Warm welcome to BIMobject's quarterly call. I have to remind you that questions are to be submitted to ir@bimobject.com. Today with me, I have Martin Lindh , our CFO, and my name is Carl Silbersky, and we will walk you through this Q2 2022 financial report webcast. In independent surveys, we as a company are consistently ranked as the number one platform for architects. BIM is starting to move from an industry outlier to an industry standard. Digitalization and the digital building process is rising in popularity. That's why we foresee an ever-increasing need for manufacturers to expand their digital product reach as the construction industry is maturing and the need for digital building models with the correct data is increasing in demand. BIMobject is the leader in BIM and the go-to place for thousands of manufacturers. We have over the year invested into our platform.
You notice this by the new user interface, but much more notably by the performance of the platform. To date, we have 3.2 million professional users. That indicates a growth of 23% year-over-year. An accumulated download of 127 million downloads that represent a 43% growth year-over-year. We're doing pretty good, but the question is, how are we doing versus our competitors? The data is here taken from Similarweb. That's probably the most trusted and comprehensive and detailed view of the digital world. If you benchmark BIMobject here versus our top four competitors, you can see that we are the top one in terms of visits, and traffic. We're approximately 7 x larger than our nearest competitor, Archicad.
If you combine all our four competitors here in this slide, you can see that they reach approximately 1/3 of the traffic that BIMobject has. We are undisputed the leading global platform for architects, engineers, and constructors when it comes to BIM. On the other side, when it comes to top websites, you can see the performance of the site. We are on average 8 minutes and 48 seconds versus competitors that are doing approximately 2 minutes-3 minutes visit time. Pages per visit outperform competitors by 3x, and our bounce rate is approximately half of our competitors. When we're looking at the state of the BIM market, there are two things that stand out. One is that the industry has recognized BIM as the best technology in construction when it comes to return on investment.
Secondly, BIM is very much becoming mainstream. Why is this happening? Well, the drive for sustainability in construction is happening today on a scale and it's much pressured by financiers, property developers, and real estate owners, and they need to disclose the carbon footprint. We're also seeing that this was a top priority from COP26. The big thing here is that the industry lacks data, and data is what BIMobject provides to the market. The lack of data has impacts. It's estimated by Autodesk that the lack of data makes us generate 3.8 x more carbon than designed to shield, and the cost of construction is approximately $1.57 trillion more expensive than needed if we would have the right data when it comes to construction.
From the market, we can see huge demand, but what about our business? The state of our business, we are seeing a couple of things happening that affects our business. On the positive side, we continue to grow our annual recurring revenue. We've had positive financial Forex exchange effects. On the other note, service sales has not been in line with expectations. What we have done in the quarter is that we have reorganized it, and that's been carried out, and that has the impact that 21 employees is leaving the company. We are also seeing potential areas to increase our revenue, primarily from three products. One is a product that we call CMaaS. It's content management as a service that we sell to our customers.
Second part is the newly introduced product Credits that our customers can use to take advantage of the service on BIMobject. Thirdly, we see huge potential in upsell on large accounts. We'll come back to more of this during the year. We're also seeing macroeconomic volatility, and it is a concern, but it's not really impacting our business at the moment. Also, the capital markets is in a state of flux. It's outside our control, but it's something that we noted. Okay, over to you, Martin, for the financials.
Thank you, Carl. From the financial perspective, we had a continuous positive development during the second quarter of the year. This, as we increased the ARR as well as net sales, while maintaining a controlled cost level. On a very high level, new sales in the quarter increased by 7% versus Q2 2021. On EBIT level, there was a significant improvement versus last year of approximately SEK 10 million. Of the total group earnings of about -SEK 20 million, about 2.5 of those are attributable to non-controlling interest related to the minority owners of Prodikt. To go a little bit more in detail to these figures, we have the next slide. Looking at the ARR, at the end of the quarter, our contract portfolio or ARR reached SEK 114 million .
If neglecting positive currency effects, looking at it with constant currencies, the ARR grew with about 1.4% loss versus last quarter and 6.1% versus last year. At the end of the quarter, we also noted some early indications of churn was starting to come down from historically high rates seen in 2021, as well as in Q1 2022. This we believe is a direct effect of the renegotiation project that has been phasing out since year in the beginning of the year. Our customer success team is now shifting gears towards a more normal and proactive work mode. Part of this new phase will also be for the customer success team to ramp up its sales of upgrades, which has been less of a focus during the last year.
So far, we believe the industry has been less affected by the otherwise negative development of the macro environment, and many of our customers still have strong order books and are more concerned about supply chain issues rather than a decline in demand. In regards to net sales, most of it, namely 82%, is attributed to recurring revenues from our platform's subscriptions, which grew at about 15% versus last year. Sales of our services continued to develop at a more moderate pace during the quarter, and this to some extent due to the reorganization made in the content production team, which Carl mentioned earlier. We believe that this new setup will enable us to better focus on the sales of services, especially in the EMEA region.
Prodikt, which is still in its nascency, is not yet having a material impact on the overall group net sales. However, during the quarter, Prodikt signed an agreement with the Swedish construction material distributor, Optimera, for which they will provide automated climate declarations onward to their customers. In the quarter, BIMobject also started to build up a Prodikt-dedicated sales organization for new sales to building product manufacturers that will be launched in the middle of Q3 this year. On the cost side, we continued during the quarter to keep our spend at a stable rate. Majority of our cost base, up to 75% historically, is related to personnel costs. As mentioned in last quarterly audiocast, we foresee to have inflationary effects on such costs in control for this year.
