LeadDesk Oyj (HEL:LEADD)
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Earnings Call: Q4 2023

Feb 27, 2024

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Hello, and Welcome to LeadDesk's Earnings Call for 2023. I'm very excited to have you all listening in and to be able to present our 2023 figures. On the call with me, I also have Kaisa Rönkkö, our CFO, who'll be presenting part of the presentation, more focusing then on the figures, and I'll be more focusing then on the operational side and our strategic process for 2023, as well as then looking forward to 2024. As with the previous earnings calls as well, we have a Fireside Chat after the earnings call, where you can also then ask your questions and put them in the chat, and we'll be coming back to them during the fireside session then.

On the agenda for this call, we have, firstly, the key takeaways for last year, 2023. After which Kaisa will deep dive into the financials and how we proceeded with our financials in the later part of the year, especially, and of course, during the whole year. After that, then, recap on where we are with developing our company, where we are heading to, and what's our progress so far. Then moving on to the market outlook, and then, as said, we have a Fireside Chat with Henri hosting it and myself and the CFO participating. So, super excited to hear all your questions then at that part. Moving then to the key takeaways for last year. Last year, we've now said that we are satisfied with the performance which we did during 2023.

We were able to grow in all our markets, even though the market was quite uneven. Even in an uneven market, we were able to grow in all the markets as well as then be able to present some key highlights and some very good progress as well in certain markets and certain verticals. Also, we had significant enterprise deals coming in again, after a bit of a actually, the year before, we had two deals we could publish and then also other smaller deals at the end of the year in the enterprise sector, which is, of course, very important for us, going forward as well.

We managed to also work on the M&A side, non-organic growth, and acquisition of Länsilinkki is a good, good turn for us, which we did in the summer, and then we were able to complete the full, full integration by, by the end well before, by the end of the year. Also, our profitability developed positively, as we've said that we are focusing on profitability more now in this uneven markets and the macroeconomic situation, and we were able to do progress there, which I'm very happy about. Investments in AI, we've been able to follow up our reports and the focus shift towards AI, which is increasing now in Q4 and going forward. We've been able to do successful pilots as well as then take some features already into wider, wider production.

There's still some uncertainty in the market. As we all know, the macro environment is what it is, but even in this situation, we feel confident in both our growth and profitability. All in all, I would say that, for 2023, we can be satisfied with the progress made on our targets and, on the financials, but of course, as a growth company, we did have some left after 2023, now going forward to 2024. These are the key takeaways for last year. I'll go more deeply into the topics, but I'll let our CFO, Kaisa Rönkkö, then go through the financials and the highlights from that side before I jump deeper into the operational and strategic developments. Kaisa, go ahead.

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Thank you, Olli, and welcome to the earnings call on my behalf as well. I'm also very excited to be here today to share our financials from last year. Now, when you look at our reports, you will first notice that we have introduced two relevant changes to our reporting. First of all, we have introduced comparable currencies, which we believe that will give you a better view on our operative performance without the impact of currency fluctuations. Secondly, we have changed the calculation method for annual recurring revenue, but I will explain that in more detail on the next slide. Now, if we look at revenue, despite of the cautiousness in especially our enterprise customers, as Olli mentioned, we were happy to see growth in all our countries, which I believe speaks to our drive and resilience in this market situation.

Overall, the growth in comparable currencies was 8.4%, and the growth was strongest relatively in Spain and Germany, and in absolute figures in our home market in Finland and Norway. Then if we look at the ARR, we see that the growth was 9.4%, which is faster than our revenue growth, and this is a positive indication, indicator of our future revenue growth. Then, as mentioned, we have changed how we translate currencies into our ARR reporting. Currency fluctuations have increased during the recent years, and this new method helps better reflect the real performance of our operations, and it also allows easier forecasting of future recurring revenue. Now, with the previous method, we converted the agreements into euros when the agreements were made, or when we made amendments to the agreements.

And now, with the new method, we convert the deals into euros on the reporting date, so on the currency of the reporting date, or by using the comparable currency. And as you can see from the graph, this, change of method does not have significant impact on the trend that we see on the annual recurring revenue. And then moving on to our profitability, which we were actually quite satisfied with. We increased our focus on improving profitability already in 2022, and now we can clearly see the results in last year's profitability. What we have actually done is that we have focused on, operating efficiency and get really good control of our costs.

