Hello and welcome to today's webcast presentation with Albert. With us today presenting, we have the CEO Arta Mandegari, Co-CEO Salman Eskandari, and Head of Finance Martin Dahlgren. My name is Martin Westerlund, and I'm from Finwire. If you have any questions, please use the form that is located to the right. With that said, I'll hand over the word to you guys. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, Martin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for calling into the presentation of the interim report for Albert's Q4 2022 period. This is our sixth report as a public company, and we are happy to welcome you here today and to share our Q4 numbers and activities, and also to summarize the full year of 2022. The agenda today will be as follows. Since we're still relatively new on the market, we believe it's like always relevant to continue to reiterate our vision with Albert and why we exist in a short introduction. This will be followed by a short summary of the Q4 highlights and the full year of 2022.
Since it's almost exactly one year ago, we listed the company, we want to take this opportunity to also give a short summary of what we have said to deliver and follow up to see what we have actually achieved during this period. Salman Eskandari will thereafter make a deep dive into how the Albert Group has evolved and how the group looks post-acquisitions. Thereafter, Martin Dahlgren will dig into and present the Q4 financials, and at last, we will close with a short summary and key takeaways before we end the presentation with opening up for a Q&A session. The ones presenting here today are 3 members from the management team. It's me, Arta Mandegari, Co-founder and Co-CEO. We also have Salman Eskandari, Co-CEO, and the other co-founder in the founder duo.
Last but not least, we have Martin Dahlgren, our CFO, who will walk you through the financials. Yeah, as just mentioned, starting the presentation, we believe it's important to reiterate what we're building here at Albert and why we exist. The best way of doing this is basically to explain our vision, which is to give every child in Europe a custom learning experience throughout our products, apps, and services. The way we're doing this is that we through technology, eliminating the human element in the learning experience. Doing this enables us to offer a high-quality learning experience at the price affordable for the many, and thus being one of the leading actors that can democratize learning.
We started with mathematics for consumers, but now we're moving into more of a one-stop shop for learning and becoming a learning platform for kids aged one to 16, where we offer mathematics, basic programming, English, Swedish, reading and writing, but also geography, physics, and biology for the oldest teens. We started as a direct-to-consumer-only company, but now we also established a significant B2B business unit selling to schools. We're active in core markets, which are 7 in number, these are Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Finland, U.K., and also dipped our toes in US. In total, we have helped over 700,000 households in our B2C offering and millions of students in our B2B offering. These children have together solved almost 70 million exercises in our portfolio.
In Q4 pre-acquisitions, we were approximately 70 full-time employees across the group. It's a diverse team with the common goal of helping children to reach their full potential. When it comes to the numbers, we had, as per Q4 closing, a paying customer base at 718,000 paying subscribers in the B2B and B2C business units combined. These paying subscribers generates together approximately SEK 155 million in annual recurring revenue, which is our ARR. Year-over-year, the ARR grew 73% in the quarter and was summed up to SEK 155 million, whereof 30% is organic and 43% is acquired growth. The net sales is summed up to SEK 34.1 million and grew 84% year-over-year.
Where out of these 84, 34% of the growth were organic and 55 were acquired. Here is, we believe it's important to mention that all these numbers are excluding our recent M&A activities that we announced in the Q4. This will be shown in the Q1 report instead. As already communicated before, pro forma, we're reaching approximately SEK 200 million in net sales and approximately SEK 230 million in ARR. Going into the Q4 highlights and summarizing 2022, like mentioned, we have now closed our first full calendar year actually as a publicly traded company. Hence, we would like not only to summarize Q4 isolated, but also follow up on our deliveries for the entire full year of 2022.
When we did the IPO, we communicated that we're aiming to become one of the consolidators in the European EdTech scene. With regards to our consolidation journey, we have now since the IPO in total closed six deals, whereof four were actually signed during the calendar year of 2022, and three out of these four were signed but not closed, but signed during the Q4 quarter that just passed. From a geographical footprint point of view, we communicated that our short-term ambitions were to successfully enter one new major European country. We have now successfully entered, not only U.K., which is today one of our absolute top contributing markets, but also Finland and France. We also dipped our toes a little bit in the US. Now majority of our sales are actually stemming from outside of the Nordics.
