Thank you, and welcome from my part as well to Lemonsoft's 2024 results presentation. My name is Alpo Luostarinen, and I'm the CEO of Lemonsoft. I jumped into the CEO position in September 2024, and before that, I've spent a bit more than three years working on M&A and Strategic Development at Lemonsoft. We've had quite an eventful year in 2024. Our revenue grew to EUR 28.9 million, and our net sales growth was 9.7%. Adjusted EBIT was 22.3%, reducing a bit from 2023. Personnel grew to 228 employees from 208 the previous year, and most of that growth came from our two acquisitions, Spotilla and Applirent. We've had a lot of changes during the year.
First of all, our biggest change is the migration of data centers on which Lemonsoft software is run all the way to Azure, which is very crucial for our future development, and we've been working on the migration for one and a half years now and expect the completion to finalize in the first half of 2025. We are quite far at the moment and looking to finalize everything soon. We also did a transition to a new e-invoicing operator, which was successfully completed quite early at the later stage of 2024. Both of these changes, we expect to have a positive effect on our profitability, our scalability, our service offering, or how the service is run and how the customers are served. We also had a lot of changes in the management and organization.
In addition to the CEO changes, which we actually had two during the year, we also had Tuomas Koivisto joining the management team as Chief Commercial Officer in June and Janne Tammi as Chief Technology Officer in November. We also did other smaller structural changes and responsibility changes within the organization. The aim is to make the organization more efficient and to provide more value to our customers, especially with regards to Tuomas's position. He's working on getting the group sales function to function as one team and to provide one unified solution to our customers. The two acquisitions we did in 2024 were a bit smaller than we've done before. Combined revenue was EUR 1.5 million and EBIT EUR 300,000, roughly. Spotilla is a well-suited addition to our manufacturing offering, which is our main focus area going forward, or one of the main focus areas.
Applirent expands our offering to rental management, which works quite well with especially our transaction business. Applirent has a wide ERP solution for that segment and has been working there for the past decade. Looking at Q4, especially our net sales growth was very limited compared to our previous years, and one of the main reasons is our consulting sales being significantly lower than earlier. One target we have is to increase the share of continuous income, recurring revenue, and that also has an effect in the consulting revenue in the future as well. Gross margin was a bit higher, 86%, than the previous year. We've reduced the use of external services, which has an effect on that figure. Adjusted EBIT was 19.6%, which is, of course, a lot lower than what we typically target.
A few of the reasons, or one of the major reasons, is the Azure migration, which had a direct expense effect for the whole year, especially in the last quarter. Of course, also we had parallel expenses coming from the previous platform as well as the new one. Both of those changes will affect also in Q1, but in smaller scale. Recurring revenue grew to 82%, and we expect that figure to grow going forward as well. Looking at the past five years, we've had a continuous growth in revenue ending close to EUR 30 million the past year. Adjusted EBIT came down a bit from EUR 7.2 million in 2023- 2024, figured EUR 6.4 million. That's, of course, not the direction we want to go.
We expect the changes we've done in the past six months and longer than that as well with the Azure migration. We expect the effects to be positive, especially in the second half of 2025. Looking at the quarterly development in the last three years, one of the aspects you might consider is the higher revenue, especially in the last quarter of the year, each year. In 2024, the effect was more limited than in previous years. We've had, especially in 2023, we had a really good consulting sales quarter at the end of the year. Going forward, we expect that difference to be lesser. Looking at the market, we focus on manufacturing, wholesale, and services market. Especially the market in manufacturing has had quite a difficult year. 2022 was a really good year for many companies, and especially 2021, 2022.
After that, we've had quite a ride in 2023 and going into 2024 as well. Especially the beginning of 2024 was difficult. Interest rates going higher. The labor market negotiations were tough in the beginning of 2024, and that had an effect on the whole demand-supply situation. Going into the later part of 2024, the situation got better. We are still in a situation where we have pretty low visibility on how the situation will develop. Of course, we expect the positive trend to continue, but we are, I would say, cautiously optimistic on how the market will develop going forward. What we've been focusing on operationally, especially in the last quarter, is to develop our sales operations. As I mentioned, our new Chief Commercial Officer has been focusing on getting all of our products to be sold as a unified proposition, especially manufacturing and wholesale customers.