We plan to continue this also in the future and make, targeted, very targeted new cost investments to places where we believe that we get the fastest return on our investment. And naturally, this, improvement in our profitability is also visible in the cash flow, which improved EUR 1.6 million from the previous year. The cash flow from operations was also impacted by a temporary increase in our short-term payables. Then, if we look at the outlook for this year, we estimate that the revenue growth will be 5%-15%, and EBITDA margin, 10%-15%. As in previous years, this does not take into account any significant acquisitions that we may, see in the future. But I will now let Olli explain in more detail our strategy and market outlook for this year.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Thank you, Kaisa. Yes, as Kaisa said, I will now look at what we promised for 2023, and what we delivered, and how this reflects to our strategic process towards our end goal. Strategic goals for 2023 were outlined at the beginning of the year. There were four things that we promised to deliver on: firstly, focusing on organic growth, maintaining and improving profitability, tighter integration of AI, and non-organic growth. Looking at then the organic side, as said previously, I'm very happy that we were able to grow in all the markets. Nordics, being our home market, of course, grew the most in euros, but then, percentage-wise, the leadership position was with Continental Europe. We've been also able to maintain and improve as well on our profitability, as Kaisa outlined.

We've been able to integrate AI more tightly into our offering and execute on pilot projects, as well as then taking those further into production. Fourth promise was the non-organic growth, which we're, we were able to execute on in 2023. And we can clearly see that the market is significantly different in the late part of 2023, compared to then 2022, for example, when the private valuations were off the roof. Looking more deeply into our focus areas for growth. We have markets going from the Mediterranean up to the Nordics and beyond. So we're quite a wide market. But then looking more deeply into the single segments there, firstly, the Nordic core, our home market.

Our growth is based on maintaining our strong position, especially in the SME segment, which is super important for us, and where we want to really focus on, and which we want to, which we want to conquer more. So the SME market still in the Nordics is a very important market for us, and we hope to gain both market share and then also extend from our, only the core, core offering to other verticals as well as, as that is where, where we have the opportunity. On the other hand, Nordics is also where our enterprise, enterprise customers are mostly, and enterprise segment augmenting SME in the Nordics is both a very big opportunity for us, as well as then, it's a great, great expansion, possibility also for the future.

Nordics, as the home, we really need to focus on providing good, good solutions here with great service, augmented with AI, and bringing all those great features into the market, which we can then utilize elsewhere. Apart from the Nordic core, the second, second footing is in Continental Europe, where we can leverage our very strong product that we've built in our home markets, and we can then leverage that in the continental market to drive growth. So in the Continental Europe, we are looking at focusing on the very core SME segments, where we are by far the strongest, and execute on that. We want to be more product-led here. We want to be more to the core, and we want to execute on a high-growth strategy here.

Of course, that's also one of the reasons why the percentage-wise growth was on a good level in the Continental Europe. Efficiency-wise, of course, all these investments, we have a very large range of countries that we operate in, and we are quite different from the other Finnish software companies in this regard. We have local offices in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, France, and Spain, which of course means that there's a lot of costs involved in this effort as well, and we really need to focus on driving performance and efficiency in operating across Europe. While the Nordics are our home market, we have a very large operation across Europe, and we really need to drive for efficiency now and in the future.

So the key takeaway here, Nordic core, good market position, driving growth there, and Continental Europe, then leveraging our strong product for future growth and really, really having a great addressable market. The other segments we have are SME and enterprise. As said, we really have a good position in the SME market, very strong product, and this is where we can really, really show off from the competition and where we really want to be the strongest now and in the future as well. And here we can really provide the SME customers great service with 15-minute onboardings, improved sales and customer service, and we can really make an impact to their efficiency as well.

We can take these advantages of a standardized product and large-scale, large-scale cloud operations, and we can bring them to the enterprise side, which then has higher requirements, more detailed requirements, localized and cultural sensitivity, and they need also the good integrability that we have learned to do in SME side. We can all bring these SME benefits then to the enterprise. And then, as in the enterprise customers have other needs, for example, around AI, and they have more investment capabilities, we have the opportunity to build great things also with the enterprise segment and bring those benefits back to the SME side. So we see these two segments as supporting each other. SME, we get the fast-moving customers that are really adaptive, and then on the enterprise side, we have customers, maybe more stable, but who have more investment capabilities, for example, in AI.

