LeadDesk Oyj (HEL:LEADD)
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Earnings Call: Q4 2022

Feb 23, 2023

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Good morning, Europe, welcome to LeadDesk's earnings call for 2022. I'm glad to have you all on the call with me. It's 11:00 A.M. here in Finland and 10:00 A.M. elsewhere in Europe. On the agenda today, we'll first look at the LeadDesk in general, then we'll be moving on to the highlights of last year, looking at the key figures as well. Of course, everybody's super interested in them. We'll look at the outlook for next year, what's the goals and ambition for the coming year, and at the end then we'll have a fireside chat together with Henri Palomäki, and there will be also ample time for Q&A then. I'm super happy to have you all on the call with me here, and I'm super excited to be able to present our last year's results.

On the call with me, presenting some of the financial figures, you have our CFO, Paul Stenbäck, who will do a deep dive more into the figures part and I'll focus then on the more strategic and operative content. One of the questions that typically comes up is that what does LeadDesk actually do? What do we do? What's the core of LeadDesk? What is the software? What do our customers especially do with our software? It's a wide question as our software is so widely used. I just wanted to highlight some of the key use cases that we have for LeadDesk and which we are happy to support our customers with. As you see, LeadDesk is a widely used system in a wide variety of different use cases, a large variety of different industries and verticals.

What takes all these and makes them the same is that all these verticals and industries have a large number of customer communication points. They have a lot of customer communication happening, whether it's B2C or B2B business. There's a lot of customer communication happening. We're not talking about marketing emails here or any automation like mass automation. We're talking one-to-one connections with people. We facilitate these conversations that our customers have with their end customers. That's our key, and that's where we are the center, bringing all the data together for our customers to be efficient at their own operations. That's the core of LeadDesk, and that's why we're so enthusiastic about our offering. Looking at the company side, we are a leading SaaS provider in our vertical, meaning providing software for customer support and sales. Our focus is on the European markets.

That's where we excel. Our market, the European SaaS market for contact center software, customer service, sales, that's the key. Our ambition for the future is that we want to reach EUR 100 million in revenues. Why EUR 100 million? We want to set ourselves apart clearly from all the legacy providers, from all the competition. We want to be the clear number one in the European market. That's our ambition, and that's the road we are on. I'm happy to say that we are well on our way there at reaching our targets.

When it comes down then to what we base all this on is our software and its ability to take all these different customer service channels together, put them into a one formalized way so that they can be analyzed, they can be routed to the right person, they can be analyzed, and that everything's in control. Our customers can be in control of the conversations they are having with their end customers. We have a lot of different channels. Most traditional, of course, is telephony, which accounts for majority of customer service and sales communication at our customers and in companies in general still.

On top of that, then we have also other channels such as SMS, email, and social media channels, web chat, of course, and all these modern channels that then put our software in the forefront of omnichannel customer service and sales. That's the foundation first. We take all these different channels, the traditional and the more modern. We have a harmonized way of controlling that. We are able to route them to the correct endpoint, meaning one of the agents or a conversational AI. In our setting, we have a few different interfaces we provide our customers in order to then interact with these conversations. We provide Omni for omnichannel customer service, meaning customer service across channels. We have outbound for sales use cases.

We have LeadDesk Talk. LeadDesk Talk is then when you are doing your work primarily in a CRM system or a ticketing system, for example, then we can bring in natively LeadDesk Talk into, for example, Salesforce or Zendesk. On top of that, as you saw previous, we do also have the field case, meaning when the employees are on the field. For that use case, we have our mobile solution. It's not, of course, enough nowadays to only provide human interaction. That's why we are super enthusiastic about our JennyBot, a chatbot that can do some of these conversations on behalf of the agents or can assist agents in doing their work in order for the personal touch to be more prevalent than in the contact centers.