When it comes to our financial targets, we communicated that we need to deliver a net sales of SEK 500 million for the full year of 2025, which means that we need to grow at least 50% year-over-year since the day of the IPO. We IPO-ed at SEK 69 million. In ARR, we closed 2021 at SEK 89 million, and now we're closing full year 2022 at SEK 155 million Swedish krona, excluding the M&As. We closed 2021 with more than 100% ARR growth. The net sales also more than 100%.
Now in 2022 for the full year compared to the 2021, we are delivering a 97% net sales growth, even much higher if we would have included the recent M&A. As you know, profitability has become increasingly important. We are therefore proud to state that post-acquisitions, we are now minimizing the financial risk in the group as well as decreasing the need of capital, having approximately 50% of our sales stemming from steady contracts with schools with low churns. From here, we could actually, with lower growth rate, reach profitability without further capital injections in the group. This is something we are very proud of and feel very comfortable with going forward.
Naturally the acquisitions were a big focus area in quarter four, the ones that were closed now in January. We will walk through partly how the Group looked before the acquisitions, what were the key characteristics, the rationale behind why we did the transaction, and now how the Group looks like post-acquisitions. Looking prior to the transaction, B2C contributed to around 75% of net sales if we look at the Q3 numbers of 2022. Our B2B business accounted for one quarter of the net sales. In B2C, we offer multiple subjects to multiple age groups on multiple markets, the ones that Arta already mentioned, under the brands of Albert, Jaramba, and Sumdog.
Whereas the B2B sales has been mainly driven by Sumdog, with sales in U.K. and U.S. offering numeracy or mathematics and spelling products to schools. The important thing to highlight here is the key characteristics of the two different businesses or business models. In B2C, we have had a very scalable business that is mainly driven by paid customer acquisition, which also means that we can charge the customer a high license fee per month, meaning the average revenue per paying user is quite high. To grow the B2C part requires access to capital. B2B, on the other hand, has a very low churn, not growing equally fast, but the revenue is much more sticky, and it's less capital intense to grow.
This is a balance that is important, and we will get back to it from a risk perspective or financial risk perspective of the group. Going into the rationale behind the acquisitions, we divided it into strategic and financial rationale. A lot of the strategic part is things that we have mentioned several times, during the last, 1.5 years. We'll get back to it again now. Starting with ecosystem. EdTech is a very fragmented business. There are no clear leaders in Europe or globally. Most of the companies are niche companies serving one product to a certain age group on one or two local markets. There will be a consolidation.
We want to drive that consolidation in order to build a larger product portfolio where you can reap the benefits of centralizing customer acquisition, may it be either digital customer acquisition in B2C or centralized sales or regionalized sales in the, in a B2B setting. Another strategic reasons was that we had or have the markets which we consider our core markets, and we wanted to strengthen our position on those markets as well. With the acquisitions now, we have further strengthened our position in the Nordics, in the U.K., and with Strawbees also in the U.S. This strengthening of our position, of course, allows us to explore the opportunities of upselling and cross-selling our products on those markets as well, which is something we already started with, especially between Sumdog and Strawbees. Moving over to the financial rationale.
Key point here is to de-risk the financial profile, it comes back a bit to the key characteristics that we mentioned between B2C and B2B. We wanted to further diversify the revenue streams. Using profitable and less capital intense B2B business, but still having them contributing to finance the growth of the group. As Arta mentioned, this enables the group to become cash flow positive in a shorter period of time, with or without additional capital. We're not forced to raise capital. Of course, one of the big synergies that we're exploring, and that will be a focus area during 2023, is the revenue and cost synergies.
Being able to cross-sell, up-sell products across the different group companies on the current markets, but also to explore cost synergies in terms of centralized function, sales organization, streamlining overheads, product development, and so on. Moving on to post-acquisition, we will shortly go through each of the acquired targets in the coming slides. But the key thing to highlight here is that post-acquisition, looking at pro forma numbers for Q3 of 2022, B2B stands for around 1/2 of the group net sales, so increasing from 1/4 to 1/2. And if we want to understand how we plan to reap the synergies, you can see that all the companies in the group now target more or less the same age ranges on the same markets, but with different product offerings.
