The investors liked it. The social media platforms were feeding to our growth. We knew better not to rely on platforms whose algorithms we could not control. We began building our own.
Inderes.fi on siinä mielessä kätevä, että jos te seuraatte vaikka Nokiaa, niin te saatte tänne ilmoituspaneeliin sitten paria päivää aiemmin, että Nokialta on tulossa osavuosikatsaus. Tää auttaa pitämään teidät myös ajan tasalla pörssissä.
Our platform soon became the go-to place for information on Finnish listed companies and the social media where investors, analysts, and companies connected: our community.
Inderesillä, niin on sellainen vahva yhteisökulttuuri, et me ollaan niinku alusta lähtien oltu sellainen yritys, jossa työntekijät on hirveen hyvin hitsautunut yhteen ja siihen yhteistyöhön.
It was time to raise the stakes to create even better content for the investors, to democratize information. We acquired a video company called FLIK. Soon, we were producing high-quality quarterly events, capital markets days, and investor events to publish on the Inderes platform. As we were successfully growing the business, we kept investing in better services for both sides of the platform. It was time to eat our own dog food by going public. We became our own laboratory for developing products for investor relations. It was like a dream come true. The market changed.
Näihin molempiin, sekä markkinalla olemiseen että siihen luonnossa liikkumiseen, liittyy semmoisia riskejä, mitä ei vaan voi yksinkertaisesti ennustaa. Niin sanottuja tämmöisiä mustia joutsenia voi aina tulla molemmissa. Esimerkiksi markkinalla tämmöisen koronakriisin ennustaminen on ihan täysin mahdotonta etukäteen. Yhtä lailla sulle metsässä, kaikesta hyvästä valmistautumisesta huolimatta, voi tulla vastaan joitain äärimmäisiä sääilmiöitä tai vaikka karhu.
We had some rough quarters and felt the public pressure. We tested the limits of entertainment and failed.
Tervetuloa osarinuotiolle!
Kiitos. Nää ei hirveästi lämmitä, mutta...
Ei vissiin ton kvartterin jälkeen.
Niin.
Anne had a tough year with our research.
Iso pettymys, totta kai, mut miten sä, miten sä summeeraisit tota meidän mennyttä vuotta?
Oiskohan se kauniisti sanottuna pohjanoteeraus, jota ei toivottavasti toisteta koskaan.
Hey, that's just a part of life in the stock market.
Pölyhattu päähän. Se hillatolppa, mistä me ollaan Vernerin kanssa jauhettu aika pitkään täällä, niin sitä siis siirrettiin pidemmälle tulevaisuuteen taas kerran.
Hyvää huomenta! Pörssissä rymylasku jatkuu, kun osakemarkkinan kumipaatti on ajautunut inflaation, korkojen nousun ja geopoliittisen kriisin pyörremyrskyn kouriin.
As a public company, we've continued developing new concepts to better serve the investors.
Mitä yhteistä on erinomaisella yrityksellä, joka on siis yleensä erinomainen sijoituskohde myös silloin, ja erinomaisella pizzalla? Mun mielestä se lähtee siitä, että pohja ja perusta pitää olla kunnossa. Se yritys, sillä on joku selkeä toiminnan tarkoitus, mitä hyvää se tuo tähän maailmaan? Mitä ongelmaa se ratkoo? Sen jälkeen me otetaan kaulin ja heitetään se mäkeen.
We've kept our pace on the steady march towards the next phase of Inderes.
Hei alla och hjärtligt välkomna till InderesTV. Idag har jag en gäst med mig här. Vi ska köra lite investeringsinspiration tillsammans med grundare och förvaltare av Lucy Global Fund, Therese Nyrén. Hjärtligt välkommen!
Tack så mycket.
It took us all the way here, no longer as a Finnish company, but as a Nordic company with a Nordic vision.
Good morning, dear Inderes community members, fellow investors, media representatives, and other interested parties. Welcome to the first ever Capital Markets Day by Inderes. We are thoroughly excited to present to you the next phase of Inderes, as described in more detail by my visionary colleagues presenting here today. My name is Eero Alasuutari, and I will humbly serve as your host for today's event. As we saw and heard on the intro video explaining the history of Inderes in a nutshell, we truly have arrived in the next chapter in our story. This chapter takes place not only here in Finland, but in the Nordics. Our mission to democratize information by connecting investors and companies is not quite complete in Finland yet, it has reached a point where we turn our heads to the West.
In that spirit, we are presenting to a live audience, not just here in Helsinki, but in Stockholm, Sweden, as well. Before we jump onto the agenda, I'd like to remind you that you can comment and ask questions to our presenters using the viewing page chat functionality. Our live audience in Helsinki and in Stockholm can ask questions using the QR code you should find on a printout close to you. We will take up your questions in the Q&A session after all the presentations. Now, let's get this show going! Our first speaker is the CEO and Co-founder of Inderes, Mikael Rautanen. Welcome, Mikael.
Thank you, Eero. In the beginning, there was just passion, no business model, and no strategy. Today, I'm happy that we still have the passion, and we also have a solid business model, and we have a solid strategy to present today. The core of Inderes remains the same, our role in the society. We are here to democratize investor information, taking this industry from serving the 1% to serving the 100%. In this strategy period, we have defined it as democratizing Nordic investor information to reflect our new focus. How we do it is by connecting investors and listed companies. In the strategy, we are not reinventing the wheel. We are using the same basic model that we have proven to be working and successful, demonstrated network effects in the business model. The Inderes flywheel.
More listed companies join the ecosystem, the better services we can provide for our investor community. The more investors join our ecosystem, the better services we can provide for the listed companies. This is the flywheel effect of Inderes. The main point of this, and main message of this new strategy, is that when we go to the selected new countries, we aim to build the full flywheel to all new markets. We will not be happy just gaining a big investor relations events or investor relations software business in a new market. We plan to build the full flywheel. All the services for listed companies, our digital platform, and the investor community. That's the long-term ambition. The key trend driving our business is a timeless trend.
It's impossible for me to imagine future investors coming to say, "Well, I just wish companies would not be that transparent and open about their operations." It's inevitable that you, investors, you demand more and more transparency from the listed companies, and our products and services are built to ride on that trend and that demand. That's the timeless trend feeding our growth. Now we are entering the third phase of Inderes. The first one was ramping up the equity research business and Inderes platform in Finland. After that, we started to diversify with our own product development and one very good acquisition, so that our product portfolio now covers the basics and the essentials of investor relations. We've been growing successfully, and now the third phase that we're entering into after our IPO and the investments we've made is geographical expansion in Nordics. Strategy is all about choices.
We have selected four main product areas where we plan to put most of our limited resources and focus. These products, we believe that by focusing on these, we can create the most value for our employees, community, customers, and shareholders. Equity research, over 2/3 of Finnish companies as clients. Investor relations events, over 300 clients, very strong market position already to start with. AGM, in a couple of year, going from 0 to over 50% market share. Investor relations software, that's where we aim to get more scalable growth, and that business is still on a startup phase. The Inderes formula and the recipe is that our products combine the deep domain expertise in investor relations and investing, our own digital platforms, and the investor community, the audience.
In addition to these four product choices, of course, we continue to innovate and develop completely new concepts together with investors and the listed companies. Four product areas and three geographical focus markets. The main markets: Sweden will be obviously the most significant growth driver in our strategy period, 2023-2027. That's where most of our focus goes. In Finland, I want to emphasize that we still do have quite a lot of room to grow within the existing client base, because many of those clients are only buying one or two of our services that we have. Obviously, we will continue to actively develop the Finnish IPO ecosystem to better serve and encourage entrepreneurs to go public. In Denmark, we operate together with our strategic partner, HC Andersen Capital.
This is an efficient way for us to start building a position in the Denmark market. Looking at these four product choices and three country choices in a matrix, you can see that we are building a solid balance between products that are in a mature growth, high profitability stage, and products that are in a startup or scale-up phase. This should enable us to do profitable growth in short term, in medium term, and build basis for the long term as well. We are seeking the right balance, and I think we've got it quite well. From the Finland side of this graph, you can see that once we get the Inderes flywheel spinning, it's pretty powerful. You usually reach quite high penetration within the market. We have estimated that the market potential of Inderes in Finland is around EUR 20 million, with the existing number of listed companies.
Looking at Nordics and our new target markets, we are repositioning ourselves to be the small challenger who is again redefining the industry. We are estimating that the addressable market in Nordics is over EUR 120 million within the product choices we've made. What is specific for Inderes is that we like to target very small niches in the markets and do them in a really good way. My friends, the journey ahead to reach the Nordic vision, we're quite honest to ourselves that it will not be an easy ride. There will be a lot of obstacles in front of us. We have spent a lot of time in trying to identify the biggest obstacles on our way, and then we have defined three key strategic themes to overcome those obstacles: productization and sales, Sweden, and international Inderes.
