Hi all. My name is Heikki Haasmaa, and I've been leading Sitowise since May 2022. I'll start by explaining Sitowise's story in brief, and then we'll focus on the sustainability goals we've been setting already some time ago. Sitowise is a Nordic expert in the built environment with strong focus on digitality. We provide technical design and consulting know-how to enable more sustainable and smarter urban development as well as smooth transportation. In addition, we provide digital solutions related to built environment and the management of forest assets. Here you can see some of our key figures. Looking at the net sales, we have grown steadily and consistently over several years, both through acquisitions and also organically. We have been the most efficient and profitable listed player in the industry, and we want to remain in that position.
Today, we operate in three countries with more than 2,200 employees, we have 32 offices. We are a stable and trusted partner for our clients. This year our NPS was at the level of 32. We have been listed in Nasdaq Helsinki main list since March 2021. We are a one-stop shop for technical consulting and related digital geospatial location-based services. We have four business areas. Our buildings business offers extensive services for the entire life cycle of buildings, and we have distinctive expertise in high-rise, underwater buildings, acoustics, fire safety, and also increasingly security-related services. In infrastructure, we are a leading player in Finland and offer a wide range of services within infra, transport and mobility, environment and water, renewable energy, and also project management services. Our digital business offers Nordic excellence in geospatial solutions.
The services include custom-made digital solutions and now increasingly products and SaaS, software as a service type of solutions, as well as consulting for the built environment, mobility and forest sector. Sweden forms our fourth business area, has inside it basically the same business areas than what we have in Finland, so buildings, infra, and also digital solutions. The built environment, including all visible elements such as houses, roads, railways, bridges, and parks, but also the hidden items such as plumbing, electricity, security networks, all of these form an ecosystem, an entity that is always alive. We walk alongside our clients through the different phases of the built environment's life cycle. Digital data management and a smooth information flows between different operators and systems are a precondition for the development of a sustainable and functional built environment.
Data is also created at all phases of the life cycle, from reports to planning and to construction, asset management and demolition, this provides us a significant opportunity. The needs of our clients are very much driven by five mega trends, which are also shaping our industry. We also see that they are our friends because they are creating demand for the services what we have. Firstly, urbanization. That will be driving the demand for sustainable solutions in the field of the built environment. Renovation or maintenance backlog is expanding with aging building and infrastructure and also the tightening legislation. Digitalization grows the demand for advanced analytics and put data at the center of new businesses. We see a big opportunity in digitality, knowledge-based management, and use of artificial intelligence.
Climate change and biodiversity adaptation impacts significantly to the development of built environment and requires major investments by cities and the whole industry. As a fifth item, the security threats affect the built environment on a large scale, especially on critical infrastructure of society. We are addressing these recently arising needs with our newly established security critical services. The new regulation, which presents new demands, especially from the sustainability point of view, brings new opportunities in our business since we can help our clients to face these new requirements. The new Building Act entering in force in a bit over a year is an important improvement. The biggest change is that it incorporates the measures to mitigate climate change into the building legislation.
The Building Act guides to carbon reduction in construction by taking the negative and positive climate impacts throughout the life cycle of a building into account. The act will also strengthen circular economy in buildings because it requires that buildings must be designed so that they are adaptable and can be used for a long time. In addition to the new Building Act regulation related to European Union's green financing is bringing new demand for our services. Our clients have to address these requirements, and we can help them in evaluating their existing practices, in developing new sustainable practices, and also to report more transparently on the impact of their operations. Let's move on to our strategy, which we launched earlier this year. On the left-hand side, you can see who we are and who we want to be.
Our values and also our new purpose, where our employees are in the center. On the right-hand side, you can see our vision: redefining smartness in cities. We believe that cities are in the core of the change that is needed to solve future challenges. According to the estimates, by 2050, almost 70% of the global population will live in cities. For us, smart is a multidimensional word. It refers to our experts' everyday vision, which gives courage to create innovative data-based solutions. On the right-hand side, you also see our strategic pillars. We want to be the most innovative. Our aim is to innovate smart solutions and services accelerating the industry transition. We want to be the most sustainable. We want to lead the way to sustainable future concentrating in three dimensions. We want to be carbon neutral in our own operations.
