Hello everyone, and welcome to Addnode Group's first ever Capital Markets Day. We've been doing it for + 23 years now, but this is our first opportunity to invite you and tell you more about the Addnode Group. A special welcome to you who are listening in to us from the webcast as well, and you here in the audience in Stockholm. Just to start off with that, there's going to be a Q&A by the end of the day for you who are listening in on the webcast. You have the opportunity already now to submit your question. Look in the upper right corner to the right, you will find a little bar that says "Ask a question." It's open now, and it will be open during the whole day as we will finalize with the Q&A. Having said that, welcome everyone.
I'm the CEO of Addnode Group, Johan Andersson. I've been fortunate to be part of this group already since 2006. I think I made one of my best decisions ever in 2006 when I decided to answer an advertisement in the Swedish newspaper "[Foreign language] " that said they were looking for someone who can handle both M&A and investor relations. That was the start for my journey in Addnode Group in 2006. I've been part of the group since then. I've been the CEO since 2017. I have a previous history also in corporate finance and in another listed company, but my main journey has been with Addnode Group all the way since 2006. Later today, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the history of Addnode Group as well. What can you expect today? You can expect four things, at least.
We're going to give you a strategy update. We're going to talk about our priorities ahead. You're going to get an opportunity to hear the introduction to our divisions. We're also going to introduce our new financial targets that we published today. As you know, no one can move this by themselves. I have a great team with me today, our Executive Management Team sitting here to the right. For you who are listening to us in-house, you can't see them, but for you who are in the audience, they're sitting here. They're going to form the agenda with me today. I'm going to start out with strategy and priorities. Jens Kålsrud is going to introduce Design Management. Magnus Falkman is going to introduce PLM division. Andreas is going to introduce Process division. Kristina is going to talk about financials.
With us, we also have our Head of M&A, Elisabeth Forslind. We're going to end up with the Q&A. Just one thing that I want to say to you is that we have published a pro forma today with our net result and net sales for the last 10 years. That has to do with in 2024, there were some changes in the way the buy-sell model for Autodesk software that we provide in our Design Management division. That moved from the buy-sell model to an agency model. It practically meant that our net sales went down, but our profit was on the same level. To make sure that you have comparable figures, we have made a pro forma for the last 10 years. Every figure presented today is according to the pro forma, so you get comparability between the different years. I just want to point that out.
It basically means that net sales is down, EBITDA the same, margin goes up, and we report in Swedish, SEK, as a currency. With that as a basis, let's move on to the strategy.
In a world where digitalization enables us to automate, build faster, plan smarter, create better products, and drive sustainability, a deep understanding of both technology and our customers is essential. Our digital solutions are used across key sectors such as urban development, infrastructure and buildings, energy, local and central government, transport and mobility, industrial equipment, aerospace and defense, and life science. With an organic and acquisition-driven growth strategy, a proven and profitable business model, and attractive offerings in markets with strong structural growth, we deliver sustainable and long-term value creation. Addnode Group, digitalization for a better society.
What is Addnode Group's mission? We operate, acquire, and develop entrepreneurial companies that provide digital solutions. I'm going to explain more about that, what we mean by that, and how we're going to do it. We're going to talk first about the foundation of Addnode Group, talk about our mission, culture, and governance, and end up with the strategy. If you look at it, we are predominantly operating our business in two areas. For us, it's essential that we focus on a few verticals where we can provide value to our customers, but also we as a group can provide value to the different companies in our decentralized organization. Focus is important in that sense. It means that if you look to the left in the presentation, you see what we call design and PLM.
That's software digital solutions for anyone who wants to design something, simulate data, and also take care of the data going forward. That means that a customer can be an architect designing houses and infrastructure, can also be an R&D department in one of the OEMs or the manufacturing companies when they are, for example, designing a new car and the new trucks that are going to be developed and maintained out to the market. If you look to what we call the process side, you will find digital solutions for central and local government, meaning that we started out sort of in an engineering perspective, moving out to what's happening in the public world. We are in local municipalities, technical departments, building permits, environmental permits, but also maintaining the infrastructure that the local municipalities are responsible for. That means that we do a lot of geographical information solutions.
Andreas is going to talk more about it later, and the guys are going to explain it. That's an area where we are. What sort of connects these two areas is that it usually ends up in some kind of digital twin. All this data is going to be visualized through a digital twin. In the building world, design and PLM, it might be called a BIM model, or we call it a virtual twin. The same thing when you go to the local and central government, it could be the way you plan a city. You also end up in a virtual twin. These are the areas where we are. I think that's important to understand our strategy going forward. The good thing is that we can see, we truly believe that there are global trends driving the structural growth in these areas.
We're talking about digitization, AI, smart cities, and sustainability. I'm going to walk you through what we mean by one by one. Everything we do is to make sure that our customers are getting the benefit of becoming more and more digitalized. That means that we provide a digital solution so they can become more efficient, both internally, but also in the way they create new solutions for their customers to create value. That's the growth driver, and that's something we've sort of been driving our growth for the last 20 years, and we truly believe it's going to continue to drive the growth. What's new and what everybody's thinking about is AI.
For us, it's just a prolonging of how can we become more efficient and how can we also help our customers to become more efficient by infusing AI in the different solutions that we provide to the customers. It's also what our partners, we're going to talk something about Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes, for example, today. They are also investing a lot in this area as well. We think it's something that's going to help us drive growth, but it's also something that's going to help us be more efficient going forward. One of the things that's important for Addnode Group is the growth of the cities. What do we mean by that? That's sort of the core of where we end up. Someone needs to plan the cities, you need to design it and everything within it, and you need to maintain it, and then refurbishment and start over.
That means, for example, we provide the software for anyone who's going to handle a building permit, but also the planning of the city, the building of the city, we're going to design software for that, and also creating the digital twin and vertical model of it, also maintain it, but also all the things that's going to be built that goes into the cities also gain plainlineness. Every time I see a construction crane walking around and I see that, I'm extremely happy because that means that Addnode Group is making money in some sense. Everything is the growth and the building. That's very important for us. Talking about AI, IoT as well is also part of that as well. Then sustainability. Why is that important? Of course, it's something that we want to improve and help with, but it's also something that drives our business.
For example, an architect making decisions about design, cost, but also what type of materials are you using. We can help with that software when you make all these choices, trying to optimize. That's a part of how we think about sustainability driving it. It also helps with the local municipalities, how we can be more sustainable in all that area. For us, sustainability is how can the customers create more sustainable products, become more sustainable with the digital solutions that we drive. That's something that drives innovation for us. Very important. If you then look at how we are organized, we are organized in three divisions, and you're going to get introduced to them in more details later today. We call them Design Management, Product Lifecycle Management, and Process Management.
You can see that Design Management is the biggest with SEK 2.5 billion in net sales, Product Lifecycle Management SEK 1.8 billion, and Process Management SEK 1.3 billion. This adds up to Addnode Group, the SEK 5.6 billion that we are. I would like to take the opportunity to highlight what are the digital solutions that we provide to our customers and what are the essence of them. The software that we provide, they are mission-critical for our customers. It means that they need them to do their everyday tasks. I gave you some specific examples here, but also if you look at the public sector, if you're working in the public sector, you handle cases and you handle them by the case management system provided by our people in the Process Management division.
If you're working in an R&D department, making sure that you are bringing new products to the market, you're using the software from TECHNIA in the PLM division. If you're an architect or if you are working to maintain the buildings and the infrastructure, you're using the software from our team in the Design Management division. It's mission-critical for the people that we work with. It's also high customer retention because it's not that easy to change this to another type of software because it's heavily embedded in the different processes that you actually are using for your everyday work. Both mission-critical and a high customer retention. As you can see on the bar here from 2015 to 2025, when we've gone from almost SEK 2 billion up to the SEK 6 billion that we're closer now, you can see that we have kept the net sales divided.
For us, it's important that we deliver a combination of owned software, third-party software, and the services that we provide. It means that we provide a digital solution. In the bottom of it, you will find the software. We integrate that with other software because in the software, we have a lot of data that's being created and it needs to be moved to other systems as well. We need to import data from other systems to make this more valuable for our customers. That means that we will have integration and implementation on that side. If you look at the circle diagram here, you will find that almost 42% of our net sales is the third-party software that we represent, 23% is our own software, and 35% is the services, the implementation integration. Usually, we provide this to the customer as a bundled solution.
It's not a separate selling third-party owned software and services. It's a bundle that creates the offering of digital solutions to our customers. This is some new information in the way we're disclosing the distribution of net sales today. Another thing that is important in our business model is that we believe that we have a high degree of recurring revenue. That provides predictability because in the beginning of the year, you basically know a lot about how much your net sales is going to be distributed over the year. It makes it easier to plan. It makes it more predictable. This is also a commitment for our customers that are willing to use the software over and over again. Most of this is also prepaid, so it has a good impact on the cash flow as well.
As you can see from the bar from 2015 - 2025 here, we've been able to increase the recurring revenue from roughly 53% to the 63% we are today. That has been done both organically by developing the different offerings we have to our customers, but also from acquisitions that we have acquired companies with a higher degree of recurring revenue. I think looking at where we are at the 63%, we can increase that a little bit, but it's a fair assessment of probably where we are going forward. You have to realize recurring revenue for us, that's the contract for the right to use the software. The services and implementation that are mostly of a recurring nature because we work with our customers is not included in these 63%. We have a lot of services that could be argued to be of a recurring nature.
Where are we in the world? We are starting more and more to call ourselves a global group. It means that we started out in the Nordics almost 20 years ago. Then we moved our operation into Northern Europe, the U.S., and lately our latest addition is Brazil. That means that we are active in 20 countries on five continents. The majority of our business is in the Nordics, Northern Europe, and in the U.S. To understand where we are today, it makes sense to start where we're coming from as well. Addnode Group, the inception of Addnode Group was in 2003 when it was our first day at the stock market. The first three years, Addnode Group started out. During that journey, it's important that TECHNIA and Cad-Q, that later became Symetri, came in Addnode Group. That's the foundation for our two divisions, Design Management and PLM.
During that time, as TECHNIA came in, at that time, Addnode Group's cash flow was not as good as it is today. At that time, Addnode also paid with shares. That was also the time when Staffan Holmström and Johan Lundstier also became the majority owners of Addnode Group. They've been part of Addnode Group since then and are still the majority shareholder through Aretro Capital. In 2007, Staffan Holmström became the CEO, and he was the CEO for 10 years. In 2017, we changed over, so to speak, that I became the CEO and Staffan Holmström is the Chairman of the group. I think that's important to tell you, not that I want to tell you how long I've been the CEO, but to look at how long people stay in this group. I think that's important for us.
We can also see that in 2014-2015, we started to move outside the Nordics with acquisitions in Germany and the U.K. We built upon that with further acquisitions in the U.K. In 2022, we were ready for our next step, moving over to the pond at the Atlantic and over into the U.S. As I said, the latest sort of step was in Brazil and Latin America. Let's see how that's going to play out. That's some of the important milestones in Addnode Group. What has this led up to? Yes, this has led to a fantastic growth over the years. If you look at the compounded annual growth rate since the inception of Addnode Group, it's 17% year- over-y ear. It means that the linear growth through this couple of years. We have some years with much better growth and some with less, but on average, 17%.
I think for us, it's been an amazing journey. If you look at culture, values, and organization and governance, how we are, Addnode Group, we perceive ourselves to be an add-on growth accelerator for companies providing technologies for a sustainable future. This has two different meanings. We are an add-on growth accelerator for companies, our customers. We are also an add-on growth accelerator to the companies within the group, Addnode. We are creating values in two ways, both for our customers, but we also make sure that we, from a group perspective, are helping our companies to grow as well. Together, we are providing technologies for a sustainable future. That's sort of our position and that's what we're trying to be and achieve. How are we organized? How do we do governance? How does this work in this decentralized organization? We are getting close to 3,000 people in the organization.
