Hello everyone, you are welcome to follow up Talenom Business Review of Q1 2024. My name is Otto-Pekka Huhtala, I'm CEO of Talenom, and here is my colleague, CFO of Talenom, Matti Eilonen. Hello everybody. I will start from the strategy progress and some topic of last quarter, and after that Matti will open more about financial developments. So let's go. Our EBITDA improved by 13.4% and strategy implementation progressed. As you see, our net sales increased 9%, and there were a little bit of challenges regarding market situations. Positive side is that our EBITDA margin increased 13.4%, and it was EUR 9.5 million in Q1. We have told also that we are now focusing more on organic growth, and inorganic growth is slowing down, and this investment level regarding acquisitions decreased over 60% as planned. Some words of European accounting markets.
We made the decision in 2017 that it looked like we were going to be so big in Finland that our market share was going to be so big that the potential growth rate would be over 15%, so it would be hard in Finland. So that's why we made the decision that we had to go to some foreign countries. And we bought first company from Sweden just 5 years ago, and the Swedish market is double size compared to Finland. And later on we have gone to Spain, which is 10 times bigger, and also to Italy, which is like 12 times bigger than Finland markets. And what we have seen in Finland is how this digitalization transformation from traditional accounting firm to nowadays digital accounting firm as we have, how this change has developed and how we have done that.
So these kinds of environment changes are going to happen just now. For example, in Spain, for example, this e-invoicing will be a mandatory way for sending and receiving invoices in the next 1.5 years. We assume that this will have a positive impact on our whole package, accounting service packages. That's why we are seeking the whole Europe, and our growth ambition is so high. Now we are in those four countries, and we will grow there. Shortly, our vision, which is unbeatable accounting and banking services for small and medium enterprises. This means that we will focus on those two things. We have a Blue Ocean Strategy. It means that we have our own software, our own platform, what our clients are using, and also our own internal person, our accountant.
This means that we can lead the whole value chain from customer- to- customer. The effect for customer is that they have very easy-to-use mobile applications or browser-used applications and so on. We try to make our clients' daily basis life as easy as it's possible. The other side is that at the same time when we are resolving our clients' problem, we can resolve at the same time our internal issues. That's why we have developed our automation. It's very high, and this is the reason why we have so high EBITDA level today in Finland. This automation will save time of our accountant, and this saved time will be used more for clients, focusing on clients and customer centricity, and we can care better for them and deliver some added value services and keep better touch than competitors have capabilities.
We have a proven strategy and strong track record of this digitalization transformation. You see there is our revenue figure, and this line is our EBIT margin, comparable EBIT margin. What we did before 2015 was that we made our transformation from traditional paper accounting environment to whole digital accounting environment. In 2015, we had more or less ready our customer interfaces and also our own bookkeeping software, the first version of that. What was the result, what were the benefits regarding this digitalization? You see this in figures 2016-2020, and our EBIT margin tripled in this period compared to before that time. Now we are going to duplicate this strategy just now in Sweden. We are implementing our software there, and we are just now in this 15-year dip there where we are investing so much for implementing our software.
Matti will open more about this impact for figures later on. Our internationalization is progressing as planned today. Less than 70% of revenue comes from Finland, and 20% comes from Sweden and from other countries, mostly from Spain. 11% comes from there. And how do we see the future? This kind of development, what we see in this line, is going to continue. Today we are growing fastest in Spain and second, Sweden, and then Finland. We also see that in Southern Europe, there is also a good positive growth level in the country environment compared to the Nordics where we have a recession ongoing. Okay, some words of strategy progress in Q1. The first topic for this year is improving operational efficiency. Now we can see the first impact of that in Finland.
We started our profitable actions last year, and now we are getting some results of that. The second one is platform rollout in Sweden, and this is ongoing as planned. Why do we do that? It's that when we migrate our clients to our platform, we have evidence that we can save time over 75% of accounting routines, monthly routines. Matti will open later on which kind of effect this will have for our EBITDA margin in country level compared to Finland. The third one is organic growth. We have continued developing our digital buying processes, and we are getting some good results regarding that. On the other hand, we have made some key employee recruitment to boost our organic growth later on. Okay, these were my slides, and now I will take Matti's speech. Here you are.
All right. Hello everybody. Welcome to follow this business review of Talenom first quarter. Let's start from the group level figures. Our growth was 9%, ending up at EUR 34 million, and the increase of the net sales came mainly from the acquisitions in Spain. Organic growth slowed down, and that was because of the recession and the economic situation going on in the Nordics. It significantly slowed down our organic growth, especially in Finland, but in Sweden also. Our first priority for this year was to make a turnaround in the profitability growth, and that happened in the first quarter. Our EBITDA went up EUR 1.1 million, and also the relative EBITDA was better. Operating profit went up almost EUR 500,000 and a slight improve also in the relative profitability of EBIT. The EBITDA improvement came mainly from Finland.