These themes will next be converted into strategic actions that we will start implementing in a disciplined way. Our financial targets remain unchanged, so we aim to reach 30%-50% combination of revenue growth and EBITDA margin, meaning that if we have slower growth, we aim for higher profitability. Our three infinite targets obviously remain unchanged. We believe that if we stick to those targets, and that is not easy, but if we stick to them, in the long run, the financial results will follow. That's in a nutshell, the strategy update we released with the CMD. With that, we are expecting to earn 12 points from both Sweden and Denmark during the strategy period. Thank you.
Thank you, Mikael. Next up, we will dive deep into our product portfolio with our Technology Business Lead, Janne Vainionpää, and his very own The Product Show.
From FLIK Studios in Helsinki, it's The Product Show with Janne Vainionpää. Featuring Yu Gong, Sauli Vilén, Minna Avellan, and Jenny Cederqvist. Now, here's your host, Janne Vainionpää!
All right. Hello, everyone. Nice to see you. A smart-looking crowd, as expected. Despite the bit catchy in-intro, I aim to keep this more informative than entertaining, so don't worry. As of our business targets, they are still rather conventional. We aim to maintain profitable growth in the Finnish market and aim to keep growing in the new markets, Finland and Sweden and Denmark. In this growth, our transition from a manpower-fueled expert organization to more of a product organization is one of the key elements. When I joined the FLIK, the company, we had the FLIK acquisition three and a half years ago. Inderes was basically an equity research company, building already then a large and active investor community.
With FLIK, the events business arrived, and also a team of developers working on the virtual events platform, which now also serves as a backbone for the AGM product. Since then, we have also built our software capabilities and launched a number of products in area of investor relations. Today we are a company with strong position in commissioned equity research market. By the way, we have wrong slide. Can we go one back? Also in the IR events business, as well as the AGMs, as Mikael mentioned. Also have a solid offering in area of software products for listed company IROs. With that, we have incorporated scalability into our business and improved our capabilities to expand into new countries.
One of the main themes in our strategy, sales and productization, revolves around how we can replicate the good things accomplished in the Finnish market in other Nordic countries. In one sentence, one could say that we are focusing on making our products easier to purchase, easier to deliver, and to sell. Looking at investor relations from our client's perspective, there is always 2 dimensions: quality and reach. Even high-quality IR content doesn't make a difference if it doesn't reach the right audience. In Finland, with the Finnish Inderes Investor community, we are in a unique position to offer Finnish-listed companies a complete set of products and services for their investor relations. Ability to offer this high-volume investor reach built in our products makes our product offering very compelling in the Finnish market.
In Sweden and Denmark, we have started to build the community and the distribution network, and we don't see any reason why our end-to-end IR product portfolio wouldn't be interesting for listed companies in these markets. Especially for small and mid-cap companies, I would claim that our suite of products offer a stellar product, price-to-value ratio. If a company is looking for relevant features for reasonable price, ease of use, and automation of routine tasks, our R&D and service approach is excellent match, also in Sweden and Denmark. Finally, we are very investor-centric, unlike many of our competitors. Our core is in investor, comms, and we have been able to recruit people with very high level of competence in this domain.
In the events business, which makes us a holistic partner that can bring much more to the table than just good production capabilities or nice studios. In software products, this enables us building stuff that are to the point, offering automation and comfort where it's needed the most. With that, I think we are well set and excited to continue our expansion in the Nordic market. Let's welcome our first guest, the one and only Sauli Vilén. Welcome, Sauli.
Thank you.
Not everyone knows that name Inderes actually comes from independent equity research. Can you explain briefly what this service entails?
Well, I mean, the equity research, it's the core, what we actually do. It's not like a side business for us or way to boost our investment banking or anything like that. It's just the core we do. We are in the game where the investors' trust is everything. If you don't have it, you get nothing, basically. Sometimes in order to earn that, it means that you leave money on the table. That's the way it goes if you wanna be independent in this business.
Gotcha. You've been very successful in Finland with 140+ paying clients. What's your explanation for this success? Where does the client value come from?
Well, if you start from the investors, what they actually expect from us, there is basically two things. First, they want independent, high-quality content, and here, by the way, the content means a lot more than just the PDF reports. That's one, and then secondly, you need to be active, since obviously the investors want to know what is going on in the market and with the companies they are interested in. If you succeed in those, then you actually reach quite a big audience through our own platform, since, well, it's a technologically very, very good, and it's also free and open for everyone. It's not just for institutions or anything like that. That's fairly simple. If you jump on the corporate side, on the commission research clients, what do they expect from us?
You can see that they actually expect pretty much the same things. They also expect the high-quality content. They also want us to be active, since because when we are active, we serve the investors, and they know what is going on. Finally, they want to reach investors through us. There is not really much of a value in the content if nobody consumes it, right? It's basically simple. If we succeed in high-quality content, we earn investors' trust through that, then we provide major value for our commission research clients through our distribution power. That's the recipe we have been more or less doing for the past decade in Finland.
Yeah. The Swedish market is obviously interesting with over 1,000 listed companies. However, given that we are still in early phases of the community building, why would a Swedish company be interested in buying equity research from us?
We have a clear chicken-egg problem in Sweden, since in order to attract investors, you need content, and then again, to attract to add value for the companies, you need investors. It's fairly simple. If you look at the content side first, I mean, we obviously we are doing several things to speed up the local content production. We are, we are putting a lot more effort on the research sales. We will be ramping up several interesting large cap companies during H2 to provide local content. Then I also want to emphasize that our content pool already is actually a massive one. We are market leader in the webcasts in the Swedish market through Financial Hearings, of course, so there is a ton of super interesting content already.
We are the only player who can offer for the Swedish investors the basically information about all of the Finnish-listed companies at free of charge, which is a kind of good deal.
Mm.
Throwing in the HGA, and their data, material from Denmark, our material pool is actually really pretty good already, and we need to utilize it much better in the future. At the same time, we need to ramp up also the local material at a clearly faster pace than during the past 12 months. If you look at the distribution side on the company, on the company level, basically, what we can offer for companies now is, well, unbeatable distribution to Finland, through our very strong market position here. Of course, we are ramping our platform in Sweden all the time with the content pieces and the resources I just mentioned. Of course, our friends in Denmark are also ramping up the DK platform.
Our grand goal is to build a Nordic distribution capability. Yeah, that's it. Basically, since we don't know which comes first, the chicken or egg, so we plan to do both.
Mm
That we succeed in this.
Sounds good. Finally, name one key obstacle for us in the Swedish market.
This is easy: finding the right people. This is a people business. That's it.
That's it?
That's it.
All right. Thank you, Sauli.
Thank you.
Next up, we have Yu Gong. Right, welcome, Yu.
Thank you, Janne.
You are the product owner for Inderes AGM.
Yeah
Services. Can you walk us through what is this service all about?
Absolutely. We are the one-stop shop that helps the companies arrange AGM, whatever model you wanna use, because there's many ways to do AGM. You can do it fully virtually, you can do it hybrid way, or you can do a classic AGM, where everyone comes on-site and, you know, do the voting, and you just permission to speak. You can see that we help actually with a lot of things. For example, also with the registration, the notifications, you know when to go where, and you know the app for voting. If you come online, you have the webcast platform, where you can vote and speak and do everything you need for AGM, so you have all the permissions online and on-site. Show you some more cool stuff.
Here, you can see if you come to AGM as a shareholder, the first thing what you realize is that you have to get your voting tickets. We'll help you with them, of course, show you how they work. We have our crew there helping you out with the voting tickets and showing you the place that where to go, where's the AGM. Of course, the main stage, you can see here that you go there, We have the design for you. We help the chairman. We do everything you need at the AGM on-site.
Basically, we are one-stop shop.
It is, it is.
Yeah.
A very comprehensive way how to do AGM, like-
Yeah
Also the legal knowledge, that's very key, like, important. We are the, like, the very few like, providers in the town that know how the legal services work here.
Yeah, yeah. Other than the one-stop shop, why do customers buy from us? You have gained already 120 companies, so why is it?
Yeah. The key things are that we can combine the knowledge of doing a hybrid production like this place, as you can see now. We are the very few who can combine this with the AGM legal knowledge and the AGM technology. Like, combining these two factors or these three factors or these four factors, we actually, like we can do it so comprehensively as a one-stop shop that we minimize the complexity of AGMs. AGM's actually very complex, like, services, we combine all the knowledge, it's like, it makes your life so easy.
Gotcha. You have gained a significant market share here in Finland, as said, and now you're planning for Sweden and Denmark.
Mm.
