Thank you very much everyone for joining us for our Q1 presentation. Just, I know there's quite a few new people that have joined the call since we've led on our last presentation. I think we'll take this opportunity to start with the introductions. I know many of you know us, but just for new people on the call. I'm Charles MacBain. I'm the CEO of Nordhealth. I joined the company in November 2018 when I purchased around 85% of the company. Prior to joining Nordhealth, I was doing a search fund. We're looking for a business to buy with great characteristics, and after a year and a half of searching, I found Nordhealth.
Prior to that I was in private equity for a family office and started my career in consulting, where I first got exposed to practice management software when I was doing operational improvement work at a few clinics and hospitals in the U.S. Mari?
Thank you, Charles. My name is Mari Orttenvuori, and I'm the CFO of Nordhealth. I joined the company in the beginning of this year, and prior to that I've been holding two different CFO positions in Finnish groups. Before that I've been working in many senior financial management positions in quite large Finnish corporates. I'm excited to be here.
Thanks, Mari. I'll start with some company updates. I'll start off with the mission of the company because there are a few new people. The mission of our company is to improve the daily lives of healthcare professionals through software. Where are we today? We're currently the leading Nordic healthcare SaaS company, and we're expanding internationally. What we do is actually we build and acquire practice management software in select healthcare niches, right? Currently, we're targeting veterinary and therapy. Therapy we define as physiotherapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy to name some, right? There are some other ones like speech therapy and so on that we target, and massage therapists and osteopaths that we also target, but those are the main categories. Why are we doing this?
There is currently the majority of the market in both therapy and veterinary, and the most other parts of healthcare are still on hosted or on-premise solutions, right? We believe that we've got a once in a generation opportunity to capture those clinics as PMS software as they shift from their on-premise or hosted solution to a cloud-based solution. That will happen over a period of the next probably five years into different markets, right? That's why in June of last year, we decided to raise EUR 120 million to be able to accelerate our entrance into different markets, to enable us to capture more and more clinics.
We're currently the market leaders in the Nordic veterinary and therapy PMS markets, and we're rapidly expanding internationally with strong beachheads in, for example, Spain, U.K. and U.S., on the veterinary side. On the therapy side, we're still purely in the Nordics for now. Today we serve over 30,000 healthcare professionals, right? Across over 11,000 clinics that are located in over 30 different countries. In April of this year, we actually recruited our 350th employee, right? Some have come from acquisitions, but it's always nice to celebrate these milestones. In terms of the ARR splits, right? Just to mention that this ARR split is before the acquisition of Vetera, right? Includes the acquisition of EasyPractice. 45% of our ARR, annual recurring revenue, comes from veterinary. 55% of our ARR comes from therapy.
If we want to split this by markets, right? Also by sort of business units, sort of 48% of our revenue comes from established therapy, right? Therapy in established markets, right? We're talking therapy in the Nordics. We've got an acquisition that's 7% of EasyPractice. We've got in established markets, which means in the Nordics for us currently, 40% of our ARR comes from veterinary, right? 5% comes from the growth markets. That 5% has been growing quite steadily over the next few quarters, and we expect this to continue growing. What's our growth strategy? Long-term, a company valuation obviously based on the long-term free cash flows, right? However, right, we are in the investment phase of our growth cycle.
What that means is that we know that in our established markets we are extremely profitable or on an ARR margin basis, right? That's how we think about profitability is how much ARR do we have in that market and how profitable in terms of contribution margin do we actually how much money can we make in this established market? We know we can make a huge amount of profits, right? In those established markets where EBITDA can range over 50% margins, but we're reinvesting all of that money into growing into new markets, into making acquisitions to capture this opportunity that we have, this once in a lifetime opportunity. I still want to have like a North Star metric even for the medium term, right? What we're looking at is ARR per share, right?
Because that's the best sort of proxy for the intrinsic value of a share. How do we wanna optimize this? Number one is we wanna be able to hire and develop and empower great people to join our teams, right? When we're thinking about who to recruit, especially on the management functions, right, we're always thinking about bringing people on board that can help us scale to our goal of EUR 110 million ARR over the medium term. The second is that we want to build a decentralized organization. I'm not a big fan at all of big centralized headquarters, right? For us, we're keeping headquarters very lean, right? Instead focusing a lot more of the people and the decision-making will be focused on the product level, right?
