Good mornin and welcome to Tietoevry's third quarter earnings webcast. My name is Tommi Järvenpää. I started at the company in the beginning of September as the new head of investor relations. Tietoevry's third quarter was good with strong growth and solid profitability. Next, our President and CEO Kimmo Alkio, together with our CFO Tomi Hyryläinen, will go through the highlights and results of the quarter. Kimmo, please go ahead.
Thank you very much, Tommi, and a very warm welcome also on my behalf. What an exciting quarter we have had, and naturally we did the pre-announcement of results already one week ago, so I will synthesize naturally the performance. Strong growth of 8% driven especially by our Create business, our software businesses specifically in the banking and care side. A solid development from a margin standpoint, up to 14.2% level. As anticipated, our performance improvement programs have contributed adequately towards our second half of 2022 profitability objectives, and we anticipate the profit contribution to be further accelerating towards the year end. Naturally, as announced a week ago, we have provided updated guidance for the year.
A brief summary on the updated guidance, the drivers behind the growth guidance update to 5%-6%, naturally based on our continued good performance in the areas which are growing in the marketplace, and we are able to play a very active game in the cloud-native, in the data domains, in the consulting side, and our software businesses. These do support the end-of-year growth outlook as well. Our adjusted operating margin guidance provided in the range of 12.8%-13.1%, and some of the factors and likely well recognizable factors being the era of the inflation, and naturally with our type of business mix there is a certain lead time before the price increases start to contribute even more significantly.
Overall we see being very important the continued positive trajectory in terms of the total performance of the company. I would also like to briefly pause and summarize our perspective on the market and the economic environment. We see continued fine development from a standpoint of the market. We believe that the specialized opportunities, which is the core of our strategy as announced one year ago, enables us to continue to build growth and scale in the software businesses, our cloud-native data, and the software engineering side. Our main point here being from in terms of market development and fit of our capabilities and strategic focus, we believe that we are absolutely on the right path.
We naturally live in the era of higher inflation, that this calls for also our company to pay additional emphasis on productivity, and the levels of expected productivity improvements, while recognizing the lead time for the price increases, which do limit the short-term profit improvement, while, as mentioned, the trajectory being very important. Macroeconomic instability is one factor that everybody's recognizing. In our case we believe we have actually quite an attractive business mix providing further resilience through the long-term customer contracts. We have a very significant proportion of our business mix based on long-term, and recurring revenues, and this practically covers all software businesses and the more traditional managed services side.
This whole era of the geopolitical uncertainty, inflation naturally calls for even more scrutiny in the totality of efficiency for companies and we are naturally paying a great deal of attention in these terms as well. Next, to go into the practical performance information and especially today's highlights on the businesses. Before we go to the businesses, let us briefly summarize, as already known, organic growth of 8%, and our drivers being the aforementioned software businesses and the new era of the consulting side, and adjusted EBITDA at the EUR 97.9 million level being 14.2%. Again, to summarize the performance improvement programs actually covering three of the businesses, Banking, Connect, and Transform, all materializing as we have anticipated, important contribution for the second half of the year, including Q3.
Operating cash flow being EUR 40 million, Tomi will talk about it a bit further, and order backlog operationally up by 3%. Let us go into Tietoevry Create. Very solid performance in this business continues. Organic growth of 19%. To be fair, the Ukrainian currency devaluation did have a positive impact of 3 percentage points in the business. That's fair to highlight. Market activity, I've already talked about. Our firm view on the incremental opportunities in the international markets continues to bear fruit. We continue to make inroads furthermore in North America and Western Europe. That naturally increases the addressable market continuously for Tietoevry Create and for the company as a whole.
Furthermore, regarding expectations for the fourth quarter, we expect the adjusted operating margin to be at the level of Q4 2021. Next, into Tietoevry Banking. Healthy growth of 9%, and favorable development, to be fair, as anticipated towards the 15.9% level, given the type of efficiency measures we have taken and we have spoken about since the end of Q1, and clearly starting to contribute to the profitability level and the profit improvement as we have expected. Healthy growth being driven by three of the businesses within banking: the cards business, the payments, and financial crime prevention.
