Presenting BIMobject's Group Q4 and Year-End Report. My name is Lisa Norlander, I'm the Director of Revenue Operations at BIMobject, and I'll be hosting this call today. We will soon hear from our panelists that will present the report itself, and as always at the end of this presentation we'll have a short Q&A session. So you can send us your question to the email address you see here, that is ir@bimobject.com, and we will answer as many of these as we can at the end of the call. I am joined here today by two panelists. We have Martin Lindh, who is the CEO of BIMobject, and then we have Per Göransson, who's our Director of Finance. Welcome, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now over to you, Martin, for the presentation.
Yes, thank you, Lisa. As always, we will start with a short summary of what we do at BIMobject, and we're in the BIM industry, the Building Information Modeling. For those of you who are listening to this call who don't know what it is, it is the standard ways of working digitally in the construction industry. When we work digitally, we use BIM throughout the construction process. It's part of the planning phase, the design phase, the construction phase, and also the operation and maintenance phase of building projects, and it's used by all stakeholders in the industry. Why is it so powerful technology and the way that it's working digitally in our industry is that everything is broken down on product-level objects. Those objects is what we host at bimobject.com, and such objects consist of primarily two things.
One is the geometry, so like a visual representation of that product, and the second is information about that object. That could be in its simplest form an ID, but also contains product properties like dimensions and so forth and functionalities and what have you, but also sustainability data that we're working with in our Prodikt platform, prodikt.com. BIMobject as a group, we are working in a global scale. We have over four million accumulated registered users over the years, located in over 100 countries around the world. We have around 400,000 monthly active users on our platforms, and we're used by most of the top architects firms in the world, but also to a very large extent many small architectural firms. We have currently three platforms where bimobject.com is within BIM and also Polantis is a French site. And then also we have the sustainability and Prodikt platform, prodikt.com.
On our platforms, we have over 120,000 product pages, or I should say product family pages, because every page also contains families and you can have several products in each family. We also cover products from over 2,000 building product brands. Now let's do some financial highlight of the fourth quarter of this year. On the financial side, we had a continuous growth in ARR of 4.5%, or as we typically measure it adjusted for currency rates of 6%. Turnover growth was 19% while EBITDA was SEK -5.8 million. We had a continuous positive development of our monthly downloading users at a good rate of 26% versus last year. We also maintained strong flexibility through a strong balance sheet, and we have over SEK 200 million in liquid assets at our disposal. Events that were happening through this quarter were the following. We had a couple of press releases.
I think the most important here to mention is the consolidation of Carbonzero, which we'll go through in more details later on this presentation. But there were also two new distributors signed on to the Prodikt platform in the Swedish market. Other events that were happening in the quarter was a soft launch of our desktop application for our user community, and we have test-launched that now in two markets. It's the first pilot version of that application. Secondly, as a consequence of the consolidation with Carbonzero and the platform Prodikt, we have integration work now internally and that we have been focusing quite a lot on lately. To give a perspective of the macro and industry situation that we see it from our perspective in this company, we typically present this slide in every quarterly presentation, and this is the latest update thereof.
From the macro and industry perspective, we see the following. We see that inflation is coming down in most markets that we operate in. There hasn't been some volatility in the beginning of 2024, but it seems like it's going in the right direction at least. The same with interest rates. There's some uncertainty there. We can see that also in the beginning of 2024, even if the interest rates are coming down, the longer rates have increased recently, indicating some more uncertainty on that level. The activity in the building sector varies between markets and has done so throughout 2023 and also in 2024 and beginning of this year. Currently, we see the European markets relatively stable, although France is going down a little bit in the activity there.
The U.S., that has been a little bit of a disappointment for us during 2023, seems to recover, and we are with interest following the development in that market. In general, though, in most markets we can see a lower level of new builds, even if there are still renovations done there. And this is, of course, an important trend for us to follow, and there might be also some lag even if the economy is recovering at a good rate at the moment. A good thing for us is that we are in digitalization, and that is progressing in the industry. It is a strong trend that will be there for many years ahead, as well as the environmental trend. To have sustainable products in the industry becomes even more important going forward as more and more legislation is being introduced, especially across the European region.
So what's the implications for us as a company? Well, firstly, it takes longer time for us to close new deals, but we're working on that quite hard during the year. We can also now see that the U.S. market is improving. It is a little bit easier to close deals there at the moment, which is quite good to see. We have also noticed throughout the year that our existing companies generally have decided to stay on. Of course, we are affected by churn , but we have still had a good performance also in Q4, even if it is a little bit volatile between quarters and markets. We also see a stable demand of our services, and services we mean by companies or like the clients we have, the building product manufacturers who want to digitize their products into BIMobjects. So we have a stable demand of that.