These are all one system, and these are just different user interfaces to make it efficient for the use case. No software can be without integrations nowadays. You need to have other systems, of course, supporting customer service and sales. For example, invoicing systems or customer relationship management and such. For those, we have great APIs, we have great integrations for these use cases, and we support a large variety of integration capabilities. If you consider this to be the factory floor, then you also need the tools in order to make the factory run as efficiently as possible. For that, we then, of course, provide a large variety of critical tools for our customers in order for them to do their work efficiently. This can be considered like the flight control of customer communication at our customers.

Our workforce engagement tools enable both motivational aspects, motivating the agents. It enables meeting your SLAs with fine-grained tools in order for you to then meet the SLAs and have the right people answer the right questions at the right time, and a whole host of other things. Especially now, quality management being a key topic that a lot of our customers are talking about. All this we can then also enable with AI. We've invested in AI for two years already, and we have many tools available. For example, Jenny is one of the prime ones, an AI, conversational AI tool that our customers use both in a customer service setting and in sales.

With the latest developments, we see great opportunities in bringing more functionality now and more quality functionality to our customers. Our primary market for the solution is the European market. We've spread across Western Europe and the Nordics with own presence in some eight countries now. All the way from the Arctic down to Mediterranean, we can service these countries very well, and this also brings a great barrier then to entry for any other providers looking at these markets. European markets are very particular in that they have very strict guidelines on how you control data, how customer service and sales should be operated, and so on and so forth. Meeting these criterias is a huge hassle for anybody wanting to enter the market.

We talk about compliance as a service, and it's built into our system, and our customers take it for granted, as they should. We must be compliant in all the countries where we operate, but it is a good barrier for entry to any of our international competitors. On the other hand, our infrastructure, where we've invested a lot throughout the years, is rock solid. We've invested in having a global infrastructure, our own CPaaS network with high-quality interconnects to local operators in order for our customers to be able to rely, not just their business critical operations, but mission-critical operations as well on our infrastructure and our software. To top it off, throughout the years, we've also invested in security and not just as passwords, but actually to prove it, we have the best security certificates available.

That's a great thing to have, especially on the enterprise customer side where they require rock solid security. Looking at highlights of 2022. We can be super proud of last year. Looking at the goals we set up for ourselves. Firstly, strong organic growth. We said that we will have a strong growth for 2022. We will extend our offering. We will focus on getting non-organic growth. Lastly, we'll enter the ecosystems, the large global ecosystems, and also build on our partner network on top of that. How did we do here? The outcomes for last year, we were well within our guidance.

We managed to also do a lot of R&D. As an example, we launched a new UI for the sales use case for Outreach, as well as then we provided for native integrations into quite a lot of systems with our Talk product and other products. On the M&A side, due to the fact that the valuation differences between public and private markets, it was quite hard to work on it. In the second half still, we see private valuations coming to a more level more in line with the public markets. That pipeline is very active at the moment, but unfortunately, we didn't close any cases last year, mainly due to the fact that the valuation differences were still too large.

On top of this, we also launched our Talk user interface to our system inside AppExchange for Salesforce and LeadDesk Marketplace. As said, we also do have a variety of other ecosystems we do natively integrate, but these are well presented now also in the ecosystems own marketplaces. I'm super proud of last year and now it's a great time then to hand over to Paul Stenbäck, who will then talk more about the figures.

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

Thank you, Olli. Good day also on my behalf. 2022 in numbers at a glance. W e generated EUR 28.1 million in revenue across 1,900 customers throughout Europe and across a number of verticals. Our international revenue was roughly 60%, and we employ 170 people across eight offices in eight countries in Europe. Which is actually, the number is actually slightly less than a year ago, which implies we've actually done more with less people. Our EBITDA margin was 12%. How does this compare to the previous year? Revenue growth amounted to 14%, of which roughly 10% was organic.