You will find that the bulk of that is in the different companies within the group. If you look at the slide behind me, you will see that we are organized in three divisions. We are almost 20 different companies in those divisions. We are 25 people in the parent company in the different divisions supporting the different companies to grow, develop, and make more business. That means that if you are a CEO in an Addnode Group company, you have the full P&L responsibility for the group and for the company that you are responsible for, in agreement with the budget that we had discussed within the strategy, and we support you to make that happen. That means that you have a lot of organizational freedom, but we empower financial control. That means that you have to deliver a full P&L every month, a full balance sheet.
You need to make a prognosis on the cash flow because that is centralized, because we want to make sure that we invest the money in the right way. We try to help you within the group as well, in the different divisions, with different initiatives, forums, et cetera, and some things on a group level. For example, we have some executive trainee programs. We handle AI, talking about that, cybersecurity. We are very much a true decentralized organization. Why is that important? That means that decisions are being made close to the customers and close to the people, so we are ready to act when it makes necessary. Because we want to continue to grow this business as we would like to do, as you've seen on the financial targets, we said that we don't want to spend time on too much governance.
We need to have governance where it matters. Like I mentioned, we like financial control, but you're free to run your business, but you have to report what you're doing. If things don't go as expected, then we'll probably have a discussion around it. For you who are able to see us well, you can see that you might ask why so many logos in one division and a few in the last. It has to do with there's a great opportunity for us to grow by integrating and acquiring channel partners in both Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes. That means that's the why, and then you need to get the full benefit of that. TECHNIA is running that in the PLM division, and in the design division, you can find that in Symetri.
If you look at Process Management, it's more of a portfolio of software companies providing value to the public sector in Sweden and Norway. There are two different governance models. One when we try to integrate to get the full value of that, and one when we are integrating when it makes sense, but we are not in a hurry. There are some things that we also ask of the people in the organization. We ask them to have an entrepreneurial spirit. We need to keep that growth because that's our heritage. That's also why we attract so many entrepreneurs who want to sell their company into Addnode Group. We're trying to keep simple, focus on growth, and don't build too much bureaucracy. We have a long-term view. I mentioned that we basically have had the same main all over time.
Many of our owners are with us over a long time. The people who are going to come up and present after me have been with the group for 10+ years as well. We have a long customer relation. Some of the customers have been with us for 40 years, 30 years, 20 years. For you, you can calculate if you know our recurring revenue. We have that much recurring revenue, and people and the companies are staying with us. It means that they have to be with us for a long year to make that happen. That's important for us. Important is also simplicity. Try to keep it simple. Don't overdo it. Always try to provide the best solution for the customers. Make sure that you do it with the organization and the people. You can keep that in mind because that's important for efficiency as well.
I just want to give you an example of how we can support these values and at the same time support our companies. That's Addnode Innovation. Imagine Idol. I think you've all seen that. This is the Addnode Idol. You get the chance to submit your proposal for a new idea that probably is not covered in your own company. You submit that for a jury, and the jury consists of people in the organization, Head of Division. We have people from our Board of Directors, and they select some that go through with them. During a six-month period, you have pitching stages, and you end up in a final where you hopefully get to be the selected one. The selected one is selected by your peers. Everyone in the Addnode Group organization votes on who's going to win that in the finals.
You get SEK 500,000 to promote your idea and make that happen. You don't get SEK 500,000 cash in the bank, but you get SEK 500,000 worth of hours and capability to make that happen. I think that's one of the ways that we can help from a group perspective to drive innovation and make sure that we create the values that we would like to do. Culture, innovation, very important for us, and governance model, keeping the decentralized model to enable the future growth. If you look at strategy, we usually call it 2x strategy. It means that every fifth year, we double the business that we have. That's our history, and that's also what our financial targets implicate. To sort of dig into that, I would explain these very busy slides.
I think it explains a lot about our strategy and what we have done and what we would like to do. A few of you might have seen it before, but if you look at the light blue bars, you will find that in 2015, net sales were almost SEK 3 billion. In 2024, we're reaching SEK 5.6 billion. In between the different years, we will find how much our organic growth has been and how much we have grown through acquisitions. If you look, for example, between the year 2015 and 2016, you will find that organic growth was 4% and acquisition 14%. Just to take another example, if you look at between 2021 and 2022, we moved from SEK 3.1 billion in 2021 to SEK 4.3 billion in 2022. That was achieved through organic growth of 12% and acquisition 26%.
As you see the different years, we are not the kind of company that grows linearly. It has, but we have a consistent growth over time. Probably that's one of the measures that I would like to relay as well. If you look at the boxes in the middle between the years that has a number, the agreement, that's the number of acquisitions we have done each year. That means that we have been growing roughly by acquiring 3-7 companies each year. This year, we have done seven acquisitions so far. This is the journey we have been on, and this is the journey we're going to continue. I think what's very important in the business that we are is that we create the cash flow for our growth going forward to make this happen.
I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about how do we think about creating value and helping our customers and what that generates and how that ensures that we can continue our growth. We talked about we have two opportunities how to grow, both for acquisition and organic growth. When a company becomes part of Addnode Group, we start with installing financial controls. It means that these entrepreneurs have been very good at driving their business, but not so very much focused on monthly, quarterly, and yearly results. It might be a period where they said, "Okay, we can't deliver a monthly report in four days. It's not going to happen, never." Then it happens, and then we start delivering that. They are happy that they're able to see how much the company is generating every month and not every year. That's the period where we go from.
It creates a lot of value for them. We look at the cost structure. How can you be more efficient? We talk a lot about go-to-market strategy for the software and the services that you provide because there are different ways of doing that. Let's see if we can add some technology and products to the customer that your group that you're already attracting. Can we look at the service offering? What type of services are you delivering? How are you delivering it? When are you delivering it? What are the business models for that as well? All this adds up to growth in net sales and that we're able to expand our margins. Why is that good? Because, of course, I talked about how we can help the different companies as well. I'm not going to spend more time on that, but do that.
It adds up our possibility to reinvest in our business, acquire more companies, and pay dividends to our shareholders. That's how we distribute our capital, and then we start all over again. I think that's been very important for our journey. I talked a lot about acquisitions. We've done nine acquisitions over this period of time. I'm not going to go into detail of every one of them, but I just want to show you where we are coming from and what we have done. This is something that is sort of in our DNA in the organization, all the way from the Board down to the people in the organization who are actually the best scouts for new acquisitions to be made.
We support our different companies to grow, but there are certain criteria that we can see go across the whole organization that's important when we look at acquisitions. That is, we're trying to find new nodes that add nodes to Addnode to create value, if you see my point. That's where we are. We try to go and add more value. If you look at what we are looking for, either we can add new geographies, we can consolidate the markets that we are, or expansion. We're looking for new customer segments as well that can drive the business and technology. What's more important is probably the people and the offering that we're looking at. For us, we are focused on mission-critical software. That's where we are. We're not a consultancy company. We do provide a lot of services, but that's not a separate offering.
For us, service is something and sort of necessary, not the right word, but something that we do to connect our software with other software. We do believe that it needs to have a strong customer retention and high switching costs. We want customers to stay with us. It's also important that the company has a strong brand in their customer market and also the people market where people want to work. We encourage the founders of the companies to stay on, and that's very important for us. That means that we have to look at the cultural fit because we're going to work with these people for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, hopefully. We're going to need to make sure that we are aligned in how we look upon the world. We are good at making profitable companies even more profitable.
We are not sort of the turnaround candidates. We are more good at making some companies even sounder and even better. That's sort of where we are. You might wonder how much you're going to pay for this. For us, we tend to look at EBITDA multiples, meaning operating profitable multiples. It means that these companies don't have that much assets. EBITDA could be EBITDA or EBIT or whatever is operating profit. We tend to have a discussion on that. We do like standalone valuation. It means that we identify synergies, but we tend to try not to pay for it because that should be our benefit. If you look at what we are paying, historically, we are paying somewhere between 4x-7x EBITDA multiple for the cash flow being generated in these companies. Seven is sort of average. That means that when do we pay more?
Higher margins, more IP, higher growth. We tend to pay up to 10x. So far, we haven't paid more than 10x . It could have been that the sort of the base case was a little bit less, so it ended up being 12x the next year. Then we had to work another year to make it come back to 10x. On the basis, never more than 10x. That means that sometimes we have paid 4x , but then it's more of acquiring a customer base that could be integrated into the business. We do use earnouts. That's usually to bridge valuation gaps. Of course, it has the benefits that the entrepreneurs are keen to stay on a couple of more years and have some more incentives as well. That means that we have been able to compound return over time.
The very important part of this, I talked a bit, is to make sure that we can attract the entrepreneurs because these are the guys that we want to acquire. We want to take part in them. Looking at the 90 acquisitions that we have done, I think four or five of them have been through an intermediary, a broker, or a corporate finance firm. The rest is bilateral, meaning that they know that we are active in the niches that I talked about, and they see the possibility, and they see us as a good acquirer. We go out to them and ask them, "Why shouldn't you be part of us?" That means that all the 20 different CEOs in the group, their management team, the group executive team, and even the board of directors, everybody's constantly looking for new acquisition candidates.
We do spend a lot of time with them, trying to make sure that they want to be part of Addnode Group. That means that we look at hundreds of different companies every year, and we have that discussion with them. It's a little bit like you imagine an FBI 10 most wanted in three divisions. That's sort of how we operate. The difference is that those 10 get filled. We fill up every month, and then some goes out, and then it comes back. It's a constant sort of dating, evolving over them. That means that we might be a little bit lumpy over time with doing acquisitions because we need to be ready when the different entrepreneurs are ready to sell their companies.
I usually say that we are not opportunistic in what we want to buy, but we need to be a little bit opportunistic when we can buy. That means that usually we end up with five to 10 acquisitions every year. It could be a couple of quarters where we are not doing any acquisition. It doesn't mean that we are not working on acquisitions because remember, we are buying from entrepreneurs who want to be part of Addnode Group. Having said that, I would like to introduce you to two of our entrepreneurs who are part of Addnode Group and what they are thinking about and their experience of being part of Addnode Group. You have Simonette Rahmberg, who's CEO and founder of Canella, working in the pharma industry. You have Kevin Schlack, who is the founder of Team D3, and he's now the CEO of Symetri US. Let's listen to them.
We now have access to specialized competence in cybersecurity, in GDPR, HR, recruitment. We also have a great management team and steering group supporting us in our business. That has been very valuable because it's not possible for a small company to have this palette of expertise.
What surprised me the most was just the culture alignment that we felt we had at Team D3 with Symetri. You know that we noticed that right out of the gate. Symetri is a people-first organization. They're very, very team-oriented. What that did is that made everybody really want to dig in and figure out how do we merge and integrate while also making sure that we're keeping our clients successful throughout the mergers and integrations.
The daily business is business as usual. The thing that did change is actually the financial routines and reporting, of course, since Addnode Group is listed.
Our ambition and ability to scale, honestly, as an independent company, we were primarily doing business with small to medium-sized clients in the U.S. With Symetri, we've expanded that scope. We're partnering with larger clients, and many of them are global. We're also able to recruit the best talent in the world to join our team. We now operate with greater resources and a forward-thinking approach, positioning us for cutting-edge solutions at a much larger scale.
Now we have a much stronger leading market position. I can't see the challenge. It's strictly opportunities. We also have the opportunity to actually network with other Addnode companies and also find cooperation and new business opportunities. It's exciting.