But we also know that a lot of our manufacturer base are dependent on higher prices to sustain their revenues. As new builds go down, quantities go down and therefore also puts a little bit more pressure for them going forward. On our platform, we also see a good growth in monthly downloading users, and that is very comforting to see that there is still a lot of activity in the market. And unlike the historic crisis, the environmental trend is unstoppable, and this is a big theme for the industry also going forward. Progression despite headwinds, I think, is a good summary of the fourth quarter.
In the quarter, we had progression in most of the SaaS metrics, and of course we really hope to grow even faster and better, but still I think it's very good for us as a company to progress each and every quarter, and that is a good indicator that we're doing the right things in the right direction. Most challenging of the quarter was the currency rates that changed quite a lot during the fourth quarter and therefore also affected our ARR and our financials negatively. The profitability level, I would say, has come more to a normalized level where we are right now given the currency rates and how they have shifted. Also that we have captured most of the savings from the cost program.
Also due to the fact that we had a very high seasonal EBITDA in Q3 due to the vacation effect that happens at that third quarter. Acquisition of Carbonzero, that of course impacts our liquid assets, but still I think we're in a very strong and good position to be working from also going forward. Cash runway is now at eight years, and that is also a very comfortable rate to be at. When it comes to Carbonzero, we had continuous growth on this platform and in this company, and we had also continuous flow of manufacturers signing in as well as property owners to that platform. The EPD production were a little bit low in Q3, but that recovered to a more normalized level in Q4. So we have a strong production pipeline that we're working with at the moment.
We also signed two new frame agreements with distributors, which is an important step for getting an even stronger grip in the Swedish market. And in the market in Sweden where this platform is currently operating, we are getting a stronger, stronger position in that market, and it's very good to see how that is being established in a strong way. Then in the end of the quarter, we finalized from our side the acquisition of Carbonzero by acquiring the last 49% of the company. And I want to mention a couple of things around that also here in this quarterly presentation. First of all, for us, it is a very compatible company and platform for us to have in our group. Both companies have very similar business models.
We have the same type of offerings to the different stakeholders in the market, and we also have very, to a large extent, overlapping client bases, especially on the building product manufacturer side. Secondly, we are complementing each other quite well. From the BIMobject side, we have a very stable international organization and infrastructure that will help Carbonzero in their expansion journey, and also we have quite good funding capabilities at BIMobject that is more difficult for a company trying to grow from its own position. Secondly, we see from the BIMobject side that performance and sustainability is not only related to sustainability, but also deeply tied to accurate product information, and that we are, of course, working with quite a lot at BIMobject, and therefore we also see a very nice complementary aspect of that in Carbonzero and the Prodikt platform.
We also see this consolidation as enabling a faster and better synergy capture between the companies. It is mainly around three areas. It's around the technical solutions that we develop together. It is how we can expand Prodikt as a platform and also how we can integrate between the companies. And fourth, and I think that is maybe the most important thing here, is that this was a joint decision between the founders of Carbonzero and us at BIMobject, and we have a very aligned path forward on how we're going to work together. And I warmly welcome both Rasmus and Daniel to the group as well as the team in Carbonzero, and it will be a great and fun journey that we will be doing together. Quite important to note here is also that this will also have some implications for us as a company.
We will be focusing quite a lot on integration, and that Prodikt will probably be running throughout 2024, so we will report back on that in further quarterly presentations that we will hold to you on how we're progressing on that and what will happen with us as a group. Per, over to you on the more financial side.
Thank you, Martin. If we move on here, in the first graph we visualize how the recurring revenue base in our platform business develops over time in constant currencies. As you can see, overall stable through a relatively tough market. The mid graph shows the recognized revenue as in the income statement. It is by type, and the light green shows our services business. It is noticeable we lost a bit of momentum versus Q3.
That is, as Martin already said, partly due to the strengthened SEK and partly due to shortages in the services production capacity. But from a broader perspective, the fourth quarter still cements 2023 as a significant step in the right direction. Looking at the development of our costs, there is first and foremost the clear summer vacation effect in personnel costs quarter over quarter. Otherwise, we have quite stabilized and a well-controlled cost base as of today. And here we can see the income statement with a year-over-year comparison. It is overall the improvement in EBITDA that stands out the most, and that improvement comes from both the mix of decreased cost base at the same time as we continue to grow revenue. EBITDA at SEK -5.8 million in the quarter and SEK 20.7 million for the full year.
