposition of connecting investors and listed companies, providing us a deep dive into the research business strategy. Antti Luiro, welcome.
All right, hello on my behalf as well. Shall we talk about research business? Let's start from the market opportunity and then dive a little bit deeper into what we are doing within this field. First of all, I think what's important to see is that there is a clear opportunity in bringing research to all investors and all companies. If you start from the company side, in the European Union alone, only around 20% of small and mid-caps have analyst coverage. In Finland, the number is 90%, and Inderes has been contributing quite significantly to this number. So there's a big gap in coverage. This gap won't be solved by investment banking-driven research because these research coverages are focused on only large companies and are available only to big investors. So a huge part of the market is not being served by these models.
The 99% retail and also lots of large investors who don't have access to research cannot be ignored because retail investing is on the rise and retail investors continuously have more impact on share price and liquidity of companies. They can organize in online communities, for example, and have more power than one individual. The challenge for companies is that where do these people get their information? In social media, there's a big risk of misinformation spreading like wildfire, and with AI tools, it is only getting more pressing. If companies don't help their investors get good quality information on the company, they risk losing control of their equity story in the market. Now, you might wonder, why has Finland been such a high performer in analyst coverage in small and mid-cap companies?
We think there's a clear answer to that because there are two realities in the research market. There's two ways to do commissioned research. There's a marketing way, and there's an independent way. If we look at Nordic and some European players and their views on the customer companies who pay for the research, we actually see that the prevalent model is to avoid negative views on the companies. Sort of market the company rather than observe it critically. In Finland, the model is vastly different. Inderes is also representing this model. There we see that critical views on customer companies are a norm rather than an exception. Why this matters? If you have an analyst that seems to avoid negative views, as an investor, you could question their credibility when they give positive views.
Would you trust their positive views if you don't know they will give their negative views when they have it? Ultimately, if the investors do not trust the research, how much impact can it have for the company that pays for it? We think this is the fundamental question why we haven't seen another player like Inderes when we've been looking outside Finland. The only way to do sustainable business in this field is by being independent and focused on investors. The approach we take is very similar to the credit rating industry. We think research providers compete for the trust of investors. Whichever provider is most trusted by investors, they are the one that can deliver most value to investors as well.
Inderes has been built on this approach from the very beginning, even so much that our name comes from that, Inderes Independent Equity Research. We have chosen that we will always rather lose customers than our independence. That is a prerequisite for running this kind of a business model in the long run. We've shown that it works. In Finland, we have over 70% coverage in the market overall. But this model, as I said, it's not new. In the credit rating industry, this has been the model for a long time. If you look at the credit rating agencies and how the bankruptcy rates of the companies that they give ratings for develop in the highest credit rating classes all the way to the more risky ones, you can see that the bankruptcy rates increase when you go to the riskier levels.
You can see this exact same kind of trend in our recommendations. The stronger our positive view, the stronger returns we have shown our research can generate and vice versa for the negative views. You can run your own numbers on our data, so we've open-sourced it, and you can find the link on Inderes' service. Why do customers choose Inderes? It's a combination of two things: quality work that investors trust, and then broad distribution. Obviously, the work is done by people. This is a people business, so it's important that we have a passionate and ambitious equity research team that works very actively to generate engaging content for investors. On the reach, we have our own modern platform, which we think is the best way to consume research. Obviously, not yet all investors have visited our site.
We also have a really broad global and Nordic distribution network across institutions and retail alike. I would dare to say that it's, if not the best, one of the best in the research field overall. With this backbone, we think there's a clear value creation opportunity in growing research business internationally. The business model is recurring, and the customers stay very long. Usually, delistings only happen from, or churn happens mostly from delistings if the company leaves the stock exchange. The business has moat from network effects and also scale benefits. We've proven that the concept we have works, and it provides value to both investors and listed companies. The nice thing about growing this business is that it's not just growing a business, but the larger we get, the more investment information gets democratized.
It actually feels pretty good to be building this business. What have we done? Last few years has been all about working on some things in the background. Our market position in Finland has matured, so all the significant growth needs to come from abroad. We've started this journey in Sweden, which is our testing ground to develop a scalable market open approach. It takes a lot of iteration to learn this, but in the first market we do the learnings, we try to iterate fast. The next markets should then be easier to do. We've also upgraded our technology platform, big work, from moving from our legacy investor platform to a new one. A lot of things in the background that maybe have not been so visible to the outside, but it definitely has put us in the right place.
The focus for us going forward is that we will be converting some of our local network effects to cross-border, meaning that we have a lot of content in Finnish, we have a large community in Finland, but this does not go to other countries because of the language barrier. So our plan is to break down these language barriers and build this business into a more international business where the network effects that we already have scale across countries. We will continue to solve growth bottlenecks in Sweden. The clear one we see in sight is brand awareness. We will keep our investments stable until we have a good growth recipe. You can imagine we're quite disciplined in allocating capital since it's a team of analysts. But we won't forget the core product and our community in Finland either.
What we're doing as well is we're upgrading our full research product. One of the examples is moving from PDF reports to online reports to have a better user experience for investors on mobile and other devices as well. This also allows us to embed AI into our processes. Keep up high quality, but also bring more formats of content to investors. Where should this take us if we're successful? We should want to build the most influential Nordic equity research team in terms of coverage and investor reach. We say influential for a reason, because that means we have to keep the high quality of our work so that it actually influences investors, so it's trustworthy. Thank you.
Thank you, Antti. Quick question before you go. Please enlighten us. What is the differentiating USP or unique selling point for Inderes' research on a global scale or globally?
I think it's the independent approach. What the company is ultimately buying is a service for their investors. It really needs to be something that the investors value and serves the investors' needs. If you are buying a marketing service, it might give also implication that are you able to stand on your own two feet as a company if you need to have a marketing service for your company? Or can you be scrutinized by an independent analyst house? I think this is something that resonates really well in companies, and many of them ask us to provide evidence that we are a credible provider because they see reputation risks if they take a paid research provider that does marketing for investors.
Great. Thank you once again, Antti Luiro.
Thanks.
For the next one, we'll move over from research to the audiovisual landscape. Let's welcome Jenny Cederqvist from Events Business.
Hello everyone. Happy to see you all here and happy to see you all online. This is what we do for a living, making events happen. I'm going to talk about the events business today, and I'll start with quite the bold statement. If there's one thing I want you to take away from this presentation, it is that live events are inevitable for transparent communications. Let's go through why this and how Inderes comes into play. The rules are changing. Authorities, like already mentioned before today, ESMA, are getting stricter about investor equality. Every investor should get the same information at the same time, no matter where they are or who they are. This is where events, especially live events and hybrid events, come into play. They are one of the few ways where companies can actually meet the standard.