For now, only HR, finance, and capital allocation is centralized. Everything else is on the product level. Third is, we focus on attractive healthcare niches. As I mentioned before, currently veterinary therapy and most likely over the next few years, we'll continue focusing on those two because there's a huge amount of growth opportunity just in those two niches. Over time, as we tap more and more of this, and mature in those niches, which will take a while, right? We will be looking to expand to new niches. Number four is our strategies for each of the healthcare niche. We build one modern, easy-to-use, efficient, cloud-based software. The strategy is to be able to migrate everyone that we acquire onto this one flagship, right?
These markets are very local, and also everyone knows each other in these markets because they go to the same conferences, or they went to the same universities, or they worked in the same corporate chains. It's a very tight-knit community. We invest a lot in product, way more in product than we do in sales and marketing versus traditional SaaS companies because we wanna grow through word of mouth. We've seen that it's been successful with us in making us the number one player in many of those markets. That's why we wanna focus a lot on product development. Number five is, we're currently growing outside the Nordics in, these attractive healthcare niches, right? First starting with veterinary. Organically, one country at a time, right?
Always focusing on when we go to a new country, having a plan for how can we be the number one player in that new market. Number six, right, is to grow average revenue per user, right? The reason why I focus on average revenue per user is the amount that they pay us, which I think equates quite well to the value we generate, right? The more value we can generate for the clinic, the more they'll be willing to pay us in order for that to generate that, right? The way we do that is by expanding our product offering, right? We've seen some initial forays that we made into the payments to be able to have a fully integrated payment solution.
We also started our journey on the consumer apps part of our business to be able to enable a more smooth communication, a better relationship between the clinics and the pet parents or patients. Those are some of the few examples, but we'll continue to be doing that. The last but not least is we wanna accelerate our growth through acquisition of legacy practice management software in current healthcare niches, which we then migrate onto our cloud platform. On acquisitions. We've done quite a few acquisitions since Nordhealth was born in 2005. We've made quite a few acquisitions as well this year. Three acquisitions were made in Q1.
One was Yoma Consulting, which was a sort of a company that was doing our implementations and running some of the support for our customers in Sweden. We brought that in-house and have recruited their employees as ours. This is quite a small acquisition. Second, we acquired EasyPractice to be able to enter the Danish markets with a product-led solution as well. Third, we signed the acquisition of Vetera, which is the leading provider for Germany. Just to give you a bit more flavor on Vetera. Vetera is the leading practice management software for vets in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with around 2,000 practices. It's actually number two in Germany after VetZ. It was founded in 1989, and its headquarters in Germany with 30 employees.
The key customers include big corporate chains like IVC Evidensia and AniCura, but also six out of eight of the vet universities in the DACH region. This is an important point 'cause this is very similar to the strategy we followed in when we were growing Nordhealth organically on the veterinary side, is we captured the universities so that everyone is taught on our software, thereby becoming the market standard. When they go out into the world, right, they and start their own practices at some point, right, they already know and have been trained on the software. If they do come into an established clinic, right, and they come in with a software which is less good, right?
Given the tight labor market, it creates a lot of pressure for the employers to be able to change the system to a better system which they would prefer. What's the financial situation? In 2021, right, the revenues were about EUR 2.7 million. The recurring revenues were about EUR 1.5 million, right? The EBITDA was about EUR 0.53 million. We're seeing quite healthy growth in Vetera as it's capturing market share in the DACH region. Recurring revenue in 2022 is expected to grow to EUR 1.7 million. The acquisition, right, we acquired a 100% stake in Vetera. For an enterprise value of EUR 8.636 million.
We also acquired a 19.26% stake in PetLeo, which is a pet parent app that connects to many different PMS software for around just above EUR 600,000, right? It's combined enterprise value of around EUR 9 million, right? The one thing to note about this transaction is that originally, at the time of signing, 90% of the transaction was done with cash and 10% of it done with shares, but the share price was actually set at, I believe it was valuation just above 28, right? They received the number of shares based on the amount of signing. The actual valuation that we paid in the end, given the share price today, would be slightly lower.
