Good afternoon, everybody. You are welcome to Tallinnam 1st Q report release. I will start in Finnish. And after me, our CFO,
Hello, everybody. This is CFO of Tallinnom speaking. Antti Aho is my name. Welcome to follow our release from the Q1. To put it shortly, the financial year started out very nicely.
Especially, I want to emphasize our core businesses that Finnish Accounting Services, very strong performance in the Q1. And this gave and still gives us the confidence to continue our expansion in Sweden to other markets and also to go into new ventures like small company concept, carryout acquisitions and so forth. First, I want to Memorize a little bit our strategic cornerstones. You may have seen this before. We have 3 Cornerstones in our strategy.
And today, I'd like to a little bit reflect on those, what can we say about those from the Q1. First, we want to make our customers' lives easy by digitalizing their financial management routines. During the Q1, we launched our new Telenom online version and are currently transferring our customers from the old Tallinn Online to the new Tallinn Online, which makes the customer experience even better. Secondly, we want to optimize the routines of the related to the accounting payroll processes. And during the Q1, the degree of our Automation kept rising, which partly explains our good results from the Q1.
And all this, of course, gives our accountants more time to talk with customers and provide value added services. And our customer retention during the Q1 also improved very well. In Sweden, we made several acquisitions During the Q1, we entered into 3 new cities and strengthened our position in Stockholm, of course, the new locations being Weksha, Ostersund and Ore. This is not only about entering new markets and getting more revenue, but it's also and maybe even more importantly, hiring new and right people to strengthen our local management team in Sweden. And we really look forward that we now have a good strong team there to keep growing in Sweden.
And also, we kept on working with our small company concept in the Swedish market, the same which we call Tilleyasco in Finland. And also that project was in schedule. And now it seems that during the summer, we will launch the Kontakalle for the first customers in Swedish market. Also maybe I want to stop here a little bit To remind that when we bring Kontokale to Swedish market, this is our first step to bring our own software to Swedish market. And much of that work can be used later when we introduce our software to our existing Swedish customers.
Another important and we could say historical step, not only for Telenom, but for accounting industry, I'd like to say is that we introduced bank accounts and bank cards to our small company customers during the Q1. And our goal is to bring these bank accounts and banking services also to mid segment customers by the end of this year. Why what's the point in bringing bank cards and bank accounts into our service offering. It's not that we would like to be just another bank in the banking sector. The point is that when we bundle banking services and accounting services together, We think that we take a very significant step towards easier lives for our customers.
Also our banking services are very competitive in many ways. The bank account can be opened within a few minutes, which we think that our customers will appreciate. And also, they will bring significant savings In banking costs, for the smallest customers, the banking services are free of charge. And when they grow, they start paying. But still, We believe that we can keep the pricing very aggressive compared to current status in the banking industry.
A couple of words of the Tiljaska Small company platform project. We presented this slide in our CMD in October, And here is the schedule. And as we can see, we are proceeding in schedule as we introduced the banking services by the end of March. And we also set some goals for the amount of customers. Our goal was to have 200 to 300 customers by the end of March.
We had some 400 to 500 customers by the end of March. In 19 April, the total number was 6.55 in Tyliaskai and in the light entrepreneur concept. So it's going very well and according to our plans. And the next significant step being accelerating growth in Finland and to introduce the first version to Swedish market during the summer. Then the figures from the Q1.
The net sales increased by 17%, about of which twothree came from acquisitions and the rest was done by our sales team. The corona still had a slight impact, making the sales a little bit more challenging, pushing down a little bit the transaction based invoicing, but not a major impact and no increase in the amount of bankruptcies. So looking forward, that corona is soon over. The profitability side also improved quite nicely. The operating profit improved by 18.7%, the EBIT being at 21.7% at the end of the quarter.
The reasons behind this, as I mentioned, The automation level kept increasing in our Finnish accounting business. Also some savings on fixed costs, pretty much due to corona. And then also on the other hand, although the total figure turned out quite nicely, But when we slice it down a little bit, we can see there quite a significant negative impact From the acquisitions, which we are doing more and more, as we have earlier communicated, The 1st 3 years, they typically stress our margins before they catch up with our normal level. A couple of figures Depicting long term improvement. The first one showing the accounting market in Finland.
As we see, the market is growing and digitalization of the market seems to be boosting the growth of the market. The market is very fragmented. We have only 4.8% share of the market, which we think is an important driver for future growth even in Finland. Our net sales, as we can see, has been improving quite nicely year by year. And operating profit and the product margin seems to be going to right direction as well.
We raised our guidance a couple of times during the first part of the year. The latest guidance we gave on 15th April after this one acquisition, where we stated that our revenue is expected to be between €80,000,000 84,000,000 this financial year and operating profit being €14,000,000 to €16,000,000 If you look The future and where our profitable growth lies, there are these 5 points that I want to remind, first, we are we have encouraging experiences from Swedish market. And after been studying other markets as well that these our key strengths, which seem to work in Finnish market, seem to work in other markets as well. And we look forward entering new markets and continue our growth in Sweden. Secondly, we continue both organic growth and acquisition growth.
And both of those In all the markets where we operate, they exploit this mid style transformation of our industry. The small company concept and the like entrepreneur concept, both good solutions for the smallest customers. They bring us new growth and also enable us to enter the digital selling. So far, we have pretty much relied on a traditional sales force, but this will open the door to digital selling, we believe. And then the banking services, It will be business in itself, we expect.
But most importantly, it will make our service offering to entrepreneurs even more attractive and will boost our growth. There are also many Process benefits we get when we combine accounting services and banking service. There's a lot of same data We need to provide both services and this will bring savings in fixed costs and when running the operations. This is a good picture To end my presentation, this is our vision picture, which is in words to provide unbeatable accounting and banking services for SMEs in Europe. Now we have Finland and Swedish market going strong and growing.
And these red arrows pointing to other countries, We can see there were automation, easy routines and care services. Those are the cornerstones tons of our strategy which we rely on. Thank you very much.