In the second half of the year, organic growth was 12%, driven primarily by Finland and Norway in the enterprise sector, and Spain and Finland in the SME segment. ARR grew at 9% and EBITDA margin was steady at 12% of revenue in 2022. However, EBITDA has been on an upward trend during the year. Second half EBITDA margin was 14% with the improvement being driven by scalability of revenue and prudent management of personnel costs. We'll dig deeper into the financials also in the fireside chat. A nd now I'll hand over back to Olli.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Thank you, Paul. Looking at our strategy for 2023. What are we going to achieve this year? Our focus is still on growing organically and managing great organic growth. At the same time, due to the macroeconomic situation, a prudent company, a diligent company must also look at the profitability side more than in another kind of market. We will look at maintaining and improving our efficiency throughout the year. Of course then, growth and profitability for us is always an equation. Now we're gonna be looking a little bit more now on profitability but still maintaining strong growth.

One of the key things for the product side is a tighter integration with the AI offering, and our AI offering, and making sure that the arms race that is now ongoing will also benefit our customers even in the short term. We are super excited about the opportunities that we now have with the new tools that are coming to the market and new studies and research that is happening across the world, and especially being driven by the likes of Google and Microsoft. As said also, the private valuations are now on a more sustainable level, and we look forward to seeing also non-organic growth this year. When it comes to the outlook, the outlook for 2023 is that we are expecting from 6%-14% of annual revenue growth for this year.

First time we've also given more on the profitability side. We are giving a tighter guidance there. Between 11% and 16% of profitability measured by EBITDA. As previously as well, this outlook does not take into account any significant M&A that might happen throughout the year. Our investment story holds very strong. We are in a prime position with our product, and we are really a leading product in the market, and that is the foundation of our growth and of our success also in the future. We have a great go-to-market model. We've demonstrated it country after country that our go-to-market model works greatly, and that is one of the fundamentals which we should also build our future on in the coming years.

Our revenue mix is stable, our revenue mix is varied, we are not on only a few customers, but we do have a large variety of customers, large variety of industries, our revenue mix is on a healthy level. Lastly, we are super ambitious. We want to take over the market. We want to dominate the European market in CSaaS, that's the ambition that we are driven towards. This concludes this part of the presentation and event. We'll move next to the fireside chat, where you also have a opportunity for Q&A. From my part, I would like to thank you now, all the shareholders and our employees for last year. It was great year, I'm super happy about all our employees and all our great shareholders.

Now, we'll have a minute or two pause while we move on to the fireside chat. Thank you.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Welcome to LeadDesk's fireside chat. My name is Henri Palomäki, and I come from Sijoittaja.fi, which is an information service for private investors. I'm here to ask some questions from Olli and Paul regarding to the earnings report. If you audience have any questions, you can raise your hands in Teams, and we will give you a chance to talk. Thank you for the great presentations. Olli, you said that you are proud of the performance of 2022 and that you met a lot of goals that you set in the beginning of the year. Which were the key milestones that you achieved in 2022?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Looking at the key milestones for 2022, I think, firstly, of course, macroeconomic market was tough last year, but we maintained strong organic growth, which I'm super proud of, and we managed to develop our team and we also managed to at the same time then scale our teams and enterprise deliveries, for example. That's something I'm super proud of. We had a lot of deals that we closed the first part of the year, and we managed to complete all those deliveries by the end of the year, which I think was a great achievement. We're talking about healthcare providers here. We're talking about global fortune companies and all that. Completing mission-critical software deployments in 12 months is a great achievement.

Lastly, our product developed. Looking back, I'm astonished how much we achieved in a year. I'm super happy that we could both invest in the ecosystems and invest in our primary use cases in the contact centers at the same time. I'm super happy about that.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Let's talk a bit about the numbers. The market environment was a bit tricky this year, last year, especially in the beginning of the year. However, you were able to gain 14% growth. How satisfied are you with that growth you generated in the second half?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Well, personally, I'm very satisfied and very glad that we achieved 14% growth and in these market situations, I think that was a great achievement. In the summer, there were some hiccups as we communicated, but we were able to move over those, and even taking those into account, and we managed great growth. I'm super happy that to bring these results now to the table. Looking at the profitability side and efficiency side, we've been managing to get the synergies from the organization quite a bit and also then work on our profitability for the future as well.

