Hello, everyone, and welcome to this webinar. It's a sunny Friday afternoon in Malmö, and we are ready to present our Q4 and end-of-year presentation to you. On this call today, we have two of our usual panelists remote, on the road, actually. Today we will have a pre-recorded presentation of the actual report, and we will follow that by a live Q&A session. As usual, you can send your questions to us at the email you see here on the screen, ir@bimobject.com, and we will pick up as many of them as we can at the end of the presentation. Before we start, I'm going to present to you the people speaking on the call today. My name is Lisa, and I'm hosting the call for you. I'm also going to be joined by Martin Lindh, who's the CEO of BIMobject Group.
We're going to be joined by Johan Dyrssen, who's the Product Manager for the BIMobject Design App. And we have Per Göransson, who's the CFO of BIMobject Group. But without further ado, let's get started with the presentation part. So, we move on to the recorded presentation, and we see you again for the live Q&A part. So, your questions again, you can send them to ir@bimobject.com.
Welcome, everybody, to today's Q4 presentation for 2024. It is the year-end summary as well that we are going to do in this presentation. My name is Martin Lindh, and I am the CEO of BIMobject Group. Let's start with the quarterly business update. The quarter of Q4 went in pretty much the same pace as we have been running in the rest of the year. We had a continuous growth in the ARR despite the challenging market environment. We also had a good growth in net sales, along with a fairly streamlined cost phase from a historic perspective. We saw some nice increase in the growth rate of our monthly downloading users. Furthermore, we are still in a strong cash position also after the end of this quarter, just above SEK 200 million in liquid assets.
In the quarter, we also had a couple of events that we shared with the market. There was first a strategic partnership with a company called gridBPM in the U.S. and also connecting to a CMS provider called Avail, which is, you can say, the second largest company in the U.S. market providing BIM files and project support to the project side in the U.S. market. That is important for us to connect to, and we'd provide better intel for building product manufacturers operating in that market. Just after the quarter, we actually had quite some press releases. First of all, we had a new user record, 5 million, which we informed the market about. We also then started to launch some products and new platforms.
Bim.com is one of them, EandoX, but also the design application, which we announced today, which is an upgrade of our previous BIM application. We are also pre-launching this new version to this market. This is also why we have invited Johan, who will talk a little bit more about this application later on. In the quarter, obviously, quite a lot of focus was around all of these product launches, but also the continuation of scaling up our offering in the Swedish and Nordic markets, which has been a bit of a testing ground for us throughout the year. Also, on testing some of these products, we are working with one of those being a product database that we are piloting. Let's move on, and we will take a look at the quarter-to-quarter performance.
As you can see here, net sales continuing in a healthy direction and mainly driven by the ARR increase that we had in the quarter. Secondly, we have had an increased spend level in the quarter. You can see here a little bit in the EBITDA, but Per will later on go more into detail to what this is all about and how we invest in future growth. Finally, we are still in a good cash position with cash runway plus five years. With this, let's look a little bit on the market side, because we have been in a quite tough market environment and still are.
I think we have come, hopefully, you never know, given all the different events around the world, but hopefully we've come a little bit in, at least in a turning point where you can see the market is changing a little bit of direction. When we look on the European markets, what we see there is that hopefully we have reached some type of bottom now, and that hopefully going forward, we will move into a low to moderate growth. Quite interestingly here is that the Nordics is a bit leading the way, which we, of course, are happy to see being a Swedish company. If we look at the U.S. market, that has served us well through the last year. That is expected to continue to grow in a healthy pace, although a bit lower than it has been.
This is basically also our experiences up until today that it has been moving on quite well, both in last year and the start of this year. All right. A bit additional mention to the Nordic market, and not so much the market in general, but I think much more of how it's going for us there. We listed this in the previous quarter as well, but I think it's an important follow-up to do also this quarter. Here we're testing the broader offering to a lot of different stakeholder groups, and we can see that we have good traction here also in Q4. Particularly, we saw a doubled inflow of ARR from new building product manufacturers. We can really also see that we get synergies between the different solution areas helping to drive clients to our platform. Yes.