Investors want to see and hear directly from the people behind the numbers. Investors want to know what's real. A live event, it's available, it's transparent, it's authentic, and it's accountable. It's still the best way to cut through the noise. You may have seen some of the recent online debates about the issue. Retail investors have been a bit vocal when they have been left out of selective briefings. People escalate, they share screenshots, and trust breaks fast. Yes, not doing open, well-structured events is taking a risk. Let's look at the timeline a bit. IR communication as such has not changed much during the last five years or ten years, but the event business has changed. We've gone from being a really smallish Finnish production company into joining Inderes in building the Nordic IR event business.
We went through the pandemic online boom with great growth, straight into the post-pandemic surge of online hangover, and then today when hybrid again is taking over. We've navigated acquisitions, integration, virtual setups, globalization, all at once. We've grown from under 40 clients and about EUR 3 million in revenue to, as of today, over 300 IR clients, not to mention the non-IR we have, and over EUR 8.5 million in revenue. That makes us not just one of the fastest growing parts of Inderes, but also, by some measure at least, the biggest business unit. We have over 30 team members and at least double the amount of freelancers working for Inderes events. Now we are moving towards being the Nordic IR-focused events agency.
We're ready to serve everything from small startups with cost efficiency—that's a really difficult word, but I got it—to big listed companies with very, very complicated AGMs. We do it with clarity, tech, and care. So why do companies choose us? Well, it's the expertise. We spent years building our brand and the event production and event investor relations. We live and breathe hybrid. That's what we do. We are the trusted partner of both big events and the small ones. We have the reach through the whole Inderes platform and network. We connect to the Inderes platform, and our customer content also reaches targeted private investor audience. We have the global distribution, of course, and local media and social media. Of course, the thing that combines all of this is the platform. Our tech is built specifically for IR use.
It's made for creating two-way communication between companies and investors, and it's secure and it's reliable. When you combine all of these, you can get an event partner that delivers. Now the Nordic growth opportunity is real. Finland is very mature. We have the major market. Sweden is now ready to grow. We've done some restructuring during this year, and now we have a very strong base. Norway is started, and in Denmark, you will later hear from HC Andersen about what we are doing in Denmark. We've got the product, we've got the platform, and we've got the audience. Finally, tying this back to the whole Inderes story. When Mikael talks about Inderes as the most investor-minded company in finance, this is what it looks like in events.
We are creating more tools that scale for us and the clients through automation and using AI, scaling from small to big AGMs again. We are focusing on trust and transparency in the center, being live and being authentic. We're going to help listed companies become better communicators using AI attached to live events to create different kinds of content types from one singular event so that you can reach all the audiences, also kind of the youngsters that only use TikTok or other for collecting information. We'll continue to scale the distribution to reach even wider audiences. We will be the default IR-focused agency across the Nordics. But even more importantly, of course, we'll keep being human in a world that is increasingly automated.
As all the people here in the studio, the people there behind the screen, you always meet a person when you come to our events, and we will take care of you. We're not just building an events business. We're shaping how investor communications will happen in the next decade. I'll repeat what I said in the beginning. Live events are inevitable for transparent communications. Thank you.
Thank you, Jenny.
Do we have time for the question?
Unfortunately, no.
Yes.
We ran out of it.
Thank you. Take care.
Thank you, Jenny Cederqvist. All right, we will move onwards in the agenda. Next up is the business that is seeing the biggest growth at the moment within Inderes. Let's give a warm welcome to Janne Vainionpää with the IR software business.
All right. Hello, everybody here at the studio and watching this online. The main theme for software business in this strategy period is scaling the business internationally. Related to that, I will be covering three topics today, key issues for a software business to thrive. First, let's have a look at the customer. What are the characteristics and issues that we are solving and justifying our software business to exist? Secondly, how does our product address the market, the customer needs, and what are the elements making us a relevant alternative for our target clients? Thirdly, giving some insights about our recipe for scaling the software business in our home markets and internationally. Looking at the target customers, our operating domain is obviously investor relations and investor communications. The main buyer profile is basically IR managers, IR directors, and in small cap companies, often the CXOs.
The need for software solutions could be categorized into two different categories. First, you have the regulatory requirements, which is a must-have. As an example, you need to have a news distribution system to release various types of information to the market. Secondly, in order to drive shareholder value, you need to do good IR, meaning communicating consistently, transparently, telling your story professionally, and also understanding how the investors are evaluating your company. And of course, reaching your key audience, the current and potential investors. Currently, all listed companies are utilizing some software products to meet these two needs: press release systems, stock and owner features to website, specific IR website solutions, IR CRMs, tools for events, and so on.
As of today, the company would typically have several suppliers to address the needs, several products that are not exchanging any data with each other and unnecessarily complicating and causing inefficiency to the IR operations. To address that gap, we have just released the IR Suite, bundling all the essential tools for IR operations in one dashboard. Our software products are already having a significant market share in Finland: the IR event platform, AGM solution and services, press release system, IR widgets, and IR website. These are now all accessible through the same intuitive interface. While still maintaining the option to pick and mix the products that you need, the IR Suite bundles bring great value for IR operations.
One supplier for all the essential tools enables simplicity, ease of use, and also, as the different tools are natively connected to each other, automation of many routine tasks is made possible. This brings efficiency into operations, translating into cost savings. Furthermore, as the data between the different tools flows smoothly, the IR Suite enables insights about your owners and potential investors as never before. So why would we be able to generate better value than our competitors, giving us edge in the competition? First, compared to a traditional software company, our solutions stem from very high-level domain knowledge. Secondly, the reach natively inbuilt in our business model, the 65,000 active members in our community, gives us almost an unfair edge to learn about what is it that investors actually need and appreciate.
This knowledge we can transform into relevant features in our products instead of investing in building and maintaining features that don't generate any value. The in-house domain expertise and the reach enable us to build a remarkable platform. Moving on to the final part of the presentation, the scaling. Our top-line development so far shows that we have been successful in finding the product-market fit, as all our software products already have a significant market share in our home market. The very exciting phase today is that we are still in the early stages of the scaling to international markets. In terms of going international, Videosync is leading our internal race of ticking new country boxes with several agency partners across Europe, out of which the one announced last November is a player with wide coverage in many European countries.
This partnership is progressing as planned, and the platform is already in use in many of their events, with the target to cover all their events by the end of this year. The IR tools have first real customers in Sweden and in Denmark, and we are confident in our ability to gain market share by cross-selling of our IR tools to our wide existing IR event client base. So as an overview, our go-to-market consists of three different models. In Finland and Sweden, we are applying the sales-l ed motion. The main pillars are using our own Salesforce to cross-sell software to our existing client base and to tap into the IPOs with our software offering.
There's still plenty of untapped potential in our existing client base, and we are confident that with our newly launched IR Suite, we'll be able to accelerate the adoption of our software offering. The product-led motion in our case means, in practice, utilizing digital channels for lead generation and self-service trials added with personal onboarding. Our experience shows that the IR decision-makers are not very keen to adopt solutions without personal sales, but we are starting some pilots to test the customer acquisition cost in this area, especially in terms of the self-service IR event platform. For the partner channel, our IR Suite brings a great opportunity to capitalize. The IR Suite, containing all the essentials for the IR operations with a reasonable price point, makes it an attractive alternative for channel partners to resell and build their own service layer on top of the platform.