As a part of Symetri and Addnode Group, we empower client success with our own innovative proprietary solutions, Naviate and Civilia. These powerful tools drastically boost efficiencies for architects, engineers, and designers by streamlining their workflows and optimizing project outcomes. With Addnode, the financial reporting process and the timeline that is needed, it was a bit of a challenge for us to adapt to. With the strong support from Addnode and Symetri's leadership, we've streamlined this and we're getting better every month and every quarter at the financial end.
Thank you, Simo and Kevin, for sharing that. I just like to end up with a summary, and I think one of the questions you're probably asking yourself is why invest in Addnode Group. Let me help you with that. I think there are three things to consider. We are offering digital solutions. That's important. We have a proven 2x strategy. We're able to double our business every fifth year, and that is giving you consistent return on capital employed. Just to give you a further, okay, and why is that important? Why do I think it makes sense? Just to sum it up, we are providing mission-critical software. We have a high customer retention and switching cost. We can see that it's a growing end-user market as well in the software that we provide. If you look at the strategy, we have a proven business model with recurring revenue.
We have shown that we can grow both organically and through acquisitions. On that journey, we have also been able to improve the markets as well. You're going to see more of that on Kristina's presentation later. Look at the sort of the risk. There are also risk sides with the capital as well. I do believe that we have a balanced and disciplined risk profile. We get great support from the Board of Directors on that subject. You can also see that we have a diversification in the business and we are operational resilient. We have never lost money. We have always made money irrespective of the difference that was happening in the world. We do have a focus on cash flow. Kristina is going to talk more about it later. Capital allocation is very important for us.
I told you about the three ways that we spend capital: investing in our own IP software and the people, acquisition and distribution to our shareholders. I think we do have a solid balance sheet as Kristina is going to show you later as well. With that, I'm going to end my part of the presentation. I'm going to be back later today, but I would like to hand over to Jens Kålsrud for Symetri and Design Management. Right, Jens?
Thank you, Mr. Andersson. Hi, everyone. I'm Jens, the CEO for Symetri U.S., as Johan said. I've had the pleasure to be part of this company group since 2009, and the absolute honor to be the CEO since 2016. My focus personally has always been to build high-performing teams with a very, very high customer value creation focus. That has been everything we have been trying to do over all these years. I hope I can share some information about how we have come to the place where we are today based on that strong focus on building teams and always being super keen on differentiation. Who are we in this division? We are a group of people who get out of bed every morning to challenge people to work smarter for a better future. That has taken us to a position where we are doing these SEK 2.5 billion net sales.
We're doing more than SEK 500 million in EBITDA, and that gives you guys who can count in this room, you can count to more than 20% profit margin so far. We're also having these 2/3 recurring revenues, as Johan said, that we have also in the larger group. We have that as well. We have operations per now in 11 countries. We operate underneath three different company brands: Symetri, Service Works Global, and Tribia. Those are the three company brands. The largest company in this division is Symetri, who is then a global partner to Autodesk. We'll get back to that later. What we do in this division is maybe more importantly, we enable people to design, make, and operate things smarter and more sustainably.
We do that through partnering with the right third-party technology providers who create value for these companies who have open APIs so that we can build our own IP to fill the gaps that our customers and we see in the market space. We ensure we have the right expertise to have the right type of advisory and delivery services with only one purpose. That one purpose is to realize the outcomes and the promises of technology for our customers. Those are the types of services that we have. The way we think about this is that we build up our expertise. We need industrial domain expertise for the clients that we're trying to serve. We need a technological expertise, both of them. If we have both of them, we are pretty sure we can build leading-edge technology and services value propositions.
If we do that well, we can enable our customers to work smarter. If we do that, and only if we do that, we earn the right to be a trusted partner to our customers over a long period of time. That goes back to the long-term commitment that Johan said. We have that with every single client. If we then split our net sales per now in this division, it's 21% is own IP sales, 34% is services, and the remaining 45% is partner software. That's where we are here and now, or at least last year. Let's talk about the most significant and long-term third-party partnership that we have in this division. It's with a company called Autodesk. Autodesk has been the platform for Symetri to grow since we were founded in 1989 in the land of far away in the forest in Borlänge, Sweden.
From that journey, we have grown together with this partnership. Who is Autodesk for those of you who don't know them? It's an American software company with $6 billion revenues in net sales. They have 200 million users globally. They have more than 100 different types of software products. They deliver these software products to three industries. Architecture, engineering, and construction is one of them. We call that AEC. Product design and manufacturing is the second one. The third one is media and entertainment. For us, we are concentrating our partnerships primarily on the first two, basically the building and infrastructure industries and the manufacturing and process and plant industries. Sometimes we use the technology from the third division to craft solutions for our customers. Primarily, we are doing that for customers inside those other two market sectors.
I know there are a few of you who might have had a few questions about the models and business models and partnering models over the years. Autodesk has changed business models and partnering models more than once over the last 10, 15 years. One huge change they did was in 2016 when they moved from a perpetual license model into the world of subscriptions. In 2016, you could buy a piece of software, own that, and pay a small piece of maintenance. After that, you bought into a subscription. You bought into the ability to use the software for a specific period of time. We did that during 2016, that transition, and we've operated with that model ever since. Last year in 2024, Autodesk announced another change, which they called the new buying experience.
This change basically meant that the customers who were used to get a quote from partners like Symetri and an invoice from partners like Symetri now got a quote from Symetri still, but not the invoice because the invoice goes directly to the customer from the software vendor. That means it's an agency-based model. That was the change. With that change, it's fair to say that Symetri still has our customer relationships because remember that we are selling other third-party software. We are selling our own IP and we're selling our services. These customers, they're getting an invoice from us still, but not for the whole solution. The changes in this model also meant that the prices are now similar irrespective of which partner you choose out there in the marketplace.
For us, we strongly believe and have seen evidence of that many customers now prioritize those who have more to offer, those with more own IP, those with more services, and those who also might have other types of technologies to bring to bear. We feel that our competitive advantage and ability to acquire customers has strengthened through this change so far. It also opens up further market consolidation because not every single partner out there in the world has had the financial power or creative capability to invest in own IP. We have done that for more than 20 years. We feel we have a strong position going forward, and we feel we are pretty attractive for many other Autodesk partners who might not have that kind of portfolio of offerings to bring to customers.
Finally, of course, also this transaction model changed that the credit risk for the Autodesk software piece moved from the partner directly to the vendor, in this case, Autodesk, because they send the invoice to the customer for these types of software. That's all I want to say about the partnering models. I'm sure there will be something in the Q&A, and I look forward to the opportunity to answer more questions. Before we go there, let's talk a bit about our customers and what we bring to the customers. As said, the way we look at the sectors and the industries that we serve with leading-edge technology and services, we see that we serve the building industry, the infrastructure industry, the manufacturing industry, and the process and plant industry. Those are the four segments that we serve.
For each and every one of these, we have our own leading-edge technology and services specifically tailored to fit the purpose of these four sectors. What we wanted to do now was to zoom into one of the product lines that we have that brings value for companies in the building and the infrastructure industry. Those two industries are generating approximately 70% of the net sales that we do in this division, meaning the other two are the remaining 30%. This particular software that we wanted to zoom in on is a brand from Symetri, which has the purpose to enhance the Autodesk technology platform. It's called Naviate, and it's for the building and infrastructure industry, and it helps them to work smarter, better, and faster. Let's have a look at that.
In construction and infrastructure projects, precision is key, but too often, architects and engineers find themselves buried in repetitive tasks, manual processes, and inconsistent documentation. Naviate, by Symetri, changes that. Developed in close collaboration with users, Naviate is a specialized product portfolio enhancing Autodesk Revit, Civil 3D, and cloud processes, streamlining the building information modeling workflow. With built-in support for local standards and regulations, users save time while ensuring quality and compliance. The result: a faster, more efficient design process, higher model accuracy and consistency, easier onboarding of team members, improved collaboration between disciplines, and thanks to built-in sustainability features, Naviate also supports smarter long-term planning. Naviate, by Symetri, intuitive and reliable. It's easy to use, easy to trust. It's building information modeling accelerated.
I hope that gave you some insights to what Naviate is and what Naviate does. For those of you who are in this room and curious for more, you can go out in the exhibition hall and learn much more about this later. Now, for all of you digitally and in the room, I would like to share some more examples of what we do for our customers, just to show you a little bit of the breadth of things we deliver to them, not just based on Naviate or any particular product line. One example I wanted to talk to you about is we have lots of customers who are large engineering service providers out there in the world who are clients to us, that they might be in the process industry, the manufacturing industry, or in the building and infra industries. They have one thing in common.
They have a lot of engineers and designers out there, and they all want to reduce the downtime, of course, for all those engineers and improve the standardization and quality of how they're going to get things done. One thing they want to do is to deploy software, upgrades, new versions, new pieces of software into their huge engineering communities. In this example of AFRI, they have 19,000 engineers, employees in the organization, and we are building out the infrastructure to configure, package, deploy standardized solutions out there. This particular implementation that we talked about, we were saving more than 15,000 hours for that organization in reduced engineering downtime by using technologies to make this so much faster, more efficient, and with greater quality. That's just one example of what we do, and that's just giving them access to the tools.
Other things we do, as you've read about in the newspapers and maybe even experienced, is that most companies want to digitize to be able to connect the data, to be able to drive automation and insights with capabilities from AI and other types of technologies. One example that we have here from our clients is the Gillette Stadium in the U.S., which is the home for New England Patriots. For those of you who are NFL fans, if there is anyone here in Sweden, maybe one or two. Either way, they have a pretty cool stadium called Gillette Stadium. They partnered with us because we were one of very, very few globally who could do both CAD, BIM, GIS, and figuring out ways of how do we digitize things, how do we bring the physical reality into a digital world.
Once we have done that, how do we connect all this data to create a digital twin from where we can drive automation and insights to sell more things to the people who come to the stadium, to manage construction projects and operations in a more efficient way? Creating digital twins is one thing that drives digitization, connected data, automation, and insights. Another example is a company called Bernheimer Architecture, where we helped with lifecycle analytics tools, embedded that in a workflow, and the outcome is that they can now do common wall elements with 50% less carbon footprint than they did before. This is supplying tools and methods for them to make smarter, better choices, and more informed choices. They are now winning more and more business based on their ability to drive the sustainability actions going forward.
Those are three companies we're very proud to partner with, three out of the 25,000 that we have per now. Over the years, we have, in this division, grown from being a Swedish company to becoming a Nordic company, and that was a huge milestone that we achieved in 2009. Super happy about that. From there, we said now we need to expand our value proposition further, meaning we need to build more own IP. We need to expand the capabilities and services we can provide to increase our differentiation. With that as a strategy, we acquired the companies Tribia and Service Works Global to expand the value proposition, and we also started to build product lines like Naviate that you just heard about. That was the mission we went on in 2009 in order for us to be able to grow geographically.
With that, we also moved into the U.K. and Ireland through the acquisition of Service Works Global. We got access to the Canadian market and Australian market in addition, but the majority of the business was still done in the U.K. and Ireland. As we went into that, we compounded a few partners into one Symetri in the U.K. It took us a couple of years, but we did it, and the team there did it so well, so well that we started to think about what's really stopping us to be the global number one. Is that even possible? If so, how on earth could we take the next step towards that goal? With that said, we concluded that the natural next step was to enter the big U.S. market.
We did that on the 1st of March 2022 by the acquisition of a large company, Autodesk Partner, who were delivering value to the building and infrastructure industries called Microdesk. We entered the U.S. market then, and we continued to expand our expertise with Kevin Schlack, as you heard speaking earlier. We acquired a couple of own IP companies to strengthen our value proposition, who came into the Naviate portfolio of products. Once we had done that and started to gain market shares in the U.S., we gained the confidence enough to move forward to the next territory. That's when we entered the Latin America market with the acquisition of FF Solutions in Brazil this summer. This journey has taken us to a position where we now have operations in four continents in design management: Europe, North America, Latin America, and Australia. We see great opportunities for continued growth.
