The name comes from words independent equity research. That's where we started from 13 years ago. We were passionate investors and equity analysts ourselves, and boy, it's been a wild journey. It has taken us to be a publicly listed company ourselves, and now expanding here to Sweden. Coming here, I was thinking, in Sweden, you have these such great companies and interesting companies to invest in. As an investor myself, I was thinking, "Why on earth would you invest in some random Finnish small cap company coming to present to you?" To make things worse, I made a slide that my investor relations didn't, they were like, "Are you for sure?" I made a slide to start off with why you should not invest in Inderes.
The picture is from our annual general meeting, and that is our chairman of the board. He plays okay guitar. If we start with why you should not invest in Inderes. First one, we have no track record of international expansion. We have started that journey, but we have no track record. We know fairly well that expanding to Sweden is usually quite difficult for Finnish companies, so we are quite honest with that one. The second one, we were a company doing 20% EBIT margin, so quite good margin seven years in a row. Year after year after year after year, we did 20% until came 2022, and we went down to, well, not this low, but 9% last year. We are definitely not happy with that level of margins.
The third one, we operate in a market with I would say I've learned that in Sweden it has kind of questionable reputation, commission research is one of our biggest business areas. It doesn't have questionable reputation in Finland, but in Sweden it's a bit different game. This is to start with, and now we move on to why Inderes might be an interesting addition to your portfolio. What we do, we are here to make the ecosystem, the stock market ecosystem, more transparent and open. We are here to democratize information. This is an industry that has been built to serve the 1%, and we are here to serve the 100%. We have brought equity research for everyone. We have brought investor events for everyone.
Just like Avanza has brought trading for everyone, we are the ones making the market open in terms of information by connecting investors and listed companies. How we do that is the Inderes Flywheel operating model. We are the platform between listed companies and investors. The listed companies are our clients. That's where most of our revenue comes from. I will tell you later in more detail what services they are. The more companies we get on the platform, the better services and content we can provide for the investors, which are the end users. The bigger investor community we can grow, and the more you investors trust us and like our content, the better partner we are for the listed companies. That's kind of like a network effect that we have shown that really works in Finland.
I will show it in the numbers later on in the, in the presentation. On the platform, we have almost 400 listed companies, half of them in Finland and approximately half of them in Sweden. In Finland, there's only a handful of companies that are not clients for one or several of our product areas. We are actually the second biggest financial media in Finland in terms of activity of our users. Investors are very engaged in our services that we provide for them. We have over 100 employees working to build better services for the investor relations of the listed companies and for the investor community. That's the operating model. The underlying trend on which we build our services is that investors, we want this market to be more transparent, more open.
That's a timeless trend on which we are building our business on. We're here to make the market open and transparent and more so that you can trust the marketplace. For the listed companies, what kind of services we have? This is where most of our revenue comes from. Four main products: equity research, investor relations events, AGMs, and investor relations software. These products combine deep domain expertise and knowledge within investing and investor relations. They combine our own in-house built technology platforms and our own media and distribution network through which the investor relations can reach the relevant target groups. That makes us very competitive in these product areas. On equity research, we have over 140 clients, so over 70% of Finnish companies subscribe to our equity research. On IR events, over 300 clients.
If you listen to a quarterly call of a Finnish or Swedish-listed company, the production is probably done by us. If you go to a Capital Markets Day, it's probably produced by us. Those of you watching online this event, the video platform on which you watch the stream, that's actually built by our software developer team. We are quite well present in the lives of investors in Nordics already quite in quite many areas. That's one significant business area we have. AGMs, we went into that business three years ago. There was basically a monopolistic situation in Finland. Our clients wanted competition, we brought in some competition, now we have over a 50% market share in the AGM business in Finland.
We can provide very modern end-to-end solution for investor relations, whether it's a fully virtual AGM, like we did ourselves, hybrid AGM or a classic AGM. The fourth one, investor relations software, that's where we are ramping up our business so that will bring us some scalability and higher margins. That's an area we went into three years ago. This is the main products where our revenue comes from. For the investor side of the platform, most of our services are for free. We built the monetization on the listed company side. For investors, we built a service through which you can discover, analyze companies, discuss about them, connect with other investors, connect with the companies and learn.
We believe that kind of like our role is to educate the investor community to understand the listed companies better, to understand where you are investing, so that you are not just investing in some random share price graph, so that you are actually investing in a company that does something that you believe in, that you find meaningful, and hopefully make a good profit and return on it in the long run. That's what we do for investors, it's been wildly popular service in Finland because the investors have learned that it makes sense. It is really helpful, it helps them to become better investors if they go to our service. We have built a pretty successful growth path in history.
The first phase was scaling up the equity research business in Finland and building our own digital platform through which we can distribute that research. We realized that, of course, Finland is quite limited market. We need to expand to new product areas or expand geographically to keep up the growth. We decided to diversify to new product areas. Through one acquisition and our own in-house product development, we built additional services in the investor relations events, AGMs and IR software. We have the product portfolio that basically covers the whole investor relations spectrum that a listed company needs to provide the really good service for their owners. That path we continued quite successfully. In 2021, we IPO'd ourselves. The point was to kind of like go to the list and eat our own dog food.