The rationale for why we use shares is because of the fact that they want to roll over, right? Usually, we would not use shares. We prefer to use cash in most instances. When the valuation of the stock is, as I said. The rationale and next steps, one was to gain a leading position in the German-speaking vet PMS market. Secondly is in the short term, Vetera will remain operating independently under the Vetera brand and will continue to be led by CEO Alexander Felber, with the support of his management team, right? In the longer term, right, as we've done with all of our other acquisitions, right, we'll be developing Provet Cloud, right?
Getting help from the Vetera team to make us understand what is needed for each of the market and each of the different segments in Germany. We'll slowly localize Provet Cloud for that. To be able to provide a cloud solution for the customers in the DACH region. Once we've tested that out with quite a few customers and they're happy, we'll start scaling the migration. The same playbook as we used in our own previous acquisitions. Our KPIs. Overall, in last four months ending Q1 2022, we grew 116% in our ARR, right? Let's break that down. A lot of that is acquisitions, right? We grew our sort of ARR by 24% organically, right?
If we break that down, 8% of that comes from organic new customer recruitments and 60% or 116% net net retention rate, right? 16% plus 8% makes it 24%, right? That's how we get to the 24% ARR organically. Where we stand today, right, excluding Vetera, which has been signed but not closed, right, we, at the end of the quarter, we were at 27.5 signed ARR, right? Which means an ARR per share of 0.34, right? If you recall previously, it was 0.3, so we've increased the intrinsic value of the company based on our definition, right? Again, the most significant number is always the churn, right? We had 1.9% organic ARR churn on an annual basis, right?
That is probably the key thing about our business, right? Let's break that down a little bit more. We started in Q1 2021 at EUR 12.7 million, right? We've added EUR 1 million of ARR from new signed ARR, right? We had EUR 2.3 million of upsell and then 0.2 of churn. That's how we got to 15.8, which is a 24% growth. Then we added around EUR 10.1 million from acquisitions, right? Those acquisitions grew by 1.6%. You can see quite nice organic growth in the acquisitions as well. From a quarter basis, right? We started last quarter at 24 million, right? We signed new customers worth 0.5 million, right?
We had a net upsell of EUR 1.2 million and a churn of EUR 0.2 million. Let's go into this net upsell in a bit more detail because in that there's sort of two different things. One is, we're increasing the number of users that we're serving, right? Our customers are acquiring additional clinics, right? We're upselling additional features, right? And thereby growing average revenue per user. That accounts for roughly 66% of that EUR 1.2 million, right? Or EUR 0.8 million. Then we had EUR 0.4 million, right, which was the price increase impact. Just to spend some time on price increases, because this is also a really key thing about our business, is that we did price increases in Q1 for part of our revenue base, not the whole revenue base yet, right?
Because the different products have it at different times, right? Based on 2021 inflation rates. The inflation rate that we've had since the beginning until the end of Q1 has not been accounted for yet, right? Our plan for how we deal with inflation is basically that we will continue to increase prices so that our ARR growth and pricing growth will match inflation on a same for same basis, right? That means that we'll continue seeing price increases, right, impacting that upsell over this year, right? Depending on the products, right, and depending on where the inflation goes, right, you'll see an impact there.
Given that this is something that operationally is sort of out apart from choosing the price increase now and putting it in place, is sort of out of control, we'll highlight it separately so that investors can have good transparency on, like, here's what's actually new revenue that's being driven versus new revenue that's being driven from price increases. If we look, the last part is we acquired EasyPractice, which brought us to 1.9. That gets us to 27.5. An operational update on Q1. New customers, we're actually contracting for pilots for Provet Cloud at one of the six largest UK veterinary corporate chains. That's the amount of information we can tell now, right? We're very excited about this opportunity.