With that, let's move in and look at 2024 in a more reflective manner to see what has happened and what it was all about. To start with this, I think we should, first of all, just take a brief view of the entry of the year. This was all about a revitalization strategy we had for the company that we've been working with since the end of 2022. That strategy was all about repositioning us as a company to create growth momentum and also to build some new initiatives. We have been preparing the company for quite some time. Also, given the low activity level we saw during 2024 in the construction sector, we were actually quite well prepared for it because we had really tried to trim a lot of things in the company.
What it started with was a very important event. That was that we had a full acquisition of Carbonz ero. That actually helped us to have a very clear focus of what we needed to do. That actually helped us to look at our company as one company. We started something that was called Project One, which was an internal project, but with the mindset of one platform, one company, one story, and really try to solve the problems of the industry. We had experienced from several years before where we had done a lot of research on what's needed and all the challenges that are coming to us as an industry that we need to help the industry with. Also, that led us also to be much better at focusing at the multi-product approach.
Really avoiding all parallel development and really focusing on different solutions that we found absolutely necessary to help for us to help the industry in this transition. Also, we started to deploy some of these products and go-to-market approaches in the Nordics. That is also why we have reported a little bit more on this region than the others. All in all, this transitioned us as a company to much more of a platform as a service solution where we have now started to talk about ecosystems of products and how it is all connected. In the beginning of 2025, or actually late 2024, we also started to have more discussions around investments into growth.
This is us moving into much more of a scale-up phase as a company, because now when we have tested these products in the Nordic market, we are now ready to move and scale it up to other places as well. That requires quite actually a lot of technical upgrades in different angles, but also, of course, the go-to-market model and the specialized salespeople and so forth that we will need to invest in. This also started off with the launch of bim.com and launch of EandoX. It's a complementary product and now the design application as well. More of that shortly.
If we first start to look at us as a group, a little bit what has happened is that we now, I mean, the sort of like the vision or the aim or mission we're following is being the world-leading platform as a service provider, making the building industry smarter, faster, and greener by connecting building projects with reliable product information. I know that's a lot of words, but it actually contains very important things. One thing here, as you can see to the right side, is that we are trying to help a lot of different groups of our industry that are like key stakeholders, you can say, that are involved in pretty much any building that you build. They need to collaborate and they need to share information in order to work effectively. This is what we're all about.
What makes us different then? There are some really important challenges of the building industry. It is one of the least digitalized industries in the world. BIM adoption is just about 50% basically. You also have all the climate challenges of 40% of climate impact basically comes from the construction industry. You have all the regulations that follow that the industry needs to comply to. You also have the problems around efficiency and the problems of inconsistent data and so forth. We really want to make sure that we help the industry to solve all these problems. This we do by connecting two sides of the industry. One of them is the whole product side. I mean, any building you build is the sum of all the products in it.
All the reports you do is the sum of those products, combined values, and all of that. It is really like a big Lego we're talking about here in one sense. Of course, it is very important that building product manufacturers get their data in the right format and that they share it to the rest of the industry. This is not only important for everything else, but also for the BPMs themselves, because they also need to comply to different regulations and so forth. By having good information on the products, they will help other people as well later on in the process. Here, of course, it is very important to find good, provide good solutions that help them with this product information and make sure that it's connected.
Secondly, it's the project side of the industry where architects and engineers create the intent of the building and constructors come and build it. You also have the property owners on this side that oversee the whole building process and take care of the building afterwards. Of course, on this side, they are also in quite large need of getting the right information and also to be compliant and all of those things for making sure that also you make the right product selections. That is, of course, super important, the whole product selection part, because this really defines the end product that you get with a building. This is what we really want to be able to help them with in the best way possible. In a test sense, what we do is that we connect these two sides.