If we say that we serve the investors and we know how to do investor relations, so it that was part of the story, and then, of course, to get capital for our international expansion. That we started last year by acquiring Financial Hearings and Streamfabriken here in Sweden. It was a spot on acquisition to the IR events business that we are in. Now we are on the path of Nordic expansion. Really exciting journey. Our strengths. Why we have been successful and why we believe that we are successful in the future. We haven't found a similar company in the universe. It's difficult to find direct peer to Inderes. We are kind of like a media company, kind of like a software company, and kind of like a professional service companies. Investment bank, we are definitely not.
It's kind of like a combination of different business model, and that's kind of like the Inderes magic that we have built. We have our own media, so the platform through which the listed companies can reach the relevant target groups. We have the end-to-end investor relations portfolio to offer for them. We are founded and built. We breed and live the investor world. Everything we do is to benefit the investors. When we started in the commission research business in Finland, and we got competition, everyone else focused on winning the companies, and we focused on winning the investors, and that's how we became successful in Finland. The investor-centric thinking is at the core of this company. Fourth one, organization. We have built quite a different organization model. It's basically a bossless organization.
You can Google Inderes playbook if you wanna go deeper into that. We have built quite the successful organization model that combines holders, agility, creativity, and very disciplined execution on our new ideas that we come up with. We have over 2/3 of our employees as shareholders in this company, and it's over 70% employee-owned company. We do have quite a bit of skin in the game ourselves as well. This is Finland. This is where we stand at the moment. This is market penetration, so if you take market share, it's even higher, the market share that we have. This is the Flywheel effect. We are not the company that is targeting huge addressable markets like many of the previous presenters.
We take small niches and then do them in an excellent way and take a big share of that small piece in the market. That's what we've done in Finland. We have quite high market penetration in most of our service areas. We still have room to grow in Finland by cross-selling and up-selling to these existing clients. The big thing for our future is the expansion to Sweden and Denmark, the Nordic expansion, where we are at a kind of like early stages as a company now. For us, it means way bigger addressable market than we've had in history. How about the business? Like I said, pretty good growth, pretty strong profitability in the history, if you exclude 2022. Why we underperformed in 2022?
One reason is that we IPO'd and started significant investments for our expansion and growth. Part of it was deliberate. One reason is that we screwed up ourselves a few things that hurt our profitability. The third one was that, well, the market was not that easy in 2022 anymore. There was not, no longer this, ränta på ränta and so on. In 2021, I would say the market was pretty favorable for us. In 2022, it turned a bit more challenging. We continued our march, and we've had quite good start for this year. 54% revenue growth, approximately half of that is organic growth, and almost doubled our profit in the first quarter. As I said, we have network effects in this business model.
We have demonstrated that it creates strong competitive advantages that enable strong profitability. One thing I will highlight also is that we primarily build our services on a recurring business models. 55% of our revenues come from recurring services. We are founded by equity analysts, so we are quite disciplined in building good and healthy business and solid cash flow ourselves as well. Revenue for this year, we are targeting over EUR 17 million revenue and to improve our profitability from last year. Financial targets. Our target is to maintain 30%-50% combination of revenue growth and EBITDA margin. We have a business model that is generating strong cash flow. It's profitable, so we are paying annually growing dividends or payout in total including buybacks. That's our payout policy.
Looking at the history, we've been performing with the target quite well, if you exclude last year. As a company, we also have some long-term, like, infinite targets. Longevity is part of our values. We wanna build this company for the long run. For that, we have three infinite targets. We always choose to be great instead of big. Like I said, we focus on small niches and do them really well. We wanna be known that we are good in what we do, not for what, that we are the biggest or the market number one or anything like that. We wanna be known that investors trust us and like us.
We rather lose business than slip from our values and help our people to grow as professionals and as individuals. If we can stick to these, this is the philosophy, if we can stick to these long-term infinite targets, then the financial results will follow in the long run. That's our philosophy. We have opened our service, so it's a beta version on Sweden, inderes.se. You can go there. You can join our forum, and you can come there and ask me anything. I promise that I'll answer. You can ask me anything about Inderes. There's already, like, one or two people chatting on the Inderes thread. I promise that I will participate and answer whatever questions you have. Please join our forum. With that, thank you for your interest. Cha, cha. 12 points to Finland, please. Thank you.
12 points for Finland. Time for questions. Do we have any questions? Yes, we have. Microphone is coming.
I would guess that size matters in your business. I wonder, who is your main competitor? Is that the company's own organizations, or who do you compete with?
We have competitors in each and every of the specific product areas, but similar competitor we don't have. In equity research, we have banks competing with commissioned research. We have some specialized equity research boutiques. In IR events, we have event agencies, some streaming, small streaming boutiques. On AGMs, it's basically Euroclear Finland that we compete against. In investor relations software, there's a lot of small focused software providers like Investis, Modular Finance, a great Swedish company, and specialized vendors like that. Our thing is that we have the whole package, and we can combine these. With that, we can automate quite a lot of the investor relations processes that are done manually today. For example, if a company does their investor relations webcast, it goes automatically to their investor relations website.