Our key target is to expand our already existing partner channels, HCA in Denmark, and the agency partners of Videosync to include also channel partners for the whole IR Suite platform in Europe. So wrapping it up, building the offering with the point products and proving the potential in the home market is done, and now entering the next phase of R&D and go-to-market, enhancing the capabilities of our unified platform for IR ops. I haven't mentioned AI even once so far in the presentation, and we are in the final minute, so let's put it out there. Bringing value with the help of AI embedded into our solution is a given, obviously a relevant part of our R&D, enhancing our platform capabilities, for example, in areas of process automation, content crunching, content generation, data insights, and data visualization.
We are in a very exciting phase, and with our motivated and capable team and with the continued dialogue with both our clients and our investor community, we are confident we will be able to build a strong international software business. Thank you.
Thank you, Janne Vainionpää. As you can see from the clock, we're over time, so you're exempt without rapid fire, please. Thank you. Now, to conclude our first half of today's show, I'd like to invite to the stage a very special guest, our friend and partner from Denmark, from HC Andersen Capital, Mr. Tue Østergård. Welcome, Tue.
Thank you.
Very pleased to be here. I'm the CEO and founder of HC Andersen Capital. Before I start, I'd like to send the regards to the Danish national team in hockey, who beat Canada last week. That's making the impossible happen. Think of that while I'm speaking today. Please, I'm not sure I can repeat it, but I have three messages for you. I just want to remind you about the Inderes HC Andersen relationship and partnership. I'd like to go through some of the business areas where we are actually doing what you just discussed, we're trying to do in Denmark, in the Danish market, and then perhaps a bit of forward-looking. Let me just start by reminding you that we did this partnership in 2022, so it's five years ago. We'll host our five-year anniversary very soon. It's been a pleasure to work with you.
I think I can say that it's a pleasure on a daily basis to work with all the team members in Inderes. Thank you very much. You own 20% of us, and we share the platform, we share the distribution channel. For the Danish clients, it's exceptionally important that a Danish company gets the reach to Finnish investors, Swedish investors, and abroad. That's the core of the Inderes relationship. I think that's exceptionally important to understand that distribution is a key to us. Also, all the events are running on the Videosync platform, and we have a very strong sense of purpose, but also business momentum together. That's the core and the fundamental of the partnership. It's a mutual partnership where we benefit each other.
The other thing I wanted to give you an update on is that our wheel, Flywheel, is slightly different from Inderes, but that doesn't mean that we are not working exceptionally a lot together. So let me take them one by one. We're doing the AGM service in Denmark. It's not easy to go to a company and say, "Look, we want to do your AGM." There's a lot of boundaries, there's a lot of obstacles, but it can be done, and we've shown the first effort. The IR platform, the Inderes IR, which is this software of sending out press releases and stock market releases, is working really well. We have above 12 clients now, which is approximately slightly less than 12% or 10% of the market, which I consider very good. We are active on the web, the IR events, of course, but also the research side.
To be frank, it's something that you need to explain to clients in Denmark that you need to do research, you need to pay for it, and you need sometimes a negative recommendation. That's the way it is, but that's the nature of our business, and we're very happy to do it. I'm very happy to report progress on all five areas. What now? Yes, of course, we want to accelerate. I'll be very honest, the Danish market is in dire straits. We have had 45 delistings over three years. That's a nightmare when you're trying to pitch into this market. Of course, I'm very optimistic that we can do other things than just these products. That's why you will see the wheel that we have is slightly different than the Inderes wheel is today. Give you an example.
We started off the Certified Adviser business a year ago. It's too expensive. It's really too expensive to have a Certified Adviser. It's this thing you have on First North where you have a specialized advisor. I think we cut the prices in half. The other thing is that that will come into Sweden. The Swedish market is definitely ready for some lower-priced business on the Certified Adviser. So in close coordination with our Swedish colleagues in Inderes, we will also try and pitch in this product into the Swedish market. Of course, it goes without saying that we'll bundle this as good as we can. We want to be a one-stop shopping for investor relations, events, AGMs, everything you can think of, and try to make it less expensive.
Because one of the key reasons that people are mentioning when they are delisting is that it's too expensive to be listed. Why is that? We need to shake up that and make products that are necessary and easy to use, but also less expensive, and we can still have a very good business and make our clients' life easier. With that, I'd like to thank Inderes for our partnership. It's been a pleasure. We look forward to the future. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Tue.
No problem.
I did actually have a quick question for you. If you want to join me, please. Thank you. You were the first one to be on time.
Okay.
Almost.
The last time we stood on this stage was almost exactly two years ago. Back then, I asked about the state of the Danish stock market. You said it's in dire straits. You said it again.
It is.
But what about the positive signals? Are there any?
The good thing is that people want to buy a product because it's good, it's basic, and it's something that is relevant for the market. I think I can report back that it's really relevant what we do together, Inderes and HCA. That's the positive thing. But we need to think outside the box all the time, and we need to be pushy and making sure that people get the value. Danes are exceptionally value-focused, and that means low price and high service. That's sometimes a nightmare, but that's the way it is.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Tue.
Okay, this concludes our first half. Now off to a short, approximately five-minute break, and we will return with the program shortly.
From Flik Studios in Helsinki, it's the product show with Eero Alasuutari, Sari Minna Avellan, Antti Viljakainen, Göran Wallin and Sara Antonacci. And now, here's your host, Eero Alasuutari.
Thank you. Thank you. Welcome, everybody, to the second half of our show, or the beginning of it, however you want to see it. Welcome to the product show. The idea of this miniature talk show is fairly simple. With me on the show are a group of bright Inderes professionals giving us a lowdown on where we are with the Inderes product portfolio. Let's welcome Minna Avellan from software, Antti Viljakainen from research, Göran Wallin from events, and Sara Antonacci from the AGMs. Give another round of applause. Let's go straight to the business, yeah?
Yep.
Starting with software, as it's now set to become the third pillar supporting Inderes' international growth. And Minna, we heard from Janne during the first half about the IR Suite, which is, I suppose, could be outlined as the Microsoft 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud, but for investor relations. The services included in the suite are all must-have things for IRs. So they are already running with something. Why should they change to Inderes?
I think the most important thing is simplicity. We kind of simplify the life of an IR professional. As Janne mentioned, previously listed companies have bought bits and pieces here and there from several different providers. But now they can get all mandatory IR software from one place. Furthermore, with IR Suite, they can even operate the IR software in one portal. In one place, they can send their press releases, stock ex change releases, they can update the website, they can book a webcast, see different kinds of statistics, see what kind of comments analysts and investors have given for the company. One thing that is important is that if the company doesn't already have all our services, we can promote them in IR Suite. Simplicity is definitely important than cost savings, naturally.