It should be a very significant opportunity for us in the market. Second, right, we signed Terveystalo Healthcare, rehabilitation clinics in Finland, right, which are rolling out therapy clinics. Some of those clinics are already our customers that they've rolled out, right? But Terveystalo has also uses a much broader functionality. Even for those customers that were with us, we've had the opportunity to increase the average revenue per user. Second, new hires, right? Mari actually joined, it seems crazy, but she actually joined us in Q1. It seems a long time we've been working together now, as CFO. Valter, who was our previous CFO, was promoted to the CEO of the veterinary business units. We've also signed a new Chief People Officer to join us, right?
As we're scaling the number of people in our company, we want to have a sort of more experienced person in this role. In terms of new hires, right? This is excluding EasyPractice. We've been hiring in support, right, to accommodate for the growth, right? We've hired quite significantly in sales, marketing, and onboarding. This is to support, and mostly in Spain, U.K., and U.S. to support our growth efforts in those markets. Given that on the veterinary side, it takes quite a few months to train them, so we have to upskill them first before they can become sort of efficient. Then we recruit 24 people in product developments. This is to speed up the acceleration of us going to new countries one after the next, right? We've added a few people in G&A.
By the way, G&A, when we define that, it's both country managers, right? So when we enter new countries, we're recruiting, so they're added to G&A. We've got people on the headquarters side. This is new hires. This is not net new hires, by the way. On the product side, we've had two significant updates, right? There's lots of minor ones, but some of the significant ones to highlight. One, we began the development pre-sale of our new Pet Parent App, which we're really excited about. It's in alpha trials now. We'll be beginning the beta trials in release in about Q3.
Second, which is, I would like to spend a little bit of time on, we spent some time too over the last year, and we built a team to be able to create a design system. I've sent a picture of this. This is how most of our apps look. As we grow the number of product teams that we have, we want to make sure that our engineering efficiency does not go down. The way we do that is that just like we've done by bringing the power down from the headquarters down to the products, we want to make sure that these product teams, which are cross-functional, made up of engineers, made up of designers, made up of product managers together, feel full ownership and accountability over their area.
They can continue innovating at the same pace as they used to when we were a smaller company, right? They can make all decisions together, right? The only way you can have sort of autonomous product teams is by having a design system because otherwise all of them have, like, make different design decisions. This is the way to extend to sort of unify the design across the different areas of our products, right? Enables us to empower those teams to be able to be efficient and quick in making improvements for the customer. That's the first benefit. The second benefit, it's not just a design, right? That we're like, "Here's how a button looks. Here's how a table looks." It's also components.
Instead of prior to having this design system, right, every time we had to do a button, we had to, like, rewrite a button, right? We want to do a table, we have to reinvent the wheel about, "Here's how the table looks," and so on. Now, it's very much like components. It's almost like drag and drop components, right? Where you can just here's how the table should look for Nordhealth products. Here's how a button looks for Nordhealth products. Then you can do different themes and so on quite easily, right? This will help tremendously improve the engineering product team that we'll have in the long term, right? We're really excited about this. Then Mari, maybe you can go to financial update.
Thank you, Charles. Just looking at the high-level summary of our revenues and EBITDA during the first quarter. Our first quarter revenue was EUR 7.1 million. That was up by 111% year-on-year. First quarter recurring revenue was EUR 6.5 million, which was up by 117% year-on-year. The first quarter EBITDA, however, was EUR -1.1 million. This negative EBITDA is really reflecting the investments we are making in the growth markets, as already discussed by Charles, whilst we continue being highly profitable in our established markets. Looking into the profit and loss, our recurring revenues, as mentioned, EUR 6.5 million. That is actually over 90%, 91% of our total revenues.
The cost base, however, differs quite a lot from the previous year. This is due to many factors. We've made a lot of acquisitions during 2021. Also one acquisition in the first quarter of this year. The cost base is different. We've also had high talent acquisition activity across all of our main functions as already mentioned. That is clearly impacting our employee costs.
On the balance sheet side, our cash balance remains to be very strong at EUR 57.8 million, and that puts us in a really good place not having to acquire capital from the markets, at the moment in order to execute our strategy. The main changes on the balance sheet during the first quarter, they mainly relate to the acquisition of EasyPractice. We financed the acquisition through money market funds that reduced our cash balance from the previous quarter. Goodwill increased as a result of the acquisition. On the liability side, current liabilities increased as we recognized an earn-out debt of EUR 4 million, related to EasyPractice acquisition. We also repaid an earn-out debt, related to Sanimalis's acquisition of EUR 0.8 million.