I would like to confirm that the strategic review of the banking business is absolutely proceeding on schedule, most specifically in the current era regarding the carve-out project and other preparatory steps towards the outcomes of the strategic review. Furthermore, on the fourth quarter, we expect the adjusted operating margin to be above the level of Q4 2021. Next, going into Tietoevry Care. One of our good software businesses. Healthy growth of 11%. Profitability continuing to be very healthy at nearly 34% level. The background to the scale of this business naturally being the architectural redefinition that took place a few years regarding especially the hospital information system solution area as called Lifecare.
We continue to see good opportunities in the care business and rather a question of how to optimize the investments to be increasing the growth potential and continued investments in the technologies to drive even, let's say continuous development in the scale of the business. We expect the fourth quarter adjusted operating margin to be slightly below the Q4 2021 level. We expect this business to be running at healthy profitability also in the fourth quarter. Next, into Tietoevry Industry. Very much also according to our own expectations, organic growth approximately 2%. Just as a background, fair to recognize that, which we mentioned in prior quarters, large customer contract that had ended impacting about 3 percentage points on the growth side.
Growth being good in the Public 360° for the public sector, highly modern software, also cloudified, as such, and then furthermore in the pulp, paper, and the fiber section or sector of the business. Profitability being healthy at the 17% level and furthermore more we expect the adjusted operating margin to be above the level of the fourth quarter 2021, for the fourth quarter of this year. Next, going into Tietoevry Transform, Q3 organic growth of 1%, profitability slightly improving to 6.3% level within the business mix of Transform. Actually, really healthy growth in the industry and forest sector, while still challenges in the telecom and consumer side. Performance improvement measures did start to contribute to the profitability, and I would like to highlight only towards the end of the third quarter.
Third quarter for Transform still started from a profitability side a bit weak and, the impact of the expected productivity and efficiency programs did kick into effect, as we expected, towards the end of the quarter, which gives a foundation naturally into the fourth quarter as well. Regarding the fourth quarter, we expect the adjusted operating margin to be above the level of fourth quarter last year. Into Tietoevry Connect, organic growth of minus 2%, factors being the traditional infrastructure declining by about 8%, no real surprises. While the growth in cloud platforms and security services up by 6%, we naturally would like to see this being higher than the 6% level.
To confirm that the efficiency measures are on schedule, and that is a factor behind the profitability improvement to the nearly 10% level in the third quarter. Regarding fourth quarter, we expect the adjusted operating margin to be at the levels of fourth quarter last year. That would be the brief background or summaries on performance by the businesses. Next, over to Tomi.
Thank you, Kimmo, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased with our Q3 performance overall. As mentioned, we delivered strong organic growth of 8% driven by Tietoevry Create, Banking, and Care. Our adjusted operating margin was good at 14.2% or EUR 97.9 million, supported by our strong revenue growth and performance improvement programs. It's fair to say that our Q3 profit was impacted by the high inflation era that we are living in, limiting the pace of profit improvement. Our operating profit in euros improved compared to prior year, both as adjusted and in reported operating margin. I'll comment cash flow and net debt on the next slide. Our order backlog was at healthy level, up by 3% year-over-year. The overall order level was down from Q2, which is fully seasonal, with typically lower order intake during the summer month during Q3.
Our CapEx was EUR 23.6 million, which is a few million above our normal run rate due to variations in data center investment levels. Our one-time items were EUR 8.7 million impacted by performance acceleration programs and the war in Ukraine. As substantially all of our OTIs related to our efficiency programs are booked, we keep our estimate of OTIs for the year of around 2%. We delivered EUR 40 million of operative cash flow compared to EUR 92 million of prior year. Our weaker cash flow was due to increase in working capital. The working capital change was fully seasonal from vacation pay accruals and advances received from customers, which we utilized over the course of the year. Compared to prior year, our working capital is higher due to quarterly fluctuations, and we expect our working capital to recover during Q4.
This negative working capital impact was also visible in the free cash flow for the quarter. Our net debt/EBITDA remained at 1.6, and our interest-bearing net debt was at EUR 700 million. Attrition levels continue to be high, but they are clearly stabilizing. Our rolling 12-month attrition was 15.3% in Q3 compared to 16.3% in Q2. We increased our net headcount by 150 FTEs during Q3, which was driven by good talent attraction with approximately 1,400 new hires. Over the past 12 months, Tietoevry Create has successfully increased its employee base by approximately 11%, allowing us to deliver the good growth numbers that we are seeing. Similarly, Tietoevry Care is positioned for continued good growth with approximately 11% increased employee base.