With this kind of bundled offering, you get cost efficiency. I think there are at least two very good reasons to switch into Inderes system.
Have you had pilots with the system now?
Yep, we're just moving the first clients into the system, so.
Great. Okay, moving on to the research business. There seems to be a tectonic shift taking place as large companies as well are now choosing commissioned research. Why is this, Antti Viljakainen?
Retail investing is on the rise. That's a trend we have seen globally, but also here in the Nordics. We have also seen that by combining forces with the help of technology, retail investors can have an impact on share prices, liquidity of shares, and also how companies are governed. These are facts that IR teams also in large caps have to take into account. I think that commissioned research is a very good way for large cap to target this target group as it's high quality, widely distributed, and also multilingual. We also have to remember the fact that bank-driven or investor-driven research is usually not available for retail investors.
Great. So why is retail becoming more relevant for IR?
It's like a rising trend. There's more wealth in the system. It's transforming to younger generations that are more interested in saving for future investing. It has become more easy thanks to online brokers and also different stakeholders who have provided information for investors. So it's always smart to be on the rising trend for all kinds of companies. Retail investors bring liquidity for stock-listed companies that they are missing in some cases.
Is this a visible trend in other business areas, like events, for example?
I think that there's a lot more talk about retail investors. I think that's something that has changed over the years just lately. Before, they forgot about the retail investors, and now there's more talk about it.
Well, continuing with the events business, Göran, there's a lot of competition, especially in Sweden, with other players actively scooping up customers with low production prices. It's a price competition. As per our positioning, clearly we are not the cheapest player. We're not competing with prices. So why do our customers choose us? What are the top three reasons, for example?
I think you're absolutely right. We're not the cheapest. I don't think we want to be the cheapest. We want to be the best. I think generally, I think we are the best. But to give you three reasons, I think to start with, I would say people. In the Stockholm office, we have, I think, around 100 years of combined experience working with IR departments. That has brought us a huge network of IR professionals. When they are moving on to new jobs and so on, they are likely to bring us along with them on the ride. So that's one way. I think the other thing is, and this is in no particular order, I think our platform, the webcasting platform. I've worked with a few over the years, and I think this is one of the best in the world, to be honest.
The good thing with owning it is that we can do instant support, but more importantly, we can do R&D and drive it to where we want it to be. I think what you see now in the AI sector is what's happening. There's so many new tools and features coming out. To be honest, the last 10 years, there's not been much new in webcasting, which has been boring. This is quite interesting and good to have your own platform. The third one is our distribution. There's no one out there in the Nordics who has the same distribution network. Coming back to the retail investors, that's what people are talking about now. That's what they want to achieve. We can help them with that. I have more reasons why they choose us, but let's stop with three.
Okay. I want to hang on the R&D, what you mentioned, and the development that's taking place within the events product. What about the other product areas? What about research? Or AGM, how are you developing the product?
We at research are doing and will do an extensive shift from PDF reports to online, fully online format, which should increase and make significantly better user experience for people who use our services on mobile. That is a very much rising segment. We are also breaking these language barriers by taking into use AI tools, which should make our community more international. That should, of course, benefit all parties involved through network effects.
Great. And product development within the AGM?
Yeah. Our newest development has something to do with bringing a more cost-effective way of translating the AGM, and we are actually using AI for that. So stay tuned.
Booming. Continuing with AGM, why do customers choose digital or virtual AGM these days?
Yeah.
And vice versa, why do they opt for the physical ones?
That's a good question. Well, customers choose virtual meetings primarily for the accessibility and efficiency because virtual formats significantly improve shareholder participation, especially for those who are geographically distant or have scheduling constraints. Also from a logistical standpoint, virtual meetings simplify production by eliminating the need for physical meeting venues or related arrangements. That, of course, reduces overall costs. But with that said, there are still compelling reasons to hold physical AGMs. Many companies still value the tradition of meeting shareholders face-to-face. That helps build trust and fosters direct engagement. Some companies even turn their AGMs into bigger IR events. For example, they like to arrange management Q&As before or after the official AGM or bring product demos on site.
But it's still important to point out that while the main event remains physical, it's increasingly common to add a virtual component, for example, the possibility to follow the meeting online. That, of course, allows a broader access and increases transparency. Ultimately, the choice depends on the company's strategic priorities, shareholder demographic, and the level of interaction they aim to have in the AGM.
Okay, so is the digitalization, broadening the reach, is that the reason why customers choose Inderes?
Yeah.
What's the reason?
Yeah, that's for sure one of the reasons. And of course, then our technology is also the key differentiator on that part.
Great. It would be lovely, absolutely fantastic to continue this discussion with you. But since we are trying to world record in the shortest CMD ever, time is running out. We'll move on to other industry news. Industry news. Financial Times reports that HSBC is eyeing virtual-only AGMs to cut costs on venues, security, and snacks. The digital-first investor gatherings would help trim expenses, FT sources say. The bank has faced disruptions from environmental activists at recent AGMs, and going online could help keep things calmer and cheaper. Inderes supports digital-first engagement, but warns taking away AGM refreshments and real dividends from retail investors could spark even bigger protests than the climate crowd ever managed. In other news, Reuters reports that companies shouldn't share market-sensitive info in so-called pre-silent calls with select analysts. ESMA reminds firms that EU market abuse laws apply even when whispering sweet nothings before earnings.
Big names like Volkswagen have seen share prices jump after such calls, raising a lot of eyebrows. The ESMA recommends good practice, like announcing calls publicly, sharing materials online, recording the calls, and keeping records. Private investors across Europe have been raging against such discriminating practices, where a small group of people in the banking sector are given edge on the market. However, according to market rumors heard by Inderes, the European Old School Banking Association, the EOSBA, suggests moving such calls back to closed cigar cabinets, where the endless nagging of retail investors or the regulator would not be disturbing our efficient market practices. In response, Inderes is now exploring virtual breakout cigar cabinets for its Video sync platform, naturally. In yet another news, Financial Times reports that British American Tobacco, the sixth largest FTSE 100 company, is paying for its own research.
BAT has appointed Edison Investment Research to help broaden our engagement with the wider investment community, including retail investors, a spokesperson told the paper. FT isn't buying it, though. Company-sponsored research, they say, belongs in the same category as marketing bumf sent by IPO coordinators. Edison, the UK cousin of Inderes, is either the future of research or just a glorified PR agency. To help investors decide, EU health regulators are, according to secret documents leaked to Inderes, proposing these cigarette-style warnings on sponsored research. The warning should cover 60% of the cover page, just to be sure. That's all the time we have to spare for industry news and the product show. Thanks to all our participants for joining, and thanks to our lovely audience for tuning in. Now let's get back to the official program with the latest regarding the Inderes platform, presented by Miikka Laitila. Thank you.