I've mentioned AI a quite few times already in the presentation, but the adoption of AI is critical for future competitiveness. The increase has been very visible, not only in our sector, but also in other sectors during last year. As the emergence of this generative AI, firstly, OpenAI, and then the others who have followed, is really an opportunity to transform software provided for contact centers as well as other verticals. To really provide great contact center AI, you need to have vertical-specific solutions. You need to focus on this vertical. You have to have great software for contact centers to be able to provide AI. You need to have the data and the understanding of the processes. What you also need to do, which we are highly focusing on, is speech-to-text.

So to be able to really use a lot of these AI tools, you have to have the speech in a textual form, and we are investing highly into that. We see that this can be really a benefit for us in the future. As a European player, we are focusing on this market and the needs of these cultures and languages, and we can really be transformational as we both have the scale and the expertise, then to service the market. We see that the players who fail to integrate these capabilities will be at a disadvantage in the midterm, and it's gonna be transformational to the market. The milestones we've achieved is that, we've been in the AI field for years already, but we decided for further investments and invest heavily into AI in the first half of the year.

We had the first pilots, we verified the first solutions with the product- market fit, and we've decided to invest more into AI adoption. One example of this is that 20% of all the call data in our Coach software is being transcribed at the moment, and now, as that is happening, we can bring great new features based on those transcripts then to our customers. Our target is that we'll integrate all these functionalities across our product suite, and we see that, these features will benefit our customers and increase the value of our solution to our customers, and we can really make a big improvement in their efficiencies. Contact centers, there's a lot of labor involved in contact centers, and increasing the efficiency is crucial for our customers.

Jumping then more to other topics on our M&A side, as you well know, we have been on a AI, sorry, M&A, M&A, strategy for quite some time. In 2020, we acquired three companies, Nordcom, Capricode, and Loxysoft, and then year after, GetJenny, our conversational AI. And last year, we were able to then execute here as well by acquiring Länsilinkki, and on the benefits that we've received from there is firstly, improved offering and quality. Now we are interfacing with all the large telecom operators directly, trading traffic. We've been able to improve our competitiveness also on the offering as we are, we are in the core now, and we don't have to rely on partners for any services.

Lastly, but by no means least, there's a lot of technical expertise that we got through the acquisition of Länsilinkki that was not readily available on the market. This deep telephony technology is not, is not readily available by recruitment. It's really great that we have a fantastic team now in our CPaaS platform team to really take our platform forward. Then the market outlook for this year, there are a few tailwinds and headwinds. Tailwinds meaning things that support our growth, and headwinds that we have to overcome. On the enterprise side, we see enterprise investment debt in contact centers benefiting us.

So for example, these enterprise deals that we've been able to now, now close, and, and all the deals that we have been pipeline on that end, we've known mostly about them for quite some time, but the dynamic in the enterprise and the large, large end customers has been that investments have been put forward. But now, with the, with the problematic that customers really want and require better digital service, together with the development of AI, it means that also the enterprise sector has to move on these investments. Also, need for operational efficiency in contact centers across the markets is helping us. So of course, in a tight macroeconomic environment, our customers and our prospects are looking for operational efficiency, which we can bring with our great cloud product, augmented with AI. And then thirdly, AI adoption in contact centers.

To really run efficient AI, you need to have the data, you need to have it readily available, and you need to have the software to support that. We are one of the few true cloud players on the market. Our software is not custom-built, it's a cloud solution for our customers, which means that our innovation cycle is much faster than our competitors. On the headwind part, there are, of course, economic uncertainties, certainties which are in the market. Customers do seek to curb the costs, so of course, there's, for example, over subscriptions have pretty much vanished. So customers, customers are very tight on who has access to our software and who doesn't, so that is, of course, of course, something that affects the market and our, our position there.

Then, of course, the impacts of the regulation, they are a bit twofold, but typically, when there's increase in regulation, there are both benefits and then risks to us in the sense that some regulation, of course, requires changes to software or more software being used, but some regulation then hamper the work in contact centers, thereby then reducing the work that our customers want to do there, and which they try to push elsewhere. But in general, the outlook for this year is quite positive, but there are, of course, naturally, risks in the environment, which we work hard to minimize. Great opportunities lie ahead of us as well, coming to this year. Thank you. This was the part of the official part of the earnings call.

We'll be moving then to the Fireside Chat together with Henri and Kaisa. Thank you so far!