This is what makes us unique. This has been one of the core challenges of the industry, why also you have all of these problems. If you're not good at product selection, you will have problems with climate impact. You will have problems with low efficiency and all of that. This is what we want to help the industry with. The way we want to do it is to connect it through one sort of like main platform, bim.com, which is basically how we approach the industry and how we connect and provide solutions to it. What we are working on quite a lot and quite intensely during 2024, but also going forward, is to connect everything to one ecosystem.
I hope that for many of you who have been following us for quite some time, it starts to be much clearer what we're doing and how it is all connected. We will come in and talk a little bit about some of these new products here to make sure that you get better insight in what they do and how they work to complement the ecosystem we're providing to the industry. Let's move on to the first product, EandoX. EandoX is a new software that we have spent quite some time and effort to develop. It's a novel software we have launched, which is an environmental product performance software. What does that mean? I think you can think about it as climate data is becoming more and more important and becoming a vital part of the product information of products.
What the EandoX does is a little bit being as an ERP in a company. It's a software that can make sure to measure and people can work with that type of product information that is connected to climate data. It can connect to different suppliers in a quite smart way to make sure that you get an accurate measurement of the CO2 impact and also for all other environmental aspects of that product. This is super important to have for reporting needs if it's EPDs or CBAM or CSRD, but also if you want to proactively work with the CO2 impact to get as low and as optimal values as possible. This is why this is such an important tool because it really helps our building product manufacturers to provide products with as good performance as possible.
This will be a good benefit to them, but also to the building projects as such. The tool is built in a way that the building product manufacturers themselves, with very limited assistance and primarily by themselves, can actually create some quite advanced measurements of their products. We see this as a non-expert tool that we are supplying the industry with. It's also an industry-agnostic tool, meaning that many of the things we develop are for the construction industry, but this particular tool is actually for any type of product-producing company so that they can measure the environmental impact of their products. Just to give you an example why this is important, this is one of the regulations that has been introduced a couple of years ago, but it's sort of like elevated for 2025.
This is CSRD, which is basically how larger companies in Europe are mandated to report on environmental data in their annual reports. This is also going to be audited by auditors. It's, of course, super important to get right. A lot of companies need to have already set or they also now must set targets that they need to fulfill. Also, they need to reduce their emissions over time. What EandoX does, which is very important here, is that it helps really to define what these values are and reduce them. When we talk about CSRD, basically what happens, we can see that in the bottom right corner here, is that you have a supply chain. If you produce a door, for instance, that door will be connected with, for instance, a CO2 value.
Now, when a company reports on that, they report through CSRD in three different buckets, you can say, scope one and scope two and scope three, where scope one and two is emissions related to the company itself, the first company here, the company factory. What they also need to do is to report on scope three, which means that this is the old emissions that is related from their suppliers of the different components of the door in this case. What's important here to understand is that more than 80% of product companies typically come from their suppliers. If you don't know what's from your suppliers, it's very hard to improve your metrics.
This is why this specific information is especially important and also to be able to capture it from the supply chain, because suddenly now this company factory can drive the benefit of what the suppliers do. Let's say, for instance, the supplier one installs solar panels and has much greener electricity to his production, then we can through this software help the company factory here to have a lower emission because the suppliers have lower emissions. Also, what if this company factory here shifts suppliers to another supplier with even lower emissions, they will also reduce their emissions and thereby reaching their targets and helping everything to move in the right direction. That's a little bit about the EandoX. I think we will come back to that and talk a little bit about that more in the incoming quarterly presentation.
Now let's move over to our application, which we presented earlier today. Today I have with me Johan Dyrssen, who's been with the company from the start and been involved in many of the different initiatives we have here in BIMobject. It was, I think, in the summer of 2023 when you started to join this new team and lead it on the product side to build an application for the designers that we have connected in our ecosystem. Johan, please present to us a little bit about this application.