On the other hand, in Tietoevry Connect, we have decreased the employee base by approximately 7%, while increasing the offshoring ratio by 9 percentage points to 52% at the end of Q3. We keep our estimate for the salary inflation for the year at approximately 4%. Next, I'll summarize the performance drivers for Q4. On growth drivers, we expect a good momentum to continue with Tietoevry Create, Tietoevry Banking, and Tietoevry Care. Tietoevry Industry will continue to be impacted by the large customer contract ending with - 3 percentage points. The price increases will start gradually take effect and improve our performance. On profit drivers, the efficiency measures in Tietoevry Connect, Tietoevry Banking, and Tietoevry Transform will contribute to further profit improvement. End-of-year licenses in software businesses and transaction volumes in data-driven businesses increase the volatility for the Q4.
Inflation will continue to be high, including increasing energy prices, and that will have a negative impact to the profitability. On other drivers, the FX impact is estimated to be negative EUR 22 million on revenue and working day impact - 1.3 percentage points on growth. Now back to you, Kimmo.
Thank you, Tomi. I'd like to next cover sustainability and a few considerations on way forward. Regarding sustainability, very important agenda that we have a very rich agenda. Couple of areas we would like to highlight at this point in time. Some of the activities underway, very exciting program that we are sponsoring as Tietoevry to increase the attractiveness of tech field amongst women, a Pan-Nordic campaign of being an IT girl, which focuses on students and young professionals, really encouraging people to be joining this very interesting, exciting industry. These activities are being conducted across different types of networks, including Women in Tech in Finland and Sweden, ODA-Network in Norway, and other local networks as well, and a degree of social media visibility embedded naturally.
The other point I wanted to just highlight on activities underway and taken to continue to elevate the gender diversity in the company, very practical activities being conducted, succession plans ensuring both genders represented for all senior positions. For recruitments, to ensure that both genders presented among the final candidates for all senior positions as well. Also, having already initiated objectives and performance indicators that include the share of women in new recruits, in the incentive criteria for senior managers in the company. Very important developments, and naturally we continue to drive with our clients number of solution domains supporting customer sustainability agenda through the solutions that we deliver. I would like to furthermore highlight couple of really interesting cool cases that we would like to bring to the forefront.
One would be actually around this importance of the energy sector, dynamism in the energy sector, whereby with St1 we are increasing flexibility with artificial intelligence, enabling utilization of virtual power plants for optimization of energy capacity. This enables St1 to participate in the new energy reserve market, creating new income streams and supporting the national electricity grid operations. Very important and applying new technologies in a very sensitive and important domain. The other one I wanted to highlight on the expansion from the Tietoevry Create side, expansion to automotive sound systems based on the existing relationship with Bose, and expanding the collaboration to the automotive side, and actually establishing a joint center of excellence in Warsaw, Poland, bringing new software engineering capabilities from both companies, enabling also longer term innovation in these very active domains.
The other one I wanted to highlight, around the, in the Tietoevry Banking side, one of the key areas being the payment software, whereby through the partnership with IBM, we are expanding the addressable market for, banking payment solutions, whereby IBM acts as a global systems integrator and supporting the market expansion of the competitive software suite we have. The other point I wanted to highlight here verbally, we did earlier today announce a significant new customer win, with Aker BP in Norway, whereby we have been selected as Aker BP's new digital services partner. The scope being full stack services run and develop, covering the application layers, covering cloud technologies, as well as the traditional infrastructure side. The contract duration being five years with a number of optional years as well, value being significant, and services to be starting early 2023.
This significant win and a new customer will contribute to the future outlook of the Tietoevry Transform business. Towards the closing, and type of key themes, we believe are very consistent from an operational execution standpoint. We fully anticipate the growth momentum in the company to continue. Furthermore, the performance improvement, very high on the agenda in the extraordinary inflationary era and, the profitability improvement program, specifically in Banking, Connect and Transform, as Tomi also highlighted, fully expected to contribute to our fourth quarter profitability. I'd also like to highlight furthermore high degree of attention on employee wellbeing and talent attraction, and everything based on our values of openness, trust, and respect for diversity. We believe this is becoming a very good place for professionals, all around the world within the Tietoevry family.