Operator

Welcome to the Fireside Chat of LeadDesk. My name is Henri Palomäki, and I'm from Sijoittaja.fi, which is an information service for private investors. I'm here to host the chat and asking some question from Olli and Kaisa. In case you have any questions, write them down in the chat, and I will go them through with the management. So thanks for the presentation, Olli and Kaisa. For me, it looks like the performance of LeadDesk was quite solid and unsurprising. There was not a lot of changes. How do you think, how satisfied you are as a CEO of the company for the general performance, and which were the main objectives you achieved?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Thanks, Henri. Yes, so in general, I was satisfied with the year. There were a lot of things happening during the year, but we were able to maintain a solid performance throughout and and overcome obstacles that came through. The happiest time, of course, with the AI developments we have, and that's something that we have a high focus in, of course, bringing efficiencies to our customers. In the first part of the year also, I was very happy with our SME process.

Then at the late part of the year, Q4 especially, I was happy that our enterprise segment has come out again well, and the enterprise customers are moving, and that's something also I'm spending now quite a lot of time in then helping our enterprise customers to onboard and to get the best possible service that they can. That's I think something that really is like very like heartwarming, at least to me, that the enterprise segment is again on the move, and that's and looking good also for this year, so that's great.

Operator

Okay. Let's talk first about the numbers and the revenue and the growth. Like last period, you also suffered a bit for the exchange rates. Your growth was 3.9%, but with comparable currency basis, 7.7%. Are you happy with the development of the revenue?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes. So on the comparable currency side, which of course we operationally look at, only, so operationally, we run the company with the comparable also, before the change to the public reporting. For that end, I am satisfied with the results and especially with the fact that we were able to grow in all the markets and not just so that some were lacking, but. I see that is a great achievement. On the other hand, we did have quite a bit of hunger left for growth coming to this year still. But in an uneven market, of course, it's always a bit uncertain. There are a bit of uncertainties that come behind the corner. But all in all, I was satisfied with the performance last year.

Going into this year, I see that we had some hunger left from last year for more growth than-

Operator

Yeah. What about profitability then? Kaisa, profitability remained quite stable in the second half. Your EBITDA margin was 13.7%, almost the same than last year. Was there any major changes, that, like, affected to the profitability?

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Nothing huge, as such. It's just continuous work towards operating efficiency and growing while keeping good control of the costs, basically. What we have done actually now and we continue to do, like I mentioned previously in the presentation, that we are really making targeted cost investments, so trying to make those investments where we believe that we get the fastest return on investment and where we have success.

Operator

Okay, and regarding gross margin, there's a question in the chat. So your second half gross margin declined somewhat versus the first half. What is driving this, and how should Länsilinkki acquisition impact on the gross margin going forward?

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Nothing major happening on that side during the latter part. For the full year, the gross margin was actually a little bit higher compared to previous years, but we estimate that Länsilinkki should improve the telco margin going forward.

Operator

Okay. What about the guidance then? For revenue, 5%-15% growth with comparable currencies. Do you see any specific sectors or countries, markets where the growth is driven?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

So, to reach our full potential, we will have to perform well in all the sectors and in all the segments and markets. So it's, of course, clear that we are targeting for absolute performance in all the markets and all the segments. Then again, of course, it's an uneven market still. There are fluctuations quarter by quarter. We see customer sentiment changing. And, to that end, of course, it's harder to predict than in some more normal years how things develop. But I see that growth in all the markets also for this year is very important, and then taking headway on the markets and the market share is important. To my understanding, it's been quite a hard years, the previous two, for also our competitors.

Then to that end, I see that we with these numbers actually might be gaining market share. That's a positive, of course, then at least to I see it as a... Like, I see our market share position developing positively. That's of course great, great then for us, considering following years.

Operator

Yes. And then there's a question from Jaakko: Were the both published large enterprise deals booked in the end of 2023 ARR?

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Yes.

Operator

Yes. Okay. And still about profitability, Frans- Mikael asks, "Could you tell us more about your profitability development in your different main markets?

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Profitability development, we haven't really shared that, as such.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yeah. And looking at the profitability on the different markets, so we basically the main bulk of the costs is of course in Finland, where we have most of the R&D and other items, and of course, like-

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Support functions

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

... support functions and all that. So, and then these countries where we have, basically they are resellers, and they are, of course, our own organizations, but you can think of them as resellers to this regard. And, if you want to dig deeper into this topic, you can look at the concept fees that are then attributed to each country. And in the concept fees, you can see the, like maybe the profitability that we are looking for here.