Thank you, Eero. Happy to be here, and nice to see a lot of familiar faces, and hopefully also online. I will talk about the Inderes platform, so I will give a quick recap where we are now, and also what are our main focus areas in the upcoming years. If we think about the Inderes platform, it has multiple parts. First, we have the Inderes community. Basically, it's often thought about as different websites. Inderes.fi , se, dk, and also an active discussion forum. Second, we have the distribution network that has been mentioned today already multiple times. You can see there like Nordnet, Avanza, Bloomberg, Börsdata, different local media, and other logos. Through these partners, we can reach the retail investors as well as the professional portfolio managers.
As a third piece, we have the social media presence, which is wide in written, audio, video, different kinds of formats. They are short, they are long, they are for fast consumption, they are for slow consumption. Nowadays, more and more of our content is also consumed through different AI tools, like ChatGPT, for example. Basically, our reach is a combination of all of these areas. For a company, this means that through Inderes, they can basically reach all the relevant investor groups, ranging from active retail to institutional investors. Where are we with our platform? We started with the Finnish-only site about less than 10 years ago, and last year we closed it down. Now we have this modern Nordic platform, where we first started with the Swedish site and then Danish and Finnish ones.
This has been our main focus area on the development-wise during the recent years. Next, we are gradually building on top of this platform. We are going towards a more global platform, and we are building these features one by one on top of the current Nordic one. Don't worry, it won't be like a huge monolith renewal project. The goal is to make it less market, less country, and less language restricted. There will be gradual improvements in the upcoming years, and they should benefit the current users and markets, as well as the new and future upcoming ones. We are building the next-generation information platform for investors. It is currently already a home to the Nordic investor community. For many, it is the place to go to discover, analyze, learn, and discuss about stocks and investing.
We are continuing on that path, but also trying to increase the scale and the global aspect. One focus area that has been already mentioned by both Antti is the online research experience. We are going to improve the experience, especially on mobile, but also this kind of getting rid of the PDFs. It will help the accessibility, it will help the localization, and still you can export the PDF if you want, but it won't be the primary medium. Then we have the global multilingual forum. What we want to do is we want to bring smart investors together, regardless of the language they speak or the country borders. In addition to these initiatives, we are focusing on different ways how we can ensure a high-quality investor experience.
There will be different tools, new content, visualizations, ways how we can help investors in different parts of the investment process, from discovering companies to actually analyzing, understanding, following companies that you are interested in. Some of these will help new investors more, and some will be for more seasoned number cruncher type of investors. Yes, I will also talk a bit about AI. We are going to renew our equity research with AI. To kickstart this, we have started a Business Finland-aided research project. The press release of that was published a week ago, so go read that if you want to understand it more. The main goal, or the first goal, is to improve the scalability and efficiency. This will mean a lot of different experiments. Some will be visible to investors, and some will not.
What we are aiming to do is exploring this kind of smooth collaboration between human analysts and the AI agent and workflows. We're trying to find a good recipe for the collaboration. With AI-powered localization, we can increase this cross-border network effect that our content can have. Basically, for example, let's pick a country, Sweden. In Sweden, the content will become more valuable based on the content that we have in Finland and vice versa also. The AI-translated content is one example of this, and the multilingual discussion forum, another. This should help us scale beyond the country borders. We'll be experimenting with the AI, but we will still focus on the investor value.
We know that no one needs dozens of pages of generic AI research, but more like these actual justified views, fundamentals, estimations, recommendations stemming from this independent fundamental research. So for us, the investors are in the core of our business, the culture, and also for our platform. So we will continue building a valuable information platform for investors also in the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Miikka Laitila.
Do I have time?
Yes, you do. There was actually a good question on the chat that I could ask from you. This is in Finnish, so I will withhold all rights to completely mess up your message in this simultaneous translation.
Have you considered within the Inderes strategy that in the future people will likely use more and more AI applications and less Google company web pages, the Inderes web, or Morning Review that is sent via email?
Yes.
Thank you.
Basically, currently we have made the deliberate choice of allowing these AI tools and AI crawlers to access our content. I think it is pretty well aligned with our distribution network and the democratizing information, because it's like, yeah, I would like everybody to go to Inderes website, please go there and use it. But I cannot assume that every investor will go there on every occasion. It's more about that we can expand the reach and help investors to get the right information at the right time. Yes.
Great. Thank you, Miikka Laitila, once again.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next speaker will take us to the realm of community building. Let's give a warm welcome to our very own Verneri Pulkkinen.
This podium makes it feel like the Finnish Dividend Party conference we had last week. I'm talking about community in this very shallow and short presentation. As you can see, we intend to be the most community-centric platform in the whole universe. Quite ambitious indeed. Let's go through some basic stuff. I'd like to remind you that two years ago I presented the same points, so I urge you to watch my previous presentation as well. Community is what makes Inderes unique in this field. I know that nowadays it's very fashionable to talk about different communities, but we are unique in a sense that it's not only one-way communication, as it usually is in this business.
We don't just bombard investors with PDFs or send them webcasts or upload videos on YouTube with no weaves. No, it's a reciprocal communication. We are in constant dialogue with investors. For example, Miikka, who just presented before me, has constant communication with investors on our forum, where he gets all the time feedback from investors, where should we improve in our platform. So it's not only between us and the investors. We also make it possible for companies to connect investors. You can see on our forum, for example, many CEOs and CFOs or IR professionals are communicating with investors all the time. I would claim that's quite a unique concept. This is a very unscientific try to show you where we are with our community. On the right-hand side, you can see the Finland or Finnish community, which already has a very high community engagement level.
It's quite a big community, but it's also quite mature. It doesn't grow anymore that much. Actually, it has stagnated for the last four years, but let's not talk about that too much this time. Our key challenge is bear market or kusetusmarkkina, as people know it here in Finland. We can really see that there are a record amount of investors in Finland, but they're actually moving their money outside of Helsinki stock market. As some officials say, we don't negotiate with terrorists. I say we don't negotiate with Hesuli. We should diversify. That's why we have, for example, third-party content from different fund managers. We can also diverse our audience with initiatives like Feminvest, where we actually target female audience. We have the international community, or right now we are mostly focusing on Sweden, to be clear.
We are still in the early innings. The key challenge is still brand awareness. Two years ago, I said that by 2025, we intend to become a relevant brand in Sweden, and we are not there yet. I think if Inderes would disappear from Sweden today, not many people would notice. So there's lots of work to do, but we are doing it every day. We are prioritizing media visibility, doing networking, and so on. As said in previous presentation, we intend to leverage our most precious social media asset, our forum, when we localize it to different languages, that hopefully gives us some speed up with internationalization. Of course, I will have to tone down it a bit. It doesn't mean that if you translate some people threads, that the AI would make them more interesting to Swedes.