I said I think one thing to note here, which is interesting, is that we actually, our acquisition have been successful now, which we actually paid out the earn-outs 'cause they've been successful, which we're actually quite happy for. I think that's a great sales argument that I mostly use when we're acquiring companies that normally earn-outs are not paid out, right? For us, we've actually paid out the majority of the earn-out that we've actually done, which we're very happy about.
Yes. Although the cash flow was negative during the first quarter, our cash balance is strong. This negative cash flow was in accordance with our plans to invest in the growth markets and product development. First quarter cash flow from operations was impacted by the timing of invoicing and payments also. Whereas cash flow from investing activities, that includes transactions relating to the EasyPractice acquisition and capitalized product development costs. Whereas cash flow from financing activities, that consists purely of the Sanimalis's earn-out payment. We are actually not issuing the financial report for this first quarter or the sort of mid-quarters. We will be issuing the financial report next in connection with the half yearly report, which is issued on the nineteenth of August.
Thank you, Mari. Just to summarize, we are forecasting, as we had previously said, to grow ARR by 20%-25% in 2022, excluding acquisitions, right? With the new acquisition, what does that mean? Right. We started the journey at EUR 24 million, right? We are expecting organic growth to be between EUR 4.8 million and EUR 6 million, right? We have acquired EasyPractice, which is looking to end the year between EUR 2.2 million and EUR 2.4 million, right? We will have a completed acquisition of Vetera, which should end up the year between EUR 1.5 million and EUR 1.7 million, right? We'll also maybe make other acquisitions, right?
I think this is a big opportunity for us, where the in the future we're looking at maybe the private markets repricing and providing us opportunities to deploy our significant current cash and balance sheets at very attractive rates of return. Where we're looking to end up is roughly a year-end ARR between 32.5 and 34.1. I just want to reiterate, like, we're reiterating that our ARR forecast, right, in 2025. Second, we'll continue to ramp up product development organization and also the U.S., U.K., and Spanish go-to-market teams, right? Which means marketing, sales, onboarding to enable to accelerate organic growth in 2023 and onwards, right? As I said before, it takes some time to be able to train people to be successful there.
We'll continue, we'll have a continued focus on new sales from new customers, right? What that means is that we'll focus a lot on acquiring new locations, right, and less on the net upsell, which is driven by sort of migration and new products, right? 'Cause this is a, we see ourselves in a race to be able to acquire as many rooftops as possible as they're switching. Once we've got those roofs all acquired, as we can see from our churn rate, we will be able to upsell them on many different products, right? Questions. Please feel free to raise your hand if you have a question or you could add questions on the chat. We got a question. Could you comment on the M&A outlook? Thanks for the question.
We don't actively comment on the M&A outlook because in terms of numbers, because I don't want it to, if I was someone selling to Nordhealth and I had like a specific targets for M&A, I would wait till December and like see where they are versus target and sell to them when there's pressure to make those numbers. We don't give actual number of forecasts. However, the public markets have gone down quite significantly, as I'm sure you're all aware of, right? That we have not seen that yet translated fully to the private markets. The majority of our targets, at least in the veterinary and therapy, are privately owned.
As we start seeing those companies go to market to raise new funds or as they're trying to transact, right, I think over time we will see sort of reduced EBITDA and ARR multiples in the market. The reason we have had raised quite a bit of money during the IPO is for opportunities like this where we can afford to deploy quite significant amounts of cash, right? It's not only our cash, but we also have zero debt, right? With our sort of recurring revenue profile being so sticky, we've got some significant additional debt capacity we can have. We have a good war chest to be able to be quite aggressive with acquisitions if the opportunity presents itself. I'm hoping it does, right?