Is there any particular sweet spot, and how do you plan to proceed in those markets?
Definitely. The sweet spot are companies who have a complex AGM. They are mid caps and large caps. They need a venue. They need help with the voting. They need registration help. They need a lot of things from us. That's the sweet spot for us, where you need help, and you have a lot of complex, and we help you out with that.
Yeah, mid cap, large cap.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those are the companies we're focusing in the Nordics as well, in Sweden and Denmark, and we'll be focusing in pilot runs. We're gonna test out things there. As a investor, look at those. How many pilots are we gonna get in the Nordics for the following autumn and spring?
Yeah, could you name one critical factor where we need to succeed in order to?
Yeah, definitely. Scalability. Everything in AGM comes to scalability. It's not a SaaS service or anything, it's a combination of software, legal knowledge, and a crew that knows how AGM works. The key factor is that we're gonna need to learn how to scale it. That's why we need to do the pilots in Sweden and Denmark, so we know how the market works, what the companies are, like, expecting from us, so we know how to scale the crew up, so we can serve even more companies in the Nordics and not only in Finland.
Gotcha. That's all. Thank you, Yu-.
Thank you.
And keep up the good work.
Thank you.
Next, we have Jenny. Talking about IR events here. As you explained, we are heavily involved in not just the virtual event setup, but holistically in the from the event planning to execution. Can you briefly explain what it's containing, our service?
That's a big question, actually. As you said, it's all about the service to the client. We help our customers arrange any IR events, is it AGM, CMDs, quarterly reports, whatever it is, we help them get the message through to in high quality to the right audience, and we help them to build brand awareness and loyalty within the public. It doesn't matter if it's, like, a EUR 2,000 or a EUR 200,000 case, kind of an event, it's just, it's the same thing we do. We advise, we coach, we help them get the message to the right people. That what we do. I could give a few examples.
Yeah
I t's easier to let you know what we do. This is from CapMan's Capital Markets Day last year. We create the key visuals, and from that, we create the whole show, both online and on-site, just like we do here today as well. Another example, Tietoevry's Capital Markets Day, that was also last year. This was a collaboration with Stockholm and Helsinki offices. A really nice event.
Yeah. We are not the only event agency in town.
No
R ight? How do we differentiate?
There's been a few factors here, said earlier, and one is kind of the one-stop shop that you also mentioned. We are a digital powerhouse. We have all the particles and all the elements you need to create a great event. We are all-in-one holistic service, of course. We own the technology, and now I'm not only talking about the AGM technology, we also have the VideoSync platform that your team develops. It's perfect for any company. We have the web, that you're gonna hear more about today as well from Miikka. We know the IR scene, we have the advisory experts, we have the consultants, the analysts, we have the forum, and we have the channels.
From the forum and channels, we get feedback and data that we can use to help the client, do better events and reach the audience better. Of course, the distribution and these lovely studios that we have here in Helsinki and in Stockholm, in key locations, in high quality.
Correct. We already have a very strong foothold in the.
Yeah
Finnish IR events market. Is there any room to grow?
That's a tough question. We have a solid customer base, of course, over 300 companies in the Nordics. In Finland, where I work the most, we cover a whole lot of the Finnish listed companies. It's almost like 90% of the active listed companies. There's still a lot of room to grow. There is a lot of smaller listed companies that are not so active at the moment, so we're developing better and more efficient and cost-efficient ways, automated ways for them to communicate better, to give them a chance to also be heard. Of course, we're developing new products and services for the financial sector, 'cause we see that they also have a really great value to bring to the other investor community.
Last but not least, the AGM and Capital Markets Day event business. We had a really good last 12 months doing large events for our customers, so we see that now we have a great opportunity to grow within the large event business. In the end, of course, there's the Nordic market, that's a huge potential.
That's the big opportunity.
I would like to finish with some feedback from our clients. I'll just leave this slide here. I think we always get feedback from the clients, like star ratings from one to 10, and from the last 12 months, our feedback is 9.1 on this scale.
That's great.
Yeah, I wanna thank all the clients for the opportunity and the possibility to serve you and make this product function.
Great. Thank you, Jenny.
Thank you.
Last but not least, we have Minna Avellan telling about the IR software. Minna, tell me, what is our approach and angle to the IR software market in general?
We have built our portfolio during the past two years or so, and now we have all mandatory IR software in place. That means that we have IR websites, we have tools for the website, we have news distribution system, and then we have the do-it-yourself streaming solution. How our products look in practice, the IR website we deliver as a full service or do it yourself version. This IR website tools, they include ownership data, management trading, share graphs, analyst estimates and reports, investor sentiment, to mention a few. The latest addition to our portfolio is the news distribution system, which we launched early this year, and actually, we are currently onboarding the first Finnish clients to the system.
Mm-hmm.
Finally, we have the Inderes Live, so the do-it-yourself streaming system.
There is, obviously a lot of competition also in the software, market. How do we differentiate from the competition?
Yes, that's a, that's a good question. First of all, we have the Inderes investor community, so we can reach a very relevant audience, and that audience also provides us with very valuable feedback and data, which we can utilize, for example, in our development work.
Well, basically the same question I asked from Sauli, since we are still in the building phase of the Swedish and Danish community, how does that affect in our competitiveness in these markets?
Yes, we are not there yet in Sweden, but nevertheless, our products, they are very, very good as a standalone product. Now that we are offering all these different systems and solutions, we can build integrations between the systems and increase automation, and at the end of the day, that eases the life of an IR professional.
Yeah. Yeah. Talking about money a little bit, what kind of growth targets do we have for coming years?
We have seen pretty good development in Finland, and we see no reason why we wouldn't see similar development in Sweden going forward. We are in very early phases, so we have just onboarded the first client in Sweden, so it's too early to say anything exact, but fortunately, we have a very good team in place, and I'm very confident that we will get there in Sweden as well.
Yeah, me too. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Minna. That actually concludes The Product Show. Thank you for tuning in.
All right. Thanks for the show, Janne, Sauli, you, Jenny, and Minna. Our next speaker elaborates on the Inderes Web development. Let's give a warm welcome to our product manager, Miikka Laitila.
Thank you, Eero. Hello, everyone, my name is Miikka Laitila, and I will briefly tell you about Inderes Web. If Janne's talk show focused on the all listed companies and the customer side on top, and Verneri will later discuss about the community, I will focus on the Inderes FI, SE, and DK, so the web in the center, and also touch upon the distribution as well. What is the main functionality of the Inderes Web? Well, it's the connecting these two parties, and we don't only want to connect, but also match and encourage the different parties for interactions, so inside the community, but also between these two parties. Well, what we are doing in concrete terms, currently, we've been building a new platform for our sites.
You can see these are screenshots from the Inderes SE site, that is the one running on the new platform, and so is the Inderes DK. Inderes FI will follow later by the end of this year. These sites, they act as the home ground for our community, there people can discover, they can learn, they can analyze, they can discuss about different companies. And there, of course, lies all our material, whether it is about the analysis, whether it's about the events or different releases and all the relevant things for the investor. We also provide different tools to support the investment process, for example, stock comparison, dividend calendar, and also model portfolio.
With this Nordic expansion that has been discussed previously, we have a wider reach and bigger audience for our customers' content, of course. Naturally, for the audience and the investors, we can provide better service and more content, and that is something that currently really guides our development. What we want to do is we wanna make it as effortless as possible for investors to find, discover, and also consume relevant cross-Nordic content. Not everybody is on our website yet, so then it's good that we have also distribution helping us. What we do is we distribute our content to different websites, and we have different distribution partners. For example, you can see Kauppalehti, we have Avanza, we have Bloomberg, other parties there.
On the social media side, we have the usual suspects, and we are also using local media partners. These, of course, these distribution partners, they are especially important when we wanna create awareness on new markets about Inderes. We also have our audio app, so that is one way to listen to different interviews and content that we are producing, and also events, like this one. We know that investors are different, so someone wants to listen, somebody wants to watch, somebody wants to read. We are providing different opportunities for people to find and consume our content, whether they are retail investor in Sweden, on Inderes SE, whether they are a newbie on TikTok, or they are a seasoned professional on Bloomberg terminal. Yes, I think that is quite briefly about Inderes Web.
What we wanna do is we wanna create an intuitive cross-Nordic platform designed for the growing content, but also for the growing community. What I wanna encourage is everybody, you can already go to the new site. You can see links there. Please use and provide feedback. You can send directly to me or discuss it on our forum or in inderes.fi or inderes.se. Thank you.
Thank you, Miikka. Our next speaker is someone very familiar to the Inderes community. Let's welcome to the stage our community builder and forum police officer, Verneri Pulkkinen.