No, but I think it gives us more chances to have some very good discussions about foreign stocks, some very good Finnish companies, and so on. Let's move from this ground level to the lower Earth orbit and talk about Kessler syndrome. Kessler syndrome is a hypothesis that because we launch so many satellites to lower Earth orbit, there's an increasing risk of collision between satellites. That would produce millions of pieces of debris that could cascade in the terrible effect where there are more and more debris that's hitting other satellites. The worst-case scenario is that humankind never becomes a spacefaring civilization because the debris would block the whole lower Earth orbit, and we couldn't send safely rockets to space anymore. Luckily, or fortunately for mankind, it's still only a hypothesis, or I think the internet is working right now when I'm presenting this.
I think this will happen to internet and social media. Actually, some experts say that next year, 90% of all content on internet will be created by AI, synthetic content. Some experts use this not-so-nice word, "enshittification" of internet, when you have so much noise and disinformation. That makes competition for eyeballs even harder. We already compete fiercely for investors' attention against Netflix and TikTok and family life. Every evening when you come back from work, you can choose to spend time with your family, Netflix, or read the latest PDF from Inderes analyst. Of course, I hope you choose the PDF. It makes your life worth living. I understand that some people also watch just Netflix and chill with their family. It's okay. That's the space we are having the competition.
There's also a risk that people could use more AI assistants, skipping Inderes in the process, even though we can see from data that those AI assistants, of course, they get the data from our web page, but you don't maybe need Inderes that much in the process. But as said in the previous presentations, we believe that demand for an authentic, relatable, and trustworthy investing brand and the need for social investing, they won't change, at least not that fast. For many investors, when they come to Inderes.fi or to our forum, it's not just about getting new investment ideas. Some people just want to share their profits and losses. Usually, it's the profits they want to brag about. That's the social behavior of investors, and we think that won't change. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Verneri. I have a quick question.
We've heard about the rise of retail investing, and as a result, the social media and the blogosphere as a whole is cluttering up with all kinds of social investing content. How is the community team equipped for that competition that is increasing all the time?
I think we are well equipped. What else can I say here in the podium? But we are focusing on right stuff. Inderes is very strong when it comes to very long content. We are very strong when we have the audience that really wants to understand what companies they are owning. As in previous presentations, people used the word smart investors, and I think that's where Inderes is focusing on. But it's true that especially on short formats, where it's more like propaganda about 30-second TikTok videos, and that the competition is really fierce, and we have to step our game there, definitely.
Thank you, Verneri.
Thank you.
In the next presentation, we'll zoom out a little bit from individual business areas and look at the big picture, enlightening us on leadership by disciplined anarchy. Let's give a warm welcome to our very own Tuulikki Rautiainen.
I don't know about zooming out when we're talking about the space orbits and so forth. I think I might zoom in a little bit from that spectrum. But people and culture leading with disciplined anarchy, it's so nice to be here in person and see some familiar faces, our investors and other stakeholders. As you've seen today, there's been a big group of our team present here on the stage sharing what we have been working on. Referring to that, I guess the environment where we are going to be doing the next stage is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable.
We are not waiting for the business environment to calm down or things to settle. Rather, we are focusing to be ready for whatever may come. We do this with disciplined anarchy. We have a very decentralized decision-making process where decisions are done as close to the investors and customers as possible within teams. The teams are co-led. Co-leadership for us means, for example, prioritizing projects and setting focus areas as the information from the investors and customers is readily available for the teams to make smart decisions. Then the teams are doing all of this with the freedom and responsibility that a non-managerial organization structure allows them. On the other hand, we still have the guided shared principles and, of course, this strategy that we have now done to keep us on track to aim where we are going.
We constantly have small evolutions and structural changes. We discuss the work descriptions and priorities and projects, also tools that we use in our work. This enables us also to very much be on the pulse of the market. So we have around 120, actually 119 team members currently, and we are sensing the outside world and feeding the information back within so that we can, rather than doing large surprise changing, we are constantly doing iterative work. All of this we need to then, of course, execute, and that we do with discipline. This type of organization and culture is probably not for everybody. But the people that really thrive and enjoy working in this type of an organization are trustworthy professionals who are capable of making important decisions.
We have a team that also takes responsibility for the decisions we make and are always looking to do positive decisions for our organization, for investors, for our customers, and also for our shareholders. With these basic assumptions of our people in place, we are continuing towards the upcoming years as well. I want to share some fresh statistics of our people. As mentioned and as shared in the March report, we have 119 employees. We've been now today talking about the investor and investor relations focused team. Within that mindset, we have a pretty diverse professional landscape within our company. We have tech professionals, finance and business professionals, and events professionals. I believe this to be a fairly unique competence group of people to be solving the problems of our customers and investors. Our employee net promoter score is at an all-time high.
As of last week, we just got the numbers out. That is currently at 54, which we are very happy about. Actually, 81% of our employees are also shareholders, which I believe might be a record in any publicly listed company, but I'm not sure. I don't have the numbers from other companies. Would be very interested to hear, though. Finally, the inclusive interest index, we do an organization survey twice per year. One parameter in that is how our team perceives the inclusivity in our company. The index is combined number of the experience of sense of belonging, recognition and appreciation, and psychological safety. These statements combined together got the score of 5.1 out of six in the latest organization survey. With this combination, I would say we have a strong team to tackle the challenges.
The challenges that we have are kind of, I'd say, out there, up there. The board members have consistently reminded us that we need to get ourselves into trouble. I say that we indeed have gotten ourselves into trouble. We have more products and more markets than ever before. We are looking to grow in an even more software-based business. We are creating go-to-market recipes in several different business areas and product lines. On the other hand, we are in an information-heavy business where AI is coming in hot. We are looking to, at the same time, drive innovation in a fairly conservative, slow-moving industry. The mindset that our team is having to tackle these challenges is the disciplined anarchy. We are setting ourselves to have high ambition and also high standards. We are focusing on building excellent teams that consist of just ordinary people.
Finally, we also understand and accept that not everything is in our control. We are not relying on luck, but we are rather well prepared when there's an open door. We are geared to be ready for partnerships and market shifts. That way, we can come up with some new ideas and also kill our darlings when need be. I want to give you all a bit of a teaser. We are launching our new version of Playbook very soon in a couple of weeks. To end, I want to share this really, at least for me, a heartwarming quote from our open strategy process that we did this spring. Somebody in a strategy survey shared that despite the success, we are still good and humble people. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Tuulikki. Quick question before you go.
We practiced this yesterday, and yesterday you went over the time, so I didn't have the time. No, no, you actually succeeded. Well done. As the businesses evolve and as per the new strategy, they will assume varying go-to-market strategies and resulting in varying practices and resourcing. How can the culture keep up with the increasing complexity?
I would rather position the culture to be a living entity and something that evolves as the people and organization evolves. It's not something that we try to hold down or stifle or somehow kind of keep intact. We rather kind of see it as a living, breathing entity that we perform and work in. Let's see where the company goes from the cultural perspective as well in the upcoming years.