Absolutely. Thank you, Martin. Yes. This new application, exactly what Martin said, we started developing some time ago. In the beginning, it was a very, of course, content-heavy application in that sense connected to BIMobject.
Today we have an app that we have been focusing on for the last six months, primarily to connect to the Prodikt platform as well, because we see by connecting BIMobject and Prodikt, we can actually offer a very good workflow for users designing buildings. Right now, especially if they're using Revit as their primary design software.
Which is, if you look at BIMobject, is really the main.
The main one our users use.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. This new application is a tool for architects and engineers to now, going forward, be able to actually do climate calculations and LCA, specifically an LCA calculation on their Revit model. Of course, if the user is already using Prodikt, it's nothing new for them. What this now offers up is the connection straight from the Revit model to the Prodikt platform. Historically, users have had to import data in other different ways there. Now we have actually connected the model straight to the platform. We are also utilizing that climate calculation through the app as well. When a user connects their model within the context of the app, they get a first insight into how the building is actually performing.
Now it becomes a real design tool for architects and engineers that empowers them and allows them to do more data-driven design. They can now see and make conscious decisions on the material choices they do and the product choices they do, basically.
I think it's pretty cool because when you started, I know we have been doing a lot of research looking at the needs of architects and engineers and really trying to build up different parts of this sort of gap that we see in the market that they need. You have built now a couple of different modules. We also saw an elevated interest in getting this LCA connection to this tool. It's pretty cool now how we connect and really try to leverage the strength of different technologies of this ecosystem we're building around bim.com. I mean, how was the sort of like the dialogue with the architects around it? I know that Prodikt in itself was a big improvement in just the way that you could automatically calculate all these values and all of that.
What sort of like led to the need of having it in this application?
First of all, the Prodikt concept of automatically mapping the objects you have in your model to real product data makes up for a really fast and really good workflow. The second part is when we are in dialogues with architects, for example, we see that now with a lot of the legislations coming into place in different countries, and especially here in the Nordics first, it's still unclear maybe for a lot of people how to work with product data on this level. The goal here is to make as easy as possible application to use for them, where the goal here is to you sit and work in Revit, you sit and model, you build up your geometry, and you design as intent there.
As soon as you connect the application here and actually are ready to do climate calculation, it should be super easy as a first step into this. I think I have a small demo with me here just to prove how easy it can be.
Yeah. I mean, really what it does, if I understand correctly, is that, I mean, the architect now becomes much more empowered. Instead of sending this to a consultant for several weeks and getting a result at the end of the project, they can now make smarter choices already from the start.
Exactly.
Do different directions if needed or test different materials or different designs and have a much stronger design early on that they can perfect in a smarter way.
Exactly. The idea here is that, I mean, firms that maybe do not have a sustainability expert in-house can work much, much more efficiently in this way, but also have more and better dialogues with their clients on what type of materials actually affect the building at the end.
Very good. All right. Normally, I guess this over the years took quite a long time if you look back in time. Prodikt has reduced it quite a lot. Now what are we seeing here in this short sequence here?
Exactly. In the first pictures, you saw a Revit model. There was a building in Revit. I opened the app and I connected to that Revit model. I then press sync. This is the result here. A very clean overview of the health of your project. This is mapping the different objects you have designed in your model. We are automatically connecting that to our product database and use that as climate calculation. It gives the user here an instant overview of the performance of the building and the material choices they've made, the product choices they have made. Now it all becomes visible. Now they can take action on that and do improvements.
It is not only one perimeter CO2. It is more, right? It is the full set, I guess, through the LCA or.
Yeah. We are focusing here first, the LCA for A1 to A3. We want to give the users a tool here that empowers them from the early design phase. Should I go with the concrete? Should I go with other types of materials in my building? What type of impact do the material choices I do have? It is, of course, with the connection to Prodikt, you can then take the project seamlessly without breaking the chain of data here and continue to work with it and connect the rest of the stages as well. I mean, Prodikt supports all the stages down to C& D level as well. At the end, you can also do a full climate declaration there.