The question is, what has this led to then? Personally, I am incredibly proud of the team that we have and what we have done for all our customers over all these years. What you can see, it has also enabled us to drive consistent growth over these 10 years. We have what you guys call, I think, a compounded annual growth rate of 26%. We've also managed to double the margins. How do you double the margins in this world of business? Of course, the strong focus on own IP has clearly helped us to differentiate, to drive value creation, to drive growth. Of course, also being more operationally efficient is also part of that game. The large move that you can see here in these graphs from 2021 to 2022 marked the entry of the U.S. market with a positive growth rate.
You need to know that the customer in our world can choose to buy a one-year subscription or they can choose to buy a three-year subscription of their Autodesk contracts. That's their choice, one or three. That means that if a customer buys a three-year contract for their specific assets with annual payments today, we would recognize that whole revenue at the first transaction for that whole three-year contract. That means that in the following two years, we do not recognize any net sales from that particular contract. This, of course, can lead to some annual seasonalities where years might be higher or lower on multi-year or three-year contract sales, or the renewal base comes and goes a bit with annual seasonalities. 2023, for us, as you can see on this image, was a year where we had a lower portion of three-year contract renewals.
We also saw a weaker market that year in the U.S., especially. That led to the drop in 2023. As you also can see, in 2024 and 2025, we were back on that growth trajectory as we were onto earlier. Going forward from here, towards the future, we expect low-digit organic growth for Symetri in 2026 due to this renewal cycle that I was trying to explain on multi-year subscriptions or these three-year subscription contracts. For the coming years of 2027 and 2028, we expect organic net sales growth to be supported by this renewal cycle of three-year contracts. Four ways to summarize the success factors that we felt we have done to achieve these 26% of CAGR. Number one is that we feel we have built a very, very strong culture brand that attracts the right people.
We are meeting lots of companies out there, and not everyone is a good fit for us. We are defining the Symetri way very, very clearly. What we mean by our values, attitudes, belief systems, what it really means being an ideal team player and why that's crucial for our future success. We know that that has attracted a lot of great people to our organization that we're really proud of. It also has had the impact that some people might not want to come into this organization, but we made that very clear. It's an option, and everyone knows what they're stepping into. That's important.
We also know that if we go into a new market or market sector, it's crucial for us to know this is the way we're going to get to number one in that particular market sector because that's when we see that the margins can grow and we can afford to invest to make sure the differentiation grows over time. We only go into markets, geographies, and/or sectors where we have a strong idea of what are the steps that are going to take us to the number one position. That might take us one year. It could take us three or four years, but no longer than five. Own IP offerings, as I talked a lot about, it does increase the differentiation.
It makes us more attractive, not just to customers, of course, to our clients, because that's the important to deliver value for our clients, but it also drives the right people to us who want to have a bigger impact. If you deliver a service to one client and can't package that and provide that to someone else, your impact is probably less. In this culture, you have an opportunity to take your expertise and have a bigger impact with that expertise, and that attracts people to us. It attracts acquisition candidates, future employees, and it attracts partners who want to work with us.
We, as a leadership team, have learned that we have to have the courage to do things slightly bigger from the beginning to reduce the time frames than we did in the past, where we maybe took three years to figure out if something is going to work or not. Now we do bigger investments to get the outcome faster, even if the outcome is that the idea didn't work. My final note is about the future. We feel we have proven to ourselves and to 25,000 customers so far that we have built a global scalable portfolio that differentiates us from our competitors in the marketplace. We have a strong team, a great team with a lot of industrial expertise. We have a large network that we built over all these years, lots of companies and people that collectively
In our industry, we do have practiced M&A integrations, processes, acquisitions over the years. Going forward, we are seeing both organic opportunities to grow customer acquisition in Europe and the Americas, and also further consolidation opportunities in our industry. We also really, really think that this is also a good time to continue to expand the value proposition, and we're looking for companies that are having IP to offer to the customers that we already serve. Those are kind of the two main opportunities that we'll be looking for from an M&A agenda. Of course, we have proven that we can drive profitable growth into history, and we will continue to do that in the future. Thank you so much for your attention, and now I'm going to hand over to my dear friend and colleague, Mr. Magnus Falkman, who heads up the PLM division. Magnus!
Thank you, Jens. Great job.
Thanks.
All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the time. I know I'm between you and a coffee break, so I'll do what I can to make this as engaging as possible. Also, great to have you all online. Thank you for joining. I'm Magnus Falkman. I'm the Division Leader for Addnode PLM. I'm also the CEO of TECHNIA. Going forward, I will refer to us as TECHNIA because we are basically running a single-brand operation. My ambition is for the next 25 minutes to give you an overview of our financial profile, the strategic partnership we have with Dassault Systèmes, the industries we serve, how we bring value to those clients we have around the world, and also what is the transformation we are currently undergoing and what will we do going forward. First, a few words about myself.
I've spent more than 20 years in TECHNIA across multiple roles and different geographies. I've been fortunate to be part of this journey, and for the last roughly five years, I've been leading this company. My focus is sustainable growth. It's also operational excellence, and for me, this means every day I need to constantly challenge my team and the customers to drive the necessary transformations. Now, let me give you an overview of TECHNIA. In 2024, we had roughly SEK 1.8 billion in net sales and an EBITDA of SEK 170 million. We are roughly 750 employees worldwide, with roughly + 200 out of this team based in India. We have a recurring revenue of a little bit less than 70%, and we are operational in a little bit more than 15 countries. We do this through four divisions, as we call them.
We are structured with full P&L responsibilities. It's the Nordic, the Benelux, what we call Eurocentral: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Slovak, U.K., and North America. Finally, for us, the rest of the world and global partnerships where we basically take our IP to the market in countries where we are not operational through other resellers. It's also worth mentioning that we support these four divisions by the strong team out of India, as well as our global team developing our own IP. Let's have a look at the pillars of our business and how we interact with our customers. Our why statement is helping our customers develop smarter products faster. For us, this means more efficient ways of developing future products. It's also more sustainable ways and creating more sustainable products.
Today, we help roughly 6,000 customers around the world innovate, develop, and manufacture with greater speed, better quality, and compliance to local and global regulations. We do this through three pillars. 60% of our revenue is based on Dassault Systèmes' offers. For us, this means design offers, namely CATIA and SOLIDWORKS, simulation-related offers with Simulia, and governance offers in the form of 3D experience. We are one of the largest partners to Dassault in the world. 30% of our business is services. What is it that we do? We are purely focusing on services around the Dassault Systèmes' offer, which makes us focused on this topic. We deliver training, business process re-engineering, integration, design support, as well as data loading, etc. Services are critical for us.
It's also how we create more value to our customers, making sure that what we deliver gets used and gets into providing value to the customer over the lifetime. The third pillar of what we do is own software. We have a portfolio of own IP that accelerates the deployment of the Dassault software. It goes from products with standardized integrations to UI and user adoption softwares, and finally, different types of compliance softwares for 3D models primarily. For us, TECHNIA software drives stickiness. It also increases our recurring revenue, and it improves our margin mix, basically. The effect of this is a high recurring revenue base with long-time customer relationships. Let me show you a little bit more about what are our industries and what type of offers and problems is it that we help these industries with. If we start from the left, transportation and mobility.
For us, this is automotive, rail, heavy vehicles, but also racing. We are serving many of the teams on the F1 grid, as well as race teams in the U.S. in NASCAR. What has been the trend here? I think for us in automotive, we have seen some global headwinds, I would say. Our both OEMs and suppliers are challenged from electrification, software design vehicles, but also, of course, supply chains and tariffs. I think for us, we see a huge potential and a need for especially the European industry to continue to digitalize. However, looking forward, I think the other industries will grow more for us and become more important than automotive. If we look at industrial equipment, the second core industry for us, it's been an important industry for us all the time.
Here, we see a continued need, and here we help our customers develop more efficiently with better quality. Aerospace and defense has been a core industry for us that has developed into more of a growth industry based on natural development over the last couple of years. We are helping streamline operations, improving efficiency, taking new defense systems to the market for our customers. We see this accelerated demand in this industry in all our regions, basically. Life science has been a growth industry for us for several years as well. It's typically driven by complexity and regulations and also a need to improve efficiency within this industry. We will continue to grow with this potential. Finally, infrastructure, energy, and materials. For us, we have seen some subsegments going down and subsegments in this industry going up.
I think what's very exciting now is, for example, all the initiatives around new nuclear where we are helping customers in most of our regions, actually expanding here, benefiting from the technology we deliver. All right, to exemplify this a little bit, I'd like to show you a quick video.
For today's industrial companies, product complexity is growing, while development cycles still need to shrink. Traditional product lifecycle management systems are often fragmented, leading to duplication, delays, and missed opportunities. Instead, enter the 3DEXPERIENCE platform from Dassault Systèmes, accelerated by AI and connected digital twins, implemented and refined by TECHNIA. It's a unified, cloud-based product lifecycle management solution that connects every part of the product lifecycle, from concept, design, and simulation to manufacturing and beyond. With 3DEXPERIENCE, customers gain shorter time to market, improved product quality, enhanced team collaboration across departments and geographies, better compliance and information security, and with fewer silos, innovation flows faster. 3DEXPERIENCE empowers teams to build better products with less friction, more insight, and full control of data across the product journey.
Right, so just to summarize, what was that? That was a quick overview of how an implementation can look at as a customer, where you see a platform for collaboration, you see 3D geometry being developed, you see a product being configured to a customer need, you also see simulation of how this will behave, and then finally, simulation of the actual manufacturing of this product, powered by some of the TECHNIA components. There will be opportunities to get more details if you're curious at the stand in the break. I want to exemplify this by three customer cases from different regions and also different industries and different sizes. If we start with Soria, it's a U.K.-based startup building electrical vertical takeoff and landing personal transportation plane, you could say. They came to us and they needed to rapidly design and verify designs for this new product.
We helped them deploy 3D EXPERIENCE cloud with design tools and simulation tools, plus with our processes. By this, they were able to drastically reduce the development cycle and improve the traceability. The second example here is an Austrian-based industrial scale-up called Automation Express. They came to us with a need to have a platform for design and also interacting with their customers, designing basically factories. We helped them with a design PLM-based platform where they now design, verify design, and also plan their manufacturing in collaboration with their customers, leading to better configuration control and seamless handover to manufacturing.
The third case here is more of an enterprise customer, a long-term customer of us, Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace, where we are currently working with them to design and develop the processes to accelerate the speed of creation of new offers to meet the demands from the customer base, which is really high, which is super exciting. I think what's common for these three cases is that it's similar technology, even if it's adapted to the different industries, helping these customers to develop with speed and quality and adapt the platforms for the future. I think we are really inspired by demanding customers that want to help their clients and we want to help our clients achieve breakthroughs. Let's then look a little bit at our prime partnership with Dassault Systèmes. Dassault Systèmes is the leading global leader in 3D design, engineering, simulation, and product lifecycle management.
I've mentioned that they have flagship brands such as CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, Simulia, 3D EXPERIENCE, but also Delmia. Today, we carry the majority of the big brands they have, and we focus on these five industries, even if Dassault Systèmes has a broader focus of up to 12 industries. I think their core value position is connecting real and virtual, and this is really interesting, and there is great potential here. I think they have a great technology where the different disciplines are connected in one platform. Now, with adding AI capabilities in this platform, the potential to accelerate our customers' journey and improve the speed to market is huge, and I'm very excited about this. Our partnership with Dassault Systèmes has lasted for more than 30 years. We are a go-to-market partner. We are an implementation partner. We are an education partner, and we are also an R&D partner.