Operator

Okay. Thank you. Then there's another question. What are your current thoughts on expanding in the enterprise segment in the Continental Europe?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

So we're focusing our enterprise efforts into the Nordics, where we have the clearest right to win and, where our SME market position allows us then to do those investments more profitability. So, being in Continental Europe, the market is huge, even in the SME sector. So like think of the greater Berlin area has more people than, most of the Nordic countries. And that's the reason why we have laser focus. So... And this also allows us for more efficiency in our operations, so we can target the marketing and the sales efforts, laser sharp instead of going for a wide beam.

We see this as a key, key, key thing for our growth in Continental Europe that we really focus in the Nordics, which are of course the markets are smaller as the countries are smaller. We have more opportunity then to to also extend to the enterprise segment as our SME segment is already strong. Our market share there allows us also to target the enterprise.

Operator

Okay. And now in the second half, the enterprise segment was doing better than SME, and I remember it turned around from the first half of the year. Was there any specific reason for SME side to be weaker, or was it just seasonal changes?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

I think the sentiment has changed a little on the SME side, where you have entrepreneurs, when, like as, as a Finn, when you have snow blowing in your face, do you go to cover or do you just move forward with your head up? And I think this is a bit different. So, when, when SMEs are hit with troubles they have to overcome, they pick a different, like, a tactic, and they really like, they push forward with their investments and efficiency gains and this, whereas then enterprise becomes more hesitant. And now I think that it's a little bit turned around as, as the enterprise side has now clearly come to the market, and there's much more activity there.

SME is by no means in the same state that enterprise was at the beginning of the year, but they have been more cautious now. They are looking at the investments more and maybe making, not making those operational changes now. But there are positive signs again, like in the beginning of the year here as well. No big shift yet, but there's like this the maybe the uneven market I've been talking about now a few times. So.

Operator

Yeah.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

It's an uneven market. I think that's the best way to put it.

Operator

Okay. Now there's a lot of questions about AI, and also that's one of your focus areas. Could you tell us about the monetization of your current AI tools? So is it like can you create a new service from that, or is it more like staying alive competition against the competitors?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes. So AI, there will be different monetization methods concerning. But... So if I just run through the two basic ones. So firstly, we believe that certain level of AI must be part of the basic package, and that's the, like, the entry level that you have to have in your software. And that we are now really wanting to also push the market that, hey, these things you must require from your vendor. And that is something that will distinguish us from, especially from the small competition, who don't have the investment capabilities. And then secondly, there are other tools that are then augmenting those basic tools that bring additional value, which are then based on the customer process. So which kind of problematics the customer is working on, contact centers.

Some work with email, some work with phone, some with web chat, some with social messaging, so on. And it differs then, like what different contact centers want to use. And of course, these functionalities are more specialized. They bring more targeted value to the customer, and naturally, then the monetization is different in these cases. They are not part of the basic package. So twofold. Firstly, stronger market position, allowing us then to, of course, take a larger market share and increase the per seat, per seat-based pricing. And then, on the other hand, more targeted software solutions for specific needs.

Operator

Okay. And continuing from, from there, if you compare your AI feature development to the large competitors, how do you position against them? How large is your AI development team, and would you like to recruit more AI talents? Are you using external service providers in AI development? So there was three questions, but,

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

So I'll try to answer those. So looking at, we actually did, in the summer, we did a external short market study on this, and it seems that even the, at least in Europe, even the largest, providers, the US providers, haven't been really able to deliver, anything except promises. It might, of course, differ in the US, but that's the case in, in Europe, according to this small study. And here we believe that we can be in a prime position to actually transform, especially the European market, where we have, different languages, we have different cultures, we have different needs. Just as an example, we have a multinational, customer, using us in, of many, many European countries.

The same AI and the same knowledge bases and the same training of the AI doesn't work in two countries because their business, while being the same, has different partners, has different registration. There's so many things that then they have to have an AI trained for each market, and that's the kind of thing that we are specialized in. So with our software, you don't have to train as much, and even though you have to have many of these training modules, that's like all, all handled. And then the language part, bringing transcriptions to the languages is a large, a large deal. And having that done then also cost efficiently, it's a big, big deal. Most likely I skipped some questions.

Operator

Yeah. Yeah, that was the first part. Good. Thank you. And then, about the, development team.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes, so we have, in the development team directly attributed, I think we have, like in the core AI team, we have, three people. But together with like the, the development of these new tools, what has changed is that it's not the core AI team who are doing translation iteration engines, training the models, and so on, but it's all about like having all the data there, having, good ways, to actually use the AI, so it's intuitive and it's user-friendly, and you can actually get stuff done. That's the big part of it. And there, of course, we can utilize our full R&D capabilities. So you have to, i n this, I think applies to all AI development, that the core team working on the models is like just the tip of the iceberg.