Finally, I'd like to maybe summarize just very briefly our capital markets day to be held in Stockholm on Wednesday the 30th of November. We will have an exciting program providing insights into the businesses as well as the future value creation plans for the group as a whole. We really hope to see many of you in Stockholm on the 30th. With this in mind, our presentation is complete and time to shift over to Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Kimmo. Operator, we are now ready for the questions.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. We'll now take our first question from Panu Laitinmäki of Danske Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. It's Panu from Danske. I'm here, standing in for Sami. I have three questions actually. Firstly, you initially guided for 2%-4% organic growth for this year, and now you have raised the guidance and expect 5%-6% organic growth. What has surprised you on the upside during this year?
Okay. Shall we take them, Panu, one by one?
Well, whichever you prefer.
You mentioned all three. We'll take them.
I mean.
Thank you.
Okay. Yeah. The second question is that, have you become more positive regarding the growth rates going forward because you had like more than 5% organic growth this year, and the historical growth rates have been about 2%-3%? The third question is about the Connect division. You have done quite material EUR 50 million efficiency improvements in this division and achieved quite significant margin improvement in Q2, but Q3, but then you are guiding for similar margins in Q4 than last year. Why shouldn't we assume that there is more permanent impact from this program? That's the three questions. Thanks.
Okay. Well, thank you, Panu. Well, maybe I'll take the first two. First of all, on the drivers of your first two relate to the growth profile. As I think everybody has seen in the prior quarters that we are both in terms of how the market is developing and our strategic choices which were announced one year ago on the specialized businesses, very specifically the software businesses and the highly modern consulting around cloud-native applications, everything based on kind of DevOps ways of working, data management, data platforms. These are areas which are growing in the world, in the market as a whole, and we've been able to develop these businesses favorably.
These are some of the I have been hopeful that everybody's seeing very consistent drivers and factors why we have been able to elevate the view on the growth side. These are the main factors. Regarding the longer term, maybe I do already want to mention we do not intend to give guidance for 2023 at this point in time. Naturally, our growth agenda we have talked about for, actually, since we launched the new strategy, and the growth agenda is very important. It is materializing, and naturally we'll be working, of course, to ensure momentum from a growth standpoint. At which level, moving forward, we wish not to speculate. Naturally, we are pleased to see the development, how far we've gotten so far.
On the Connect question specifically from you're asking Q3 to Q4, why not seeing a better improvement there. One is to build in the impact of vacation period, which is highest, the impact in Q3, and then being lower in Q4. That's sort of the headwind that we are seeing there. Of course, the programs will continue to deliver improvement.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Daniel Djurberg of Handelsbanken. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and good morning, gentlemen. Yes, I will also have three questions, if I may. First, I would like to ask a little bit on Tietoevry Connect and with regards to demand and especially not only Connect, Tietoevry as a whole in Finland, actually. Some of your peers have seen quite large weakness in certain areas following the Russian war against Ukraine. We're seeing some, you know, longer time of decision-making, et cetera. The first question is really if you can comment a bit on the outlook in Finland and where your segments you are. Secondly, in the Connect side, I was wondering a little bit on energy costs.
You have data centers, for example, and in Sweden we're also discussing the reduction of the sponsored tax rate in this segment. My question is really if you can elaborate a bit on how important the energy cost side is and the hurdle and also if you have any, you know, if you have done any major energy hedges, et cetera, that we could be aware of. Finally, a little bit on the order backlog. If you look at the order backlog, you expect 24% versus 80% to be invoiced in Q4. This, given the increase of the order backlog is also indicating some, you know, 34% more Q4 revenue that is known compared one year back, i.e., good visibility.
Can you share any details on this, why this has happened, if it's certain projects, certain areas or that gives this change year over year? Those are the three questions. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. Let's begin, of course, your first point then. I think you were asking specifically about the Finnish market. Let me also-
Yeah
Give maybe a bit of reflection, a bit broader, then I come very rapidly to your exact point. I think overall this type of economic downturn, which is visible, the kind of higher inflation era, very likely will drive some type of caution over time in behavior. As we had highlighted earlier, the market drivers are quite healthy, the signals we are seeing. Naturally, we are also mindful that in an economic downturn there can be at some point in time investment postponements and the like. They are not very concrete at this point in time. We are mindful that economic downturn's implications, that's why we also wanted to talk briefly in the early part about the resilience of the business mix.
