2023, report release. This is Otto-Pekka Huhtala who is speaking, and here is my colleague Matti Eilonen as a Chief Financial Officer.
Hello, everybody.
Today, our content is that we have short review of latest period, and after that, I will shortly tell about strategy progress, and Matti will open more about financial figures. After presentation, we have short outlook and guidance, and you have possible for any questions. Okay. Talenom's growth fell short of the target, but continued as strong. Profitability improvement measures progressed. Our net sales increased 20%, a little bit over. EBITDA margin decreased 2%, but in Q3, it increased 5%. As you can see, this recovery is ongoing regarding this profitable. Comparable operating profit was 22% less than a year ago, but Matti will open more about figures. Here is some words regarding accounting industry and market in Europe.
The total market is roughly EUR 100 billion, and Finnish market is just only 1% of that. Basic for this big picture, this is the reason why we have made the decision to go forward, to go new market, that it could give possibilities to grow faster, and we are so big in Finland that our growth rate will moderate all the time in Finland. Okay, the digitalization is accelerated by many structural changes. Labor shortage, together with increasing regulation, forces us to seek more effective practices. It's very difficult to hire new people in like Spain and in Italian markets, so it's needed to have some better practices to make like bookkeeping and digitalization will help people to work with in this industry.
Okay, the other driver is this E.U. e-invoice directive. It will be as a mandatory way of sending and receiving invoices near future in all European countries like Spain today. It will be there during next two years, that all companies should have some solution for that. We see that all small and medium-sized companies, they have to have solutions like software to send and receive e-invoices. This will give very good momentum for us because we have a platform which can resolve those problems. It will, like, demands our organic growth. Shortly, our one-pager, how do we see? Our vision is unbeatable accounting and banking services for small and medium enterprises. This is what we try to achieve, like it's the vision.
Our competitive advantage is basic for that, that we offer for our clients easy way for daily basis financial routines. The second one is that we automate our internal routines as much as is possible, and it gives more space, it gives more time to care our clients, and so it will also rise our customer satisfaction because we have more time than our competitors, and this pays it for our high level of automation. Okay, we have a proven strategy and strong track record. We have done transformation from the traditional accounting office to current way to do the things like digital way, and we created our own platform between 2000 and 2015, and we enabled it totally in 2016-2020.
As you see, our net sales has increased all the time, but EBIT margin tripled, and from phase I to phase II. Now we are duplicating this proven concept on international markets, and so we are now in Sweden, like in phase 2015, we are just enabling our software there, and we are adopting it for by office, by office. We believe that it will really help also our business from our clients' perspective, we are offering cheap and easy-to-use tools for them. The other stakeholder, our experts, can have also better solution, more automated solution to do the bookkeeping, and it will give time us to help our clients, and it will increase our customer satisfaction. Also, third stakeholder, investors, they will get also higher profitable, as we see here.
Our internationalization progressing as planned. 2021, our international net sales was like 13% of total, and today it's like close to 30%. You see that Talenom has growth, but we have even faster growth in foreign countries like Sweden, Spain, and now also in the Italian market. Some words regarding our strategy process. We have accelerated our digital sales. We renewed our brand, and now we have one brand in all our four countries, and we have same products in all countries. This will, like, help us to improve easy-to-buy onboarding processes. Today, we see that first results that we are getting more clients via digital way. We are just in beginning in this phase, but now we have the basement.
Basement things are in place, and we are now improving, like continuously improving our digital sales. We believe that the future, all of them, more and more, our organic growth will come from digital way. Second issue is distribution of banking services. We started deliver Talenom Accounts in Finland market during last summer. We see that there is a clear demand for a comprehensive solutions, including bank account software and accounting services, especially in the small enterprises segment, for which the Talenom One product has been developed. The third thing is the software implementation in Sweden. Implementation is ongoing by office by office, and as I told earlier, why we do that. We are now adopting it, and all major features are in places.