Thank you, Eero. Good day, all inderesTV viewers and listeners, greetings to all the physical audience here. As Eero said, today I'm talking very basic stuff about our community. In the beginning, I want to highlight that we aim to build the most community-centric platform in the universe. This is not official target for the whole Inderes, this is how our community team, we are around 10 persons, this is how we think. This is our everyday vision when we work. Our community refers to investors who interact with Inderes content and services. I've added some memes to this presentations. I think you won't see many CMD presentation with memes. These are all from our community members. This one is from Divinesia, if you get bored by my presentation, you can enjoy the memes on the right.
The core of the community resides, of course, at Inderes.fi, though in a wider sense, we consider our Instagram or Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blah, blah, community and audiences as part of the community. We love if you spend time with us at Inderes.fi because that improves our year key performance indicator. It's okay if you only want to enjoy time with us on Twitter or somewhere else. Our philosophy is that we try to be in the all the possible places and social medias where the investors just hang around. At least in Finland, it's hard not to see Inderes if you are investor that's using internet. What's community building? It's very simple. It's like cooking Italian food, but Italian food, like pasta, takes 15 minutes.
Building a community might take five to even 15 years, so it takes longer, but the recipe is very simple. You need passion, like Italian food. First, a great and epic product or service must be built. For example, for Inderes, that was analysis, and especially Aamukatsaus, Morning Report, back in the days. Build distribution with partners and by leveraging social media. People will notice the product, fall in love with it, if it works, and become your fans. Over time, some fans will become evangelists, spreading the gospel to their networks, bringing more fans to the service. You just have to organize a community around the excellent product or service by deploying evangelists and fans, and enjoy your time with them. The key takeaway in this slide, I think, is the high-quality service. This is what we have to think everywhere, every day.
Why community? Inderes services, everybody who uses Inderes knows that it's very hardcore stuff and quite complicated service. We have tons of very long PDFs, and it's very hard to do good social media marketing. We have tried many times, but if you try to market people that, "Hey, here's this 40-page long PDF, why don't you love it?" We only wonder why they not want to read it. It's very hard to do good marketing on PDFs, but instead we are very good at creating, or I think we are very good at creating, interesting content, like videos, about that analysis. When we have a community that does word-of-mouth marketing for us, we don't have to use much money on marketing, so we minimize our marketing costs.
Community digs a moat around Inderes service over time. It's quite hard to displace Inderes when we have a community that is of high quality, and it's very active. Of course, community gives us good feedback all the time. We need to improve all the time. Here are some examples and quotes what our members think of us. The meme in the background refers to Harvia Stock, made by Thomas Rahula in our forum. Like Mauri said, "It's hard to imagine life without Inderes or Sijoitusfoorumi," our Finnish forum. "Forum is like a drug," from anonymous user. "Inderes is an exceptional island in this world of social media scuttlebutt," or öyhötys, in Finnish, was the original word. As you can see, investors who are part of our community, they are very passionate. They spend many hours per day with our time.
I think Inderes' contribution to Finnish GDP is negative because many people use their work time to hang around at our services. How to build it? I echo the previous presentations here. We create the best service. We drive traffic to Inderes platforms with good, relevant content to investors that help them to become better and more informed investors, hopefully. Of course, they have to do something themselves also. Here are examples: Morning Report, as I said previously. We have short videos or Instagram and TikTok that are very popular social medias among younger users, or, for example, Inderes TV with many different concepts, like analyst interviews. I have Vartti, we have ROAST, Sijoittajapäivä, Webcast, you name it.
Community development, I would describe that it has gone from easy trading back in 2020 and 2021 to what we call in Finland, kusetusmarkkina, bear market in diplomatic terms. While we would like our community to grow over time, we are not concerned about short term, which means few years, shrinking of the community because of a bear market. Strong community will bounce back. I would also add that I'm not worried about our community shrinking. What I worry every day is the quality of our service and the quality of our community. If the quality stays high, we can sleep well, and the community will grow over time, when the market gets better. The only focus is in the quality of the service. If Yao goes down a bit, it doesn't matter that much.
If the decrease continues for many years and the market goes up in the same time, then you can start roasting me, why are we losing users? As you can see in the Divinesia's meme on the right, many people have turned, for example, into ETF investors. Yesterday, a big Swedish gaming company, Embracer, gave very negative guidance, and its stock went down 50%, and I saw many comments on our forum, "This is it, I quit." Many investors quit yesterday, and they turned into ETFs, and of course, it's okay, but it's a very concrete example how investors lose interest in stock picking in these harder times. Sweden, I can only promise you blood, sweat, and tears in the coming years.
The recipe will be the same: build excellent service, we are building it, distribute, Avanza partnership will help a lot, build trust over time, also brand awareness with analysis or other content. For example, if we might find some very good companies and have good discussions about those companies, our forum, that might drive traffic to our service. I'd like to highlight that in Finland, I think even though Inderes did many things right, we were bound to be successful because we were the only ones trying, and no one else tried the same thing. The difference in Sweden is that there are just gargantuan amounts of different investor services, so it will be very difficult to make our service known among investors. We are not bound to be successful just because we do something.
We really have to do something different, and that those things can make really a difference. Our target is to become a relevant investor media by the end of 2025. If you ask people what is Inderes, they might have heard of it in the streets of Stockholm. I also like to use this moment to highlight we are hiring in Sweden. Isa has done outstanding job in Swedish platform, but she also needs help. She's only working four times a week. If you're a passionate, Swedish-speaking investor living in Sweden, please contact us and help us build the service Swedish investors deserve. I want to thank you, read analysis, and make good stock picks, and join our community if you haven't already. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Verneri. Now, it's time for a short break of about 10 minutes, but don't go anywhere since we have loads of great presentations left for you to enjoy. A short break will ensue. We are back live! Welcome back to Inderes' Capital Markets Day 2023 program. I hope you had enough time to grab a snack and some coffee, for we have several interesting presentations ahead. Now, it's time to link up to our colleagues in Sweden and hear more about Inderes' Swedish expansion. Let's give the mic over first to Peter Westerlund, and then Peter Sergel.
Hello. Welcome to the live audience here in Stockholm as well. Before my colleague, Peter Sergel, will introduce our strategy, I will give you a update on the event business here in Sweden. As you already know, we acquired Financial Hearings and Streamfabriken last year's November. After the acquisition, we now have over 200 listed companies here in Sweden. You can actually see, Financial Hearings as Financial Hearings and Streamfabriken as one team representing our event business here in Sweden. The operation itself is quite similar to the event business in Finland. Of course, there are some differences, which I would like to go through next. Here on this slide, I have narrowed down the business and will only talk about quarterly reports.
Here in Sweden, we have about the double amount of clients, even though we do the double amount of events, we have a smaller team compared to Finland. The big difference is that 85% of all quarterly reports here in Sweden are remotely produced video and audio cost, mainly audio cost, which doesn't require so much resources. 10% is studio productions, and about 5% are on-site events in different locations. Even though we have the double amount of clients here in Sweden, our market share is much smaller compared to Finland. Our market share in Finland is over 90%, and this is due to the Swedish market is about 10 times bigger compared to Finland. This is something we see as a huge growth potential.
By having a look on the competitor landscape, I must say that different platform providers will, in the future, be our biggest competitors. As software develop, tools are getting better, you will be able to automate things we now are doing manually. Our clients are already used to connect remotely by phone or using a web user interface. By the beginning of this year, we have started to automate the operation here in Sweden. We are digitalizing internal processes, which used to be manual handled. This will, over time, reduce resources and minimize risk of human errors. The tools we are providing to our clients are as well developing, and in the future, we will be able to reduce resources as well in actual productions.
This event venue, where we are today, was launched in February. This is a really good option for new high-end clients. Of course, for existing clients who would like to upgrade from a remote solution to a service with higher production value. This venue, where we are today, is suitable for quarterly reports, Capital Markets Days, smaller AGMs, press conferences, and similar events. We have produced about 15 events here since the concept was launched. The client feedback we are getting is really positive. By having a event venue like this, allows us to produce more advanced IR events. We can remain a price-effective service as well. Together with the event design team we have in Finland, we can now serve our clients here in Sweden with the same standard as in Finland.
This was a really quick and short update of the Swedish event business, and next, I would like to hand the word over to my colleague, Peter Sergel, who will introduce our strategy.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for listening in online, and a warm welcome to the people here in the studio in Stockholm, our really nice event place. The big question for Sweden is: Can we build a flywheel of trust the same way as we have built in Finland? All investor relations, as Sauli Vilén explained, built on this trust issue, so that the investors trust the information they read, and the companies trust that we reach the right investors. The landscape in Sweden is a little bit different than in Finland. There are multiple competitors on each and every one of our specific services. For instance, there are 5-10 different IR events providers, there are more than 10-20 equity research firms, and multiple tech providers that can handle these type of events.