What is the role in our transformation and our customers' transformation together with Dassault Systèmes? We have a great potential to guide our customers to benefit from all the new technology that is there, and there will be even more AI features coming both in our products and in Dassault Systèmes products. What brought us to this situation and how did this journey for TECHNIA start and what was it like? What happened? I think this story starts in 1994. There are two guys in this room that actually were part of the inception of that story. We have the Chairman back there, Staffan, and also one member of the Board, Jonas, who founded a company called TECHNIA in Sweden. During this early phase, TECHNIA expanded in the Nordics. Some of our own first IP was created, and the relationship with Matrix One, that later became Dassault Systèmes, was formed.
In 2004, there was a strategic and transformative shift where TECHNIA became part of Addnode Group. It was a catalyst for growth and expansion outside the Nordics. In the period that followed, TECHNIA entered the U.S., created our operations in India. We were really early there, creating the foundation for delivering projects at scale with a muscle with our great team in India. After that, a phase of expansion in Europe followed, where we had two transformational acquisitions. First, Transcat, which was basically almost 3x the size of TECHNIA at that time in 2015, putting us in the position of being the biggest partner also in Germany. Followed in 2017 by the acquisition of Intrinsys, putting us in the number one position in the U.K.
From basically 2019 and forward, we have consolidated a number of expert companies in the area of model-based systems engineering and simulation, broadening our expertise and making us well-positioned to be able to accelerate on the new combined offer from Dassault Systèmes. Today we are a global actor with really deep knowledge in core domains and with a global delivery capacity. What has this meant when it comes to numbers? Our growth rate has been roughly 10%. However, the last two years, we have seen a downward trend. This is partly driven by some of the headwinds in the industry, being very exposed to automotive. We have acted very diligently on this. In Q1, we communicated a transformation program, reducing costs and taking out some colleagues, creating a more streamlined organization. Following that, we are now working on three topics.
One is to streamline our offer, basically scaling down some parts in our offers that don't strategically work with what we do and don't contribute to the global ambition of TECHNIA. We are continuously improving the efficiency of the organization. It's something we will continue to do. Thirdly, we are focusing on reducing our OpEx, all in order to strengthen our margins. Let's have a look at the success factors taking us to where we are. The first one, market leadership, which I share this with Jens, actually. Our learning and ambition is very clear. When we are number one in a market, it's really a favorable position. We are that in many parts of our organization, and we have plans for the areas where we are not. It also guides us when it comes to where we are going next.
If we don't see a path to leadership in a market, we will not enter that market. The second success factor is culture is really a competitive advantage. We are a people company. It's our employees that meet our customers on a daily basis. We have to make sure that we have the right attitude and the right spirit in all parts of our organization. This is, of course, an ongoing task when it comes to our own existing teams. It's also really a key topic when we look at M&A situations. The third success factor is own IP. For us, own IP is more than technology. It's our identity. It provides opportunities for employees. It generates a uniqueness to us, and it also creates a stickiness in our customer situations. This is something we will, of course, continue focusing on. My third success factor is simplicity in global execution.
This is something we have been working on, but it's also something we honestly are working on. This is a never-ending story, but I have a lot of potential to continue to drive simplicity in how we operate. Let's have a look at the priorities going forward. I touched on that. For me, the key priority is to drive efficiency and profitability in the organization. We have taken action. We are continuing to do this, making sure that we can run with a higher profitability than today, and I'm convinced we can. The second thing is simplifying, strengthening our offer. Harmonize our global offer. We are selling more or less the same things in all markets in order to be more scalable and efficient. The third thing is to leverage our leadership position with Dassault . We have a really strong position.
My focus is to continue to do that, of course, but also expand further our services and own IP into our customer base. We are doing all of this to be ready to be agile and scalable to take potential next steps in our journey. I think by that, you all deserve a bit of a coffee break. There is an exhibition outside. There will be coffee after the break, where I really want you to be back here at 3:00 P.M. latest, preferably a couple of minutes before. That's a half an hour break. Mr. Wiekholm will take you through what's the course and ins and outs of the Process Management division.
Welcome back. Hope you all had a nice coffee break with some Swedish fika and perhaps had a chance to have a look at our software demos out there. For you following us online, hope at least you had a nice cup of coffee. Welcome back. It's time for the final division, the Process Management, le grand finale. Sometimes you save the most exciting and thrilling part for the end, right? I don't think the word thrilling is a better word. I can't give you a thrilling grand final, but I hope to give you a predictable grand final. My name is Andreas Wiekholm, and I've been with Addnode Group for 10 years now. I've been running the Process Management division the whole time. I have 25 years' experience from the IT sector. I've been working mostly on the supplier side with the public sector and the modernization and IT there.
Before Addnode, I was quite a long time at the Nordic IT Group and serial acquirer Visma, and ahead of that, in the beginning of my career, a long time ago, I worked at the Nordic IT giant Tieto. I'm born up in Luleå, but I moved now to Stockholm a long time ago. I lived in, actually in Lidingö for a long time. I consider myself as a city boy. Enough about me, let's talk about the division. Let's start with some basic facts. Last year, we ended our net sales at SEK 1.3 million. I'm the little guy compared to those giants over there. We own the majority of the IP in our products, and that actually helps us to keep up the profit margin to almost at a 20% level. We have two main offerings.
One is GIS-centric, more or less geographic IT, and the other is around case management, and I will come back to that. Almost all our customers are in the Scandinavian public sector. We do have a footprint in some private market segments as well, typically segments that remind you of the public sector: insurance companies, pharmacies, electric utilities. We like rules and regulations. The majority of our employees are based in Sweden and Norway, but we do have additional software centers in Lithuania, Serbia, and India. As you can see, we work with multiple brands and companies within our division. I know it might look a little bit fragmented at first glance, but don't worry. This structure actually helps us to keep focused on the decentralized governance model that we have. This is small and mid-sized companies.
The best thing about the decentralized model, you once said it, but I will say it again. I will probably repeat it one more before I leave the stage here. The best business decisions are taken by those who know the customers and employees best. The brands you see up here, they are very well known among the customers. We are careful when it comes to consolidations and mergers. Over the years, we have been able to establish lots of programs and initiatives where these companies actually cooperate. They can, they're not in nirvana, but I would say that they can combine the strength of being a small and mid-sized business with the benefits of belonging to a big, solid group. How can they all perform so predictably and stably then?
I think that the main answer to that question lies in the nature of the customer base and the smartness of our products. Let's start to take a look at the customer base. Public sector in Sweden and Norway. First of all, all Scandinavian countries have had high ambitions and budgets when it comes to IT modernization for a long time. This is a customer segment with money. It doesn't matter how the stock exchange develops. Selling and delivering to the public sector is a special sport. It's like cricket. The procurement processes are rigorous and complex. A single sales cycle can take years. If you want in, you have to be very patient. We have been here with our companies for 40 years. This is also a customer group that is very risk-aware. The fear of doing wrong or even doing something different is very high.
You don't want to be that guy that bought an unknown system that didn't work. You might end up in the local newspaper or on TV, Kalla Fakta. The contract lengths are normally eight years, sometimes even longer. Altogether, this creates high entry barriers for newcomers and a quite small fishpond of suppliers. For instance, can you guess how many competitors we are up against in an average public procurement? Anyone?
Ten. Six.
Ten, six. Very good. I would say definitely less than three. Says something about the customer group, right? If we move on to the smartness of our products, the very best thing, our customers can't live without them. We deliver truly mission-critical solutions. You can't run a modern city today if you don't know where the pipes on the ground are, and you need a system for that. You need a building permit solution. Otherwise, my hometown Lidingö would be overflooded by installations that are totally crazy: buildings, castles, paddle tennis courts. More importantly, the customer, the city hall, would be breaking the national law. Of course, there are other options that the customer could switch to.
Even though there are other options, limited by others, the cost of switching only a standardized building permit solution might be SEK 5 Million- SEK 10 million just for a normal Swedish municipality, and that's quite a lot for them. If you run a central government agency or perhaps, and you want to switch your own case management solution, you better have a thick wallet. Why is that? The businesses and the cases at central government agencies are very unique and special. Even though we provide a platform for case management, you always have to tailor-make it. That is actually why you see quite a lot of services in our division as well. Remember, as Johan Andersson said before, the services we provide are connected to software and the software that we provide. We don't sell jobs. Developers
to the guy next door. This is services connected to our software. More importantly, a lot of this software services is actually of recurring nature. Customers commit to buy, for maintenance or development hours, a number of hours every year. It is of recurring nature. If you look, for instance, at what IDA Infront is delivering to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Naturvårdsverket, a customer that we have been working with for 15 years, we provide our case management platform, IPEX, and on top of that, we are building support for them to handle tens of thousands of different environmental cases every year, covering permits, supervision, taxes, grants, and all types of stuff. You can imagine, if you work with a central government agency for 15 years doing that, that solution will be very hard to replace.
More importantly, IDA Infront and IPEX are helping Naturvårdsverket to focus on the core business and spend less time on administration, protecting the Swedish environment and promoting sustainable development. If you then move from central government to local government, and we take a look at Zukigo, they have a product called GAIDA. Perhaps someone had a look at it outside, but this is a more standardized product designed to fit the needs of 290 Swedish municipalities. Instead of me talking further, let's have a look at a short video.
Swedish municipalities face a delicate balance. On one hand, supporting development that contributes to economic and social growth. On the other, securing cost control and safeguarding shared resources for future generations. GAIDA by Zukigo is built to support this balance. As a powerful process management and geographic information system based on the world-leading ArcGIS platform, GAIDA helps municipalities structure, refine, and manage the information that drives better decisions. With GAIDA, local governments gain smarter planning and forecasting, higher data quality and traceability, access to the right information when it matters, and better budgeting and cost control. The result is more transparent administration, improved citizen services, and more sustainable urban development. GAIDA supports the core mission of municipalities, now and for the future.
Looking great, right? Soon to be installed at all Swedish municipalities. At least I hope so. If you leave the products and customers for a while and focus on what Addnode Group can deliver to the entrepreneurs selling their companies to us, I like to see this as a smorgasbord, a set of initiatives and programs that could help the companies becoming the supplier number one and, of course, also an attractive workplace. Johan already mentioned our innovation program. I think that is one way, of course, to foster entrepreneurship within our group. Lots of engagement from all our employees. We also arrange annual leadership programs. That sounds quite easy, but you know, if you are a single standalone company with 100 or 200 employees, it's hard to do that every year.
We have a group-wide trainee program, executive trainee program, that helps our companies attract the very best top talents from top schools like the Royal Institute of Technology or Stockholm School of Economics. Another highly appreciated initiative is the Addnode Women, a strong network promoting skills development, collaboration, and networking among women in tech. We arrange hackathons where our software developers from across the globe engage together with customers and solve almost impossible challenges. On the security side, we have a comprehensive cybersecurity program, ensuring that our companies take the necessary actions to avoid leaks and hacks. Do you want to know exactly what we do? That's a secret I can tell you. Perhaps the most appreciated of all is all the professional networks that we have in the group. Role-based professional networks are key.
If you are a CTO today, you can discuss with other CTOs on how to use modern AI tools to speed up the R&D development. If you are a sales guy, you could collaborate to do cross-sales with your other colleagues in the group. If you work as an HR Director, perhaps you need to share some best practices with others on how to implement the tricky working-from-home policy. Having those kinds of role-based networks, I would say that it's really key for success in our fast-moving business climate that we have today. How has the division developed over the years? You can take a look at it from many perspectives. One way is to look at the acquisitions we made, most of them bolt-on acquisitions, strengthening our value proposition and customer offering.
