Welcome to Sitowise's Q1 Result Presentation. My name is Mari Reponen, and I'm head of investor relations here in Sitowise. I have here with me our CEO; Heikki Haasmaa, and our CFO; Hanna Masala, who will shortly start the presentation. Before that, I will briefly give you some technical instructions. Here you see our agenda for today, and as you can see, after the Q1 performance, we will discuss how our strategy execution has started. If you wish to comment or ask questions, you can do that via the chat box under the presentation. I will go through the questions you have sent after the presentation. We kindly ask you to provide your full name also when asking questions. Now we continue to the presentation, and I will give the floor to Heikki and Hanna.
Thank you. Thank you, Mari, and welcome to the First Quarter Result Webcast. Here is this year's first quarter in a nutshell. The market around us has clearly uncertainties, but we are very happy with our strong performance during this quarter. As in the previous quarters, we can report strong growth as our Net Sales increased by 14% year-on-year and the organic growth was 4% year-on-year. Our Order Book was EUR 176 million. This is slightly below the level of the year-end, but we consider the Order Book to be on a good level. The decline mainly comes from our buildings business and from Sweden. What I'm really happy about is our first quarter Profitability, which was clearly better than a year before with our Adjusted EBITDA margin of 11.8%.
We'll go through the factors behind this development in more detail shortly. It's also worth noting that our unadjusted Profitability increased even more than the adjusted figures as we had clearly smaller amount of items affecting the comparability than last year. We had our annual client survey during the first quarter, and I'm happy to see that the level stayed on the same good level as the year before, so NPS was 32. Of course, I would like to thank our clients for their trust at Sitowise. One of the highlights of the quarter was naturally the launch of our updated strategy. I'm very delighted to see the inspiration and excitement that it has brought, and at the end of the presentation, we'll come back to how we are progressing overall.
We also completed an important acquisition after the quarter, and, next Hanna will tell more about that one.
Thanks, Heikki. I'll do that with a pleasure, nice to be here again. Indeed, we announced the acquisition of Infrasuunnittelu roughly a week ago. Infrasuunnittelu, which means infra design in English, does what the name says. In other words, it provides expert services in environmental and civil engineering. With this acquisition, we got 70 new colleagues and the main office is in Kajaani in Eastern Finland, where there is a lot of activity in, for example, mining industry. Infrasuunnittelu is overall active in road, street, and water management as well as in regional designs. It also produces wide-ranging survey datasets for its clients. The Net Sales of Infrasuunnittelu have been roughly EUR 1.5 million.
We feel that this acquisition very well strengthens our competencies and capacity to serve the industrial client segment, which is really good considering the outlook in this particular segment at the moment. Here we can see the top-line development of all the business areas. Each business has its specific characteristics, so I'll go them through quickly one by one. In the buildings, Net Sales was flat year on year. Due to the challenging market environment, the organic growth was negative, but the acquisitions, especially Rakennuttajakaari last summer, contributed to the Net Sales. When it comes to infra, the growth was almost fully organic and this we consider a great achievement. One factor to the positive development has been our focus on developing the pricing and project mix, and this is showing results.
The growth of digital solutions, which was as high as 70%, compared with the previous year, is to a large extent coming from the acquisition of Bitcomp last summer. This was the SaaS provider, but also, the organic growth was good, and overall, the performance in digi is very strong. The Swedish business also grew well, and especially if we take into account the weakening of the Swedish krona. If the growth would be looked in constant currencies, it would have been as high as 27%, and this is a nice mixture of M&A impacts and organic development. Now back to you, Heikki.
Thanks, Hanna. Let's deep dive to our business areas, in, more detail. Starting with the buildings. The weakness in the construction industry is impacting our business, and the outlook has not improved. The increasing interest rates and the general real estate market development has also started to impact the renovation market, which has slowed down faster than expected. We still have a good Order Book for buildings and have also taken actions to adjust our capacity through different vacation arrangements and also limited temporary layoffs. In the info market, we continue to outpace the market growth, which is really good. Some parts of the info market show signs of weakening demand, such as road projects and also the foundation works for house construction. Demand for energy and environmental projects relating to the green transition is growing strongly.
Also, the Order Book for the infra remained strong. In digital solutions, we had a strong growth overall. Bitcomp's largest current product, LeafPoint, is a SaaS solution targeted at forest industry customers. This is now in rollout phase and has progressed well. Overall, we see a very good market demand for our digital business overall, and the Order Book remains strong. In this business, the competition for good people is continuous, but we have been quite successful in our recruitment activities and continue to focus on them. In Sweden, we are facing a mixed market that is affected by inflation and rising interest rates. Thanks to our positioning toward commercial, industrial, and also institutional buildings, the local housing market drop had only a minor impact on the business.