Yeah. This is one step. Now you're testing it right now.
Exactly. Right now, we're giving access to existing customers here in Sweden. Of course, we're going to continue to iterate with more features, make it more powerful, but also taking it to more markets over the year.
Nice. Thank you so much, Johan.
Thank you.
Great to have you here. All right. With this, I think it's time to hand over to Per to go through the quarterly financials.
Thanks, Martin. I will start with a look at our revenue split by type, quarter- over- quarter. Following our ARR development, we recognize 7% growth in recurring platform revenue. All our underlying solutions and offerings are growing. In the Nordics, fully as a circular business model, as Martin described. In terms of revenue, best traction in the fourth quarter comes from our product solutions towards building product manufacturers. That is done in the Nordics through the circular business model, but also continued strong development in the U.S. market, while the rest of EMEA is still on a weaker note. Within platform business, on top of the recurring revenue, we add a not insignificant SEK 0.9 million from campaigns in the quarter. Services revenue performed in line with the previous quarters at SEK 7.5 million.
If we look at our cost development, we clearly see how we increased the investments in product development and also commercial solutions. Other external costs increased 29%. That is in all material aspects related to external consultants and primarily within the product development services. On the personnel cost side, it increased 8%. We will also continue an upward trend in 2025 as we hire and onboard new colleagues to the company. That is both within the commercial side as well as within the product development side. If we take a look at the full income statement, we see that we grow as a company on most accounts, while the result has also successfully improved. Despite no currency effects in the net sales, as it is based on average rates, we do have positive effects in other operating income coming from revaluation of balance sheet items at year-end.
Our financial net has also been strong throughout the year. That is due to good and stable yields from the short-term investments. In total, EBITDA landed at SEK -3.8 million equals -9% of net sales, and EBIT of SEK -6.3 million equals -15% of net sales. Again, in total, successfully improved. Full year, it's the company's best financial result so far. A quick look at our assets in the balance sheet. We end the year with SEK 203 million in short-term investments and cash equivalents. Short-term receivables are stable. Intangible assets increased somewhat due to the increased investments in product development. We have no loans to credit institutions. We are well funded for 2025.
Great. Thank you, Per, for those insights. Now let's share some concluding remarks of this presentation. We'll then move on to the Q&A session. First of all, we see a slow recovery that's expected to come in 2025, moving the market in a positive direction. Secondly, we've had a recent launch of bim.com and the related new products earlier mentioned in this presentation today. Finally, we're moving as a company into more of a scale-up phase as a company, where we're now trying to scale up the products we have been earlier launched in the Nordics markets to other markets and invest in their technology to expand further. With that, we thank you all for listening in and open up for the Q&A session.
Thank you. All right. We had a few questions coming into our email, ir@bimobject.com. I think not surprisingly, most questions today are centered around the bim.com design app and to an extent also Prodikt. We have some questions here around the user base, the number of downloads we had, how we plan to monetize on this feature. I think we will start with just opening up. Martin, maybe you can start elaborating a little bit on the design app and what the plans are.
Yes, sure. We'll be happy to. I think one thing here that might be good to mention as an introductory to this topic is that, of course, we through bim object.com have a lot of users connecting to our platforms. Of course, maybe there are some of these users that we can monetize on and so forth. I think it's very important to understand that there is a difference on a general user that downloads objects on BIMobject and what is potentially a paying user. That can be quite complex relationships. This we will try out. It's not necessarily a user that downloads objects that is the one that is buying certain applications and so forth at an architectural firm and all of that. I think it's important not to draw any too quick conclusions on what it could mean and how it will develop.
This we will learn as we work with these different solutions and we added modules and all of that. When it comes to these questions that we had, I think we are now entering very interesting trials in the Nordics. We have been transparent with that before that when we add modules, we're going to test them and see how we can monetize and where we will provide sufficient values and so forth. This is what we are now starting to engage in a little bit. We're not charging for this first test that we're doing because it's connected to the Prodikt users. Maybe Johan, you can also elaborate a little bit on where we are and how you think about these things.