But we also made a couple of strategic partnerships along the road, like the one that we have with Esri today. Esri is the global frontrunner when it comes to GIS technology, quite similar to Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes, but within the GIS community. Today, we are the only one providing Esri technology to Swedish municipalities. That is a business setup we would like to expand further, perhaps to other market segments or other customer segments. We have also done a couple of mergers and consolidations, even though we are careful with that. The company Zukigo that I mentioned before is actually built on eight different companies. If you take a look at the development from a more financial perspective, it looks like this. Quite solid development almost every year. The CAGR, 14%.
I thought that was quite good, at least until this morning, where we released, or at least someone raised the bar a little bit. If you haven't read the press release, you can see that as a teaser for Kristina's presentation later on. I think it's a quite solid development. Some of you might wonder what happened in 2020. You could see that our profit margin took a jump up. Part of it was due to two SaaS-driven acquisitions, Netpublicator and Intraphone. The major part was actually a COVID effect. During COVID, the customers kept on buying our solutions, but at the same time, we managed to cut costs in travel and office space. Savings we'll be able to maintain even after the pandemic. Someone clever here, or many people clever here, might think, is it possible to take another jump in the future, perhaps with the help of AI?
I think that's a good question for the Q&A later on. If you reflect a bit on the key success factors that have helped us during this development over the years, also things that we should bear in mind walking further, I would definitely highlight the decentralized governance model. Here it comes again. I love to repeat it. The best business decisions are taken by those who know our customers and employees best. That's key in Addnode DNA. Big fish in a small lake. What's that all about? It's about being supplier number one. If you are the supplier number one, if you are the thought leader within a product segment or market segment, you have a unique possibility to deliver value because the customers really listen to you, and you have also the possibility to get paid in a good way. Definitely.
Our focus on the public sector has also been core for our success. Yes, we work with other segments, as you heard, but understanding the public sector and the customers so deeply as we do or have done, learned to do over the years, that has enabled us to build the solutions they simply cannot live without. Finally, culture and winning team. This is the tricky thing that's sometimes hard to put words on, but I would say that we have managed to create a culture where you mix psychological safety with a healthy dose of competitiveness. This mix has been crucial for us to create success and constantly take market share from competitors. What lies ahead of us? We will definitely continue to grow in Sweden and Norway, both organically and through acquisitions. There's still a lot to do here.
We do see a compelling potential outside the Nordics as well. We know that our know-how and solutions are relevant for customers in the U.S., in the U.K., in Germany. Will we go with everything everywhere? No, of course not. If we go at a geographical expansion, we will for sure support that with acquisitions. Let me put it this way. I would be very disappointed if we, three years from now, haven't put down the Process Management flag in a country outside the Nordics. Anything else that you should watch out for on the road ahead? You heard about AI. AI is making everyone more efficient. It's probably wrote 90% of my speech. Perhaps the most affected ones in our organizations are the software developers. We are already accelerating our software development through the help of modern AI agents. Who's the winner of this?
Better margin in my decisions, in my division? Yeah, maybe. You want to hope for that. I hope for that. A couple of more guys in the room hope for that. Maybe it will only be the customer getting more for less money. Or maybe we could both be winners. Maybe the competitive landscape will shift if some players are betting using AI than others. One thing is for sure. AI is here. That's obvious. It will be crucial for success in the future. I'm confident that we will handle this new spice with steady hands, just as we had handled other emerging trends the last 40 years, like the internet, like the cell phone. If we do that and continue to deliver mission-critical solutions to the public sector, I'm 100% sure that we'll still be around 40 years from now. Hopefully, a lot bigger.
Nothing dramatic, nothing thrilling in this final presentation, just solid and predictable business. Thank you for listening. With those words, I would like to hand over. This is the moment you all have been waiting for, right? I will hand over to the queen with the keys to our treasure chest. Please give a warm hand for our CFO, Kristina Mackintosh.
Thank you, Andreas. Thank you all for listening in, both the audience here in the room and also you, the audience online. I'm going to take you through the financial targets that we just published this morning. I would just like to ask you, who read the press release? That's 99%. That's great. Now you know what you have in front of you. I'm Kristina Elfström Mackintosh. I've been with Addnode Group for almost two years now. Not as long as my colleagues, but I'm really committed, as committed as they are, in the future of Addnode Group. Historically, Addnode has presented three financial targets. Now we're going to add the new and fourth target. I'm going to start by going through them one by one. I'm going to start with the growth target and explain the reason for the new definition of the EBITDA growth.
Addnode has always been focusing on profitable growth. This is also forming a basis for the change in the growth target. We were going from net sales 10% to a target of 15% EBITDA growth, focusing on profitability, efficiencies within the business. I'm now going to take you through the 10 years' performance in the past in this matrix, also providing guidance for the future. Over the past decade, Addnode has focused on profitable growth. We have increased EBITDA from around SEK 170 million in 2015, reaching over SEK 900 million in 2025. An impressive CAGR of 19%. You heard my colleagues talking about how that is possible, how we are growing. Recurring revenue is really an important part of that, growing the business, being predictable, profit being predictable, and stable going forward.
Also, our focus on our own products, new technology, and services also form an important part in the growth journey. As we know, acquisitions, really important to Addnode. During this time, we have acquired more than 40 strategic and bolt-on acquisitions that have added to the growth in EBITDA. You can see the temporary drop in 2023. I think we have gone through that, but I'm just going to reiterate what Jens and my colleagues have said before. That's a part when we had a temporary drop in customer demands, mainly in the construction industry. We also saw longer sales cycles in 2023 and also the shift to lesser three-year contracts in 2023, together also with a restructuring measure in one of our divisions. Addnode will continue to drive EBITDA growth. We will do that with a balanced mix of organic growth as well as strategic acquisitions.
We remain confident and excited about the road ahead to deliver EBITDA growth of 15%. By that, I'm going to take you through the next financial target, which is the margin target. Addnode's EBITDA margin has shown an upward trend over the past decade. It has been driven by organic efficiencies, also releasing new and advanced technology-only products and services, and also expanding margins and making good and profitable acquisitions. Additionally, the shift in the new transaction model has supported a higher margin level, aligning well with our strategic focus on profitability. We have adjusted our margin target from 10% to 17% EBITDA margin. As Johan informed before, the margin has been adjusted in the past to make the years before 2024 alike the new transaction model. We have adjusted the figures.
For your benefit, we have posted a pro forma that you can have a look at at our website. I will now share the historical performance of the EBITDA margin with you. Since 2015, we have steadily improved our EBITDA margin from around 8% - 9% to now 15% -1 6% in the last years, which has been a great improvement over time. Gross margin is strong and remains strong, which is a good foundation for the EBITDA margin. As you heard from my colleagues, the expansion and development of our own technology and products and services has also found a key role in driving the margins up. Addnode has, even though challenges in the past, like the pandemic, the increasing interest rates, the geopolitical unrest, and financial instability, made progress, which is quite impressive.
We heard a lot of my colleagues talking about the decentralized organization, where decisions are made closer to the customers and the markets. That has really proven very successful. Actions can be made quickly, driving the margins up. We are continuing making acquisitions with high margin, bringing us to new geographies, new markets, and new customers. We are continuing to making acquisitions in that respect. We are combining the multiple geographies and customer markets and segments, bringing the concentration risks down, but also allowing for opportunities, growing the business in new areas. With this development, we are excited and confident to continue to drive the EBITDA margin and improve the margin to 17%. With these two targets in mind, I'm going to take you now moving over to the dividend. The third in financial targets is the dividend.
Addnode's capital allocation strategy is focused on long-term value creation and disciplined financial management. Our capital allocation approach includes three components. Firstly, investing in our core operations, focusing on high-return projects to drive organic growth. Secondly, strengthening our positions with acquisitions that would strengthen our market position, our customer capabilities, improving our long-term growth. Thirdly, the dividend to our shareholders. The capital approach remains valid, and we are maintaining our dividend policy, underscoring our commitment to consistent and predictable shareholders' returns. Strong cash generation is an important part, and we are driving cash flows and cash generation hard in Addnode. I will take you through the cash generation for the past 10 years. Our business model is characterized by an asset-light model with moderate working capital and R&D requirements, strong cash generation supported by upfront payments.
The graph that you're seeing behind me shows the cash conversion for the past 10 years. The cash conversion is calculated as the free cash flow in relation to EBITDA. You can see the pink trend line, which shows an average cash conversion of 17%. You can also see in 2023, something happened. I think Jens explained that quite well, that before that, when we sold the three-year contracts, we would get the revenue for the three years at the time we sold the contract. We were also getting payments for all the three years. That changed in 2023. Now, when we sell the three-year contracts, we will still get the revenue for the full three years, but we will only get 1/3 of the payment upfront. There we have a temporary working capital drag that you can see in this graph.
I would just like to point out we're not losing any money. It's just this shift that makes that we have a temporary working capital drag. We're working hard with a lot of actions in bringing this level up. We know that it's going to come up because that's the business that we're working in. Cash flow is important to our dividend allocation and dividend payout. I'm now going to go through the dividend for the past 10 years and also the EPS development. We can see a solid EPS growth over the last decade. From 2015 to 2024, EPS has grown by around 280%. Approximately SEK 960 million has been distributed to our shareholders. We're confident in our long-term prospects and continue with our current dividend policy, 30% - 50% of our net profit being distributed to our shareholders.
Addnode benefits from long-term shareholders who remain strongly committed and provide consistent support for our strategic initiatives, our operational execution, and long-term success. I will now comment on our fourth and new financial target, which is the net debt to EBITDA. We never had a target in this area, but we get a lot of inquiries about our leverage and our leverage position and our leverage target. Addnode is introducing that for the first time. With this new target, we are reinforcing our commitment to maintaining a strong balance sheet and strong capital structure that supports both organic and strategic acquisition. The new target is a net debt to EBITDA of no more than 2.5x . This metric provides transparency into our leverage position. It also ensures that we are disciplined when it comes to balancing growth initiatives with financial stability.
I will now go through the performance of this leverage metric for the past 10 years. Addnode is operating with a resilient balance sheet with a low debt and leverage level. You can see the leverage has been around 1.1x - 1.3x over the past three years. You can also note in this graph that in 2017, we made a lot of acquisitions. The leverage came up to 2.0x. Addnode then in 2018 made a new share issue, and the leverage was brought down. We are planning to maintain a controlled net debt position going forward, but we will also balance the level with strategic opportunities, which may increase the leverage from the current levels. We are also evaluating our performance in relation to capital employed, although we're not proposing a new financial target.
However, I'm going to take you through the last 10 years' performance of the return on capital employed. Addnode is a true compounder with consistent and increasing return on capital employed. In 2015, return on capital employed amounted to 13.5% and has been reaching 18% - 19% over the past three to four years, except in 2023 and when the profit drops that we talked about just recently. We are currently focusing on improving return on capital employed by increasing our operating margin and profitability. We're also optimizing our OpEx and working capital, trying to reduce tied-up capital. We also manage our CapEx and reinvest profits to high-return projects. As we heard, from time to time, we are restructuring our operations that are not performing according to plan. This has really been successful and based on a proven track record. I will now finalize our financial targets.
I believe that repetition is the mother of knowledge. I'm going to repeat the targets. We are now leaving our old targets, and we are working with our new targets: 15% EBITDA growth, 7%-10% EBITDA margin, 30%-50% dividend, and a net debt/EBITDA of no more than 2.5x . When you combine Addnode's track record with a clear path going forward, it shows how consistent we have delivered margins and strong returns and how confident we are in our financial strengths and our ability to reach these new targets. Thank you very much for listening. I will now hand over to Johan.
Thank you, Kristina. We're going to high five us. Thank you. Before we move on to Q&A, I just want to take the opportunity to say a few words. Firstly, thank the fantastic management team who's been able to present today. Thank you. I think it's so much easier if you have a great management team because you know if you're by yourself, you're going to do everything by yourself. Nothing gets done. First of all, I'm very proud to have been able to introduce the management team to all of you today and also introduce the strategy and the things that we would like to do as moving forward. I want to take the opportunity just to take three minutes just to summarize. Going back, you have already seen this today. Why invest in Addnode Group? We are offering digital solutions.