Regarding Finland on its own, I would not say there is any clear signal that the market would have become less active or inactive. Naturally, I would call it a more normal, differential decision cycles and decision thresholds on investments that companies are applying. Now what do I mean by that? One factor might be around the international manufacturing companies. You have some of them in the forestry sector performing really well. You might have other manufacturing companies that are dependent on external energy prices can be impacted. We can start to go towards the financial services sector, how these are performing. We can go further into public sector. Public sector investments into the digital agenda likely continues.
We can go even further or into healthcare welfare within the public sector, where significant investments are expected for the years to come. Why did I say that background? I don't think there's any simple answer. I would just maybe a bit aggregate that the type of potential caution, it's good to be mindful. We believe that the market dynamics we are accounting for in our short-term kind of own expectations.
On the energy side.
Yeah.
If I comment on that. Historically, our energy cost, for you to get a high level understanding, has been approximately EUR 10 million, slightly over EUR 10 million. We hedge our energy in accordance with the company policies, so major part of the volumes are hedged. It means that we will be impacted by some of this price increases immediately. As I said, major part is hedged. Some of this will fall over towards the end of next year and then 2024. We will be impacted already in Q4 and then the full 2023 as all the market participants. On your order backlog question, of course, it is sort of a combination of the shorter contract cycles that we are experiencing in combination with the higher growth for the Q4. Those would be the sort of primary drivers for the backlog question.
Thank you so much. Yeah, I will come back with a follow-up later. Thanks.
Thank you. We'll now move on to our next question from Felix Henriksson of Nordea. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, it's Felix from Nordea. Thanks for taking my question. I have a couple starting with Create, a very strong organic growth, and I'm wondering whether you see this type of double-digit progression as sustainable, and how should we think about the performance of this business in a recessionary scenario, given the shorter contract durations compared to your other businesses? Secondly, on the industry seeing margin contraction around 350 basis points there from last year's level. Could you perhaps provide a bit more color on the contraction of such a wide magnitude? Thanks.
Okay. Yes, thank you, Felix. First of all, I think on the Create side, we do see this as kind of a positively opportunistic given that we are playing in a broader international market. The probability of companies continuing to invest and increasing investments in the modern technologies on exactly where our Tietoevry Create delivers its services and significant capabilities. If you think about the cloud-native applications demanding software engineering capabilities in telecom, automotive. We think about the data engineering, data management, data platforms, probability of these being attractive market segments, I would say, is very high.
Will these be impacted in case of or in an era of potentially severe downturn? I don't think that should hinder what type of business we see opportunities in and the longer term potential and our consideration to expand this further. Regarding industry software, I would say there's nothing significant in that, I call it minor fluctuation in profitability, so nothing of significant nature.
Okay. Thank you. That's helpful.
Thank you. We'll move on to our next question from Aditya Buddhavarapu of Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. This is Aditya Buddhavarapu from Bank of America. Thanks for taking my question. Three from my side. You mentioned the significant contract win with Aker BP. Could you maybe just talk about any other sort of large deals in the pipeline, and when we might expect to see anything on that? Second question, in Connect, you mentioned that cloud platforms were up 6%, but you would like that to grow quicker. Could you just maybe talk about what's happening there, anything in particular which is maybe impacting the growth and how that maybe could be improved? And then the final question is on the price increases. You talked about the lead time there.
Maybe can you give us an indication of the level of price increases which start to come through, you know, into Q4 and next year? Also how you're thinking about the ability to raise prices in 2023 if there's a weaker macro environment. Thank you.
Okay, thank you. Let us begin indeed with your point on the pipeline. Again, it is good to recognize that, of course, the pipeline, we need to kind of describe it to you also consider or reflect on it per business. If we think about briefly the type of pipeline in Create, the activity level that exists out there in the marketplace, I'd say it's very, very healthy. All our software businesses are deep in the industries, very deep in client engagement. They're deep into investment plans with clients, overarching view on activity level on the software side also healthy. Your question might be more centered around Transform and Connect. This example, Aker BP, is a very fine one.