During the quarter, we saw a small drop in the Order Book. At the same time, we see increased activity in a early-stage project which is a good signal going further. When we look at the growth on the whole Sitowise level, we continue on double-digit growth figures, which is well in line with our target. As Hanna already described, Net Sales growth was driven by both organic growth and also the acquisitions made last year. Overall, we can be satisfied with the 4% organic growth, taking into account that Buildings business area suffered from the market downturn and showed negative organic growth. In other words, Infra, Digi, and Sweden have been performing really well, and our organic growth was driven both by pricing and also increased volumes.
Good to mention also that we benefited from the additional working day, year-on-year. The group's Order Book decreased by 2% from the year-end, so year-end of 2022. The decline was due to the weak market situation in the buildings business area and a small decline in the Swedish Order Book. In Digi, the Order Book remained at strong level of the previous quarter, and in Infra, the Order Book increased. When we compare to the end of March 2022, our Order Book increased by 2%. Overall, we consider our Order Book to be at a good level. I would like to share a couple of examples of recent wins. The first example is from the buildings business area, which won a tender for a new construction in the middle of the Meilahti hospital area in Helsinki.
The new build will comprise facilities such as Helsinki University Hospital's central pharmacy and kitchen and four underground parking floors. The second example relates to Infra and the several environmental assessments of wind power projects the team started in first quarter. Infra also won a tender for the design of the Lielahti–Lakiala rail project, which is a part of the main rail line between Helsinki and Oulu, which is here example number three. The last example comes from Sweden, where the number of early-phase pre-projects were trending up, and one of the projects won during the quarter was a pre-study on the next phase of a pharmaceutical factory for dermatology company Galderma. All really great wins. Let's go through three things that are important in our technical consulting business. The first graph shows our headcount and FTE growth, which tells about our capacity to grow.
Sickness absences play a key role in the picture, as those reduce the available capacity, and then the utilization rate in the third graph tells about our ability to build available hours. In first quarter, we had a small increase in the FTEs, which has a minor positive impact on business. The sickness absences were down from the comparison level, which also had a positive impact. In first quarter 2022, we had high sickness absence rates due to COVID-19. The first quarter utilization rate was down, and there are a couple of drivers for that. Firstly, the difficult market environment in buildings business area was reflected in the utilization rate. Secondly, utilization rate is by nature lower in our Digital Solutions business than in other business areas. When the sale of Digi, of the group's business also grows, the group's utilization rate is impacted.
Thirdly, changes in project and tender mix impacted the utilization in this quarter too. Now back to Hanna.
Thanks. As already mentioned, we are very happy to report a strong Adjusted EBITDA this quarter. It was EUR 6.6 million versus EUR 5.2 million last year. Obviously, the strong growth contribute to this, but to summarize, there were other important factors which are worth noting. First, we have succeeded in improving the pricing and controlling the rising costs. The agreed salary increases did not yet impact us almost at all during Q1, but the impact will be shown from second quarter onwards, and I'll come back to this on the next page. The recent acquisitions gave a positive contribution to our performance. I would also like to point out that there have not been any bigger issues in the project management, so the operations have been going well in that respect as well.
This is important even if might first sound small, the one extra working day compared to the year before has a positive impact on the first quarter. This situation will be different for the remaining quarters of the year, as we will have one working day less than in year 2022 in each of these. The third factor has quite obviously been the market uncertainty, which impacted us, and we expect it to continue doing so. I'll give a bit more details on the differences between the first quarter and the rest of the quarters of the year. We obviously have also the typical seasonality in our activity level, with the third quarter being usually the lowest due to the summer vacations, these factors should be considered on top of that.
As said, we had one working day more in Q1, there will be one less in the other quarters. The collective bargaining agreement negotiations have been completed in both Finland and Sweden during the past months, these agreements mean roughly 4% increase in salary costs in each of the countries during the year. This is not yet burdening the first quarter Profitability, as the new salaries become effective from April onwards. The Finnish agreement included a one-time payment for the employees amounting to roughly 1% of the annual salary. This was paid in March, this is included in the cash flow. We periodized the cost, so, for the rest of the year from March to December 2023, as the payment relates to the annual agreement. Only a small part impacted the costs in Q1.
From the second quarter onwards, the full impact of the increases will be visible, you should expect higher personnel costs. Quick comments on the indebtedness. As you can see, the net debt amount was slightly lower than at the year-end, the leverage is now again below our long-term target level of 2.5. As we already mentioned when we reported the full year numbers, we extended our financing agreement with two years. The financing package originates from two years ago when Sitowise was listed on the stock exchange, now it has maturity until March 2026, the terms remained the same as earlier for the extension years. We are comfortable with the current balance sheet structure, our good operative cash flow gives us a possibility to continue on our growth path.