There's also multiple communities, as Verneri said. We know exactly where we should position each and every one of our services. We know the competitive landscape for those services, the most important thing is that no one has all of these services. Together, our services form a very unique offering on the market. The key product areas that we will focus on in Sweden the coming years, this is also narrowed down into a timeline, where we will focus in the short term from now on in the coming year, and a little bit on the longer term, as Peter Westerlund explained about the automations and so on. The first focus that we have now is actually to utilize the studio capabilities that we have built here in Stockholm and increase the average spend per customer.
Get the revenues up from these events by showing a great customer experience and the type of add-on services that we can provide, such as design, distribution capabilities, etc., to prove that value. Also launch the new type of equity research service that we do have with this A-class service that is extremely active and that reaches all these people that consumes this content. Over time, move more and more into automated services. Lifting the high-end market with studio productions, but also automate the low-end market with more do-it-yourself versions, services that are really easy to buy. Internal goals and what we're working with internally now, is to develop, of course, our people and the customer experience. We're letting the people grow in terms of being producers and production managers and technology providers.
be bringing bigger events into the studio. On the equity research side, we have proved the value problem where we will work with key references, and even as mentioned earlier, pro bono research of large cap companies to show the value of our research and our distribution capabilities. A little bit of educating the market, both on the business side, but also on the investor side. Internally, we will focus on transformation into a more sales-oriented organization. Financial Hearings is an extremely strong brand that has been built during many, many years, but most of the sales is actually inbound sales, people asking for us to deliver services to them. This, we will enhance our outreach so that we can bring on more customers into our flywheel.
We're also focusing quite a lot on building distribution partnerships to enhance the reach, to reach more investors, to build the Nordic community, but also, reach through other providers' platforms, so that the content that we produce is actually received by as many as possible. These are the short-term internal focus areas. If we look upon the general market challenges in Sweden, it's, it is like Peter Westerlund said, in Finland, 90% of the companies are mainly doing studio productions, and in Sweden, we're mainly doing audiocasts. How do we educate the market and transform the market to do these higher level productions? We need to get an acceptance for this from the companies, that they actually do more and better productions and look more professional in their appearance to their investors.
That they're also buying more and more value add services, and accept that that can be part of the package. On the trust side for equity research, the Swedish market, you've read the news in Dagens Industri, that commission research or equity research is the reputation has not been so good. Here we have a big educational part as well to educate both the companies and the investors to understand that the type of research that we make is actually a research to be trusted. And that is one of our key challenges on the market.
From the IR software part, the key challenges come from competition, and our reach into these business-to-business companies that we want as our customers, and our sales and marketing efforts. The focus areas a little bit longer time and more externally going out from the company will be on the marketing side to prove our independence and build this trust that we are talking about. You will probably see a little bit more activities from our side there, both in our community side, but also in our distribution channels. When it comes to distribution, it's really important to have the right viewers.
Over time, as our Nordic community grows, we can also show the activity and what they're doing by using analytics and data to feed back to the business customers. Hopefully, we will be able to create a more healthy stock climate and stock discussions here in Sweden, where you have a positive feedback loop between companies and investors, like Inderes built successfully in Finland. Over time, but also starting already now, we already have the first few customers on these services. It should be really easy to use so that the customer themselves can launch a quarterly report, generate the press release, and start the event if they want to, if they have the capability, and to do that, it should be plug and play.
It should also be very easy to buy so that you can get access to this. This comes down to how can we work with sales automation and lead generation and our web pages for business-to-business communication. In the long run, putting all these pieces together, we believe that we also in Sweden, can build a flywheel of trust by starting with an open and independent equity research that people trust. If the companies build a really comprehensive and compliant web and IR communication, using our software tools, we will help them to look professional as well with the events that they produce.
So that you get your media training, standing in front of the camera, speaking to an audience during the quarterly reports to perform on the CMO, etc., and look really professional. Of course, the key here is the distribution side, that you want your content to reach as many as possible in the correct way, so that it's the correct content and not the gossip that flies around out there. If we succeed with this, we believe that we can help companies, increasing the liquidity in the stock trading and get more shareholders and shareholder relations that are built on trust and feedback. In summary, externally, we're trying to transform the market so that studio productions become more of a must-have and a want to have than it is today on the Swedish market.
We want to introduce a new level of equity research, which focus on fair value analysis and the professionalism that signals. We want to expand into the lower end of the market using our software tools, so that we can get more content on our platform and serve our investors better. Of course, enhance our distribution partnerships, both via producing new types of content, but also new types of distribution agreements with various partners. Our internal focus is, of course, to let people grow. We believe that we can let people grow by doing more enhanced productions and higher level of services when it comes to equity research.
We have a number of analysts already employed, and we have the first few customers on each and every service in our flywheel right now. We're on a good path going forward. We want to automate things where it makes sense. A studio production like this will not be automated. There you need to have a human interaction and to create a great experience. When it comes to quarterly reports in the middle of the summer, for instance, which you easily can do yourself, just do that transmission by pressing a button, and you have the order to build process already at hand. That's our target for that part on the market.
With that, I would like to give the our 10 points or 12 points actually back to Finland. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter and Peter. Our 12 points most definitely go to Sweden, although I suppose a couple of weeks ago, we could have spared some of those points to get that victory. Let's continue with the program. Let's welcome to the stage, HC Andersen Capital CEO and Founder, Tue Østergaard.
Thank you very much for, first of all, the invitation to come to your CMD. It's a pleasure to be here. I should send my regards from the team in Copenhagen. We are very delighted to work with Inderes. That's very short. It's a platform that is great, and I'll come back to a short introduction of why we think there's a great future together. First of all, this is me. We founded this company three years ago now, and it's been quite a ride. We share exactly the same values and the sort of dream of democratizing and digitalizing the financial markets. That's the thing.
I'll take you briefly through HCA, why we're here, the problem we solve, and where we see the future for us in Denmark, but also where with the obvious synergies are. First of all, it was founded 3 years ago, and one year ago, we made a deal with Inderes. Why was that? That was because the goal, the solve of the problem is exactly the same. The Danish community, the Danish investor relations community, is still very focused on institutional investors. It's still very focused on doing it the old way. We just like to disrupt things. That's nice. Well, that's what we do. We have gone out there, tried to offer a new product in an old market, you can argue, solving the same problems as Inderes.
Along came Inderes, we made a deal, and now we're working together. We're committed to the same things, growth and profitability. We have to make money every year. It's quite a hassle, you know that, but we have to do it, and that's our guiding star for how we want to develop the company. Remember, we're three years old. We're approximately 21 full-time employees. Approximately seven of them is in the research department. The rest is basically digital or advisory business that we do. We have revenue of EUR 1.6 million. Last year, we have cash at hand at EUR 1.5 million, which is very nice in these markets. Things change overnight. The daily collab is on events. It's on a shared research.
We hope that investors in Finland get some benefits out of this in Denmark, simply because they can now access very easily new companies they never heard of. Not everything in Denmark is Novo Nordisk. It's, it's a big thing, but there's a lot of other companies that we wanna draw your attention to. We do mutual events, we do content, and if you go in, if you're a Finnish investor today, you can go in on inderes.dk. Check it out. It's of course, slightly different, but the aim is the same, that we want to attract and engage investors. The synergies, as you've seen on Sweden and Finland, is quite obvious in my view. That is that all the things on the software side can be basically distributed to the Danish market. It's not easy.
Nothing is easy in this world, but it can be done. The other thing is the equity side, the equity research side. I think we will, over time, transform into the way Inderes has done it very beautifully, and of course, we will do the AGM service in Denmark, too. It's beyond discussion that it's a relevant product team. The strategy from us in HCA and the team in Denmark is to grow the market share in Denmark, but also the upside and harvest the upside on cross-selling the services. That was it. Thank you for listening, and thank you for the invitation.
Thank you, Tue.
Thank you.
Before I let you enjoy your coffee, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions.
Sure.
First of all, based on your experience of the cooperation during the first year.
Yeah
W ith Inderes, how has it been working together with Inderes?
Well, the first thing we needed to get fixed was to have a platform. I mean, the way Mikael introduced your early start was doing all this on social media, and we realized the same thing. We need to be on a platform, and we have concentrated on building inderes.dk, so the content that we produce is shared. That's up and running. It was already in October, so four, five months after, and that was, you know, a stepping stone. I think we gradually explore the opportunities of the mutual events. For example, Finnish, Swedish companies presenting to Danish investors, and vice versa. It's been a very good experience, and every time we call for help, Inderes helps us, so that's great.
Fantastic. How is the market situation looking like at the moment in Denmark?
Do you want an honest answer?
Yes, please.