Overall, we're currently trading at the stable spend level, and the moderate increase versus last quarter can be explained by two things. First one is about SEK 2 million from extraordinary and relatively high severance payouts, and second one being SEK 1.7 million in recurring but not comparable costs related to the add-on of Prodikt. Cost is an ongoing and important focus for us, and we will therefore proactively be working on reducing the overall spend level where in the way we can. Most of the changes in our balance sheet versus last year is due to the acquisition of Prodikt. For more details on those effects, I recommend you to listen to the audiocast held in last quarter.
At BIMobject, we continuously have stable cash position, and we don't foresee the need to raise additional funds in the near future unless a larger acquisition opportunity would present itself. We still enjoy about SEK 280 million in cash and cash equivalents when including short-term investments made in low-risk financial instruments with a high liquidity. To summarize, BIMobject is a true SaaS company. We continued to increase the net sales of the quarter, of which 82% is attributable to recurring revenue from our platform subscriptions. ARR at the end of the quarter reached SEK 114 million with an estimated 12-year lifetime. We saw a continued discipline in spend and landed at SEK -18.6 million in operational results. Finally, we remain well-funded with approximately SEK 280 million in readily available funds.
With that, we're done with the presentation for today and open up to answer some of your questions. Great. We have a couple of questions that have come in to the mail. The first one is regarding the service units we have and the layoffs of 21 employees. It's regarding the positive net effect on the cost side of this transition. Will there be some layoff costs related to this project?
Great, Martin. You want me to take that question? I can do that.
Yes. You do it great.
Correct. We're gonna see some slight, there won't be negative impact at all. It's rather the opposite. We are expecting cost savings, slight cost savings. However, we're not actually foreseeing any layoff costs, since this is an agreement we have done with an external agency to take over the 21 people from BIMobject. We are also as well increasing our capacity, the ability for us to produce more services-related revenue at the contract with this external partner. Hope that gives some flavor to or answers the question here.
Yes. All right. A second question we have received is around key metrics, concerning the development of churn and ARPA for our customer base.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, any view on that?
Our thoughts here, I mean, what's going to happen, we do not reveal churn at the moment and ARPU. First of all, let's clarify this one. Churn is improving quarter-over-quarter, and we're seeing a very positive trend. Two things you have to remember. Last year, we put in place a large renegotiation of all our contracts with our customers, and the intent of that was supposed to be the payoff this year. We are seeing that trend happening now, and the combination with the investment in that work, in combination with the investment in customer success program we put in place, is paying off. We're seeing that. We're expecting the churn to decrease, increase, over the year.
The outlook on the other metrics, ARPU, average revenue per user, we do not monetize on user base, but it's average revenue per account. We have to get back to reporting on that one, since we're not revealing that number to market at the moment. Hope to get back to you perhaps early next year. We are working on that.
Great. We have also another question here regarding the service segment and the decline in service sales. Question here is regarding if the decline is temporary, and we will see a shift going forward, and also a little bit related to this reorg we have been doing and if how we look upon the capacity going forward.
The lower demand or actually we've seen the lower demand in service sales is actually related to an effect of a large customer completing their product portfolio of BIM objects. What we're seeing now is that we are, as we are redoing the contracts and also investment into customer success program, that would enable us to work with the more customers in developing a BIM their BIM portfolio. We do not expect it to be going to have a lower demand. We hope for the opposite. Going forward, this could be a temporary effect, but also remember that we came in with a huge contract on a couple of large ones that are now getting completed. Those are getting more replaced with others.
We are seeing a stable demand in BIM objects, and also that's very much related to the industry we're in. There is a need for BIM objects in the industry, and that will continue for a very long foreseeable future. The reorg in capacity, like I mentioned, is rather the opposite. We will not have any capacity constraints.
Great. All right. We have a question on the value proposition and a comment that we have recently strengthened the value proposition to our customers or building product manufacturers. The question is concerning whether we see any improvement in customer acquisition and the efforts required to acquiring customers.
That is correct in one way. We are, again, I would say we put in place and invested last year into a sales model that we explained to the market very much in details. What we've seen is that we've taken out approximately SEK 60 million in costs over the year, and we're still seeing a very stable, so that you can see that the efficiency per salesperson has been going up. That's a very positive trend. That's where we want to be. We want to get to that position before we start to scale up the sales side. We're very happy with the outcome. We think we can do more here, and we expect that to be happening over here. The efficiency is going in the right direction, definitely.
Great. We have a couple of questions regarding monetization of users and to which extent it would happen this year.
We have mentioned we have done some trials in this. We have been running trials in the U.S. on a certain area. We haven't seen the effect we wanted to see, so we are still iterating on that trial, and I have to get back to you if that's doable by the end of this year or if that's early next year. I have to get back to you on that one, to market.
Great. The final question then is regarding the ARR forecast outlook for the second half of the year.
We do not provide forecasts, but we are feeling confidence on two levels. One is that we're having a good tailwind since we have put in place contracts that are in external currency especially in euro and dollars. We're having that tailwind with us. We foresee a double-digit growth. I can say that humbly, but we do, at the moment, we're in a year where we would like to hope to come back to you next year with when we have a robust year behind us to provide forecasts. Martin, maybe that's something that we need to talk about as well.
Yes.
What do you say?
Yes, let's do that.
Good
By that, we actually are done with the questioning for this quarter and look forward to continue to answer your questions in the next audiocast for next quarter. Thank you very much, everybody, for participating, and feel free also to reach out to us at ir@bimobject.com should you have any questions for us. Thank you.
Thank you.