Welcome to Lemonsoft Q1 2025 results. We will start with a presentation of the results, followed by a Q&A. Please use the chat function in the player for questions to the speaker. Lemonsoft CEO Alpo Luostarinen, the floor is yours.
Thank you. And welcome from my part as well to Lemonsoft's Q1 interim report presentation. My name is Alpo Luostarinen, and I act as the CEO of Lemonsoft and will be presenting today. We've had, again, quite an eventful Q1. We've been progressing the changes that we've been working on for the past year or so, and everything has gone quite according to plan, although some bumps in the road. As for the financials, we were able to grow 10% in Q1 compared to last year's first quarter, mainly due to the acquisitions of Spotilla and Applirent in July 2024. We were also able to get our organic growth back to a positive track. Organic growth was 3.1%, basically driven by a few factors. First of all, our sales have been a bit, there's been a cautious uptick after Q4 last year and Q1 this year..
Our Lemonsoft ERP and Kellokortti price increases have also contributed to the growth in organic growth that we implemented in the beginning of the year. We are now beginning to report on a continuous basis also our organic growth figure for recurring revenue, which was 4.6% in Q1. We also implemented, after we implemented the price increases, we will do some price increases to other products also later in the year. We will see some positive benefits from that part later on. Our gross margin increased a few, let's say, 1.4% in Q1, mainly due to reduced external services as well as the price increases. That has been a positive direction lately. Our profitability increased quite significantly from 16.2% last year to this year's 23.1% of sales. The profitability was benefited also from the delayed salary increases.
Due to the local collective bargaining negotiations, the increases in salaries have been delayed until May 2025. Our recurring revenue share increased. That's due to basically Spotilla's higher recurring revenue share as well as our reducing consultancy revenue lately. Also, transaction revenue has been growing less than previously. Our number of employees has risen from 220 to 230 since last year's same period. Basically, Applirent and Spotilla acquisitions have increased the figure a bit. Otherwise, we've been actually reducing a bit of personnel. Other main events that have happened in Q1, we have nearly finalized our Azure migration, which is one of the biggest projects in the company's history. We started the actual transfers in December 2024 and have now in January, February, March, and April implemented the remaining parts. After April 2025, we should be quite finalized with the project.
Everything should be transferred to Azure from our own data centers. Of course, there have been some effects on our customers' use of software, which we have been working on very thoroughly. We hope to be able to finalize all the corrections and changes in the system in the next weeks and months going forward. We have also initiated change negotiations in April after Q1. The objective is mainly to ensure our efficiency and profitable growth in the coming years. We are not looking for short-term cost reductions, but longer-term profitability enhancements. We estimate that we need to reduce personnel at most 35 employees. About 192 employees are included in the change negotiations. We will report in more detail at the end of May when the negotiations are finalized.
On April 23rd, so last Wednesday, our CCO, Tuomas Koivisto left his position as member of the management team as well as his roles in Lemonsoft's CCO position as well as CEO of Finvoicer Group. We will continue recruiting another person for those roles. Basically, the invoice financing business that we have under Finvoicer, it hasn't been run as we'd like to. We have had to draw conclusions. Also, with that regard, the provision of credit losses on trade receivables and financial receivables has been reassessed. We have a significant increase in the provision from EUR 100,000 to more than EUR 1 million, which is significant. The credit losses and the provisions related to those are related mainly to Finvoicer's invoice financing business and mainly to one significant customer.
Moving forward to the monthly and quarterly development, Spotilla and Applirent's acquisitions are driving the sales growth mainly in Q1 2025. We've also had, in previous years, we've had a significant increase in sales in Q4. As you can see, the effect of that single higher peak in the quarterly development has diminished. We expect to see more stable growth going forward. As for the revenue split, SaaS revenue has grown to almost 74%. Transactions has gone down a bit and consulting revenue as well. SaaS growth, as we've commented many times before, we will be emphasizing the effect of SaaS revenue to our business going forward. A few comments on our operational focus during Q1. We had a good quarter in terms of manufacturing and wholesale ERP deals. We've increased the share of those deals compared to our overall sales performance.
We've piloted a few different pricing models. We are planning to make deployment easier for our customers so that they can move from other companies' software easier to our software. We are expanding or making it easier for customers to expand to more and more software solutions within our product portfolio and make it more attractive for also new and existing customers. We've had positive feedback in the beginning of the piloting phase. The technology transition I already commented briefly. We've moved several hundred customer environments and thousands of customers into cloud. That's almost finalized. We are expecting to see the cost and efficiency improvements later in the year, especially in the second half. We've been working on integration and group-level sales.
We've moved basically all our group companies into using Lemonsoft software in their own administrative work and to enhance visibility across the group, for example, in terms of sales and other performance. We have also increased the number of customers taking into use several solutions from our offering. That is also related to the piloting of different pricing models. We've started the organizational restructuring, which affects the organization in quite a wide extent. The change negotiations are related only to Lemonsoft Oyj and Finvoicer Group, which are the two significantly largest entities in the group. More than 190 people are anyhow affected. We will make the decisions and conclusions at the end of May, or that's the plan. We will see the effects after that. We think that approximately EUR 2 million we would be able to save if we go with the initial estimates.