There isn't any more blockers, so we have also started to sell this ourselves for new clients. We are our own sales force. What we have seen for transferred customers, the customer-specific saving, savings in working time have been significant. This give more and more evidence for us that we are in the right track ongoing. Okay, this was shortly my phase, and now it's time for Matti. Thank you.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to follow this presentation from my behalf also. Let's start with the revenue. The revenue growth was 21% during the whole year and 20% on the last quarter. A third came from the organic growth, and it was driven by active sales and value-added services. Two-thirds came from the acquisitions, especially in Sweden and in Spain. Our target was a little bit higher, and we didn't achieve our internal targets on revenue. Overall, the economic development, it has the negative reflection on the growth. Anyway, it was nice growth, but we were expecting a little bit more.
Due to the fact that we were expecting a little bit more growth, we were recruiting people against that stronger growth, and during the spring, we had to launch profitability improvements for the whole group. Now we can see a little bit impact on that. Usually, the second half in our industry is a little bit weaker on profitability side, but that's natural thing. The significant thing is that we were able to improve our EBITDA from year behind. The EBITDA grew 5% from EUR 7.3 million to EUR 7.6 million. We believe that this kind of profitability development will continue in the future when we are setting up this profitability improvement, especially in Finland.
I would like to remind you that the business is very profitable relative to the industry at the moment. Let's move on to the country-specific figures. Finland has a quite steady and strong position, and our growth was 9%, 8% on the last quarter. This growth was mainly or was purely organic, and it came through the active sales and value-added services sales. In Finland, as in Sweden as well, we are heading towards recession. We are probably in the recession, and overall, the economic slowdown has weakened our growth. Generally, the slowdown of the economy resulted so that the volume-based invoicing per customer and the revenue per customer in some cases, it's a little bit lower than it was before.
That's how it works, this recession, that it slows down our growth in Finland. Also, we made significant price adjustments in Finland, but it doesn't have that much impact because of this slowdown effects, what we can see in economy. Here is Finland profitability development. As you can see, it's quite steady and also strong. This year, it suffered a little bit from this phenomenon of economic slowdown, as you can see. In the spring, we started this profitability improvements, especially in Finland, and you can see it on the last quarter that the EBITDA went up from EUR 7 million to EUR 7.8 million, and also the relative profitability has increased a little bit.
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Also the Swedish krona is quite low at the moment compared to euro, and that also has the negative impact on the euro-denominated net sales development. The profitability in Sweden, as you can see, the EBITDA margin is significantly lower, and also the euros are lower. The economic slowdown also had the same kind of effect on the profitability in Sweden. In Sweden, we didn't want to press the brakes on recruitments and replacing the leaving people so much because we really want to ensure that the implementation of our own software, that we can get it up and running. This currently requires personnel so that we can get this own software working in Sweden.
We choose this path rather than the short-term profitability development because we believe that when we have our own software, so we can build up this profitability development later on more strongly. As you can see from the chart on the right-hand side, that the economic slowdown has steepened on the last quarter, and that also has a negative. Other countries, these figures are mainly from Spain. Italy is really small part of this. In Spain, we ended up EUR 5.5 million revenue and really strong growth, 460%-470% growing this year. This came mainly from the acquisitions.
We have really strong growth in Spain and through the acquisitions. Those acquisitions we have made lately, those are really profitable, but the profitability is depress down because the relative shares of the supporting functions is quite high. As you saw that it was EUR 5.5 million, and when you are building up the supporting functions, of course, that takes money and brings cost, and the relative share of that is really significant at the moment. Also, that we bought this business platform business in autumn 2022 is pressing down our figures also. That was a sort of a must-have investment because we want to ensure that we have capabilities to take the advantage of growth when the EU e-invoicing directive is coming mandatory in Spain as well.