We focus heavily on challenging our customers to make wise, sustainable choices. We also see that there's a clear business opportunity with the sustainability services. The most efficient, we optimize our way of working, sales, and tools to provide best value for our clients, partners, and employees. We'll also define further six strategic focus areas that guide our strategy execution, but I'm not going to go to those today. We are strong believers of data, and therefore, our sustainability work is also based on analyzed data. Sitowise conducted a materiality analysis that identified the most crucial ESG aspects of sustainability regarding Sitowise operations and the related level of ambition. The analysis examined the trends affecting our business, made comparisons to the United Nations sustainability or sustainable development agenda, and took the views of our employees and clients into account.
The analysis formed the basis of our sustainability program and its goals. Let's look then at our sustainability program and to the goals we have set for 2025. Firstly, we are carbon neutral. Secondly, we are the most equal workplace with the best employee well-being. We aim for sustainable economic growth, and we actively contribute to making our industry more sustainable. Let's start with the first one, carbon neutrality. As you can see from the graph, our biggest effect comes from purchases, premises, and traveling. We are looking at the following areas to reduce our footprint. Premises, it's about carbon-neutral electricity and heating, also paying attention to the carbon neutrality goal when selecting new premises, and then fuel selections for our vehicles.
For the ICT, it's about going for the low carbon equipment and emphasizing low carbon business trips and encouraging sustainable means of commuting through different kinds of employee benefits. Our second target is to be the most equal workplace. We are actively improving the well-being of our employees in many ways, and we also ensure and want to ensure diversity and equality in our company. Diversity is very important for us as we design and plan living environments for diverse people. With new solutions to our clients, we also need very different kinds of experts with diverse thinking. Our employees have together actually more than 100 degree titles, from construction engineer to sociologists, from geographical scientists to biologists, and from designers to butterfly experts. We have all kinds of competencies. What are we then doing to reach our goal?
Concrete examples are sustainability and DEI training for our employees, improving accessibility of premises, taking actions for gender equality in terms of the share of female/male managers, and regarding equal pay for equal work. We measure our performance with our employee surveys with specific questions related to employee well-being. I'm really happy to see that we are moving to the right direction, and that our employees feel that they are treated fairly and have opportunities to develop their skills. Employee well-being, satisfaction are both reflected in our key group KPIs, such as voluntary attrition, sickness, absences, utilization rate, and employee NPS and the NPS net promoter index. Our third sustainability program target is that we aim for sustainable economic growth.
Concretely, this means that we will anticipate and follow the shift in the market while keeping an eye on the direction of sustainability trends and our clients' sustainability goals. It also means that we are actively developing our current and future services to meet the challenges of sustainable development, and that we will increase business activities aimed at sustainable development. We need to make sure that Sitowise as a company meets the requirements of new regulation, and that our company culture meets the standards that our current and future experts have. We had our first capital market day in June this year, and we shared there that our ambition is first to double our sustainability service revenue to exceed EUR 10 million by the end of 2025.
We also had a second important growth target, which is to grow our recurring revenue to be 10% of our annual revenue by the end of 2025. If we then look at how we plan to grow our sustainability services business, we have identified areas with high growth and margin potential. I'll share a couple of examples for each of these areas. Firstly, renewable energy. Here's a case example, in which our experts have developed methods and carried out effectiveness evaluation of renewable energy policy measures along time. The impact assessments cover realized greenhouse gas emission cost and employment impacts. Secondly, climate change mitigation. Together with our client Skanska, we implemented a pilot in which the carbon footprint of building materials and investment costs were optimized. Thirdly, climate change adaptation, and also biodiversity. In Hollola Municipality, we conducted an environmental study of harmful substances in urban waters.