It goes automatically to Inderes distribution channels and all the releases. Many of the manual processes around those can be automated with our kind of like end-to-end service offering.
Någon fler fråga? En fråga här. Kom med mikrofon.
Hello. Do you have music at all your general meetings?
Good question. Actually, so far we've had two general meetings as a listed company and we have a unofficial after party after it where Inderes house band plays. They have, like, three songs, and the latest song is Renta på Renta version of Inderes house band. That was released in the, in the latest AGM. We have quite active house band that is run by our chairman of the board.
Sounds nice. Another question, you said that most of the people that are employed also are owners in the company. Do you have incitament programs that takes a lot of the revenue back to the employees?
With the employee ownership, so we onboarded a lot of employees before the IPO, and now as a listed company, we have a share savings program that was launched this spring. Through that, we encourage people to be shareholders in the company. With regards to incentive programs, we have only fixed salaries. Everyone has fixed salaries and the share savings program. It's pretty simple. With the organization model, we actually have that level of autonomy that basically the teams themselves negotiate or discuss their salaries. We've taken that quite wild. It's working. It's working.
fixed salaries and not a big portion of stock-based compensation for your employers. Oh, sorry, employees.
Yeah. Fixed salaries-
Fixed salaries.
Good benefits.
Okay. Mm-hmm.
Then you get access to invest in Inderes with attractive terms.
Yeah.
You need to put in a bit of your own capital and take a bit of risk.
Have the money invested for quite the term, a couple of years?
2 years is the minimum.
Two years. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
In Sweden, there's been a debate of the soundness of paid commissioned equity research. On the other hand, the companies needs their fair share of spotlight because traditional media often tends to focus on the largest companies on the stock market. Well, what is your view here when you get the question of the soundness of paid equity research?
I think the key is to understand is you need to compete for the investors. That's the only way to build a viable business in the long run. For us, you need to accept that you will lose business because of the value independence. Like I said, in our infinite targets, we accept to lose business because of our values. Independence is our first value. It's in our name. That's obvious, we will lose clients, if you get the scale, and if you win the investors, we have seen that it's pretty sticky, the commission research business in Finland. Our churn in Finland has been around 5%, and it basically comes from buyouts of the company.
Quite few, actually terminate the contract because then investors will be coming to ask, "Why did you cut off Inderes? Where do we get our information now that you cut off Inderes?" That's the kind of like mindset you need to have in this business.
You showed us a couple of different business areas. How many different offerings does a typical customer subscribe to? My question is there a big potential for customers to add an extra offering? The average revenue per user if they have the IR service, they might need the equity research or vice versa.
Yeah.
The typical customer, how many offerings do they tend to subscribe to?
In Finland, if we get into an IPO company, then usually they take the full package because it's so simple and convenient to buy the full package. With the existing companies, we typically have started from equity research, then expanded to doing their quarterly events and Capital Markets Days, then AGMs, and then rolling out investor relations software. It's kind of like step-by-step evolution, but in Finland, we have demonstrated that we can provide the full package for quite a many, many companies, and there are synergies and benefits related to that for the customer.
Last question, if there is no more question from the audience. There is? Okay, a microphone is coming.
I think this is a universal problem. If you have this investor focus, historically, there is a huge majority of buy recommendations rather than neutral or sell.
Yeah.
How do you square that circle?
Yes. In history, it's been biased towards optimistic recommendations, that's because traditionally, for 100 year, how equity research worked is that the analyst, I've been analyst myself, the analyst's role was to generate trading for the bank. How do you generate trading is by issuing aggressive recommendations. At Inderes, our role is to connect investors and listed companies. The analysts that have been working with banks, and they come to work with us, they are blown away by that, "Now I can focus on doing equity research. Now I can focus 100% on doing equity research, while in bank, I was focused 50% on doing sales." I think that's the key. With regards to recommendation distribution, at Inderes, it's been sometimes it's been 50-50, sometimes it's been weighted towards reduce and sell.
Nowadays, I think it's around 60% positive and 40% reduce or sell. In history, we have demonstrated also that we are not that biased to positive recommendations. Of course, not all our recommendations are kind of like fully accurate, but we have also shown that for the investors that it actually makes sense to follow our research because we've had some quite successful picks as well.
Last short question. You have a high gross margin, sorry, low operating margin, at least 2022. What is a reasonable level for the operating margin going forward in the medium term?
In Finland, we have demonstrated that when you reach the scale, then you can go above 20%. At the moment, we are in the phase of expanding internationally, that will increase the cost level. From those four products, our biggest business area at the moment is investor relations events. Even though they are good margin, it's the lowest margin of those four products. With those two drivers affecting our profitability, that's what I would say kind of like in forward-looking terms.
Oh, sorry.
We have our Capital Markets Day on Friday. If you wanna learn more, please join that event, and there we will shed a bit more light on our Nordic strategy.
Events like this because you are the owner of Financial Hearings, which are our host here today. Mikael, thank you very much for an interesting presentation.
Thank you.