Operator

Mm.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

The real value lies in the other parts as well, and that's as important, and it is as difficult.

Operator

Okay, then I think the last one about AI. With AI features partially reducing the needed seats by your customers, are you expecting to go through a larger pricing model transformation in the near future?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

I don't foresee that in the near future.

Operator

Mm.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

The thing is that typically, where you get the biggest benefit of AI is in menial tasks, but that's typically where you have the lowest value. If these contact center agents can be transferred to more value-making jobs and, like, more value-making business processes, it doesn't decrease the amount of agents, but it actually increases the whole share that we have of the wallet.

Operator

Okay. Okay, then, what about Jaakko asks, "How is your current sales pipeline looking versus the situation a year ago?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Especially on the enterprise side, it's looking much better now. So enterprise, as I said, it's come alive, so on that side, it looks better. SME, the sales cycles are much faster and so on, so pipeline at one point doesn't predict a certain period, but it's on an okay level, but...

Operator

Okay. Then, Kaisa, one question for you about the numbers. Frans-Mikael asks, "What is the explanation behind the clear drop in your depreciation level in Q4 versus Q3?

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Q4 versus Q3. There was in one of our subsidiaries which we actually merged at the end of last year, we had done too many depreciations that we actually had to reverse in the last quarter.

Operator

Okay. And then another one: "How did your net revenue retention develop this year?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Well, on that end, I don't have the figures here, but, I don't think there's anything to... Like, there wouldn't be anything to report on either.

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Mm.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

It's like on the same kind of level that one would expect from previous years.

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Yes.

Operator

Okay. Let's talk about M&A then. So last year, you published the acquisition of Länsilinkki, and now in this report, you said that you completed the integration. What's next? What's-- How does the market look like at the moment in the M&A side?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

So on the M&A side, we are looking at two vectors there. So firstly, of course, like market access, and we are looking at competition and near, like, verticals.

Operator

Mm.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

To that end, there it's about, like, faster growth. We are in a software market where our software is mission-critical to our customers, which means that customers are typically quite reluctant to change the software, which, of course, then M&A helps here that we can get a better access to the market. And then, on the other hand, we are looking at certain, like augmenting software, so providing our customers with more of the software suite that they are using, and also then possible benefits from, for example, new features or new sub-products in our suite.

Operator

Okay. Then about partnerships, that was also one of your main strategies, before, and last year, you also published the Salesforce app, for example. Is there any news, or any major changes in the second half, or what we're looking at this year?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes, so, we do have now integrations to all the major CRMs. So, Salesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and then also Zendesk on the ticketing side, for example. And this is something that we do provide for customers and which we are partly focusing on. We see, though, that the, like, the pipeline for the full call solution is typically, like, best together, so that we have the CTI and the partner model for some users, and then the other users use our full stack solution with another integration. So it's like, it, it's always, like, we typically do deliver these with together with the other parts of the solution as well, which of course then helps.

Now that we are natively in these ecosystems, we are in much better position to offer inside the ecosystems.

Operator

Okay. And then the general outlook for 2024. So what are your main strategic themes and objectives for this year?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes, so we want to maintain our growth and also we have hunger there, and that's of course the main topic for growth company. Looking at the, of course, the markets and the general economic situation, we have more focus on profitability and we are focusing on that also this year. AI, rolling out features to more and more customers, and then, of course, upsells related to that, and that dynamic is very important to us. And fourthly then, as also last year, executing on M&A, we see that the market is consolidating fast. There's happenings now again on the market, which were not there maybe one year ago, two years ago, when we also had a brief pause in acquisitions.

We see that the market in general is consolidating, and we need to act there, and the private valuations are now at a level where we can then execute on that as well.

Operator

Okay, good. Thank you. I think my basket of questions is done now and over and empty, and there's no more questions in the chat either. So, thanks for the great discussion. The recording of this event will be published in the LeadDesk's investor page. Do you have anything to add in the end?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Well, just a big thanks for, of course, our employees and customers, but also our investors and owners. Big thanks for having your trust in us last year and going forward. It's a great pleasure to get to see 2024 results then in one year, hopefully with Henri then as well here. And thanks, Henri, also for coming and hope your back is better.

Operator

Yeah. Yeah, thanks, thanks for the invitation, and I'm happy to be here always. And, yeah, have a wonderful day.

Kaisa Rönkkö
CFO, LeadDesk

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Thank you.

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