The, the things that we did in efficiency are not just one-offs for last year, but they are things that also then bring fruit to the later years as well.

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

It may be add on to what Olli said about the, well the difficulties in the second quarter of last year. I think like what the rest of the year showed was that the also the resilience of our business model. Even though one sector was in difficulties and it was this case, the energy sector, despite that, it didn't disturb the big picture that much because our system is mission-critical, and we have a very diversified customer base with many different verticals. If we're not kind of dependent on one single customer vertical.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah. You also mentioned already, about the profitability, how it improved. About last year in the second half, you had an EBITDA margin of 9.5%. Now you improved it to 13.6%. Which were the main causes for the improved profitability?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there were a couple of things in particular. We do have a scalable revenue model. In fact, when we had to take some enterprise costs up front when we started our projects, but then when we got revenue ramped up, that improved our profitability. The scalable SaaS model. Then, the second thing, we were very prudent with our investments, making sure that we, kind of released the last synergies from our old M&A cases, and we're very efficient across the organization and only investing in the places where we get the most bang for the buck. The right investments.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah. Good. About the guidance, you guided, for this year the revenue growth of 6%-14% and the EBITDA margin 11%-16%. Are you focusing more on profitability this year than growth, do you think?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

We're focusing both on profitability and growth. The mix has been... Our previous guidance for last year was that we are profitable, and that has been historically our guidance on profitability. Now, we set a scale, which is clearly up of zero, right?

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

We are focusing more now on profitability, and we see that this market environment, companies have to be prudent, and they have to be diligent, and that requires that you build up a buffer for for for the short or long-term recession that we are going to be facing in the general market. That's basically the reason why we are now putting a little bit more focus in the profitability side. For us, it's always been an equation. Most of the startup world sees the equation as having quite a bit of less less focus on profitability than we've ever had. But our focus previously was that we are profitable and growing. Now it's more that we are... We have a healthy profit margin and are growing. The equation changes a little bit.

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

For us, the change is smaller than for many other growth companies. We haven't had to do any drastic-

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yeah.

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

... moves, like what you hear from the U.S. or some other, also here in Europe. For us, it's more about smaller adjustments that we can do without disrupting our growth, without disrupting our normal operations.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Okay. Good. We have the first question from the audience. Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. You're free to unmute yourself and ask questions.

Jaakko Tyrväinen
Equity Analyst, SEB

Yes. Hello. It's Jaakko from SEB. I know that you're not publishing churn rates or retention rates. Could you talk a bit how the second half was in terms of churn, given that the organic growth slowed down a bit towards the year end?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes. Looking at churn, we have no changes in our churn. If there are any major changes, such as, for example, the energy sector, we have brought those always up. Now we see churn as being on a level that historically, it's pretty normal for us. Net retention rather... Net retention rates are at the historical norm, and there's no changes there. Q2, being of course for last year, difference there with the energy segment back then, but since those times, the net retention rates have been at a historical norm.

Jaakko Tyrväinen
Equity Analyst, SEB

Okay. Good. Thanks. My second one, on Spain, where you highlight the strong performance, could you a bit give color? What is the size of the operation in Spain now, and what was the key driver behind the solid performance in 2022?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes. Looking at Spain, we see that, percentage-wise, it's the fastest growing country for us, and been that way for quite some time. Also, like size-wise, it's reaching the level that it will, of all the countries outside of Finland and Sweden, I think it's the largest one now or pretty soon.

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

After Norway also.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yeah, after Norway. Sorry, yes. After the largest countries in the Nordics, it's the largest single market for us. That I think then also adds flavor. It's the growth levels there are very nice and we continue to operate well there.