Absolutely. Like you mentioned, right now we are focusing on the existing Prodikt users. With that, of course, when the time comes and we open up the app for new users, that being the BIMobject users or completely new users that have not been using the BIMobject platform or the Prodikt platform, for example, we want to explore these different options. Like you mentioned, I mean, we have developed this modular in that sense where we have this new LCA feature, for example, which is then very much aligned with how the Prodikt business model looks like. What we would like to try there is to connect it to that model in the first steps.
Of course, there are other modules in the app as well, like we have libraries and storage cap and these types of things that we would like to explore.
Great. Thank you.
Excellent. The app is, of course, closely related to Prodikt. We also got a question here about the next generation or the next iteration, maybe we should say, of the Prodikt platform. Do we have any update on that?
Yes. I think one way of describing this is that now when we are working with the concept of bim.com and we are connecting products and sharing features, all our products become much more closely connected in that sense. Especially in this case, also when it comes to the design application and Prodikt, you can see the design application also as an improvement of Prodikt because it's so closely connected. Also, when we have now engaged in these parallel streams of the different products, we're also working in a way where we're going to launch more smaller releases than going for big launches in that sense. I think that can be much more expected as for the different products going forward, we will launch different updates instead of one big launch of a product.
Yeah, I think that sort of describes on how we work both with Prodikt and other tools to build these upgrades.
Thank you, Martin. I think that concludes the questions around the app. We also had a question here about the development in the Nordic market. Both in the report and in the presentation, Martin, you mentioned here that the client inflow in the Nordics doubled compared to previous quarters. This is, of course, the region where we are piloting this broader circular offering. The question here is if we can provide some type of information on what type of clients these are and what part of the offering it is that they are buying at this point.
Yeah, thank you for that. That's a good question. I think this should be clarified a little bit because what I was referring to here was the building product manufacturers, which is the largest customer segment that we have in our company. This, of course, was therefore quite interesting to see that we had this development in this region where we're now combining all of these offerings.
Excellent. One final general question. What is our view on future expectation for the cost development and our expectation for how ARR is expected to grow?
Yep. Thank you for that one as well. I think the boring answer to this one here is that we do not provide forecasts. What we can do is to elaborate a little bit on the situation and what we are doing at the moment. You can say right now for us as a company, I mean, our main focus right now is to get our products ready. It comes with some basic functionality of them, but also to make them international scalable. As I mentioned earlier in this presentation, it can be sometimes a bit tricky and complex to get them ready. This is what we have a lot of focus on and therefore also have an increase in cost. When you do that, of course, that will affect the cost side. Hopefully also we will have good effects on the top line.
I mean, that's why we're doing it because we really believe in this. I think this is the thing about ARR. You never really know exactly how it will come, where it will come, and all of that. It depends a little bit on, of course, when products get ready, but also how we can build adoptions in different countries. We will test different markets and we will see where it will take on for which products and if we should go deeper into some markets or not. When we do that, we also need to invest then in sales capabilities of those markets to really get a strong foothold in this more comprehensive offering that we are in. Okay, what does that say? That says that we are very focused right now to get this right and pursue this.
Also, I mean, we as a company, we are very flexible and we are very conscious about the cost development and how to measure the effects and make sure that we put the resources in the right place. If we find something that works, we will put increased efforts into it. If it takes too long time or something like that, we will calibrate as we go. Therefore, it's a little bit uncertain, but this is how it is when you scale up companies like this. We are very focused and we are doing all we can to get this ready and scale it up.
Thank you. I think that concludes the question part. You can always reach us at this email address, ir@bimobject.com, if you have more questions. Other than that, thank you to Martin, Per, and Johan for joining on the call. Thank you to all who listen in. We will see you on the next call. Have a nice Friday. Thank you, everyone.