We have a proven strategy that has shown that we can give the return, and we hope that's going to happen going forward as well. Mission-critical software, that's what we provide for our customers. We do believe that we have a high customer retention and switching cost. That gives us predictability in what we are doing. We can see that we have growing end-user markets. We have a proven business model, recurring revenue, and high cash flow, even though we have a temporary drag on the cash flow. We do like the combination of organic growth and M&A, and we do try to work consistently on improving the margins 1% by year. That's a good way of doing things. We do like to have a balanced and disciplined way of looking at our financials, like Kristina told you. We do like the diversification and the resilience in the business.
We're going to continue to have a focus on strong cash flow, a resilient balance sheet, and be very effective on our capital allocation as we move forward. What can I promise you and what can you expect? More of the same and a little bit of more. That's probably what we can hopefully do. That means that we're going to continue to do bolt-on acquisitions. We're going to do what we call bigger acquisitions, some of them that we have discussed today. We are not going to make bets. We're not that kind of company. As we grow, we can handle bigger and bigger acquisitions. I think that's the way to look at it. We're probably going to enter some new geographies. We have discussed that a little bit today.
We're active in 20 countries today on five continents, probably some of the neighboring countries to where we are today. That's probably what to expect. We're going to look at new niches with market growth, but they're probably going to be quite close to where we are because remember, we do believe that we need to be able to create value in what we're doing. In order to do that, we need to support the companies and our customers. That means that we'll probably be adding nodes to the existing nodes. That's probably what to expect from us.
We're going to continue to invest in own IP, as we said, both sort of pure IP offering, but also the IP that gives value to the platforms that we represent because both are important, both to create higher margins, but also because it's a glue that connects people and it also makes us more attractive to the entrepreneurs that we want to bring into our organization. Of course, we're going to work with price increases. At least I know that my Board of Directors is going to ask me about it. Johan, what about the price increases? Are we doing enough? Could we do more? It's a constant work, and we need to balance that with our customers as well. We're going to work on internal efficiency. There's always more to do, and we had some presentation discussion around that today. It's a constant work.
Hopefully, these things are going to bring us to an EBITDA growth of 15%. Remember, 15% year -over -year, that means that in five years, we're going to double our business. That's what the target says. On that journey, we probably need to increase our margins as well. As Kristina said, we are trailing around 15%. We're saying at least we're going to go on that journey up to 17% to make that happen. That's what we're having now. With that, I want to open up for Q&A and questions. With that, we're going to do like this. You hear the audience. You're going to be able to ask questions directly here. We're going to hand out mics. When you get the mic, please put it close to your ear so you will hear you.
For those of you who are listening, you've hopefully been already putting out questions in the webcast. There's an ask a question function. If you haven't done that, you can still do that. With that, I would like to open up for Q&A. Do we have any questions from the audience to start with? Please state your name as well, also that for the rest of the group.
Yes, thank you very much. Daniel Torsson from ABG. Two questions. One for Jens. How large share of your partner software in the revenues do you think are less connected to own software and services that could be kind of at risk when Autodesk is getting a bit closer to customers, sending invoices directly? The second one to Group Management and also Head of M&A. When you allocate capital between the three divisions, you see obviously different scenarios, different M&A alternatives with different returns. Which one or which segment do you find the most accretive potentials in today?
Jens, you want to start with the question?
I can try. Can you hear me? Yeah.
Yep.
Question one then, to repeat, is kind of where do we see the risks in the 45% of the revenues that we have from partner revenues? I would say that's a very tricky question to answer in numbers, to be honest. The majority of our, if I answer it in a different way, that if we use the 80/20 rule and think about how much of the revenues from the customers generate about 80% of our total gross profit, that doesn't buy any services or any own IP, it's very close to zero. I think we have a good protection if that's what you asked for. I don't know if that answered your question correctly, but we feel pretty confident that we have strong and good customer relationships, and we don't really, how do you say, fear what you might fear with that question at the moment. I don't know if that answers it, but that's the best answer I can give, I think.
If I understand it correctly, next question, in the different sort of divisions, different regions of the ESL, where do we think we can get the most value out of investing in new M&A?
OK.
Yeah. The correct answer is probably in all areas, but maybe you want to, within the different divisions, elaborate what are we looking for, what type of acquisition that probably can give some value to that question.
Should I answer first and then pass over to the guys? Yeah. All right. I try to articulate that we're looking still to grow the customer base in Europe and across America, North America, and Latin America. We're also looking more strongly now than maybe in the history to expand the value proposition with companies who have built technology that we think could add value for the customer base we already have. In our case, we will both continue to expand the customer base because we already believe we have an IP that has value. We will also look even more in the future than we have in the past on companies that can provide technology to the clients we already have to provide more value. Handing over to you.
If I continue, the position is similar for TECHNIA as it is for Symetri, meaning can we strengthen our positions in existing markets by either acquiring customer bases, managing those bases with the same team you already have, or grab positions that complement our position in an existing market? If there are, so to speak, bolt-on markets that make logical sense where we can get clear number one position based on M&A, that is also considered. Thirdly, priority number one for me is can we find good candidates with own IP that we can upsell on our existing base? That's similar, yes.
Yeah. From the Process Management perspective, I would say the bolt-on acquisitions in Sweden and Norway strengthening our value proposition within GIS and case management is still 80% of our M&A pipeline. We do have strength in our efforts, and we have more people now looking for acquisitions even outside the Nordics. We are looking in areas we are particularly strong in within Sweden and areas that we know are relevant for other countries as well: urban planning, urban development, building permits, and also case management in certain areas. The bolt-on acquisitions in Scandinavia are still the most part of the pipeline.
To add to that question, you said basically all the Heads of Divisions have, there are a lot of things that we can invest in. They get the opportunity to talk with Elisabeth on M&A, getting the help of how do we make a case out of it, how do we value that. Basically, Elisabeth and the Division Manager present it to me. I ask a lot of questions, and then we bring it to the Board of Directors. On that journey, the person who is closest to the acquisition candidate probably wants to pay a little bit more because he sees more value. They get to the Head of M&A, who probably wants to pay a little bit less. It goes to me, I want to pay a little bit less. Then they go to the Board of Directors and the Chairman, they want to pay even less. That way, we have sort of a journey to walk through on that. That does a little bit of evaluation.
Better start high.
We sit through that.
You're exposing your secrets.
Yeah. Should we take one question from the audience on the webcast as well? I think this is for you, Magnus. It's from Jay Blishower from Griffin Securities. A question relating to Dassault. Dassault has identified infrastructure and cities, AEC, as a strategic market, but it's not now a significant business for them. How do you foresee this changing or not?
I want to be a bit careful with talking about my biggest partner. We have been following this initiative for the last five years. It's very exciting. Right now, we are not putting effort into this industry because our judgment is that the current offer is not mature enough for the channel. Let's see what happens.
It's an opportunity still.
It's an opportunity, but it's not one we currently are investing in.
Thank you, Magnus. Any more questions from the audience? Hello.
Hello? Yeah. Thank you for taking my question.
My name is Daniel Jubar from Handelsbanken. Thanks for great presentations. I will start with a question to Kristina, and that is on the net debt/EBITDA gearing target below 2.5. Will this be a strict target, or will you temporarily allow overshoots for a year or two?
Let me put it this way, that we have published this target, 2.5. If there are acquisitions that require a temporary change in that level, we will go back to the board and revisit the number. It's important, of course, if we have strategic targets that are making up our progress going forward, we can't deny that to happen. There will be discussions with the management and the board.
OK, thanks. Another question to all Division Heads, really. Cybersecurity is obviously super important. We've seen Milieu Data, Data Tech Service, et cetera, getting hacked. Can you just comment on how you secure this? Perhaps mostly in Process Management, we have a lot of decentralized businesses. Thanks.
Yeah. We have a comprehensive program on group level where all companies within the group engage. There's a set of activities that is sort of minimum required. Of course, we have some companies that have raised the bar even further, dependent on what customers they're working with. I would say, of course, you have to be humble when it comes to cybersecurity. We have been under attack the last 10 years a couple of times. That's no secret. That's how it is in the market right now. I would say that I sleep a lot better today compared to how I slept like three or four years ago. I would say this is an area where we have developed incredibly strongly over the last two or three years. You're never sure, right? It looks a lot better today.
I share that with you for us. I think there is a very big awareness in the entire company about the importance of this and how the risk associated with making the wrong decisions, so to speak. We are now 27,000 certified in all countries. I think that process has helped us a bit. It's not a guarantee, but yeah.
I agree, of course, with the gentleman before. From our side, in addition to that, because we have the you don't want to speak too much about how exactly we do this, of course, but we do have some common systems and processes in certain areas and the common, call it, governance of day-to-day activities, monitoring of things. We've also hired a CISO from the fintech industry that brings expertise in our company that we think helps us globally. We're trying to take measures and have been taking a lot of measures to date. Pass it back to you if you want to say something more.
Yeah, Andreas wants to add something.
I can also add, I think one important change today is that if you were attacked like six, seven years ago, the market was quite forgiving. Today, you're actually in a blame position. If you're attacked and you leak, then you're in trouble. This is even more important now compared to five, 10 years ago.
Compared to five, 10 years, we're investing a lot more money and efforts.
Yeah.
We do have two people working centrally full-time with cybersecurity. We didn't have that five years ago. We're definitely investing more in hardware and digital solutions that are deployed across the group to protect us as well. We're definitely investing more than we did five years ago. Does that mean that we are bulletproof? No one is. We are trying as best as we can to make sure that we are getting in a better position as we go along. It has to do with both protecting ourselves being on the wall, but also with the software that we provide, making sure that it by itself is getting better from a cybersecurity perspective.
It's also a huge part today of the due diligence process. Ten years ago, it was like 10 questions. Today, it's hundreds. Elisabeth, how many is it?
It's a lot. We also have an external partner always helping out in the due diligence with the cybersecurity. I will also add that cybersecurity is one of very few things that are mandatory for the targets that we acquire. After the acquisitions, they go directly in our cybersecurity program. Yeah.
Good. Right. Thank you. Good question. Any more questions from the audience here in the room?
I want to start with the new margin target. It's above recent years, also if looking at the pro forma figures. Could you perhaps elaborate on the way to 17% and also the timeline?
I think probably for me to start on that. We are now roughly on a trailing around 15%. At the same time, we're saying we're going to double our business in five years. You need to see those two in combination, I think. If during that journey, we can double our business and at the same time move our underlying profit margin from 15% - 17%, and if we are in a position to do 1% each year, do that every year, I think that's probably to be expected. That's probably at least what the Board of Directors would expect us to deliver as well going forward. It's going to be the usual things. Work with operational efficiency, probably look at our offering. Let's see if we can work with our acquisitions even better and just keep on grinding and doing it. There's no magic in it. It's just keep on doing it, but a little bit better every year.
One question for Andreas. You talked about going outside of the Nordics. As far as I understand, at least for case management, it's usually challenging to sell a Swedish solution in Denmark, for example. What synergies can you bring into Europe if you're going there?
Yeah, I think one important thing is what you mentioned. Some kind of case management or GIS-related solutions are highly regulated to national or local laws, but not everything. If you look for the system for sewers and that stuff, it's actually quite similar between the countries. That is definitely something that we take into account when we're looking into new geographies. What kind of solutions do we have that are state-of-the-art, perhaps where Sweden is at a high digitalization level compared to other countries, and see if that could be possible to, at least, spread our know-how and parts of the solution so we have something to bring to the table. We will never greenfield that. That's not the plan. We will probably buy a, I don't know, a provider of building permits in another country, and we will support that company with the know-how and solutions we have. That would be the classic Addnode way, I would say. We will never go to an unknown geography for us. I would probably piggyback on those guys and look where they have the flag put down in the market.