Still not profitable, and that is to a large extent due to new initiatives in Carbonzero. For the personnel costs specifically, we're almost the same number of FTEs as a year ago overall. The slight increase versus last year comes from inflation and currency effects. And the financial net, you can note, is very close to zero in the quarter. Underlying, there is interest income from liquid assets but offset by negative currency conversion in the quarter as the SEK strengthened a lot at year-end. And bottom row, there is a result attributable to the minority, and that is up until the full acquisition date. There will be no minority going forward. Then we have a slide on the cash flow as well.
Despite a tough environment also for our customers, our negative operating cash flow significantly improved in 2023 to less than a quarter of the comparison year. If we include the change in intangible assets, which is basically the own work capitalized, operating cash flow is close to our EBITDA as it also should be over time. For the acquisition of Carbonzero shares, we had a good mix of purchase price components. You can see the direct cash component here of SEK -8 million. Besides that, we paid SEK 7 million through a new share issue and another SEK 5 million as future payments in debt. For the investing activities, cash flows should be overall seen together with the change in current investments, which is primarily our corporate bonds and interest funds.
Thank you for that, Per. Now some concluding remarks for the whole year of 2023.
First of all, let's summarize the macro and industry situation, and that can be summed up as headwinds throughout the year. It's been a tough year for the building sector due to all the different macro changes that are happening. But also, we can also see a lot of interesting development within the sustainability area of this industry providing very interesting opportunities ahead. For us as a company, we've had throughout the year a very dedicated focus and also good progress in developing our revitalization strategy that we launched in the end of 2022. That has meant that we have been able to improve performance despite these industry headwinds, and you can also see performance in some of the key metrics here to the right where we have had quite good progress in these metrics.
We reached the first profitable quarter of this company's history in the third quarter of the year, and we have also deployed a team during this time that is focusing on use and monetization. The pilot was launched, or like a pilot version of this application was launched in this quarter we're reporting on, and we will throughout 2024 be working on adding additional features to this application. We've also in this year gained an industry-leading position within sustainability with Carbonzero and their platform prodikt.com, and they're currently in the Swedish market and have been connecting now with a quite fair share of the stakeholders in that market. Finally, we've also consolidated with Carbonzero at the end of the year.
Looking ahead in 2024, we will, of course, as a company continue to focus on cost prudency, but I think most importantly is that we also will have an increased focus on maintaining and accelerating our growth as we believe this is key to drive shareholder value in the best way possible. Thank you for that, and now let's do some Q&A.
Yes, let's do that. So we had a few questions coming in here to the email address that you see on the screen, and we'll try to answer them now. And if we don't have time to answer all of them or if your question is not answered, you can still reach us on this email address after the podcast. So the first question we have here then, can you share where you are on your strategic journey and how to handle the market uncertainty ahead?
Thank you for that question. As you can imagine, after all the events that have occurred during the last years, I mean, it's very difficult to predict where the market is going. This is also why we continuously share our best understanding of what is happening and how we notice market changes happening over time as part of these presentations. I think this is an environment that we just need to learn to live with, and what you can do in such situations is to prepare for it as much as possible. I think this is exactly what we have been doing quite well now during 2023. Basically, what we did was, first of all, we lowered the overall cost base and also as an ambition also to reach a lower burn rate of the company.
Secondly, we made sure to hold and to maintain and build an agile and competent workforce and strengthen our processes and internal capabilities to have a better and stronger organization, basically. And thirdly is that we started to develop mid- to long-term growth initiatives. This is to secure our future ahead. And now, after this first year of deploying the strategy, it has allowed us as a company not only to improve our profitability but also made us start to invest in our future growth in an early stage. So with that, I would say that we are quite well prepared to deal with most scenarios of how the market develops ahead and even to come out of such a situation as a winner in the market.
But I think in addition, though, it should be said that there's one part of the market where there's little uncertainty in, and that is the sustainability area. And there we think quite differently in that one. Yeah.
Thank you, Martin. So we had a couple of questions centered on monetization of the users of BIMobject. So if I take one of them here and read. So we have two years ago, it was announced that BIMobject would develop user services that could be charged for. And now, after two years, the Q4 report states that during Q4, a pilot version of the desktop app was launched into test markets. So we have a plan here to add more features to create enough stickiness to start generating ARR from users.
In the Q3 presentation, it was stated in plain text that several user services would be launched in 2024. Does that still apply?
Thank you for that question. Let me first start with that it's important to mention that we at BIMobject as a group have different strategies for use and monetization, and that we currently within the group have a close to SEK 0.8 million in ARR that is related to projects that are done within the user community that we serve, and we are continuously growing this volume.