A new client combines the capabilities of Transform and the infrastructure capabilities coming from Connect and doing the full IT stack, the run and development with further opportunities into the data-centric layers as well. Overall, I think the pipelines are healthy and to be fair, competition is hard. It's been always hard. It's really not unusual because in that sense we do see healthy development, and of course we need to demonstrate that we maintain healthy win rates in these businesses as visible through the future views of the business won and future views on the backlog generated. We do expect also high activity level in this regard for the fourth quarter as well.
Regarding Connect on the growth side, naturally greater success in order to uplift that performance in the very modern, very competitive private cloud services we have ensuring that we penetrate in the marketplace adequately, and do further activity in the multi-cloud related professional services. Higher growth is absolutely possible. To be fair with that in mind, we're not, in that sense, happy with the 6%. Those would be some of the drivers. On the price increase, maybe if I start from the logic, what type of businesses do we have?
We have Create with shorter life or shorter contract businesses where we have been able to increase our pricing, that the impact we commented will be visible now in the Q4 growth numbers. We have not been able to do in addition to what we normally do on an annual basis yet on Create either. We have the longer-term contracts where the pricing is typically on a calendar year, where the beginning of the year price increases happen. They typically follow the indexes, whether it's consumer price index or other indexes relating to salary inflation. Those will happen then towards the 2023. For this year, there has not been a potential to do any price increases basically on those type of contracts.
That's why we comment on this delay in pricing increases kicking in and impacting our performance. The levels of what are sort of feasible, of course, sort of the shorter term contracts which I refer to Create, they typically follow more or less the salary inflation levels. The market is getting more and more sort of having more appetite for the price increases because it's such a large phenomenon as we know in the market. That would be sort of the high level comment on that.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll move on to our next question of Jaakko Tyrväinen of SEB. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. It's Jaakko from SEB. Most of my questions have all been asked, but perhaps touching on the salary inflation and the expectations there, would you dare to give any kind of early indication or expectation for the 2023 salary inflation? What are the expectations there? Should we kind of expect salary inflation to accelerate from the current levels or stay around here? The second one goes to the attrition, and given the overall economic uncertainty that we are experiencing, do you expect people to look for a bit more stability and hence the attrition to come down going forward?
Yes. Actually, these two are combined. Your salary inflation question, it's a bit tied to the attrition as well. I personally, now I'm guessing, my view is that we will see roughly the same salary inflation next year as we have had this year. I don't foresee huge increases, and it's especially connected to my view of the attrition, which I still see stabilizing, maybe even decreasing a bit due to the economic situation that you also refer to.
Mm.
I think your second point as well, maybe, further comment. Normally what would happen, but there are no significant signals yet that in a recessionary environment, the job market would become a bit cooler, not as hot as it has been. That would. There's been some discussion in the industry of that already. We believe that our attrition levels as shared about with over 15%, clearly starting to get more normal, and we are not in attrition terms on the higher end relative to the peer group. We need to be very mindful, continue to actually develop, support the well-being of employees. Quite good feedback we are getting from colleagues in the company regarding our modern ways of working, all co-created with employees through crowdsourcing.
I think number of somewhat favorable signals on the attractiveness, of people within the Tietoevry family.
Okay, excellent. Thanks.
Thank you. We'll now take the question from Daniel Djurberg again from Handelsbanken. Your line is open, please go ahead.
Thank you operator, yeah, it's me again here. I was wondering a little bit on the IBM collaboration with Tietoevry Banking. Will IBM Global Services have, you know, exclusive rights for a period of time in certain markets or is it all non-Nordic markets? Do you have any initial wins or any guaranteed revenue from this collaboration already? Another question is on if you see any uptake in general in demand for your global delivery centers. You have roughly, I think 12,750 employees, so more than half of the company in these centers.
I guess if customers have started to look more at cost-saving projects, it could be triggering more of this demand for, I guess, cloud-based outsourcing somehow. Yeah. Those were the two questions. Thanks.
Thank you. Regarding the banking and the payment solution suite, this is quite a typical partnership consideration or program for increasing the addressable market in partnerships there. We don't believe in exclusivity. That's not a good practice. Performers will need to tell how far to go. Highly in that sense, needs to be expansion-oriented. Very typical type of an SI arrangement on a global level.
Yep.
