Go ahead.
Thank you very much, Operator. Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. Welcome to our Q3 2020 Financial Report Audiocast here at BIMobject. My name is Carl Silbersky, I'm the CEO, and together with me today, I have Alexander Dahlquist, the CFO. We'll walk you through this financial report. Operator, next slide, please.
Highlights into Q3. First, we'll start looking at the number of registered users. The accumulated number of users is up 38% year-over-year, and we total of 2.1 million, up from 1.5 million previous year. On the platform side, we can see net sales has increased by 19%. Things are moving in the right direction. We are seeing a great tailwind here, especially in the reflection that we have also done some pretty dramatic cost-cutting in our sales force during the year.
Third thing worth highlighting is that we now have approximately one product downloads per second on the platform. We see that the downloads increased. It's fueled by accelerated digitalization of our industry and a large improvement on our product search experience. Very positive news there. Further in the quarter, we have done something that we're very proud to say. We have a directed share issue of SEK 304 million. We did this through a group of Nordic and European institutional investors. I'm proud to say that some of them are the most prominent institutions in the Nordics and Europe. Worth mentioning maybe some of those are Swedbank Robur Ny Teknik, TIN Fonder, Handelsbanken Microcap, and Berenberg European Micro Cap, as well as Alcur. That's some of them.,
Today you could say we have a strong cap table with some of the best institutions. We're well-funded, and we are definitely in the right space at the right time. That's some of the highlights from the Q3. Let's focus on Next slide, Operator. Focusing the Q3, you can divide that into three areas, but the general headline is we continue to follow the plan. On the product side, we kept improving core functionality such as the bimobject.com and user experience and analytics module for customers. We also launched a new feature for on-platform promotions that's called Promoted Products, which allows the customers to pay to rank at the top of search results in certain category markets. We're very excited about this. The second thing we did is on the commercial side. We're speaking here a lot about our commercial transformation.
Worth mentioning that in what's happening in Q3 is that the new European customer success team is now in place, as well as the prospecting team of sales development representatives that are building a pipeline with the support from digital marketing. Both of these teams are up and running at full speed, and this allows us to operate at a scale and build deeper excellence in some of the key functions. Well, also worth mentioning here is that there are areas that we need to keep addressing here on the commercial side. We're not satisfied with the sales performance in some European countries, so the work continues, and we continue to follow the plan. The third part is the financial position. We are continued saying that we return the company to strong financial position is ongoing.
The SEK 50 million cost reduction program that we launched in Q2, we're now certain that all of that will be captured in 2020. The final part there, a new product I just mentioned, the Promoted Products, which allows our customers to be ranked at the top of the search results. Very positive news. Okay. Now over to Alexander Dahlquist for the financials.
Okay, operator, next slide. Thank you, Carl. Looking at revenue development in the quarter. Overall, we had a small drop due to our services being affected. We see that our customer base is pushing projects during the COVID-19 situation, and that is impacting us. We focused a lot on our platform or our SaaS side of the business, and that's where our focus has been. That's where we see the growth. Platform growth is at 19%, healthy, which is good. What is also promising is now that 78% of our business is on the platform and only 22% is from services. Platform then is up from 62% last year, the same period, to 78%. We are truly now defined as a SaaS company, which is something that has been a focus area for us for some time.
Looking at revenue quarter-by-quarter, unfortunately, we're more or less flat against Q2. Q3 2020 against Q3 2019 on the platform, we're up the 19% we discussed. In all, it's heading in the right direction, but of course, we would like to grow faster than we are doing. If we move to the next slide, operator. As Carl mentioned, we launched our program on cost-cutting, the cost reduction program, and in the quarter, we're now at a good total cost of only just above SEK 40 million. I think we will plateau here, maybe a slight increase in Q4, but again, we will deliver on the SEK 50 million. There are still employees leaving the company. We are now down to 169 employees after Q3, which is a reduction of 34 year-to-date. Total cost versus Q3 2019 is down 31%.
The cost-cutting and the focus we've had on cost is now, I would say, we've established that in the company, and our employees more and more understand the importance of spending money on the right things. Operator, next slide, please. Looking at the financial results for the quarter, we see that we're at minus EBITDA. We're at SEK -7 million compared to SEK -23.1 million Q3 2019, which is a 70% improvement. Gradually but surely, we're getting closer and closer to that zero line, even on EBITDA. Of course, depending on how fast we gear up the sales team moving forward, we might not yet go for going into positive numbers. Growth is still going to be our key focus. Year to date as well, we've almost a 50% reduction on the loss on EBITDA. Operator, next slide, please.
Very important for us is our cash flow, and then the focus is on the cash flow from operating activities. Here again, we see that we're going down and down. I would say that Q2 is the best quarter we've had. In Q3, it's slightly higher. Q2 was heavily affected by the COVID relief that was available. Q3, there's a lot less of that. At the same time, our EBITDA margin is drastically going downwards. We mentioned again that we had the directed share issue in the quarter. Cash flow in the fourth period is very positive. We're good now. We're getting ready for the growth that we want to see moving forward. Okay, operator, next slide, please.
Okay. Thank you very much, Alexander. Focusing Q4 and going forward, this is a repeat of a slide I have been done in the last quarters. I just want to emphasize that we keep following the plan. The levers we keep pulling in our plan are to create a more efficient BIMobject. We focus on attractiveness on our platform and secondly, on execution. On the attractive platform side, we have three things we focus on. We keep improving the core functionality such as end-user experience and the analytics module for our manufacturers. The second lever we keep pulling is to lower the barrier of entry. We're hard at work in improving the onboarding process for new manufacturers to make the time between we sign them up and get them onto the platform as quick as possible.
The third lever we pull there on the attractive platform side is that we continue the implementation of our new pricing model to new and existing customers. As most of our customers are on annual contracts, it's an ongoing effort here, but most renewals will take place mostly in Q4 and early Q1. On the other side, we're looking at the strong execution side. Alexander mentioned the cost control. That's an ongoing work always. We keep pulling that lever. On the point number five there, the commercial transformation continues. Like we mentioned, we reduced the sales force significantly, and we still managed a growth of 19% on the new ARR. I keep coming back to the new ARR because I think this is the most important and the value creation inside BIMobject. This is the recurring revenue that is so vital for our business.
Well, again, worth mentioning, there are pockets of growth for improvements here in some European countries, and as well that are not performing as we expect them. Point six here, and what we continue to pull the lever on, is increase the share of wallet. What we mean by that is that we need to grow our existing customers. With the help of our new price list, we see very positive towards this one. That's a very rapid walkthrough of BIMobject's Q3 report, but I will hand over to operator now for Q&A. Next slide.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. As there seems to be no questions, I'll hand it back to the speakers for closing remarks.
We have no questions here then. I guess that's it then, folks. Thank you very much for listening in to this report. I hope all of you stay safe and take care of each other. Thank you very much.
Thank you.