The plan is to combine these product offerings to be able to give the customers a more attractive offering, in a more cost-efficient way, utilizing sales and distribution strengths across all group companies. Starting with Film & Skola, it's a company that's been around for 75 years. They've evolved through multiple technology shifts during these 75 years. Have a very strong position in Sweden and offer movie streaming services, consisting of educational movies, feature films, documentaries. Present in around 65% of the elementary schools in Sweden, and a group of around 15 employees.
Summarizing the benefit or rationale behind Film & Skola, they will basically serve as the lead company when it comes to B2B sales in the Nordics, opening up the door for B2B sales of other products, but also B2B sales of what is today consumer products in the Nordics. Educational movies is also something that we don't have too much of in our B2C offering. Here, we will also explore the possibility to utilize that video content in our B2C offering, strengthening the offering to our customers. Strawbees, Gothenburg-based company, sitting not too far from our headquarters, teaching children STEM and engineering subjects. Selling both coding kits, robotic kits, building kits. Employs around 15 people. A strong position in the U.S. and also potential for a strong position in the U.K.
Sumdog and Strawbees go quite well hand-in-hand. Active on the same markets. Not too far away from each other when it comes to the subjects they offer. Here we see strong synergy potential when it comes to sales. This is something we already started. We have the first salesperson of Strawbees in the Sumdog offices since last week. We'll start to explore how we can upsell both in the U.S. and in the U.K., integrating these two companies. Finally, we have Holy Owly, French company, B2C company, teaching children language, in the age three to 12. Today, English and Spanish, but more languages on the way. There are basically two things to summarize when it comes to the rationale of Holy Owly. One is the customer acquisition model.
Holy Owly have been very good at building their business through organic traffic, through Apple and Google, with good relationships that they have with Apple, and selling annual subscriptions. A majority of their subscriptions are annual. We are very strong in paid marketing through web. Here we will combine the knowledge and the resources that we have, and centralize the customer acquisition to get the benefits of both business models. Another part is that Holy Owly, by adding Albert products and content to their platform, we will be able to further increase their strength on the French market. France is their main market, and we will help to further strengthen their offering to their customers on the French market. This will be a good segue into the financials that Martin will go through shortly.
If we look at the evolution since 2018, we see in the yellow circles that it has been a 100% B2C focus up until 2021. Now pro forma Q3 2022, half of the sales is coming from B2B, and the group EBITDA margin has steadily improved. Now with a size of around SEK 190 million in net sales, we really enable the group to reach profitability earlier. With that, I hand over to Martin.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I will now walk you through the financials in our Q4 report, as well as any highlights from the quarter. If we start with our ARR, our ARR has grown 73% year-over-year between Q4 of 2021 and Q4 of 2022. ARR has grown both due to an increase in subscribers as well as ARPU, combined of course, with acquisition of Jaramba and Sumdog. ARPU has increased year-over-year due to the fact that we see new subscribers continue to choose either our standard or plus subscription plan. We have, during the quarter, also seen traction for our yearly subscription plans. These have a slightly lower ARPU than our monthly, but instead contribute to a more healthy net working capital where we regain the customer acquisition cost up front.
Our B2B segment is new for 2022, and was started when we acquired Sumdog in the end of Q1 2022, and it's just accelerating further with acquisition that were just announced. quarter-over-quarter, our B2B business has decreased from SEK 28 million - SEK 27 million, and has during the year been on a steady line excluding FX. As previously mentioned, our B2B segment is currently focused on larger deals with multi-academy trusts, which consist of several schools. The lead time between first meeting and signed deal is therefore longer. We knew that we would lose some smaller schools based on this shift, but our plan and focus is instead of signing some larger deals during the first half of 2023. If we then look at our net sales, net sales for the isolated quarter grew from SEK 18.5 million - SEK 34.2 million , which is a growth of 84%.