Here you see a set of key figures, and most of them we have already covered in other parts of the presentation. I'll just make one additional note relating to the net result. As you can see, this was more than three times the result last year in the same quarter. Beyond the operative performance improvement, the contribution factors are the lower items affecting comparability, which Heikki already mentioned in the beginning, and also somewhat lower net financial expenses. Back to Heikki.
Thank you. We continue to strive to remain the most profitable in our industry, and we have 4 main priorities to improve further our Profitability, which remain the same as presented earlier in the result webcast. As inflation is high, we look carefully at all the levers to further improve pricing. At the same time, we put a lot of effort on the cost containment in all parts of our organization to respond to the challenge we have. I'm happy with the progress what we have had during the first quarter with both of these. Secondly, there's a clear focus to improve further the billable project work, and in practice this means that we need to stay very close to our clients and ensure that our work adds value to them. Here we need to improve.
Thirdly, we continue to look at new ways of working. As part of our strategy, we launch the smartest ways of working. We believe that Sitowise unique digital platform, Voima, our motivated employees and strong management culture create a solid foundation for this. The work has started well, and we will share more highlights later on. The fourth item, we already see positive Profitability improvement contribution from the recent acquisitions and expect to see that going further as well. About the outlook and guidance. Firstly, demand for our services is supported by megatrends, urbanization, renovation backlog, digitalization, and climate change. They are creating a lot of boost. There are still several uncertainties in the market which may continue to impact our clients' short-term decision-making, we don't see that they impact so lot our business.
Demand for the digital solutions remains strong. The outlook remains stable in Infra and Sweden. In building business, we see that the year will be a challenging one due to the construction market downturn. Good to mention there are also the other impacting factors in 2023 as Hanna already pointed out. Cost inflation, then less working days than in 2022, potential currency fluctuations, and also higher interest expenses. For all of this, we have mitigating actions progressing well. Our guidance, it remains unchanged, but I could repeat. Our estimate is that our Net Sales in EUR will increase compared to 2022 and that our Adjusted EBITDA margin will be broadly at the same level as the Adjusted EBITDA margin was last year.
In recent weeks, we've also received new members, both to our management team and to Sitowise board of directors. This is something I'm really happy about. Anna Wäck started to lead our digital solutions last Friday. She joined us from the position of Head of Global Offering, Pricing, and Sales Development in KONE's global maintenance business. Anna brings with her a forward-looking business development thinking with an analytical client-focused and solution-oriented mindset. The gentlemen in the middle and right are Niklas Sörensen and Mats Åström, who were elected to the board of directors in our annual general meeting in April. They both have extensive experience from technical consulting industry, and Niklas also from green transition and digitalization, and Mats from financial services, strategy, and M&As. Their expertise will be valuable when we continue to carry out our strategy.
Now actually it's good to move on to our strategy for the next three years, and first recapping what that is all about. Our strategy builds on our clients' needs, our core competencies, and the achievements of our previous strategy period that ended last year. As a part of our strategy process, we defined for the first time our company a purpose, which is empowering passionate experts to solve complex challenges. It means that we at Sitowise go to work to solve problems for our clients. This has been taken really well both internally and externally. Our five values on the left side remain unchanged and build the foundation for our company culture. Our vision was revised to reflect the direction we want to grow. We want to redefine smartness in cities.
To reach this vision, we will build our expertise on innovation, sustainability, and efficiency. We have defined further 6 strategic focus areas that guide the strategy execution. The first 3 ones are the growth engines, so creating new smart services, accelerating growth in Sweden, and expanding digital solution business. The next three are the enablers for the growth: becoming a thought leader in sustainability, being the most well-known and desired employer, finding the smartest place to work. We'll discuss these in more concrete terms in our capital market day. After the strategy launch, I've been on a internal strategy roadshow with our other management team members in our offices in Finland and Sweden. These pictures are from Tampere, where we visited in March.
I can say that it has been really encouraging to see that our employees, clients, investors, and other stakeholders have welcomed the new strategy and its three strategic pillars, most innovative, most sustainable, and most efficient, all of them very positively. This gives us a good momentum to proceed with the strategy implementation. Today the plan is to share a little bit highlights from all of these strategic pillars, starting with the most innovative. Our goal is to develop and engage our people and partners to innovate smart solutions that accelerate the industry transition. We want to expand smart city solutions in all our business areas. We continue building scalable SaaS business, we want to enrich design environments and processes with new solutions. After the strategy launch, we have strengthened our existing pipeline for the new smart services.