Okay. Not good. I think that we have a lot of challenges in Denmark with the stock market. We have approximately 180 companies listed, 40 of them is on the First North growth segment. We have a lot of delistings, we have a lot of companies in bad need for capital, the markets are tight right now. I think what you describe as a bear market in many ways is the same we see in Denmark.
Okay. Thank you, Tue.
Thank you for having me. Thank you.
All right. A couple of more compelling presentations left, so please do stay to your seats here and back home, or wherever you might be watching this. Our next speaker is going to tell us about the Inderes organization, culture, and people. Let's give a warm welcome to our Head of People, Tuulikki Rautiainen.
Everybody, thanks, Eero, for the warm welcomes. Good to see so many familiar faces here in the crowd at the studio, and hi, everybody watching elsewhere as well. As mentioned, I'm Tuulikki, and we are in the middle of Inderes' evolution towards an international Inderes. Most of you know, we started as a small equity research boutique around 13 years ago, and today we have roughly 115 experts working with us, not only professionals in equity research, but also in IR, in tech, event production, marketing, business, community. We have a wide variety of knowledge in our team, and this is the crew we are going to go forward.
Inderes is a pretty modern type of company, we will continue to grow with our co-led organization model. We will have a lot of new career and development opportunities, we will continue to strengthen our diversity in the upcoming years. The biggest challenge for us and goal for us is, of course, to get the right people and keep the right people in the organization. Inderes Playbook is something that we can be very proud of, it describes pretty well our organization model and also our culture. It is shared publicly on our website, if you just Google Inderes Playbook and want to take a deeper dive into what is Inderes culture, you can definitely do that.
Maybe to sum it up, we are a pretty modern company with no traditional organization structure, and the no organization structure, traditional organization structure is based on our basic assumption of our people. We truly believe that our people are trustworthy professionals who are capable of making important decisions. They are able to take responsibility of the decisions that they make, and they want to make decisions that are for the benefit of the company. This is something that enables us to have no managers. All people are capable of affecting the work that they do, and they can do the best that they assess when they are working close to the customers or any stakeholders that they work with.
Another aspect that I want to highlight here is that at Inderes, people have space to be human. What does this mean? It means that we're not machines. We are not unbreakable. We are not. We don't need to get to some extraordinary goals to be able to have an interesting career and achieve some pretty magical stuff as Inderes has been able to do. It's enough to be just a human when you work here, and having this type of a very humane working culture is something that I personally am very proud of, and we are looking to continue to grow just as the humans we are. A little bit more about our co-led organization model.
It's all about freedom and accountability. Sometimes when people hear that we don't have managers, it might sound that, okay, there's no leadership, but actually there's even a bigger need for leadership in an organization model like this. This spring, as you now have heard, we have been working on our strategy. We have had a very open strategy process, and we have been defining what our market is, where we are going to be playing, what our main products are, and the teams have been working on setting up plans on how to reach the targets that they have. All the individuals and teams together define what the goals are for them in their work. They set the quality standards that they want to achieve in their work.
They design and plan and continue to develop the work processes that they need to be able to reach the quality and goals that they have. They continuously prioritize, start and kill projects, discuss and define roles according to the company development and the situation at hand. Our teams are also responsible for their financials. They recruit on board, build competencies, whatever it takes for them to keep on growing their businesses. Of course, they have a lot of support and help on it. The high accountability and the high freedom that our experts get when they work at Inderes or in any of the companies within Inderes Group is pretty remarkable.
For those who thrive in this type of a company culture, really, really get to work in a very different and interesting opportunities. We consider the, I guess, the maximum freedom, combined with accountability, combined with the co-led organization model, to make us a pretty agile company, and we are able to perform well also in rapidly changing market situations or, for example, let's say, during COVID times. When people have the ability to affect their work, they seem to care quite a lot of the quality of the work and the work that they do for our customers or any stakeholders, investors or towards each other. We have long customer relations, we have high engaged investor community, and also high employee engagement.
Last year, our employee churn was around 6%. We have been able to, so far, keep the right people. We are, as I mentioned earlier, looking forward to do that in the future as well. One important principle for Inderes is sense and respond. This means that all our employees are sensors in the market, inside the organization and also outside the organization. They assess the situation, see what needs to be adapted, how can we develop our services, respond accordingly to the market changes. This also allows our team to have a lot of continuous learning opportunities, which is usually something that drives the internal motivation of experts at work.
When now that we are growing towards international Inderes, the journey that we have already started, we need to have a continuous focus on transparency of internal information, especially me and Mikael have been talking about that we need to democratize internal information as well, and this is really needed for us to continue to make good decisions and for teams to work together. We are seeing a lot of cross-collaboration happening already now, for example, between Finland and Sweden, and between different teams in general, and this brings out a lot of innovation. For example, the AGMs and other new products that we have are cross-collaborative efforts around the organization.
With the open, transparent information and the cross-collaborative culture, we are able to have minimal bureaucracy and also minimal organization layers. Co-led organization model, scaling, and growing forward, we are not even giving, people just have the decision power in the new markets as well, where they can assess the local market adaptation needs. Our co- culture and company will continue to evolve with the new geographies that we have.
And um, and, uh, I would say that, uh, when we are, uh, recruiting new people to the team, we are, of course, looking for people that, uh, that are, uh, fit for the basic assumptions of our people, but we are also always looking for the culture adds, so people who enrich our team and, uh, bring something new, and this way, our culture will continue to be, uh, a living entity, and, uh, Inderes will continue to grow as a living organism, or organism as we, uh, see it. Um, this happens, of course, uh, with a, with a bigger effect, uh, also in, uh, inorganic growth.
We are very happy to have new colleagues from Sweden now joining the company or who joined last year our company, and they are bringing a lot of new perspective and new knowledge to the team, and our teams are working together to continue to grow. To sum up, journey towards international Inderes for us means strengthening diversity and growing our inclusive culture even further. We are continuing to build our company with equitable practices, where people feel safe, comfortable, and accepted.
In our organizational survey that we do twice per year internally, this is something that is currently already in a fairly high level, but I think we will never be done with strengthening these aspects of our company culture, so continuous development here. As mentioned earlier, we are automating some manual processes, which will allow our professionals to use their resources and time for more customers and qualified work. With this in place, we are looking to have the high employee engagement in the future as well. That is supported by our recently launched Inderes Employee Share Savings Program. We can be very proud of that.
I'm happy to say that roughly two-thirds of our employees are owning Inderes shares, we are looking forward to continuing with this program in the future as well. Culture development, which is of course slow, this continues, competence building and knowledge transfer across teams will continue. I'm happy to see how eagerly our teams have started to work together, which means different tests and projects via teams. It can mean quite a lot of business travel and also first relocations between Finland and Sweden. With this, I think, we ska continue to renta på renta.
Faktiskt, vi ska fortsätta. Thank you, Tuulikki. We have one more presentation left. Before we go into that, we have gotten a really nice number of questions already on the chat, but, well, there's always a bit room for more. Please do send your questions and comments on the chat if you want to have them heard and hopefully also answered during the Q&A session that's about to launch right after this final presentation by our very own CFO, Mikko Wartiovaara. Welcome, Mikko.
All right. Hello to everyone. I hope you have still some energy left for the last 10 minutes about, where is it? Shareholder value. It's behind me. About the shareholder value. I'm about here to tell you, our current position and about the strategy and how it reflects to our numbers. Today, little bit less numbers than usually, but let's go through it so that we start with our current solid financial position. Entering to our strategy, we have a quite solid situation. We target to generate still a stable growth, profitability, and cash flow during the strategy period. What helps us in this is that over half of our net sales is recurring revenue.
Once we start the new year during the strategy, over half of the net sales is kind of still already in the pocket, and also it gives us stability in the cash flow-wise. Usually it's pre-invoiced annually or quarterly. What comes to our balance sheet, it's in a good position also. We have done over EUR 10 million worth of investments since IPO. We invested in HCA in Denmark. We have done investments in Sweden, acquisitions there, also in Finland. We have bought our own shares. Despite of these investments, we are still in a good position, and our balance sheet is actually net cash positive. Net gearing reflecting that figure as it is negative, we have more cash in balance sheet than we have out there alone. I think, I firmly believe that this gives us good base to execute our Nordic strategy.
We have a good base, if needed, we can react through acquisitions. Also, we can stick on the annually growing payouts. We usually divide and want to look our sales between recurring revenue and project revenue. As I said, over half of the revenue is recurring, and since IPO, it's been a quite good story for us. We have continued over 20% growth on each quarter since IPO. Of course, this is something where we aim to emphasis in our strategy. We want to build up our strategy based on recurring businesses, and of course, we are happy to welcome also project revenue growth, but this is where is our focus on. We try to move some business also from project sales to recurring business. As we have heard today, we can also see different strategic products in our portfolio.