As Otto told us, it was because we launched the efficiency measurements and profitability measurements in Finland in spring 2023. In Sweden, we are in the middle of implementing our own software, and that dragged down the profitability significantly in Sweden. In Spain, we made good progress, and with the volume boost, or when the volume is on a higher level, we were enabled to improve the profitability significantly in Spain as well. Let's move to country-specific figures. The revenue in Finland was on the same level as last year, and that was because of the recession and the economic slowdown happening in the Nordics, and it has a certain influence on figures in Finland. The transactions of customer volumes had come down a little bit, which has decreased our revenue per customer. There has been also an increase in business closures and bankruptcies, much more than usual.
We were able to offset this by getting new customer acquisitions so that we could improve the growth there, but the economic situation dragged down the growth. In Finland, we made pretty good progress with the EBITDA improvement. It went up EUR 1.1 million, and significantly the relative profitability went up almost to 40%. And that was because we made some changes and improvement measurements in Finland in 2023. On the other hand, the economic slowdown has also impacted on Finland's profitability. If there was no recession and the business was running like it used to be, a little bit growing all the time in Finland, we would have possibilities to make even better profitability in Finland. In Sweden, we grew 3.4%, ending up to EUR 7 million, and that mainly came from the acquisitions. The same kind of phenomenon is happening in Sweden as in Finland.
The economy is slowing down, and we can see the same kind of effect also here. In Sweden, we have slowed down our acquisition progress there, and we are more focusing on integration work and particularly implementing our own platform. We have strong trust that in the longer term, this will improve the efficiency, profitability, and also for organic growth opportunities. It's really good. In the short term, as we can see that our EBITDA went down from EUR 800,000 to almost zero. In the short term, the resources which are required for this project to get it through, it is declining the profitability significantly. Here is some view about this, what the differences are in Finland and in Sweden. In Finland, we have strong software expertise and really highly automated and really efficient processes in accounting.
We can see that our profitability measured by EBITDA, it's been around 40% for several years already. The lower line is EBITDA in Sweden, and as we can see, it varies between 0%-10%. The most significant factor there is these automated processes, which can improve the profitability. Based on our experience in Finland, we have measured that it's possible to bring down the routine work to almost one quarter of what it used to be. So 75% of improvement in routine work. Of course, that opens up a good possibility to improve the profitability, and also it enables us to provide value-added services to the client. Business development in other countries, Spain and Italy. We have nice growth there, more than 200%, ending up to almost EUR 4 million. It came mainly from the acquisitions in Spain.
However, there is good evidence of that we can grow also organically via our office network in Spain. In Italy, we have continued our studies on the accounting market, and we hired the country director there. According to our studies, it seems to be that Italy is quite hard for inorganic acquisition-based growth. Instead of that, our first priority is to grow organically in Italy. As we get the volume up in Spain, that also has an influence on the profitability, and it went significantly up in the first quarter. The Spanish accounting business is profitable, measured by EBITDA, but the profitability is dragged down because of building up the organic growth and relatively high share of supporting activities. We have measured that with the current supporting activities, it is possible to grow the volume without growing the supporting activities significantly.
The outlook and guidance for 2024, it is unchanged. We are expecting to have net sales between EUR 130 million and EUR 140 million, and EBITDA between EUR 34 million and EUR 40 million, and operating profit between EUR 14 million and EUR 17 million. Thank you very much, and I believe now it's time for questions.
Yes, there are a few questions in the chat from Ben Horner from Granular Capital. The first question: can you please outline the specific reasons for the growth reduction in Finland, alongside if you will be able to increase prices this year to boost organic growth?
As I told, the volume-based transactions went down per customer, and that has an influence on the revenue per client. Usually when the economics start to boost, it comes with a delay to us. Of course, when the environment in the economic situation, we should be able to put back in the revenue and also increase the prices per customer.
Okay. Do you want to add something or?
That's okay.
The second question, can you provide an update on customer numbers and churn in Finland?
I'm sorry, but we don't tell customer figures out anymore.
One more question. Are you planning to continue the M&A activity in Spain as planned?
Just now we have a hold regarding acquisitions, and we are going to get all integration things in place before we are going to continue acquisition. And mostly we are seeking how we could grow faster via organically, and this is the main topic just now. But when we have the end of this year, maybe it will be possible to make some strategic acquisitions, but still we are preferring organic growth.
Yes, thank you. No further questions in the chat.
Any more questions there? Okay, thank you very much, and have a nice day.
Thank you. Bye-bye.