The product development side. We've been reorganizing our product development teams in February and May. We are continuing that work in the change negotiations. After the Azure migration is finalized, we should have more resources to focus on achieving a significant improvement in the product development cycle time, which is one of our key strategic targets in 2025. Lastly, capital efficiency. We've implemented or initiated last year the first share buyback program of Lemonsoft's history. We've now finalized the first phase, which ended at 8:00 A.M. this year. We've acquired or bought 160,000 shares worth roughly EUR 1 million by the end of Q1. The objective, of course, is to improve capital efficiency and EPS and make the earnings per share for our investors higher. A brief overlook on our financials. Net sales, especially in Q1 2025, has grown in the SaaS revenue, especially.
As you can see, transactions have been stable and consulting and other revenue as well have been stable. The share of SaaS increases. I briefly already commented on organic growth. The biggest effects have come from price increases as well as the slightly improved performance in our new sales and upsell net downsell figures. Looking at the ARR development in detail, we had EUR 21.9 million of ARR at the end of 2024. That figure is adjusted based on Finvoicer's recurring revenue reclassified partly into transaction revenue. New sales, roughly 1%, which is significantly less than we want to have. That figure we expect to increase and want to increase later in the year. Net downsell and upsell has been positive. The effect, part of that effect is price increases and part of that effect is current customers increasing their use of our software.
Churn was slightly elevated in Q1. Especially in January, we saw some customers that actually informed us already in the beginning or in the middle and end of last year about reducing use of the software. That figure is, and we expect it to be, a bit elevated in the first half of 2025. After that, by the end of the year, we expect that to go down. That is our target. Now we have ended up at EUR 22.4 million of ARR at the end of Q1. As for our cost base, we had a significantly higher cost base, especially in terms of employee expenses in Q1 last year. That figure has now gone down back to 49%. We expect that development to continue. One of the reasons, of course, for the change negotiations is also to get that level to a healthier level.
Last year's expenses, they were fairly high. One of the reasons was because of the last CEO's termination agreement in February, March last year. As for personnel, we increased slightly our personnel figure in Q1. A few individual employees have been hired in the beginning of the year, but otherwise quite a stable situation. The main target of our future growth is to make our organization more and more efficient. We are working on, in all the departments, making our processes, the tools we use, and the performance we can do with those much, much more efficient. We also are taking into use and have taken into use a lot of AI tools, which should improve our efficiency later on. The distribution between R&D and customer functions is still quite the same as before.
Roughly half of our employees are in the R&D department, and the customer functions make up almost the other half. More information will be distributed in the half-year report later on in August 4, 2025. The interim report for Q3 will be available on 31 October 2025. Otherwise, myself and the CFO, Mari Erkkilä , will be available for questions. Of course, as always, visit our website for more information. Thank you.
All right, we can open the floor for questions. First, a couple from Atte Riikola at Inderes. First, about the provision for credit losses. How conservative is the new assumption? Do you see risks that you need to make more of those in the future? Are you planning to continue the factoring business under Finvoicer?
I would say that the assumption is quite realistic. As I mentioned, there's one single client contributing for a significant majority of the provision. We see that there might be smaller increases to the provision later on, but nothing close to this increase. We will continue factoring business under Finvoicer. We have implemented already at the end of last year new measures in how we estimate the risks of each customer and how we estimate the measures that need to be done after those customers and their business develops in a worse direction. This is mainly a single event that we tried to keep so.
Okay, could you open up a little bit more the recognition of additional purchase price as revenue, which was EUR 0.9 million in Q1? Is that related to Finvoicer or some other acquisition?
Yeah, that's related to purely Finvoicer acquisition. That, of course, relates to the previous question as well. There is still the other half of earnout that can be, let's say, removed after 2025, but that is the part of 2024, which we do not see realizing.
Okay, and still from Atte Riikola , CCO departure came as a surprise. Could you open up reasons behind that a little bit more?
Yeah, as I mentioned before, we have not seen the financing business of Finvoicer being run in the way that we want. There has been a lack of visibility in some functions. Unfortunately, we have been forced to draw conclusions after that. That is basically the only thing I can comment on at this point.
Okay, about the salary increases, how big are those going to be in Q2?
Yeah, based on the local negotiations, we are looking at roughly a bit more than 2% increases based on the negotiations. We typically do a bit higher increases ourselves. We are looking at roughly 3% as a whole.
Okay, how much cost improvements are you expecting from technology transition in H2?
We are looking at, we had the platform costs at around EUR 150,000 per month. We expect that figure to go down to closer to EUR 100,000. We expect some, roughly EUR 30,000 which is, of course, just the estimate at the moment, but on a monthly basis. You can calculate from there.
Okay, a question from Daniel Lepistö at Danske Bank regarding the material change negotiations previously announced. Do you expect these employee reductions to affect negatively to growth? Will there be reductions in sales personnel or customer support?
We will see how the negotiations go and how we will treat different functions. Of course, sales personnel and customer support, as well as the whole R&D department, are included in the negotiations. We expect that the negotiations or the reductions that we need to make would not have a significant effect on our performance. We try to make any decisions accordingly. We expect to be able to continue growth going forward as planned before and to increase significantly our profitability at the same time.
Yes, that was our final question. Back to you, Alpo, for any closing remarks.
Thank you. Thanks a lot for everyone for joining. We will be reporting in more detail after we have all of these major changes behind us in Q2. Happy to give more light on our business performance after that. Thanks for joining and have a nice day.