The main takeout from this slide is that we have, in different stages, these products. Equity research and IR events, they are more in the mature stage, meaning they don't grow that much. Of course, we try to find growth there also, they are the profitable, the most profitable ones for us. In equity research, for example, we maintain the high profitability and try to expand to Sweden. IR events, we are already in Finland and Sweden with a good position. We need to find out the way to unify our offering, automation, as we heard, to be more efficient. These businesses are in mature phase. AGM, we heard, that's been a success story during the past two years, we are still in the path of high growth there.
What we need to find out there is how to improve still the concept, look for the customer value we bring, and how we can reflect that also the pricing. How we can expand this great product to other countries. Then it's IR Software. There we are still in the startup phase, meaning that we invest more there than we get current in net sales. During the strategy period, we need to move this business from startup to scale-up phase. As we all know, scale-up businesses are usually highly profitable businesses. Some thoughts about profitability. We have five bullets here. Let's start from the center, discipline. We need to keep on with the wise spending culture.
Even though we grow, we need to be still responsible for the cost we do, we need to have the transparency over there, and every time we do a decision to make investments, we need to see the ROI over there. Customer value. Once we go Nordics, we get better products which have more eyeballs. This means that we need to be able to reflect that also to our pricing, and that's where we can get also profitability. Third point, automation. That's more about the efficiency, how we produce, for example, our events, how we do it in Sweden, how we can do it in Finland, how we can unify that way. Whether we can create products to Nordics, which helps the markets to be more efficient. This easily goes up to software.
Once we are able to go as we have planned in our strategy and increase the software business, we can increase our profitability also. At last, as Tuulikki told you, the talented people what we have in Inderes, we need to be able to attract and keep with those people. Over 60% of the cost structure is actually personal cost. Not over, sorry, close to 60%. This is something where we need to be careful and look that our culture supports motivated, self-driven people. Okay, to sum it up, shareholder value, 3 points: growth, profitability, cash flow. To look our growth, we need to be disciplined. We have talked that now we have more emphasis on Sweden. Even though we would have something nice in Norway, we need to stuck on the Sweden and get it rolling and get it working.
What it means also is that once we go to Sweden, now we have the one business there, events. If we want to get the good growth over there, we need to have several products, get the flywheel spinning, meaning IR Software, equity research, and community. That's how we get the extra growth. If needed, we do M&A. Profitability, that's more what I talked in previous slide. It's about cost discipline, automation, understanding the customer value we bring for the new customers in Nordic levers, and keeping up with the good profits where we have those. If we are successful in growth and profitability, that turn out to be a good business cash flow.
If we don't mess up with the investments, if we do investment gradually, not taking too much risk at one time, always cautious with risk and reward, and stay with the low investment and working capital in these businesses, I believe we can truly bring some shareholder value during this strategic period and maintain annually growing payouts. Thank you.
Thank you, Mikko, and thanks to all our awesome speakers today. Let's give a round of applause to our speakers. Now, it's time to take up your questions, so let's jump straight to the Q&A session. Okay, did everyone find their seats all right? Yes?
Yes.
Good to go. One request before we start with the questions. We have many of them, please try to keep your answers short and concise. No rambling on, even if you'd like to do so. Let's start with a question from Mörkö. Yes, indeed. "Do you see Quartr as your competitor, and why?
Briefly, no. Quartr is in the business also of democratizing financial information. They are doing it in a global way. The fact that they are redistributing some of our events helps our clients to reach wider audiences globally. That's good for our clients, and I would prefer to see them as a, kind of like, one distribution channel, just like we have many other platforms that we leverage on.
All right, M örkö continues: "Why do you not have any capital efficiency ratio or cash flow-based parameter in your financial targets?
Well, we have the annually growing dividend target, which basically forces us to keep strict focus on generating solid operating cash flow. Also, it's integrated in our business model that we have very light balance sheet. Of course, with acquisitions, you get a bit bigger balance sheet, and then there comes the accounting stuff with Finnish accounting standard that pretty much messes up the traditional balance sheet metric. I can promise that we have a high focus on cash flow and keeping the balance sheet light.
Well, what is the best variable to measure your ability to create shareholder value?
Well, of course, growth, profitability, and cash flow.
All right.
That's to put it in a nutshell.
Short and sweet.
Yeah.
We believe that the, in, good growth and profitability, that will end up to a good business cash flow, and that way we can bring shareholder value.
Yeah. Also we have quite good track of that cash flow that we generate. Yes, dividends, but also reallocating that capital. Basically, it's M&A in our case, to selected acquisitions, that can create shareholder value.
Okay, let's talk about pricing a little bit. What is your pricing strategy? asks Lammikko. Now it's moving just a second. If you have a competitive advantage, I assume you have some kind of pricing power as well. Have you?
Yes, we do have pricing power. To sum up in a nutshell, the pricing strategy, it's described in our Playbook. It's give, ask. It means that when we go to a new market, we might even give it out for free, we build trust, we show that we create value. Once we have proven for the customer that we really create value and we are trustworthy, we are also quite good in monetizing that value creation. I think that's also a kind of like long-term way and long-term philosophy to build a business. We're in the long game, we can use these type of tactics in our strategy.
For example, we've set out that in Sweden we will do some pro bono research, we will do some AGM pilots with free or very low cost to prove ourselves in the market. Once we have the trust, we are good in monetizing that also.
All right, one more question from Mörkö: "What is the thesis behind your financial targets? Growth plus EBITDA margin target can be achieved by value-destructive acquisitions and/or capitalizing R&D costs on balance sheet.
Well, we're not capitalizing R&D costs, first of all, and even if we did, it's annual target, so you will pay it down the road if you start capitalizing. The point is that if we are within that range, I can quite easily, as the CEO, claim that we are good in what we do. That's what we wanna be. The second thing, we are running a healthy business. That's what we also wanna do. That's the simple logic. Acquisitions, well, then you have the payout policy that forces us to put emphasis on cash flow after investments, not to spend out money in a stupid way. I think those kind of, like, play together quite well.
All right. Jorma asks: "How attractive are you as an employer in Sweden when looking for analysts?" Maybe this is a question Tuulikki could answer.
As Sauli mentioned earlier, the recruitment is one of the biggest hurdle we need to cross in Sweden. I would say currently, we are not very attractive. I know the players in Sweden, recognize us. They are interested and curious, and we are hearing a little bit of buzz around Inderes, I think with time, we will grow to become a very strong employer brand in Sweden as well, and an attractive employer for analysts who are looking to do independent research.
Great. Another question from Jorma: "How are you incentivizing employees to achieve financial targets?
Short question is, we don't. We have fixed salaries, and that's that.
The Share Saving Program.
Of course.
Yeah.
Great.
We're looking for people who are driven and motivated by the things they are passionate about and what we do. We have seen that the rewarding philosophy that we have here attracts the right talent. There's two targets for rewarding: get the right people, keep the right people. Once we have the right people, they are self-motivated within the organization. Of course, with the share saving in the long run, we have shown that also the employees get good share of the value we create.
Okay. Let's pick a question from Jaakko Tyrväinen regarding Sweden. "Are you planning to launch freemium research model in Sweden? How large investment this is, i.e., how large analyst and support organization are you planning for this? Do you have plan to gain media visibility in Sweden, as you did in Finland in early stage of your operations?" This is a multiple, multifaceted question, I'm gonna just ask a few bits of it first, and then we'll continue.
Maybe if I start from the research point of view, like Sauli mentioned, we are looking to launch handful of exciting research on exciting Swedish companies that are interesting and engaging for the investor audience, and that way, use that as a way to get that attention and engagement and, and visibility in the, in the Sweden market. Just like we did in Finland, started covering, for example, Nokia, and then that way, attracted a lot of interest from the, from the media and investors that, like Verneri described, came to our service and became our community members. That's kind of like a tactic that we have shown that works in the Finland market.
Nothing more specific that I would like to state out at this point. We now have two analysts in Sweden, and we have the Finland team also supporting and potentially taking on coverages of Swedish companies. We do have quite good resources to ramp up either pro bono or commissioned research clients.
Okay. Following up with Jaakko's question, or questions, the next could, I think, be directed to Verneri. "How important are the partnerships with Avanza, Nordnet, et cetera, in order to build up the community in Sweden? Also, could you give some light on how the inderes.se platform visitor data has developed from its origination? Are you seeing rising numbers from month to month?
Sure. First, the partnerships, I think they are even more important when we are selling analysis to companies, so we can show that we have distribution already, because of course, inderes.se is not very big web page. Of course, I also anticipate that when we have more analysis, when we have more stuff that we can push to Avanza and possible other partnerships, and then their distribution, we will see that Inderes will get more attention from investors. I think that's a great help over time. If we think in Finland, basically, Inderes was providing Nordnet the morning review, so Inderes was mostly known through Nordnet for many years. It's been only a few years that people don't mess up Inderes and Nordnet together.