The growth is primarily driven outside of Sweden with Sumdog's net sales as the main factor, and therefore, most of our net sales are now in markets outside of Sweden. I just want to highlight some overall financials. The main area here that I want to point out is our adjusted gross margin, which came down during the quarter, to 88% instead of 90%. This is due to an increased platform fee to Apple when our subscribers convert in-app. I do however want to reiterate what was stated in our prospectus that in mid Q2 of 2023, we will no longer pay any royalties for our Albert Junior Math product, which is the most popular product. This will then increase our adjusted gross margin back to above 90%.
The EBITDA for the quarter was - SEK 22.8 million. This is due to marketing spend in the quarter for our year-end campaign in the B2C segment. We have also had a one-off of SEK 903,000 , which is fees related to the acquisition which was announced during December and closed in January. We will also have some one-offs in Q1 tied to the acquisitions. Lastly, I just want to drill down the key financial figures. Our operating result was - SEK 29.6 million , and of those SEK 6.8 million is related to amortization of acquired intangible assets such as customer relations, software goodwill, and are related to Jaramba and Sumdog.
Our net working capital is also showing a healthy figure where the B2B segment is receiving upfront payment for yearly plans. This is a trend that we continue to see during 2023 with the increased B2B segment as part of the group. Then I just want to reiterate the financial targets. Those are focused on growth and profitability. On growth, we have targeted net sales of average by more than 50% per year in the medium term, of which the majority will be organic growth. This is to achieve the net sales of SEK 500 million for the full year of 2025. Profitability, we target an EBITDA margin of 40% in the long term.
Thank you very much, Martin. From here, we would like to end this presentations. presentation with some key takeaways that we would like to highlight for this quarter. First, we would like to state that we have had a very active quarter from an M&A perspective. Even if they're not shown in the Q4 numbers, now 50% of our future sales will stem from a B2B business unit, business unit, where we're now decreasing the financial risk profile of the company significantly. Secondly, we would like to state that we're delivering another solid quarter, where we take a clear step towards our financial goals and delivering higher growth than needed for the full year of 2022.
Taking the recent M&A into consideration, we're even one year ahead of our growth plans, which enables us to focus on synergies a lot going forward. From a risk perspective, we are confident that despite current microeconomic climate, there is no need to further capital injections in order for us to switch to profitability if we decrease the growth rate a bit. With that, we would like to open for a Q&A.
Thank you very much for that presentation. Now we'll jump straight into the Q&A section. We'll take the first question here. You mentioned that you are not forced to raise any capital post-acquisitions. In terms of future mergers and acquisitions, should we assume you will focus internally on synergies as opposed to further acquisitions? Should additional capital only be needed if you want to do more acquisitions?
Yes, we will have a focus during 2023 on integrating the group companies and reaping the synergies. When it comes to further acquisitions, I mean, our strategy is to build a European dominant actor, and we always have dialogues with potential targets. It will be on a situation by situation basis, if a good opportunity occurs, and we have the possibility to finance that acquisition, we will consider that, if it needs to be done by cash or by shares. One of the key focus areas for 2023 will be to integrate the already acquired companies.
Okay, thank you. Is business to business subscriber intake a matter of timing of new deals, or can you open up a bit what impacts subscriber intake, and how does seasonality look in the segment?
Yeah. When it comes to paying subscribers into B2B, there is a seasonality to it. Usually it's Q2 and Q4, which are strong in the B2B business. When it comes to the traction in B2B, historically in our B2B business units, we've been very focused on high number of unique schools. Basically lower deal sizes, but higher number of deals in absolute numbers. We're switching strategy there, especially in the U.K. now, where we trying to focus more on like Martin mentioned during his presentation, on multi-academy trusts. Focusing much more on larger deals. It's a little bit according to plan that we will probably lose some number of smaller schools, but this will be recovered as soon as we start signing the deals with the multi-academy trust. We are opportunistic, on how that pipe looks right now.
What risks do you see that could impact your goals for 2023?