The last example is related to the Vantaa tram and circular economy. The project covered the recycling of land masses, the reduction of carbon emissions, and the protection of biodiversity on a scale not used in similar projects before. For each one of these, we have set clear targets. Our ambition is high. We have also revised our sales organization and management practices that they will be supporting us to reach these targets during the strategy period. We also seek further growth opportunities from new sustainable innovations. We have established already some time ago The Smart City Lab, which operates as our platform for creating new sustainable business innovation, helping us to develop new services that meet our customers' needs in the future and to redefine smartness in cities. Here you can see some key figures of the innovation pipeline.
As you can see, we are well progressing. On the right-hand side, some of the research topics in the innovations. Whether it's about cybersecurity or climate risks, data-driven circularity or location intelligence, The Smart City Lab operates as our platform for creating new sustainable business innovation. As a part of our innovation work, we also organize innovation competitions. This year, the competition winner was Soil Health Audit & Action Plan Tool, which brings a new way to meet the requirements of the European Union Soil Strategy for 2030. We also seek further growth with acquisitions. In M&As, our focus is on our strategic priority areas, including sustainability. In the past three years, we have done four acquisitions focusing on sustainability. The first two ones were Benviroc Oy and MSDI Oy, which we acquired in already 2021.
They had a strong focus on municipal emissions calculations and related decision-making. Our quite recent acquisition of Positive Impact Finland Oy strengthens Sitowise expertise in sustainability services and related digital solutions offered to companies and communities. Just today, two hours ago, we have agreed to buy the expert business of Ahlman Group, which offers services in the nature and environment sector, really focusing on the biodiversity. I'm really happy about these recent acquisitions. Of course, we also keep our eyes open for new opportunities as well going further. Our fourth sustainability goal is to actively contribute to making the industry more sustainable. Under this goal, we aim to be the most active and interesting actor in the discussion concerning the sustainability of the built environment. Our The Smart City Talks events have been organized since 2021.
They are a forum that raises discussion and drives dialogue relating to the questions of sustainability in the built environment. Some examples of the topics during the last years have been how green renovation construction helps with the energy and climate crisis, why diversity is important in terms of the built environment, and radical creativity and innovation in cities. We have actually just now also ongoing one webinar related to The Smart City Talks. We also want to improve our employees' sustainability competence. In addition to trainings, we have developed our own sustainability tool, which is based on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In the tool, sustainability targets and actions are set for new projects. Basically, we first want to challenge our own people to think about sustainability questions and then truly to challenge our customers to make wise, sustainable solutions in the future.
Actually, last year, 86% of the new projects we had used already this tool, so it's really well in use. The third part of the work is collaboration. We actively participate in the industry networks and events, which enable influencing the development of sustainability aspects and sharing ideas with other organizations. As we all know, the challenges we face in society are so big that we can only solve them with others. To conclude my presentation, it's good to sum up and share some key takeaways. Firstly, we are driving positive change through our design and consulting work. The handprint of our work can be basically seen everywhere. Secondly, our business is supported by megatrends and the new regulatory initiatives. They provide significant growth opportunities in our more traditional technical consulting business.
In addition, also, we see growth with the new sustainable innovations and smart services. Thirdly, the ESG-related investments and costs are mainly related to employee wellbeing and training, time spent on new smart and sustainable services, and addressing the new regulatory demands in group level reporting. They are quite minimal. Overall, we consider the opportunities to outweigh the potential cost. Just as our handprint will continue to be bigger than our footprint. With that, I'd like to thank you.
Welcome. Thank you.
Thank you.
For your presentation. Take a seat, please. It was quite insightful and really interesting to hear a little bit more about concrete activities and concrete changes and impacts the market is facing due to climate change. You mentioned the Building Act. Could you elaborate a bit more that what does that mean for your business, the new regulation? What are the opportunities, do you also see that there are some risks for you in terms of available resourcing or competence, increased need or something like that?