It was few years ago, people still ask, "Are you a subcontractor of Nordnet?" It was a really great help, and I would look that in Sweden, That would give a great help to us over the long term as well. To numbers, I can tell you I actually have Plausible here open, so I can give you some statistics. When Mikko and Mikael start looking me in very angry face, I quit, because I don't know how much numbers I can give, but I think they won't affect our free cash flow, and in that sense, it's not very secret information. We moved to Plausible from Google Analytics in the beginning of April, and since the beginning of April, we have, according to Plausible, over 11,000 unique visitors.
Don't take this number seriously, because every device is counted as a unique visitor, so I would maybe divide that number with three. Before we used Google Analytics, I could already see that the trend is, however, going up. The, of course, visiting inderes.se and inderes.fi is very cyclical, so usually, the fourth quarter earnings season in January, February, March, they are the most, the busiest time, and then the first quarter earnings season is not that interesting anymore. In summertime, not much traffic, and then we see upward trajectory in traffic into autumn. Thus far, I'm quite happy. The problem is that, for example, we have very high bounce rate, but that's.. t hat means that when people come to inderes.se, they almost immediately go away, it's understandable, because the web page is not ready, and we don't have much content there.
There's much to improve, but the main message is that the trend is right, and it's going upward over time.
Great. Verneri, how many Swedish Instagram or Twitter followers do you have, and how has that number developed during the past year?
Personally
It's from Jaakko. This is not my question.
I think Jaakko is meaning, we have Inderes accounts. We haven't opened Instagram in Sweden yet. That's one of the things we should do as soon as possible when we have the new recruit, because that's very important channel, especially for younger investors. In Twitter, we have a bit over 600 followers.
Okay. Let's take a question from Mikko Mäkinen about getting traction, visibility, and growing community in Sweden. There's a bit of a typo on the presentation. Presenting where somewhat higher level strategy, could you tell more about concrete steps you plan on how to get investors' attention in Sweden?
Maybe Verneri.
Yeah, I can continue. I could also add to Jacob's question, to give just context, when I talk about those over 11,000 unique visitors in the last few months, so it's around 5,000-6,000 per month. In Finland, according to Google Analytics, again, we have around maybe 250,000 unique visitors per month at inderes.fi. Of course, in that context, the Swedish numbers are still very small, but as I said, they are improving. I wanted just to give you context that what's big in Finland. I wonder, we always show you only the yearly active users, which is of course, very... A lot smaller, but we are very conservative. How we gain traction in Sweden?
I think it comes to the points we have given today, that one option is that we start to follow very interesting companies, either as a premium model, or then we get them as customer. A dream scenario would be that we would find the new revenue or cute of Sweden, start to follow that, and in the next five years, that stock would become a 20 bagger or 10 bagger, and we would get huge followership through that. Of course, we can't count on that because there are not many 10 baggers in the world anymore, unlike few years ago. That's one way. Other way is that we now have few people in our Forum in Sweden. We actually didn't plan to open it already, but we did it by accident. Actually, we do many things by accident in the community team, I mean.
Accidentally, we opened it already, so now we have to put some discussion there. It's been a huge stress, but thus far, I could see that there are some people joining in. It might be that there are some interesting threads over time, so maybe they get some more traction. One option is, of course, I just talked with Eero when we had the pause, that we should do some marketing campaigns just to get awareness in Sweden, traditional marketing. Eero is a professional of marketing, so I won't get involved in that campaign, but that's one way to get more awareness, and over time, maybe more traffic to the website. As I said in my presentation, it's the high-quality service, and when people will notice that will help a lot, but it's true, it needs a lot more content.
Right now we have, of course, webcast of over 200 Swedish companies. That's quite interesting, but it's of course, it's not enough. I think we also need the analysis, but that will come over time.
Great. We are running well over time, almost 10 minutes over time. I apologies for that. If you just bear with us, we'll continue with a couple of more questions, and then the rest of the questions we'll answer on Forum.
Yeah
Y ou can, we can continue the dialogue there. There's a question from Jaakko Tyrväinen from SCB. How many AGMs have you arranged in Sweden this year? How long are the sales cycles in AGM services? Maybe this is something Janne could.
We haven't done any AGMs at Sweden this year, and that was a decision that we made earlier. It's a knowledgeable decision, the AGM sales period starts from August, September, and continues until November, December. Basically, last autumn, we concentrated on the FH deal. Next year, you and colleagues will be attacking the Swedish market. There might be coming some pilots already for the companies that arrange AGMs on the latter part of the year.
Well, what was behind the reason not to take on Sweden? Were you late this year in order to gain more clients in Sweden, or did you lack the technological or organizational capabilities to take over the markets in terms of AGMs?
If you look at the state where we were at last September, we didn't have a decent organization in Sweden, so it would have been too much of an effort to arrange it, to fly people from Finland or arrange it otherwise. That's the reason.
With the technological capabilities, this spring, we organized the AGM of one very large Nordic bank. We have built the technical capabilities to basically operate with the AGM solution in any country in Nordics. That's not a hurdle.
Great. Let's take a question from Nikko Ruokangas from SCB as well, and let's give this over to Peter Sergel, who should be online over... Hello, Peter.
Hi there.
I have a question for you. You have probably discussed with Financial Hearings and Streamfabriken and old clients about your broader offering. What kind of feedback have you received?
Yeah, in general, the feedback from the market is very positive that we come with this holistic offering when it comes to IR services. Most of the client base of Financial Hearings and Streamfabriken are mid-cap and small-cap companies, and they have most of their IR web, et cetera, type of services in order. It takes time, and it also takes time to build the trust for our equity research, in order for them to change what they currently have, if they have something. In general, they really like that there are a new market entrant here, that comes in with fresh blood.
Great. Thank you. Another question from Atte Riikola: "Why don't you take on large cap companies on coverage for free, to start with?
Is that a question for me?
Yes.
I think that Mikael have explained that that's part of our strategy to select a few companies that we will do pro bono research in order to create content to attract our community and show the value that we can provide. It's not necessary that it's only large-cap companies, it could be interesting companies that have a lot of discussions and interesting business models on the market. That is part of the strategy. Just as a comment on the analyst questions, is that we have recruited a number of analysts in Sweden, too. That will support our near-term demand, and what is needed in order to follow the strategy and the numbers that we put into the strategy. It's not like there's a problem in recruitment, it's more of brand awareness that we will have to work with on the market.
Great. Thank you, Peter. Let's take one more question regarding Sweden and regarding the Inderes culture. This one is from Johannes Sippola: "About the Inderes culture, how will you make sure that the Inderes culture is transferred and integrated successfully in the Swedish market and later in the Danish market?" I guess this is partly to Tuulikki and partly to Peter over on the Stockholm side.
Well, maybe I can start. We, first of all, will allow time. We are not in a rush. Of course, with the Swedish team, we already evaluated how well our company cultures matched together, and we didn't find any significant gaps between us and Financial Hearings or Streamfabriken. We are well on our way already. The teams are working together, and I think the best way to grow closer is by just doing the work that we do. Also, we have some people from Finland who are looking forward to spend some time with relocations in Sweden starting next autumn, and actually this spring we already have started with that, too. I think, with active discussions, active cross-collaboration, and also spending time together, things will start to evolve.
Yeah, just a quick comment there. I think we see. As Tuulikki said, this type of transition takes time, and the experience from Inderes when acquiring FLIK back in Finland, was that it takes a couple of years before it all settles down. What we can say is that we already now see people growing as individual, taking own responsibilities, own decisions, accountability for those decisions, and we will continue on that path, but it will take some time.
I think the difference between the acquisition of FLIK and the latest acquisitions is that now we already have event professionals in the company, and the way our production, our producers, our event design team, have started to work together with the team in Sweden, and of course, the tech team as well, video sync team, we are very happy with how things are moving forward. It is a bit of a different setup than it was in 2019, yes, things take time.
Yeah, I would like to emphasize the importance of enriching our culture.
Yeah.
For example, when we became friends with Janne, and we acquired FLIK, Inderes was a boutique equity analyst house, but we didn't integrate FLIK people to become passionate, deep-dive equity analysts. It was FLIK that enriched Inderes culture to be what it is today. Now with this acquisition, it enriches us to become from Finnish company to a Nordic company, so that's very important.
Yeah.
Great. We've now way more than exhausted our time, so it's finally time to thank all our speakers, our fantastic production crews here in Helsinki and in Stockholm, and most of all you participants. Let's give a final big round of applause to you. Thank you.