All business areas are involved in this work. We focus on cross-business area solutions that would help our clients to succeed in their businesses. We are also preparing for Sitowise innovation competition that will be launched in June. The third example I want to mention here is the DataMust project which started in first quarter. The aim of the DataMust project is to accelerate carbon neutrality in the built environment, promote the development of secure solutions, and optimize the energy consumption of digital infrastructure. The project is funded by Business Finland and is part of the Nokia's Veturi program, and is a joint project including several companies in addition to us.
Sustainability has been in the core of our all our operations already in the previous strategy period. We truly believe that we can make an impact. We want to lead the way to sustainable future by understanding our clients' existing and also the emerging needs and by solving them. Sustainability is an integral part of our expertise and all client projects. When talking about sustainability, we have three focus areas. Firstly, focus on developing new sustainability know-how. During the strategy period, we want to grow our strategic and data-based sustainability services for the built environment. At the same time, we consider extensively how sustainability affect our existing expertise and everyday work. How will we make all our projects more sustainable? This will be done with our sustainability tool, which we will develop according to our client needs.
Thirdly, we will make sure our own operations are as sustainable as possible. The most efficient, we will optimize our ways of working, including sales, customer processes, tools, and also meaningful data creation and usage to provide the best value for our customers and to maintain the industry-leading Profitability to be able to grow and develop. After the strategy launch, we've been focusing especially on the smartest ways to work and sales excellence streams, which are also areas that will be benefiting from our ongoing ERP and CRM projects. In addition, we continue to develop Voima, so our digital platform, and here our focus is that in addition to gaining additional internal efficiencies on our clients and the ways in which Voima could be used in client work for their and our mutual success.
We have set clear goals and KPIs to monitor our progress in each strategic area. They are related to, for example, revenue growth and our clients' perception on us. We'll report on the progress in these areas later a bit more. Here is just a summary of our strategy once more. Who we are is presented on the left-hand side, what we want to reach is on the right-hand side, and where we focus on are at the bottom. We'll discuss all in more detail in our Capital Markets Day, which will be held on 7 of June, we hope to see you there. Thank you, now it's time for questions.
Thank you, Heikki and Hanna. Yes, we have received some questions.
Mm-hmm.
Let's start with those related to the market environment. The first question is, that do you think that the worst is behind us in buildings?
It's tough to say. Now we see that at least, during the next months and quarters, maybe the situation is not at least improving, so, we still might be seeing a bit tougher times ahead.
What about infra? Is that picking up or continuing as it is?
We are confident with the overall, like, infra market growth. As I said also, we've been clearly outpacing the market growth. In that sense, of course, I also mentioned a couple of items where the market has been a bit declining, like, inside the infra business, like, road projects. Still overall when we look at the infra business, it's growing well, and we are confident with that one.
How about Sweden? Is, Sweden, showing signs of slowing down or how would you summarize?
Yeah. In Sweden it's a bit of like a mixed picture. Clearly we see that in the commercial and also the institutional side there is growth, and overall, like in the infra side. The local housing is down. If you think about our position, we are focusing a lot on the commercial institutional side, and that's why we see that the overall picture for us would be pretty stable.
Okay. We have a question about the one work day more in Q1. How much did it affect your Profitability or our Profitability?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I think, that's actually shown in our-
Mm
... report, where we show the bridge between the full growth and the organic growth. The impact was almost EUR 1 million, slightly less than EUR 1 million. It has a meaningful impact.
Question about the billing ratio. If you could sort of recap the reasons behind the decline during Q1?
Yeah, there are basically like three different reasons. The first one relates to building segment, once the market is there tougher, then it has also an impact on us because we cannot always allocate the work in the best possible way, that's one element, and that has been also the reason over like the last two quarters as well. As I mentioned, our digi business is growing well, which is really good. By nature, the utilization rate is a bit lower than in other business areas. Once a share for digi.
Mm
... grows, then of course it has an impact on our Group utilization rate as well. The third thing is that, of course now we've been focusing a lot on the customer activity and tendering activity to improve further Order Book, and our, like, guaranteeing that we have enough work in the future. Of course that takes a bit of time. Also the project mix has a bit of impact. There are several different reasons, but of course a clear thing is that we want to improve it clearly further.
Okay. Question about headcount. Do you see your headcount moderating or decreasing because of the buildings business outlook?
In the buildings side we've had a bit of decline. When we look at the other business areas, there's a need for talent, and we continue to focus on the recruitment activities. What comes to the, like, overall, or group level, we see that there's a going to be increase also in the FTE.
Okay. Those were the questions, today. Thank you, Heikki, thank you, Hanna, thank you all, who viewed this webcast. We hope to see you in the Capital Markets Day in June or at the latest, in connection of our half-year results in August. Thank you.