Here's a little bit development on, of our profitability in Spain. As you can see, at the end of the last year, Q4 of 2022, the profitability was negative, about EUR 400,000, and the same continued on the, on the first quarter of this year, and then it has improved quite a bit. Now, when we have put more volume on the business, it started to get close to zero euros , and our plan is to, to make more, more acquisitions and turn this to a positive profitability in near future. As you can see, the development has been quite good lately. About the outlook and guidance. We started this year preparing ourselves for stronger growth.
Unfortunately, the economic situation slowed down our growth, and we had all this costs and recruitments in, and we needed to start profitability improvements on the spring. Unfortunately, we are running out of time, sort of a thing, and it wasn't possible to keep the original guidance anymore, so we lowered our guidance for this year. The net sales is expected to be between EUR 120 million-EUR 125 million, and EBITDA is between EUR 30 million-EUR 34 million, and the comparable operating profit, excluding the software-related write-downs, is around EUR 10 million and EUR 13 million. The write-downs of those softwares, which we are no longer use or plan not to use in the future, was EUR 3.2 million.
It means that the operating profit with those write-downs included is going to be EUR 7 million-EUR 10 million. On the profitability side, this year is going to be a little bit weaker than the year before, but we are very positive about the opportunities created by the digitalization of the European accounting market, especially in the central parts and southern parts of Europe. Through this digitalization, we have great opportunities to grow and create also profitable growth. Thank you very much, and now it's time for questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to remind you that you can post questions to the chat, or you can use audio by raising the hand in the video screen. Okay, we have first question from Emil Mariov at Carnegie: "How large has the decline in billing volumes been for your customers in Finland and Sweden?
Well, first of all, it includes the purchase invoices and the sales invoices and the payslips, and the part of this volume from our revenue is around 30%. The accounting itself, it's fixed pricing, but it based on the volumes as well. If the clients' volumes drop significantly, then we need to adjust this fixed price as well. It works both ways. First, more quickly to the volumes, but later on also to the fixed price.
Emil continues: "What is the revenue per customer currently, and what is the normal level?
The average in Finland, for example, is EUR 5,000 annually revenue. The variation between the clients, it's really high. Some of them are lower than EUR 1,000 annual revenue, and some of them are really, really big. The variation is really, really big. This same kind of thing is in other countries as well. The average in Sweden at the moment is a little bit lower, and in Spain, it's even more lower.
Still from Emil, I don't know if you answered this already in your previous answer, but how much of your sales is tied to your customers' revenues slash billing volumes?
Like nothing. Nothing is based for our clients' revenue, and our fixed price is based for the transactions volumes what we have in bookkeeping and so on. Maybe some comment what I could add for that is that in Finland, we have totally all clients are in fixed price method. In Sweden, we are moving from hourly basis to the fixed price, and this have been also some effect for our revenue because we have not been so much work to be done, and it has been hourly basic revenue, so it will also decrease our bookkeeping revenue as well. Yeah, this is the shortly the status.
The next question from Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank: "As you will continue acquisitions in Spain, what size of an organization would be sufficient for you to become cash flow positive there?
The cash flow, it's already turning to positive with this volume what we have right now. It was EUR 5.5 million, and the annual revenue is, of course, bigger because we have made significantly these acquisitions in Spain. At the moment, we are sort of in the limit, but roughly, this is really roughly figures, but let's say that between EUR 20-EUR 30 annual revenue, we could stop the acquisitions and turn it to more organic growth. Then we think that we have size enough that we can have proper supporting functions and also that the supporting functions is not taking too large share of the whole business size, and then we could continue also the organic growth.
That's really rough, rough figure what we are aiming to when we could turn the acquisition growth down and continue with the organic growth.
Yes, today our revenue basement is between EUR 12 million-EUR 14 million in Spain.
Yes.
Okay, and we have no further questions in the chat or in the line, so back to you for final remarks.
Thank you, all of you who followed our release. We have many, many positive things ongoing in Talenom and in this accounting industry. This digitalization boost will also boost our own business. Let's take the position what we could have. See you. Thank you.
Thank you. Bye-bye.