On the other hand, as a horizontal offering with financial management solutions, HR solutions to a wide range of small and medium-sized customers. We'll be talking in Q1 more about the commercial approach we've taken and how we expect us to win new customers. From the group point of view, we've focused a lot on integrating the acquired businesses, both the two ones acquired last year and the ones acquired, the 10 companies acquired before that. We've nominated a person acting as Chief Operating Officer, focusing purely on integrating subsidiaries, making sure that the processes we have in place for all companies combine and align with the group's overall vision. Cross-selling initiatives have been increased.
We are building or selling a broader solution, and we are actually focusing on one individual metric that we follow, which is the number of companies using more than two different software solutions that we offer. Customer implementations, we had quite a difficult situation after the summer, or actually during the whole year of 2024. We made a lot of effort at the end of the year to improve the resource capacity in that specific function. We addressed the challenges that we've had before, and we made some individual changes in the responsibilities of the management of that function. Now we have a really much better situation. We've had the capacity restored, a few more resources in the function, and we expect the customer satisfaction to improve going forward. Technology transitions I've discussed a few times before.
We expect the Azure migration to finalize at the latest Q2 2025 and in Azure operation to provide a better service quality for our customers in the future. As you probably know, we had a ransomware attack basically two years ago in 2024 spring. After that, we've hired information security managers. We've put a lot of effort into getting our information security level much better than it's been before. We've also made a lot of effort in the management team and with the key individuals within the organization to regularly practice situations that might happen regarding information security risks. We are very confident that the work we've done provides us a very good position to react in any case in the future. We've also initiated a capital efficiency program focusing on share buybacks. The objective is to improve our capital efficiency and earnings per share.
That has been going on since November, and it's been developing well. Looking at the acquisitions we did in 2024, Spotilla is one of the market-leading solutions for maintenance field service after sales management. It's a really easy solution to take into use, easy, very intuitive solution to use. Around 200 small and medium-sized customers, especially in industrial manufacturing, use Spotilla's software and services. That has a really good effect on our market position within that segment. The company is around EUR 1 million in revenue at the moment, is growing well and has a positive cash flow and EBIT position. Applirent is focusing on rental and fleet management and has a customer base in construction, manufacturing, and wholesale segments. Around 100 customers, a bit bigger customers on average size than Spotilla.
Company is quite the same size as Spotilla, grows a bit more sort of slower but steady, and EBIT profitability is very, very good for that size of business. Let's move on to detailed financials. If we look at our revenue distribution in the past few years, we've had an increase in, especially in transaction revenue, which is due to the acquisition of Finvoicer in the middle of 2023. That also brought some revenue increase in transactions in 2024. Consulting revenue has grown also in 2023, but due to the focus that we have right now, it's going a bit down, and we expect that trend to continue. Looking at the SaaS metrics, churn has grown a bit before in 2023, up to 5.4%, which is the highest we've had on an annual basis in the past years.
During 2024, churn went down a bit to 4.4%, which is a good direction, and that has not been sort of alarmingly high at any time. Net revenue retention, on the other hand, is on a level that we are not at all satisfied with, especially upsells, downsells within our current customer base that needs to improve. We are focusing on getting our current customer sales processes in place, and we have actually, at the end of the year, moved the current customer care and sales function from customer care to under the sales function, which we expect to have a positive effect on that. Good. Let us look at the ARR development in more detail. We had annual recurring revenue at the end of 2023 at EUR 20.6 million. New sales was 4.2%, which is, of course, a lot lower than we expected to be going forward.
Downsell and upsell, as you can see, it's on the positive side, but it's still very low. Downsell has been, or let's say our customers have been reducing the use of our software in the difficult times in the market, and upsell has been limited. Now we expect that to improve on both sides. Churn, I've discussed quite a bit, and we expect the Q1, Q2 situation to still be not that positive since we have a lot of changes going on, but after that, we expect the churn to remain fairly limited. We had 6.7% growth from M&A, Spotilla, and Applirent acquisitions, and that goes from a revenue side that brings some revenue to 2025 as well.