Here, the B2C business is performing according to plan, and we have a good structure in place. The integration with Holy Owly has already been started and aimed to be finalized during the first half of this year. As mentioned previously, integration across the group will be a focus area, both in terms of how we should work and organize, but also how to best utilize the resources that we have to gain revenue synergies and explore cost synergies. The amount of time it will take to integrate would probably be the biggest risk. The businesses per se stand alone, are all performing according to plan.
What milestones should investor look out for in the following years?
I think like we mentioned now a couple of times, integration focus with the companies that we have acquired, exploring synergies among the group will be significant milestones that we are looking to deliver and achieve within the group. Due to the fact that we're ahead of our financial goals, and that we have had a high M&A activity, we can actually afford to have a slightly lower growth rate, but instead focus on the integration. Also investors can expect that we will be much more responsible with the cash at bank and not spend as much money in our B2C business.
Okay. Thank you. What could investors expect from you this year?
Yeah. Basically, I just answered that question before, this is basically what the investors could expect from us. We are, from a growth perspective, one year ahead towards our financial targets. Investors could expect that we will slightly decrease the growth rate during 2022, keeping the cash at bank as much as possible and focusing a lot on integrating the companies that we have acquired and achieving full synergies that we have been calculated with. Focus much more on profitability.
Thank you. Are you worried about the current macroeconomic situation and the potential impact on your business?
That's a very good question. I think a short answer would be just saying no. Elaborating a little bit more, you can say that if Albert would have looked the same way as it did when we did the IPO, the answer could have been yes. At that point in time, we were basically 100% direct to consumer business. In Q1 2022, we built the B2B business unit through the acquisition of Sumdog, which then contributed with approximately 18% of our ARR through steady revenue streams from schools which are having very low churn. With the recent M&As, we're now diversifying our revenue streams even more, like Salman described, with the business unit of B2B now contributing approximately 50% of our sales.
In addition to this, I think it's important to mention that in our, even if we have a very decreased consumer exposure, we're following the operational KPIs very much in detail. Even if the trial-to-paying conversion rates have been slightly decreasing, we don't see any shifts in the paying churn in our customer base. The customers paying and using our products are still being very happy and very loyal to us. The combination of diverse revenue streams and less consumer exposure in our business today, but also with the solid paying churn KPI, we could state that we are not worried about the current macroeconomic climate.
Thank you. Can you talk about your product development and how that is going?
We have during the quarter worked a lot with continued develop our product and the subjects as seen in the report. The development of our product was both in terms of adding content, but also localizing some subjects. We believe that in the foreseeable future, our product will continue to be more of our self-developed content, which also should improve the adjusted gross margin positively over time.
Okay, thank you. Do you have any data that suggests that learning subjects online trumps the classical model?
We don't compete with the classical model. I mean, we don't replace the teaching that takes place in the classroom with the teacher. What we do measure on the other hand is the learning impact of those that use our products compared to those that don't use our products. That research is published on the Sumdog website. It shows that frequent regular users of Sumdog, 30 minutes per week, outperform those not using Sumdog quite significantly.
Your ARR is growing at a steady rate. Would you say that these levels are sustainable, or could we expect slower growth in the coming year?
Yeah. I would say that for 2023, the ARR growth will sort of be highest given the acquisition that will be contributed to the ARR from Q1 2023 and onwards. As mentioned previously in the presentation, our focus will be on realizing the synergies as well as our road to profitability. Therefore, investors shouldn't expect the high level of growth going forward. I think that is the key thing to take away.
Okay, thank you. That's all of the questions that we got in today. Would you guys wanna end this presentation with some closing remarks?
Yeah, I think we can reiterate the takeaway that we had in the presentation. It's basically three things we would like to close this presentation with, and it's we had a M&A-focused or high activity within the M&A in the quarter. We will continue focusing on integrating these companies. We will prioritize having a cash at bank taking us to profitability. Investors could expect lower growth rates going forward and increased focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible.
Okay. Thank you very much for being here presenting today and answering all of our questions. A big thanks to all of you who followed this presentation with Albert today. I hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you, and, goodbye until next time.
Thank you.
Thank you.