Very typical would be my short consideration. Nothing exclusive. Regarding the delivery center, as we have reflected upon for several years, the global delivery center network we have is a very important competitive asset for the company. We have the combination of being able to support clients' feet on the street, close to customers if it is important to a client. When customers want to prefer or do prefer cost optimization, we have a number of locations to choose from around the world. That would be my short comment. It's a very important part of our competitive equation, and we continue to develop the delivery center work like we've done in recent years.
Okay. No, you know, major changes in demand pattern, so we have at least,
No significant shift. Yes.
On the mix.
Yeah. No significant. It's just a very important factor in every dialogue and it's just really positive, I would say, that we are able to have customer by customer consideration of what capabilities are preferred, where in the world, at what type of price points, and we can be flexible given that our global delivery centers and that network is well scalable.
Perfect. Thank you. Good luck, Q4.
Thank you. We'll now take our last question from Matti Riikonen of Carnegie. Your line is open, please go ahead.
Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. I would like to continue on the price increase theme just a bit more, how they work and actually how they work by division. I'm trying to understand how the kind of wage inflation component and other cost inflation elements like energy, how they impact your divisions. So you already said that in Create you have shorter contracts, it's easier to raise prices, that's quite understandable. But my first question is that how does it work in the software businesses like Care and Industry? Is it also easier to execute the price increases there because they are basically in your own hands? And secondly, how is the situation with Connect, where your prices basically decrease contractually every year?
Is it possible to pass on the increased inflation to the customers in addition to just the salary inflation part, or how does it work in those kind of Connect deals? Then finally, the same question related to Transform. You have some longer-term contracts, but just how exactly does it work in the contracts? That do you get possibility to make increases due to the other than wage-related inflationary components? That would be helpful. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Matti, for the consideration. I will try to give a punctual view on an actually complicated topic. Let me first summarize one level above the businesses. Good to recognize that in our industry, it's typical to have a combination of shorter project cycle contracts like the Create, like you summarized. It also typical to have long-term frame agreements, and frame agreements tend to be applied specifically in the public sector, which are highly governed. Then you have outsourcing type of contracts which have pre-built price discounts built in. Create, you personally summarized it, Matti, there very punctually that and Tomi had commented that earlier.
Software businesses still need to be slightly broken down between maintenance costs, between license costs, and if you are already in the cloud environment, you increase the subscription prices. Point being that there's a lead time into when new price levels kick in, and whenever they are longer term in the case of license type of contracts, including maintenance, you tend to have index clauses that are applied at a certain point of the year with a certain lead time of kicking in. That's index-based.
The final factor indeed that you were a bit alluding to is in the type more outsourcing-oriented contracts which are in both Connect and Transform, they tend to be long-term contracts with certain price levels being built in, and as recognized, the new type of price points tend to be kicking in in the first quarter of the new year. Now, with that in mind, in Connect and Transform, naturally the business part of the business where we do consulting, where we do add-ons, where we do a lot of new type of private cloud platforms, we have the opportunity of course to reprice these in the era of higher inflation. That would be a bit more thorough opening up on how the pricing practically works across the businesses.
All right. Basically in outsourcing, you can affect the consulting and add-on parts to the project. I'm just trying to understand the kind of magnitude between consulting and add-on revenue within those contracts and then the contractual, let's say, infrastructure part.
If I may.
The infrastructure larger and, do you get to change that price, based on inflation?
Managed services, the pricing is fixed for the duration of the contracts typically. As Kimmo referred to add-ons, two types, consulting and capacity. Add-ons are typically part of that managed services frame where there is a time point which is typically, again, I say typically, but it's not 100%, it is the beginning of the year when price increases happen. Those tend to be then rate card increases, which typically then follow. Where it's consulting, it follows the salary inflation. Where it's capacity, there are other indexes that it's based on. That's how it works in practice. Yeah.
I think, Matti, the other point important to recognize about how this industry has been developing for many, many years, the background to that business model is why productivity and automation increases every year to offset any of that, you know, how the price points in the market work. It's important to recognize that is part of the standard equation for continuing to improve performance of that outsourcing or managed services type of businesses.
All right. Good. That's all from me.
Thank you. It appears there are no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the conference back to the speaker for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you.
Thank you, and thank you very much for the questions. I will now hand over back to Kimmo for final remarks.
Thank you very much for joining today. Looking forward to hopefully many joining then for the Capital Markets Day in Stockholm. Looking forward to seeing you at the latest then, and we all look forward to a very exciting fourth quarter. Thank you.