On the expense side, no significant changes, but something that we could take a look at, the employee benefit expenses, so personnel expenses has been going up, which is a direction that we want to change. That figure is now close to 50%, and we expect that to go down at least at the end of 2025. The other operating expenses have been higher than before at 13.4% in Q4. That figure has a lot of expenses from the Azure migration and the parallel expenses with the previous and the new platform. From a personnel side, we've grown to 228 people. The size of the organization is currently at the level that we are satisfied with, and we don't expect the need to significantly increase the number of employees.
We'll invest in increasing the number of sales employees, especially, and make some other smaller changes, but nothing drastic. From a management point of view, I discussed the changes that we did at the end of last year. We also changed the roles in the product management organization. Kari Joki-Hollanti, the founder of the company, moved from product development to manage the product management function. Basically driving the direction that we want to develop the whole product suite that we have. Janne Tammi joined the management team, and he leads the product development function. His main objective is to increase the efficiency and quality of launching new products and further developing our product portfolio. We've had difficulties in the speed that we have to bring new products into the market and to develop existing products to lead in the market.
Both of those problems, we expect Janne and Kari to be well suited to fix. They are in full speed at the moment. As I mentioned, we also strengthened resources and clarified responsibilities within customer implementation. We also combined the two functions of implementations and customer care. We want those two functions to act better in unison. Good. I think we are fine with the organization. Going into the year 2025, we have a fairly cautious outlook on growth. Net sales growth from 0%-10%, which is we expect the organic growth to improve, but we do not. We are still looking at the growth outlook from a current situation point of view.
As far as we do not see significant changes at the current state, which we at the moment have a lot of changes going on still, we do not expect to guide a strong growth momentum yet. Also, the market uncertainty is quite high at the moment. Still, we expect positive trends to continue, but as you all know, the market situation, especially from a wide geopolitical point of view, is quite uncertain. As I mentioned a few times, the technological changes will affect profitability negatively during early 2025, and after that, it should have a positive effect. Looking at the IR point of view, we will publish our annual report during week 12. We will have our annual general meeting in April 2025, and the interim reports will be published pretty much the same schedule as previous years in April, August, and then in October. Good.
Then I would like to give the mic to Janne.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial Pound key five on your telephone keypad or use the raise hand function in the web browser. For the moment, we do not have any questions on the lines, but we do have a few questions in the chat from Atte Riikola at Inderes. First question, your organic growth in 2023 and 2024 has been slightly negative. How do you assess this development in relation to your overall market and competitors?
Yeah, thanks, Janne. Our overall market position is fairly good if you look at it from a manufacturing wholesale point of view. We win the right kind of customers, and we lose a very limited amount of the same type of customers.
In some aspects, if you look at some of the companies that we've acquired, we've had some changes in the management of those companies, and some of the companies have experienced higher churn than we'd like to see at this point in time. We have invested in sales and customer care functions in all of those subsidiaries, and we expect the trend to change going forward. We've also invested in customer care within Lemonsoft, and that should have a better effect on customer satisfaction. When we get the product development after the Azure migration, product development up to speed and all the changes back, I expect the situation to improve.
Okay, thank you. Next one. Could you open up the profitability impact of Azure migration this year after the project is done and the old platform is shut down?
Yeah. This year, the direct costs have been around EUR 500,000. We have had an effect from the parallel use of both platforms around EUR 100,000-EUR 200,000. After the old platform is shut down, which should happen, it goes gradually down, but should happen in February or March, we expect the costs of the parallel use to go down close to zero from the current EUR 50,000-EUR 100,000 per month.
Okay, thank you. Next up, you are basically guiding flat or slightly decreasing profitability for this year with guidance midpoint. What is burdening profitability this year? If you look at our overall profitability, how our profitability develops, it depends pretty much on organic growth. If our organic growth is zero or negative, we will not have a positive profitability effect if we do not reduce the number of employees significantly.