Thanks.
Thank you. Let's see if we have some more questions in the room.
Thank you. Jarl Marek from Lannebo. A question on the EBITDA growth target. It's EBITDA growth, absolute terms, not per share, as I understand it. Historically, you haven't used a lot of shares to acquire companies, but just to confirm, is that still the case, or do you want to be able to use more shares to do acquisitions in the future?
Yeah, we have done in a few instances when we acquired companies. I think it was 2020 and now also recently in 2024 when we acquired Jernus. The employees had a large stake in that company that we acquired. We made a new share issue to replace those shares with a dilution of less than 1.5%.
Just for CIS to add to that, the plan is not to print new shares to make sure that we reach our financial goals. We would be, as part of the discussion today, that we believe that we will be able to generate the cash flow. We have some of our banks here as well to make sure that we are in a good position to have a discussion with them rather to finance our growth. That's sort of the primary target.
OK, thank you.
There were some more questions there.
Yeah, Erik Larsson, SEB. I have a couple of questions on competition. First off, how do you see the competitive landscape in terms of consolidation? How do you stand versus competition when it comes to combining your own software and partner software?
Should we probably do that one by one? Competition?
Yeah. OK. In the world where we operate in, you could say for Symetri in the Design Management division, there are three other companies out there in the world who are aiming at building a global operation similar to our aim, you could say. We feel today that we are in a position of strength when it comes to value proposition and what we can bring to bear for our clients. We feel we have a portfolio that is proven and that truly can compete with anyone else out there in the marketplace. That's our position here and now.
There is also, of course, a consolidation and a couple of global players in the Dassault Systèmes ecosystem. My quite firm belief and understanding is that we have the strongest portfolio of own IP among those competitors. I'm quite pleased with that situation.
Anything you want to add, Andreas?
If you look at the competition, we definitely work as a market leader where we send in our offerings. We would never be outside the first three positions. I cry every time we are number two. I would say that within GIS and case management in Sweden, we are the number one. We're still an outsider in Norway, but we're getting there.
Thanks.
Probably one from the digital audience then. Someone is asking, why are you not allocating a greater share of your cash flow towards reinvesting in the business? It's from Oscar Niklasson, sorry, from Askenit. He's basically asking, why don't we allocate more money to doing more acquisitions rather than shifting capital through dividends? I think probably for me to give some answer for that. I think this is an ask from our Board of Directors directly and also reflecting the shareholder structure where we're coming from. We have been a company that's been paying a dividend, and that's been part of the DNA. Having said that, you can see Kristina talked about our target for that. Historically, it was 50%.
A couple of years ago, the Board of Directors changed it to 30% or 50% of our EPS to be shipped out to our shareholders, meaning that we probably have been going down from 50% to 30%. We can see a shift in that. I still expect us to be a company that pays dividends going forward. I think that's the expectations to set. Any more questions from the room? I have one in the back there.
Yeah, thanks. Mikael Lassin, DNB Carnegie. I'm just curious about the targets here, if you can sort of talk to us about the situation on the EBIT margins, EBITDA margins for each segment, and specifically for the PLM segment. Where do you see margins trending ahead? Is it sort of 9% where you could be, given the product offering and the revenue streams, or?
I know the answer, but I'm going to let Magnus bring it.
I think we are targeting to get back to last year's level to start with. My ambition is, and I think we can, the target is to improve by a percent a year. I think we should be able to do more than what you're indicating.
OK, sounds promising. A follow-up. I was also curious about how we should think about the cohort mix in terms of contract lengths, one-year versus three-year contracts. Where is the baseline? How can we sort of think about this the coming five years? Should we expect significant changes from here that three-year contracts continue to increase, or is this the level where you sort of are comfortable and think that this is a good baseline to compare to?
Good question. Thank you for that, Mika. Do you want to start, Jens, thinking about sort of development?
Thank you.
Really?
Yeah.
I will help you.
I think, yes, it's a good level to compare with. What I was trying to say is that the seasonality, the annual seasonality, if you look backwards, you could see that 2020-2023 was a bit lower, whilst 2021, 2022, and 2024, 2025 was a bit higher. I think that seasonality, as I try to indicate by saying that we are expecting low-digit organic growth next year, and we were expecting 2027, 2028 to be supported by these three-year renewal cycles of contracts. That's maybe the best guidance I could give before you give us something smarter, more clear than that.
No, but what we're basically saying is that when, like Jens said, next year, we're seeing a lower portion of contracts is going to be renewed to the totality. That's going to sort of, that means that the good thing is that we are not losing those contracts. It's just when they begin to renew. That means that what we mean by 2027, 2028 will be supported by that. Also, looking at, like you said, in the history, we talked a lot about it. Why did we see the dropdown in 2023? That means that the three-year contract that was renewed in 2023 are the ones that's going to be renewed in 2026. That means that it's going to be flat now. We're not saying that it's not, we're not, please don't interpret that it's going to be as bad as it was in 2023.
I just want to say that we have a seasonality that we need to be aware of. You're true that we probably have a job to be even clearer on this going forward. 2026, we will not be supported by a sort of a good renewal year that will come in 2027 and 2028. Maybe one question from the digital world. We have one question here just to sum it up. I think it's from Jay here at Griffin Security, saying that he was at the Autodesk University last week, and they presented a lot of good news with regards to their platform and et cetera, and spoke of enabling more options. Are there any sort of changes or takeaways that you can see there that might be of importance for you guys?
I think this year was a build-on, of course, of last year, which was a build on the year before. What Autodesk announced is a couple of great things. We think about the former value proposition. In the history and up until today, most of the design software solutions are desktop-based applications. Autodesk has step by step started to build up something more cloud-based to do the design processes as well. They invested in a company called Space Maker, a company in Norway two to three years ago. Space Maker is the name of the company, and that became the basis of what now is Forma. They announced some further, call it, capabilities of detailed design in that framework, which is just another step ahead of the Forma framework.
We are very, very much looking forward to expanding the capabilities of this Forma cloud-based, cloud-native platform because it makes it almost easier for us to build value-adding capabilities on top of that platform. We're also, of course, very happy with all the announcements made last week about the AI capabilities that are going to come to all the users of Autodesk Technologies, which we see great benefits of and opportunities around. That is kind of the big thing we saw from last week, I think, or heard that we're happy with. The Forma platform is going to be growing in the future and drive businesses for us and value creation for our customers.
Thank you, Jens. Any more questions from the audience? One more over here.
Yes, Daniel Torsson from ABG. Looking at your partner software revenues in Design Management and PLM, how has the margin profile of those developed over the last 5 to 10 years, and what do you model into the next 3 to 5 years?
It's easy to say. If you want to start, or I know the answer, but you can start.
Yeah. The thing is that what happens is when you're working with partners, it's slowly diminishing. I think that's the way to describe the margins. That's sort of the name of the game. That also benefits us being a little bit bigger, a little bit slower. That means that the guys who are able to do this on a bigger scale are still going to be able to sort of generate more money out or still have. If any, the margins are sort of slowly diminishing on that part of the offering.
Maybe diminishing is a strong word you want, but the...
No, no, if any, it's not growing. That's why. Having said that, I think that's a very good thing, what you're saying, is that bringing new products out to the market usually has a higher margin, and sort of the older products have a lower margin. That's the name of the game. There are other products that are increasing.
The recurring business and the cloud-based business have similar margins as we had 10 years ago. Some of the older parts of the portfolio where we have lost some margin, there are incentives to sell new stuff.
Diminishing is a strong word. Not growing is probably better.
Yeah, thank you.
Another question in the back.
Hi, Tobias from Team Founder. A question on AI, of course. We. Are some AI game changers kind of broadly for each of the divisions? If that's the case, if there are any game changers, can it be done in-house or does it require M&A, or would it be kind of left to the third parties, the Autodesk or the Dassault Systèmes, to implement instead?
Thank you. I think Andreas, it's probably you to start. You're a conversation for the Q&A.
Yeah. If you look at game changers, I would start looking at our software development and AI agents. I think today, even though we are accelerating the R&D already today, we are at sort of a generous phase because I speak to lots of CTOs or IT managers with budget responsibility. Both in-house at Addnode, but also at customers or peers. So far, I haven't heard anyone telling me, it's so great with AI, now I need a smaller budget. Everyone still asks for the same budget or even more. I would also like an additional budget to elaborate a bit with AI. That's the situation today. Even though we are getting more efficient, everybody's asking for more money. I think that that's okay. That's the generous phase.
What we will see in next year's coming is actually the companies and customers getting more efficient. I'm quite sure of that. That's a game changer in my division. Half of the employees are software developers. Will it be like that in three years from now? No. How exactly will it be? Hard to tell. I would say if you're looking for game changers, look at AI agents speeding up R&D and software development.
If I try to follow up on the question about whether we are going to do it internally with our own R&D teams, if I got your question right, or through M&A or through our partners, I think the answer is all of the above. For example, some of you who were out here in the exhibition saw one of the areas of investment we made in a startup company called Pimify. Thank you, Alexander, for being here. To exemplify, that is one of the opportunities that we see with AI. There are lots of companies, of course, starting up to try to build interesting use cases. Some of them are still to be proven. Some of them are proven. We are there and we're building our network.
Secondly, partnering with these large companies who are investing much more than we have the opportunity to do short term is helping us as well to learn and guide a lot of things. Internally, we're doing both R&D measurements, like creating assistance inside all of our products to make it easier to ask queries or prompt things and get the design done for you, for example. We're also working quite a lot with the go-to-market engine because that's where we invest most of our resources in sales, marketing, customer success, etc. We are investing quite a lot and seeing quite a lot of good return on investments already. I think all of the three is the answer and which one is going to be the best, maybe come back in three years and we'll talk about it. Thank you. Minus, anything to add?
I think I'm not sure I have so much to add. I think it's the same. I mean, we have to follow the path of our strategic partners. They are providing a lot of new capabilities. We haven't fully seen it take off in all the dimensions with our customers, which is a great potential. Transforming our customers, adapting these technologies. Of course, we are putting a different type of gen AI capabilities in our own IP. Anders and my team have been showing this, like your teams here, which is also exciting, where we typically can be a bit faster moving maybe than the big editors, bringing quicker wins to our customers. For us internally, I think, you know, three years from now, there is a lot of potential for improving efficiency internally with go-to-market, with operations, with software development, and also how we help our customers. Exciting times.
Yeah.
It's an important question. There's a lot of opportunities and a lot of things to happen. Once a year, we gather the top hundred management in Addnode Group in the different teams. Next week, we're going to meet and we're going to spend 24 hours just discussing AI. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? What can we do? It's definitely a topic. I guess last year, we did an internal survey so that we had at least 50 identifiable AI products running in the different companies and the different divisions. If we would do the survey today, it will not be a less number. Like Andreas said, we haven't seen the effect yet. We're still trying to figure out how to move these things forward.
I can add to you. I think that one thing I bring with me today is that we have to be better at communicating with the customers what we're doing within AI, because otherwise it's easy that you let someone other in into the market, an AI specialist. I think that we have to be more transparent with all the initiatives we're doing because we're doing a lot, but we haven't perhaps been superb at communicating to the market. That's also important yet.
Yet.
Right.
Great. Thank you. Great questions. Any more questions? We're available. I think it's time to close the Q&A and give a big thank you for all the viewers out there on the webcast and you've been here all day. Hope you had your value worth this afternoon. It was great to see you. It was very great to introduce the management team as well. Hopefully, we'll see each other in less than five years because that means that we have double the best business. We're looking forward to that. Thank you.
Thank you.