We're still keeping close contacts with many of the different potential M&A targets, and we're hoping for the best in that one. If they do want to transact, right, we'll be ready. Hope that answers the question. The second question, what are the main drivers behind the significant step up in organic growth for the remaining quarters of 2022? Thanks. One is, I believe that some things which are sort of out of our control but will have a significant impact, one will be price increases. This is important thing is that we are mission-critical software. Inflation, right, means that we can actually continue increasing price for our customers, right? Given the operational leverage that a software company have, that's actually really profitable, right?
That's one big thing. The second, and I'm not doing this in order, is we'll be ramping up, as we had said. We can see from our numbers that we have ramped up the team in the U.S., Spain, and the U.K. quite significantly, right, in terms of onboarding sales and marketing. Those were being trained, right, in Q1 now, right? We're looking at growth in terms of new customers coming from those markets. The next one is that we will continue as we have in the past, right, to have so net revenue retention, which is quite high due to the fact that like the end markets are growing. Even in our established market, in both veterinary and therapy, there are new clinics opening.
They're growing the number of users, right? The thing that's limiting growth is actually not consumer demand. It's actually, what's limiting growth is the talent acquisition that's available to those clinics, right? Those are the main sort of drivers to be able for organic growth in 2022. There's another question. Jack, the organization has made significant additions in human capital this year to support growth. Do you foresee similar additions necessary in the coming years to support growth for 2023, 2024? Secondarily, can we expect to see operating leverage in the next few years? Yeah. Thanks for that question.
We don't provide a forecast on profitability or EBITDA less CapEx, which is a proxy we use for a conservative proxy for free cash flow, given the negative working capital that we have. It's for the reason that it depends on the opportunity, right? The way I think about investing in these markets is we look at what's the return I can get from those investments. If I'm investing X, for example, to expand the U.S. sales, marketing, and onboarding team, right, they should be able to generate additional returns which are higher than sort of our 25% hurdle that we have internally, right? What I foresee is that we want to be investing this year quite heavily, right?
To be able to enter into veterinary U.S., right, which is half the global market for veterinary, right? We wanna invest quite heavily on that, both on the product side and on the operational side to enable that, right? Once we have entered that market, right, we will most likely taper it down, right? However, that being said, right, the reason we don't provide a forecast is you never know if a new opportunity will come up. If a new opportunity comes up, right, we'll always be looking at the return on investment of that. It's very similar to an acquisition, right? Yes, you have to pay up front for it, but like if over time, you, we wanna make sure it earns you money based on the price that you pay. Hope that.
I know it's a bit of a non-answer there, but this will provide us a little bit of flexibility to be able to operate. I don't want to provide a guidance on this, given that we don't know what the future holds for us. In the long term, right, not in the 2023-2024 period, in the long term, even if we spend a huge amount on acquisitions, on new customer acquisitions and on product development, right, the operating leverage does translate quite rapidly, especially as we start migrating more and more of these legacy platforms to our cloud platforms, because then we don't have to maintain three different platforms for therapy, three different platforms for veterinary. We only have to maintain one, right?
The growth in development of those platform will be driven by people migrating from working on the legacy platform to the new platform. We will see operating leverage happen. We had a question, how many net new hires in Q1 excluding acquisitions? On this one, Mari, do we have it?
I think the 61 was the new hires, and we only had 3 exits during the first quarter. The attrition rate is very low.
58.
Yes.
Any other final questions or comments?
Maybe to add on to that still that we have actually signed a total of 80 new employees during the first quarter. They 61 have started.
We have a question. Is there a minimum level of cash you would like to keep on the balance sheet to support operations? I like to sleep well, right? Sleeping well for me means that we have a significant amount of cash in the balance sheet or ability to raise cash in a very short amount of time through something like a revolver or so on, right? The second thing that makes me sleep well is that if ever there's a great opportunity to buy something, right? Or to go into a new market which provide a great return, I wanna have the cash to pounce, right? We will maintain slightly higher levels of cash equivalents. That's one, we're not at the mercy of the market, right?