Great. Thank you, Tuulikki Rautiainen.
Thank you.
We're almost done with the official program of our Capital Markets Day 2025.
We just have one official presentation left. Last, but definitely not least, the Finance Dad, Talousfaija. Let's give a warm welcome to Mikko Vartiovaara.
To everyone, and I hope you still can track with me the following eight to nine minutes before heading to the Q&A session. Today, I'm here to talk to you about how to generate shareholder value with discipline at Inderes. But first, before heading to strategy and the numbers behind there, let's look and recap on the past five years. During the past five years, we have generated around EUR 70 million worth of net sales. During that time, we have had an average of 14% EBITDA. That has generated us EUR 10 million of cash flow before CapEx. Where we have allocated this money, EUR 12 million in investments, mostly in M&A, but also in CapEx.
Also EUR 9 million returned to shareholders as a dividend and also as a real dividend, as we can see here. Nice salmon breads. I twice asked our business contractor whether these costs were included in the EUR 9 million , and they were included there. Anyway, hey guys, the point is here that we are net debt free. We've been for the five years net debt free. This sets up as a good place to start the next phase in our strategy. Let's start from the recurring, sorry, let's start from the net sales. Recurring revenue and project revenue, that's how we divide our net sales. Recurring revenue, around 60% of the net sales. From 2022, it increased quite significantly due to the acquisition in Sweden.
But also, we've been able to grow in the recurring side due to the software and also steady development in research. What comes to project revenue, we can see that the first two quarters are usually higher on the lower chart because of the AGM business. The AGM business has been the success story the past two years, and it generates project sales to our software business and to our events business. Now, heading to the next phase, we still believe in the recurring revenue. That's the foundation. That's the concrete for our business. Once we start the new year, we want that there's 60% net sales already in place. We believe in the growth of research and software. They will drive our growth during these years.
But also in the event side, in the project sales side, there we believe in a stronger offering for larger productions and AGMs. This is happening in Nordics. Once talking about Nordics, international revenue. On the right side chart, you can see that since the acquisition 2022, our share of the international revenue increased to 20%. Since that, it has been 20%- 25%, the share of the international revenue. That was not our plan. We wanted that the international share of the revenue will increase. We wanted to be more growth in the international side than in Finland, in our home-based markets. What happened? We failed. We had quite a wrong go-to-market approach in Sweden, especially. Also, I suppose we kind of underestimated how long it takes time to acquisition integrations to happen.
But now, entering to a new phase, we have new strategies for each business unit, and there's a new way to seek growth. In events, Sweden especially, we look for expansion in the value chain. That's how we find the growth. In research, that's where we're going to penetrate to the Swedish markets now. In the software side, it's not about Sweden. It's more about Nordics and European customers through our own partners and through our own sales efforts. What comes to Finland? There, IPOs are playing a key role to expand the market where to sell our services. Of course, in software, we still see also some untapped potential. Talking about our business lines, a bit more deeper dive. They all stand financially on their own feet. Research, around EUR 7 million. Profitability, above 20%. We can hit the 25% mark there.
But now it's not the time yet. We still invest in Sweden, so we don't expect to hit the 25% yet in the research side. But somewhat a couple of years ahead here, we need to be above 20% for sure. In the event side, the first comes to profitability, then comes the growth. That's our strategy, and we need to hit the double-digit profitability figures in events. But of course, the growth, once it comes, we will welcome it, but not at the expense of profitability. In the software side, that's the case that now we are turning away from the negative EBITDA during this year. But we don't expect to be much profitable during the coming years because we need to push the expenses and push the investments in R&D and international growth during the coming years.
Maybe the scaling phase, we can hit that at the end of this strategy period. Looking at our finance targets, some fine-tuning, but still basically the same as previously. Our growth plus EBITDA above 30%. The second target, annually increasing absolute payout to our shareholders. These targets are here to last. I hope that this strategy is also here to last and succeed. Thank you.
Thank you, Mikko Vartiovaara. This concludes our official program. We'll continue with the Q&A session in about one minute or so. Thank you so much for participating thus far. Welcome back to the Inderes 2025 CMD and the final part, which is the Q&A. I actually just realized that I had some sort of intro written down for the Q&A as well, but I left my cards over there, so I will just wing it.
In any case, we have quite a lot of questions already on the chat. You can obviously send more. There's still some time left. We have approximately 15 minutes or just under 15 minutes for the Q&A session. If we don't have the time to handle your question, to answer your question during the Q&A session, we will answer all of those at the Inderes Investment Forum in the coming days, not to give any hard deadline for that. We have to recover after the CMD first. All right. Like I said earlier, I have to translate some of these on the go. So we'll withhold all the rights to make terrible mistakes. Starting off in a chronological order from Sam, how is Video sync shielded from competitors? Is there a strong moat?
I guess that's to me. Obviously, all the IPR is ours.
Shielding the interface that's visible to the investor audience, that's practically impossible. We can already see that it's an age of white coding, and it's quite fast to develop new platforms that look like they would be the same. But obviously, for example, thinking about the security issues and compliance, we are working with ISO 27001 security standard at the moment. That's something that these rising competitors are not up to par with. Nothing more about that. Thank you.
Sam continues. Have you considered dual listings for increasing awareness? Do people, companies, customers in other Nordic countries know that you're eating your own dog food?
On the dual listing, no, we have not considered that. As we see examples from our clients, many of them have actually withdrawn their dual listing from Sweden.
Nordic investors can easily invest into Inderes shares, even though we are listed in Helsinki. We should also encourage that as part of our broader brand building in the future.
Great. Jorma Kastinen asks, when will the national debt of the Western world become a problem?
I guess you could use Finland and the US as an example. The situation appears to be quite different. National debt.
That's a big question.
It is a big question.
I would perhaps recommend to watch the excellent Verneri's Vartti show on YouTube. Probably there's a lot of videos related to this topic. Last year, I did a video about debt of Western nations. I recommend to watch that. I can send the link to our coffee room, for example, on forum.
Great. Thank you. Nickname Investor is asking, why are you not showing profitability in your long-term charts?
This was asked before Mikko's presentation.
There was actually.
Yeah, there was the matter phase where we can hit during the time, but we haven't put those out yet. We don't kind of release those. It's the two targets what we have, financial targets, above 30% and the annual increase in payouts.
Yeah. Thank you. Investor continues. What do you define being good profitability in the events business? What is good profitability?
I guess that's for me. It depends on what you compare it with. If you look at the events business as a whole, in Finland at least, the big event companies have a profitability between 3% and 7%. We have mostly stayed above 10%, sometimes over 20%. I think that's a very good profitability for the events business.
Events as a total, events as a total, we say that 10%- 15% is the good matter phase profitability as we look at as a total it.
Good. Then there's some praises. Well done, Jenny. Strong. This is from Jyrki. And Janne, great glasses. Well done.
Thank you.
They look like mine.