Jaakko Tyrväinen
Equity Analyst, SEB

Okay. Great. Thanks. That's very helpful. Regarding the Salesforce and Zendesk cooperation, what should we expect looking towards 2023 here? Will those kind of contribute materially to the sales in 2023?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

These are, of course, some things we have just launched, and we do have a nice -sized pilot, for example, going on in the Salesforce ecosystem, providing our Talk for a large multinational. We have of course smaller cases. I think it's mostly the revenue is going to be mostly driven by the large deployments and the small deployments that are then business as usual. They don't have a significant impact now or in the future, but rather the large ones that we can, we can close here. I'm super excited about the pilot we're running at the moment.

Jaakko Tyrväinen
Equity Analyst, SEB

Okay. Good then. Thanks. My final one, a bit technical, regarding the FX impact. You kind of first time referred to that in your guidance. What was the FX impact in the second half 2022 or Q4 2022?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

It was not very significant last year. It's more about how it impacts this year, so 2023. If I remember correctly, the rates started going up, or the Swedish krona and Norwegian krona started depreciating in the last quarter of last year. Now compared to the average rate of last year, they're a bit weaker. That might If they remain on that level, they will have an impact on like a like-for-like numbers, so to speak. I think we had the number in the report, but Sweden and Norway accounted for roughly 38% of our revenue, which is a decent share.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Just to be clear here, it's, we have, of course, like the local entities. We charge customers locally in their currency. We pay the salaries in the local currency, and so on. It's more on the top line than than the other, like, the effect than than the cost base.

Jaakko Tyrväinen
Equity Analyst, SEB

Okay, great. Thanks. That's all from my side.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Thank you. If you then talk a bit about the market, enterprise segment is one of the key strategic areas of LeadDesk and the revenue from enterprise segment was total, 43%, last year. How did it develop in the second half?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

The enterprise sector actually developed really well in the second half of the year. As Olli mentioned earlier, we had a bunch of bigger deals that were signed in the beginning of 2022. But these always take time to ramp up and then the revenue starts flowing in. So that is why the enterprise side looked really good in terms of our numbers. What we have seen then later on in late 2022 and early 2023 is that in the market, enterprise customers are currently a little bit hesitant because of the economic situation for enterprise customers.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Taking into use a system like LeadDesk is a big investment, which is why they really need to be sure that it's worthwhile in a, in an environment like ours. Which... I think this is something that not only relates to call center software, but it's basically all kinds of software and all kinds of investments right now.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Mm-hmm. Okay. What about the energy sector? It was a big topic in the last half year report in August. How did it develop in the second half?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Basically, we saw the headwinds in, during the summer, so Q3 and a little bit in Q3, but mostly focused on Q2. Then in the later part of the year, we didn't see any significant impact either way. Now of course, it's interesting how the energy segment will start developing after things stabilize across Europe in that segment. I think energy companies are still little bit hesitant to move steps, of course. So many unknowns in the market still, and they concentrate on the must-haves, only the must-haves in their investments.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah. Next we have a question again, Antti Luiro from Inderes. Feel free to unmute yourself.

Antti Luiro
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Wonderful. Thanks a lot. A couple of questions. I think first on the competitive landscape and how it's been evolving. We recently got the bankruptcy filing from Avaya, for example. Do you see that there's any change in how the competitive landscape has been evolving, or is this just part of the bigger trend that the market is moving towards the more modern players?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Looking at Avaya particularly, I don't know how many Chapter 11s it's gone through already. It's not the first time for that particular company, I wouldn't take that as a market trend. What is clear is that Avaya and the legacy players are having a hard time competing on the contact center as a service market. They try to bring their existing solutions and cloudify them, it's really not the same thing. As you saw from my presentation, we have our global CPaaS network. We handle all the channels ourselves. We've got super solid experience, we were born in the cloud. We are fully self-provisioning, meaning that our customers can do all the things themselves. We are true cloud player.