Yeah. Actually, the changes will be quite big there. Firstly, I think it's more like an opportunity clearly for us because it's driving for clearly more demand in different solutions. What we are already seeing now is that our clients' demand for new kind of design solutions and also all kind of impact assessments, and we are, of course, willing to help them there. What comes to these resourcing, I think we are clearly in a good position there. Actually, as I also shared, we have just recently clearly strengthened our team and experts there. Basically from roughly 10 persons in the biodiversity team, now we are already having over 40 people and really aiming at being the largest in Finland. Concretely, of course, what kind of possibilities there are.
Naturally, it's about that the act will be guiding for clearly a carbon neutrality in construction, increasing the circular economy, that we need to be deciding buildings so that we take into account the adaptability, so that they have to be there for some centuries. Of course, the use of the buildings might be changing throughout the time, so that we need to take that very into account. Then, of course, the biodiversity as an increasingly hot topic as well. Now we are more seeing these impact assessments, I'm sure that there will be next steps on that one as well.
You mentioned that you today, if I understood correctly, have published that you acquired this Swedish company.
It's a Finnish one.
It's a Finnish one. Okay. You make a Swedish acquisition a little bit earlier. Sorry for that.
Yeah.
Have you assessed whether there are any kind of differences between Finnish and Swedish market when it comes to customer requirements?
Especially related to sustainability, I would say that at least we are seeing it so that maybe the Swedish clients are even more demanding.
Wow.
We are already seeing a couple of clients where the demands are very high. Of course, they have their own very high standards. They want to follow the Science Based Targets, and they are also then requiring that basically all of their suppliers or who are providing the services need to really fulfill those requirements. At this time, seeing that actually there's coming even more like a push or challenge from the Swedish customers.
What about the time of the recession we are sort of living currently? Are you seeing that the recession might risk the need for environmental services or sustainability services? Do you think that it will be so much a must that the impact is rather similar across the products and businesses?
Of course, okay, firstly, naturally, the downturn in the especially construction industry has been quite heavy, and unfortunately, it seems to continue for a while still. Of course, firstly, I think Sitowise has been quite resilient in this kind of market downturn. We have continued to grow pretty well and have maintained our position as the most profitable in the industry. I'm really happy about that one. Then, of course, our infra and digital business have been really strong.
I would say that actually, now we are seeing that it's more like an opportunity for us because the mega trends, as I went through, especially the green transition, digitalization and also security, there is a strong demand for those one, even though there is a downturn. We are basically seeing it every day. What comes to green energy or biodiversity, there's so much demand that basically our challenge is more that how do we get just the workforce and resources to meet our clients' needs. That's why we have also now been active in these acquisitions.
Yeah. Last but not least, you are kind of saying that the need for these services is increasing, and it's obvious due to the climate change and related regulatory changes and need to kind of renew the built environment. How do you see that the competitive landscape is evolving?
Yeah. The more traditional players, of course, like us, we are naturally seeing the opportunity there, and as I said that there's a downturn, you need to go for the growing market segments. Of course, everyone is then trying to seek the growth from these ones. At the same time, of course, there will be new players in the industry, especially the ones which have some kind of niche competence on certain topics. Again, as mentioned, like these recent acquisitions. They are companies which have been really focusing on certain specific segments and with specific competence. Of course, I see that there might be even more those kind of smaller companies coming. There's clearly naturally potential for that.
If you should summarize that, what are your strengths when you compare Sitowise with the competitors? What are the biggest strengths you're having considering competition?
Maybe the first one is, of course, that we are clearly having a one-stop shop, offering really comprehensive services, solutions. We can handle all types of clients' needs, also the biggest ones. That expertise, wide expertise, what we have. We have a good number of resources basically supporting that one. I really would like to emphasize, of course, our strong focus on the sustainability and digitalization. I see that our unique competitive edge is basically this smartness. How do we build it into new kind of innovative solutions? How we are able to digitalize both the operating environment but also bring new kind of digital services and business models. That's, of course, our strength. Naturally, I really would like to thank all of our employees. It's just great to be part of Sitowise. We have so many dedicated and passionate people.
Sounds that you will have a lot of business possibilities going forward. Thank you very much for this interview. I wish you all the best on your journey.
Thank you, a lot.