But coming back to the question and also to clarify a little bit, it was in Q4 2022 which we communicated our strategy to the market in which we included a dedicated effort to work with use and monetization, and which was related to a tool that could be put in the hands of the wider audience of BIMobject. And there we have around 400,000 monthly active users. About a half year later after that, in mid-2023, we had a team ready to start the development, and in the end of that same year, we launched this first version of the tool that we now have real users working with in two test markets. The tool in itself is quite simple in this first version, and it's not more functionalities included than what we basically have on the website of bimobject.com.
Even if it is a simple version, it serves many purposes. First of all, it includes the basic functionalities that any application have, like installment, update capabilities, and also submitting back quite important feedback metrics on user behaviors. It also connects to Revit, which is the main design tool the vast majority of our users are working with. Secondly, it provides a good foundation to which additional and more value-adding services can be added to. It is our ambition here to build and add new modules, one after another, to continuously monitor user behavior in order to understand when it would be valuable enough to the market to start monetizing on it.
I think important here to understand is that this tool we're building, it is competing with other existing platforms that started up to five-seven years ago and thus having a head start to us. Even if we believe that we are able to build a tool that is quite capable and even perhaps in the long run more capable than these other solutions, we are still a bit behind the others, which set some moderately high requirements of where we need to be before users will be willing to pay for such a solution. To get back to the question of when and to which extent we are currently working on launching updates for this tool, that would depend on the size and the scope of each module, of course.
But if we don't come across any unexpected difficulties, it is our ambition to start releasing these updates during the course of the year. And at the same time, we will then evaluate how the client adoption develops so we can determine when the right place will be for us to start monetizing on it. And perhaps one module will be enough, and perhaps there needs to be several in combination to reach the critical point where we will start with this. But important here for us is that we bring something to the market that the market really, really likes so that we will scale sufficiently in the long term.
Thank you, Martin. And moving on to another topic, we have a question here. So what is the reason why the financial net is so weak in Q4 despite cash and short-term investments of SEK 200 million?
Yeah, I think I touched a bit on it during the presentation, and it is underlying not especially weak, I would say. The underlying return in the quarter was SEK 2.6 million, and there are two things offsetting that return. First, we have a negative currency revaluation of financial items of SEK 1.5 million, and that is primarily a group internal loan in foreign currency, which we more or less get that value back within group consolidation as translation difference in equity. Then there is another SEK 1.1 million, which is an unrealized market value in interest funds. Booked value equals acquisition value, and then there is an additional unrealized value of SEK 1.1 million.
Thank you, Per. Next question. The report states that the cash flow related to the acquisition of Carbon zero is SEK 8 million. Explain it in more detail how it came about.
Yes, the acquisition price for the outstanding shares was about SEK 20 million, and that is structured over various components where the direct cash component was SEK 8 million as seen in the cash flow. SEK 7 million was paid through a new share issue, and then we have another SEK 5 million as future payments within debts.
Thank you. Do you foresee the deficit will reduce in Carbonzero this year?
I can take that. Thank you, and this is also a good question. I think this year is a little bit different from BIMobject because BIMobject as a company is quite established. We're working a little bit more with market uncertainties, and so that is in sort of like one bucket.
In the other bucket, we have Carbonzero, which is a growth company, quite strong traction in the Swedish market, getting well established there, and at some point also getting ready to go to other markets. Also Carbonzero working also in a part of the industry where there are legislations coming in and therefore also a more secure market and a secure movement towards growth. Of course, I think this platform, they will increase their monetization more and more. They have a good start. Then, of course, we will also need to invest in it. Even if we're going to stay prudent with cost as a company in total, we still don't want to hamper their growth by such a strategy. They need to catch the opportunities that are out there here and now.
So we will, of course, make sure that they can grow as a platform. And then to the extent which they will outgrow the investment or we need to invest until the growth will catch up, that depends a little bit on how fast the platform will be able to increase the track of their monetization. But so it's a little bit hard to say, but I think what we can communicate is that we see a little bit differently on how we treat this platform than BIMobject as a total.
Thank you, Martin. Now we have one more question on the Carbonzero acquisition. So BIMobject acquired the rest of the shares in Carbonzero at the end of December. Does this mean that the accrued loss of approximately SEK 6 million for the minority shares during Q1 to Q4 affects Q4?
That is, if the purchase of the minority share had been made in January, would the results have been about SEK 6 million better?
No, it would not. There's no such effect in the income statement. The result attributable to minority, that affects the minority part within equity, and that is up until acquisition date. Then when we pay a purchase price for the remaining shares, that is transaction within equity between shareholders.
Thank you for that, Per. And I believe that was the last of the questions that I had in the inbox for now. So you can still reach us there if you have more questions or so. So ir@bimobject.com. And with that said, I think we will end this presentation today. So thank you, Martin and Per, both, and thank you to everyone who's been listening in. And we will see you next time.