It's light years from where then legacy players are with their offering, where they just offer the same old software just running in somebody else's cloud.

Antti Luiro
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Thanks. That's helpful. Another one on cloud infrastructure costs. I think last year, the U.S. dollar getting stronger was one cost driver on that front. Now recently we've heard of the cloud infrastructure players doing maybe even quite aggressive price hikes. Have you seen this in your negotiations?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yes, we have. We've had actually that's one of the areas where we are putting time in. We are looking into ways where we can limit that exposure, so basically bring out, bring down our cloud pricing. There's a lot of things that we can do technically. Then there's of course things that we can negotiate about. For us, we still see that we can manage our cloud spend, and even with the rising trend, we can at the same time bring down our infrastructure spend in the midterm, at the same time then also having more scalable solutions, and having a more scalable infrastructure. We are confident that we can actually make that happen.

From my point of view, maybe it was a positive thing that the market pricing has been going up, so we can now justify these investments even better.

Antti Luiro
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Thanks. That's all from me for now.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Thank you, Antti. What about partnerships? That's also one of your key strategic areas, and you published this new Salesforce app application in January. What has been the feedback on that and, yeah, how do you see that in this year?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yeah, especially the enterprise players, viewed as very positive as previously for the European market, the offering has not been really on a great level. We can provide mission-critical quality for bringing telephony and other channels into natively into Salesforce or Zendesk and so on, where then the offering has been basically lacking previously. This is much to do with our scalable infrastructure and our super reliant infrastructure that our customers can rely on. I see this especially on the enterprise segment as a great thing and the best sales cases on that end are on the enterprise segment, as of course they have also then more investment capabilities into their own processes and so on.

When it comes to then, other partnerships, for example, the case we did with CrossPoint, and that end, I think that is something that we'll develop further and we might have a good then, other partners also coming up. Of course then investing in this partnership is critical for us as it is helping us with other cases as well.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Product development. You said that your product also and service went to huge steps last year. Can you open up that a bit? What will be the focus for this year also in product development?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Yeah. Looking at the product, we had a lot of focus in the partners and ecosystem side for the whole year. As said, we've now published Salesforce and Zendesk integrations in their respective marketplaces, and we do also have other integrations ready and available. This has been a big investment. Also we totally transformed the outreach side of our software. The sales user interface, we totally renewed that and renewed the technology and can now bring a lot of new features to our customers through that change. On the other hand, our customer service offering developed a lot as well, especially now with so many businesses using our software. We have a great dialogue with them in order to be even more cost-pressed.

That then allows us for this year to also focus more on the AI. Last year we used a lot of time in integrating Jenny, our conversational AI, as tightly as possible, and now we can then, now it's all done. Now, we have the capabilities of bringing even more AI services to our customers. For example, having intelligent agents assist, so not only so we have a conversational AI, but also that that AI can assist agents, while they work and do their work. That's something that, I'm super excited about. Also being able to, most probably then, also train Jenny better now with the tools available coming to the market, from the arms race between Google and Microsoft.

The contact center as a use case is very particular in that you want and the customers, they need to control how it operates because if you send a message that is the view of the company, and then if the customer takes that as a fact, then it is a fact. So you need to be very particular on how you utilize AI in a contact center setting. We are really in a prime position there now to take the modern tools into use also on that end.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Okay. Sounds good. We have a next question from Frans-Mikael Rostedt. You're welcome.

Frans-Mikael Rostedt
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Okay. Hi. Thank you. You comment that the Finland, Norway and Spain developed especially well last year. How about the other more mature markets, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark? How did they develop last year?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

Yeah, we had growth in all our countries. Those that were listed there were basically the star players. They were the places where revenue grew fastest. We're continuously adding clients and revenue in all our markets and we see no reason for why that wouldn't continue going forward.