At the moment, we are putting a lot of resources into the technological transitions. Before we finalize that, we get to focus on the development of the actual functionalities in our software. Improving our organic growth drastically is not easy. We expect those changes to finalize. We expect to be able to focus on selling new software solutions and selling to our current customers. After that, we expect organic growth to improve and then have an effect on profitability. As I mentioned, we have quite a cautious guidance on both profitability and growth from this point of view.
Thank you. Still, Atte Riikola from Inderes continues. Lemonsoft's profitability has decreased a lot after IPO and during that time announced over 40% EBIT margin target seems nowadays really high. What is your current ambition with profitability in midterm?
Yeah, when we announced those targets back in 2021, the geopolitical economy or whole economy was quite in a different situation at that time. During the past three years, we've had difficulties, surprising difficulties, both in our own software development as well as information security, as I mentioned. All of these changes and, of course, the acquisitions we've made, 10+ acquisitions in four years, have been a bit more difficult to manage from a profitability point of view. All of these changes have had a negative effect on our profitability, and we expect that to turn around. We are working a lot on that. It, of course, depends on when we are able to do that. We'll provide an update on the long-term and midterm financial targets later on.
Thank you. There has been lots of changes in Lemonsoft organization. How has employee satisfaction and attrition level developed during 2023, 2024?
Yeah, especially in 2023 and going into 2024, we had a lot of changes in our attrition level and a lot of changes in the management team and in the higher and the upper management as well. During the past three months and looking forward, my personal point of view is that the situation has stabilized. The employee satisfaction, we go through on a quarterly basis in detail, and we talk to all the teams that we have and what issues they have. We have seen positive development from that point of view. Of course, that is a continuous issue, and we work on that heavily.
Okay, then about M&A, are you mainly looking for smaller bolt-on acquisitions, or are you still open for some bigger deals if the opportunity would be there?
Yeah, we've been focusing on bolt-on acquisitions for the past four years. We always carefully analyze the market if there are bigger deals available, and we've been participating in discussions regarding bigger deals as well. We'll definitely consider those going forward as well.
Okay, what is Lemonsoft's view on AI, and what kind of development projects do you have related to that?
Yeah, good question. We focus on using AI as a tool in our product development, and we've actually, in the past two months, focused on getting all of our product development people to use the right tools at the right sort of from the right perspective to use the right tools. There are a lot of tools available at the moment, and the number of tools improves and increases all the time.
We have already seen a lot of good development in our own sort of product development side. From a proposition point of view, we are piloting a few efforts that we want to bring into the market. We will discuss those more in detail. I would like not to sort of promise anything, but we are working with a few partners to develop AI solutions for our own internal use, but especially for our customers.
Okay, about cross-selling, is there some specific product combo that has been working well on that side?
Yeah, we actually follow on a monthly basis the number of customer companies using specific combos of our products. One combo that has been working well for the past four years is Lemonsoft and Kellokortti combination. There is Lemonsoft's ERP solution.
Could be manufacturing company, wholesale company that uses Lemonsoft's product management function or production function or warehouse management function, and then combine that with financial management, HR, and then time management solutions of Kellokortti, which is quite a good combo. Then we have Finazilla, which is a reporting budgeting solution, and that works quite well with all of our products, especially Lemonsoft, Finvoicer, and so on. Finvoicer provides a few different alternative propositions. They work on invoice lifecycle management and invoice financing and so on. We have built Finvoicer's proposition basically and are building the financing option as well into Lemonsoft. That combination has been quite heavily taken into use by customers.
Okay, that was the last question in the chat. Back to you, Alpo, for closing comments.
Thanks, Janne. We look forward to finalize all the development that we have ongoing in 2025. At the end of the year, we expect us to have a good market position, good product position, and a lot more efficient processes within the organization. Looking forward to developing to the right direction. Thanks a lot for joining. We'll come back in the next Q1 report in April. Thanks a lot.