Okay. A bit of a longer question from Cod Liver Oil Lamp and the Orange Double Comma, the Orange Juice. This is actually the nickname. Yes. Regarding your financial target, you still have not lowered the combined total of revenue growth and EBITDA margin below 30%, even though this target has only been achieved once in the past three years, and even then solely due to acquisitions. Therefore, I ask, when is this target expected to be met by the end of the strategy period or annually?
Well, if you look at the history, in a booming market, we have outperformed this target significantly. In a declining market, we have underperformed the target. And that combined together, we're still above that. Will we give up on the ambition level of this company where we want to go financially? No, we're not giving up on the ambition level. So that remains as the target pace what we aim to get as a company.
Good. That's a good response. Thank you. Timo Leskinen asks, why Inderes has not moved yet to the main list? And is it under consideration?
Long term, absolutely. First, not growth market is the stepping stone for companies to grow bigger and move to the main list. Are we there yet? I think we need to be significantly bigger in terms of revenue and market capitalization to be ready for that.
Good. Investor is asking, why Inderes market penetration is so low in Denmark?
I think going to HC Andersen's presentation, which is kind of like the Inderes go-to-market partner for Denmark. If you look at HCA's performance in that market, serving over 50 Danish companies, serving over a third of the local companies, having really close and deep relationships with the local investor relations community. I think through HCA, we are actually really well penetrated into Danish market, ranging from the small caps to even the biggest companies like ISS and Danske Bank that are customers of HCA.
Nickname Sweden asks, why has your Sweden webcast business not grown after the acquisition?
That's a tough question. The market has been tougher than we anticipated. The market in Sweden is pretty different from the market in Helsinki.
Here we do live events, and there it's more audio cast oriented like Europe. We haven't grown as much as we would have wanted to, but now we have the base. Now we have a strong base from this year onwards to actually grow. The competition is also different and has grown in Sweden through Europe.
Good. Worldwide rights. As known and as Mikael underlined, IR have the needs for high-profile services and a platform to make it easy. Inderes can be a leading company in Europe. The case is as solid as a rock. Finland is already enough, a proven successful case of how to make it work. Why not make a Wolt? Why not merge and cooperate with a suitable counterparty and make expanding like a Wolt? Market has demand, timing is perfect. It's just good to scale and go.
Why not make a, what was the question? Wolt, like the. Yeah, like company Wolt. Yeah, we actually have one board member working at Wolt. That's a good question in a way. We need to think bigger, like the great scale-up stories in Finland have done, thinking globally, how can you scale faster and faster. With our business model, of course, the challenge is the conservative industry. Many times, investor relations is said to be the most conservative department in the enterprise, which makes this in a way slower-moving business. But that said, we still need to challenge ourselves. What could we do to move faster and change this industry in a faster way? I think we're moving that direction in our kind of way of thinking and mindset.
Okay, I'm seeing that we have just a few minutes left.
Let's see if I can find something to engage other people than just a few of you. Maybe from the audience, if there's any. Do we have any audience questions? That's a great point. Jaakko, please.
Hi, good morning. Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. I could ask for a bit more color on the challenge of creating the community in Sweden and build up the community. This obviously takes the question also to the renewed go-to-market in terms of paid research. If you could provide a bit more color, what are the next steps? What becomes to expanding the research business in Sweden? Obviously you need the content as well in order to be more relevant in building the community.
I think Antti Luiro is the right person to answer.
Maybe I can start.
The fundamentals of building a community in Sweden, I mean, we need to have good content for investors to be engaged. Then we need to be trusted by investors in the market. By nature of this business, everything gets easier when you have scale and you have sort of stronger brand, you have more content. Obviously starting this up is a challenge. I mentioned that we have not utilized our position and scale in Finland well enough in Sweden. One of the things we're doing is that we have the community and we have the content in Finland. We can make our Swedish platform much more attractive when we bring this content in Swedish to Swedish investors and bring the community to Swedish investors as well. I think we have one of the best investor communities and platforms in Finland.
I think this is definitely an asset. We're trying to get more benefits from our scale that we haven't had before. On the business and go-to-market, previously we've had a more volume-driven approach to sales where we try to talk to as many customers as possible, learn the market. We're shifting more towards a relationship-building approach where we show to the companies that we are professional, we can take good care of their investors. Through that, win their trust and win the companies over. There's quite a big shift in how we're approaching the Swedish market right now. With the tools we have on the table, I think this is going to look quite different in the coming few years.
Any other questions from the audience? Go ahead. Following up on that one.
Are you planning to push the Finnish investment cases to Swedes going forward? And are you, for example, investing in marketing to break through in the media to gain their attention?
Yes. Finnish cases, there are many that have interest in Sweden as well. And we've already seen that in our media collaborations. Of course, in the local market, we need to kind of prioritize and optimize, make sure the content that is there is relevant. But we are doing quite a bit of work in media. We are visiting EFN, for example, a local financial news channel quite frequently. We are building closer collaboration with local financial journalists. I think instead of pushing a large marketing budget to get visibility, we have the ability and the skills of our analysts who can go to media and get some earned visibility through our ability.
I think our easiest way, most cost-efficient way to be on the front page of Dagens Industri is to have good, sharp views and our analysts available to comment on interesting cases in the local media. That is a priority for us, working a lot more with media. At least the shares are cheaper here in Finland, you can use that one.
We've run a little bit over time, but maybe if you allow us to go a few minutes over time, we can take one more question if any member in the audience has. Please, Teemu Hinkula.
Hi, thank you. I'm the username_teemuhinkula from the forum. Prefer to stay anonymous. I have a question from a stupid investor. Now, when you make the reporting in a new way that you have the research and events and software, how is the revenue divided?
For let's say if you have an AGM event, I guess something goes to the software and something goes to the event. So all company is ordering the customer for research. They also have webcasts and stuff. So what part of these deals goes to its revenue?
AGMs, it's pretty simple. We have the AGM technology part, which is the voting system, the registration system, and the legal help on site. That's part of the tech that goes to the tech. And then we have this business, like the design, the event design, the event production, and the event planning that goes then to the event side. And the same for the technology or for the other part, the production, the event production goes to us, and then the tech goes to the tech. Did I answer the question?
Yes, you did on that part.
But how about, for example, if you have the research, custom day, they have webcasts, interviews? So what part goes to where? Is this also split or everything in the research?
No, the webcast, they go to events and the interviews and other stuff goes to research.
Yeah, community is part of the research as a whole. So everything the community does is, and the community actually do the interviews and the analysts do the interviews. So that's their part. But we do the webcasts.
All right, three minutes over time, not much. It's been such an eventful day for me. I hope for you as well. One final thank you to our audience here in Eliel, in the event studio, and also, of course, all of you online. Thank you for participating. Thank you for good questions.
Like I mentioned, we will answer all of these on the Inderes forum in the coming days. Finally, thanks to our fantastic presenters.
Thank you.
Thank you and hope to see you soon again.