At any time, right? So we never have to raise money when the stock we believe is undervalued. Second is the ability to pounce, and third is I don't wanna have to stress about not meeting payroll. Those are three things. Yes, we will be more conservative than traditional companies on this one, right? I think those three things we'll benefit a lot from. On the level, right? The level will change depending on where we are in the cycle and so on, right? Currently, I think we are above the minimum level of cash that we need. Seems like it needs to be above, right? We had a question, what is the market composition of Vetera in Switzerland and Austria?
I'm guessing by market competition, position, do you mean the breakdown of revenue between those? I'm guessing. I'll assume that's the breakdown. The majority of their markets is their customers are in Germany, right? Switzerland and Austria are a significant minority position. I don't have the numbers on hand, but. Oops. Are they market leaders? Oh, sorry. They're number two in the markets in Germany, right? And in Switzerland, in Austria, they are also. I believe they're number one or two, depending on a couple. They've signed the University of Vienna, but it's not implemented yet. Maybe after that they will be number one. The market leader is a company called VetZ in Germany, right?
We've been capturing market share. Well, Vetera has been capturing market share. Hopefully we, now that we've acquired them, will be capturing market share from VetZ. The rationale for that is the majority of the corporates, right, have gone with Vetera because Vetera is a better suited system for those corporates. Second is that the product is a bit more modern than the product that VetZ has currently, especially on the back end. Although we are sort of slightly behind Vetera, right? Probably by a 10, maybe eight percentage points, right? In Germany, we're looking forward to continuing our expansion, and that expansion will be driven twofold. One is by us acquiring new customers, right?
Second, it's gonna be driven by the fact that a lot of these corporates are actually continuing buying up practices, and their strategy is to have one PMS for each market. We got a question regarding ROI. What kind of return have you managed to get out of all the acquisitions made so far? The return that we've been able to make, if we look at I think the best way you can look at these, we did a case study on a couple different acquisitions in our IPO presentation you can find on our website. The level of return on investment will depend a little bit on what are the growth opportunities in terms of ARR once we migrate them over.
Roughly we're targeting over 20% return on investment from these acquisitions, with conservative assumptions, right? I think we've beat that quite a bit in our previous acquisitions, right? Once they migrated. That's what we're targeting at least. On the previous return on investments, right? It's just you take a look at the different case studies we did in our IPO presentation. Roughly when we for those previous companies, which are basically Vetserve and Trofast were the cases, we were able to once we acquired them, right? Given that we stopped developing that product, we can take out most of the development costs, right? Thereby the EBITDA shoots up, right? Before migration. Then when we migrate them over, right?
We were able to increase ARR because we take on hosting, right? We also upsell them additional features and we're now cloud, so we can charge a bit more, right? We can get quite significant additional prices, price increases from them. Then the third thing is that the amount that's of gross margin that is made from a hosted software, right? It is much lower than a cloud software. The main reason being that, for example, for a lot of the hosted software, they use software like Citrix to be able to access that remotely, right? That's quite expensive to be able to run, right? We're talking about 10-15 percentage points of the ARR to be able to run that. By moving them to cloud, we just take out that cost.
The way I think of ROI, it's the contribution margin that's generated from that additional ARR once they migrate versus the contribution they had before, right? Because everything below we sort of unified and centralized, right? Sales, support, all that's unified. We have another question. When is larger scale SaaS migration going to impact revenue in Norway on the vet side? What we've decided on is that we're focusing, as I said previously, on our growth investments in product on our growth markets, right? U.S., U.K., Spain, right? In Norway, right? The majority of customers are still on the legacy platforms, right? They're slowly migrating, but we're not pushing that migration aggressively because we wanna be able to focus my product development efforts in those growth markets.
We currently have quite limited competition in Norway, so that ability to upsell will come at some point, right? We can choose when that comes because they don't have much choice to migrate over to anyone else. They're also currently quite happy on their legacy software, right? We're not pushing it very aggressively. I think once we've finalized the localization for those three markets, we will resume our sort of push in terms of updating the product and making small business tweaks to the product to be able to go faster on the migration. Probably not this year, but maybe in 2023, 2024. Well, perfect. Well, great. Well, I think there's no more questions for now. Thank you very much for the questions.
It was a nice discussion, and I always enjoy the question part the most, right? Thank you for your time. Wish you a lovely Friday. Happy Friday.