Frans-Mikael Rostedt
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Okay. Yeah. You don't see a lot of differences in the current outlooks of your different markets?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

Well, a little bit, yes. There's always local conditions like for example, the energy part that we talked about hit a little bit more in Netherlands, for example, than other countries in Europe. All in all, the kind of cloud trend is or transition to cloud in our segment is prevalent in all countries and it's also a driver for us everywhere.

Frans-Mikael Rostedt
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Okay. Yeah. one more question about the cash flows then. could you comment about the drivers behind the working capital development last year?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

The main thing about working capital, and particularly around the year-end is that in one of our major countries, we invoice our customers primarily one year in advance, and that happens right before year-end, which is why our working capital was pretty poor at the end of last year. It improved directly in January. The cash position at the end of December is actually shows a little bit more negative picture than normal, so to speak. That is the main explanation for the working capital development. All in all, there's no like issues with regards to working capital.

Our collection rates and credit losses and stuff like this is at the normal level that where they've always been.

Frans-Mikael Rostedt
Equity Analyst, Inderes

Okay. Thank you. That's helpful.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Thank you. Let's talk about mergers and acquisitions next. You mentioned that you signed new CFO, Kaisa Rönkkö, and while you are focusing more on corporate development and mergers and acquisitions in the future. Can we expect something to happen there in 2023?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

I definitely hope so. That is what Olli is expecting from me. That's Olli touched upon the subject already. One of the issues we had last year that we've been talking, along the way is that the public and private company valuations were a little bit out of sync. Now they are more in line with each other. That's one thing that makes it easier. The second thing is that we've, in the last three to four months, maybe in particular, we have seen, quite a bit of, small to mid-sized tech companies throughout Europe notice that, hey, the financial environment is changing. They might not... They realize that they might not make it anymore on their own, or they will have challenges.

There's more, or quite a bit of interesting technology available in the market. What we just need to make sure is that the underlying business is good and the tech is something that we need and the tech is good, and then that the price is level. In general, I think going into 2023 compared to last year looks better for the segments that we are looking at.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah. You are positive. In terms of M&A. Yeah.

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

Yeah. I'm slightly positive, let's put it that way, without bumping up the expectations too high.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah. Okay. What about in the long term then, and this year, 2023? What are the main strategic themes for LeadDesk to make this year as a success?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

For this year, for us, it's super important now to make the equation, the new equation of growth and profitability work well for us and get that balance right as we are adjusting it a bit. That is the focus that we are working highly on. Secondly, looking at the product side. Of course, we need to enhance our product with many ways, but one of the key things is to bring data and AI more into the forefront. At the moment, we have tools for both, but it needs to be even more productized and even more integral part of anything you do in LeadDesk, and that's, I think, something that is super important for this year.

Then of course, I'm looking at Paul Stenbäck here that there are a lot of super exciting opportunities in data and AI sector. Companies that have great technology but haven't found maybe the product market fit or that the local market is just not ready for them, but that we could then take to the wider market and really bring out the best in them. There's quite a few of those kind of companies on the market at the moment. Of course, direct competitors. There's the financial markets are rough for small companies and for that reason, for us as a stable, profitable growing company, the market is good for M&A, I believe, this year.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Okay. Good. All the pressure to both for this year. Perfect. I'm out of questions now. Is there something you want to add, yeah?

Paul Stenbäck
Interim CFO, LeadDesk

I'm super happy to have all of you here, and I'm nice to see so many also participating in this event. I'm very happy about last year, we're all here now to make 2023 a success. Our team is ready to take on the new challenges that 2023 brings on. I would like to thank everybody for participating in our earnings call and the fireside chat, hope to bring you great numbers also into the future.

Henri Palomäki
Analyst, Sijoittaja.fi

Yeah. Thank you, everyone, and thanks for the great discussion. The recording will be published in the LeadDesk's website on the investor basis, after the call. Thank you, and have a wonderful day.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto
CEO, LeadDesk

Thanks, everybody.

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