Hello, everyone, and welcome to this audio cast from BIMobject Group, where we are going to present our year-end report for 2022. In this call today, we'll be giving you a short update as a yearly summary. We will also dive into looking a little bit at our strategy. If you recall from our previous audio cast we did at our Q3 presentation, we shared with you the strategic directions for 2023. We will be looking a little bit at what that strategy is about. How we are progressing towards it. We will also look at some industry trends. We will, of course, share something about the Q4 financials. At the end of this audio cast, we will have questions, time for questions.
You can already now submit your questions to ir@bimobject.com, and I will monitor that inbox during this call, so you can send your questions there, and we'll leave time for them at the end. I'm joined today by Mr. Peter Bang. Peter has been a member of the board for BIMobject since 2022 and is currently serving as the Chairman of the Board. Welcome to the call, Peter.
Thank you very much, and I'm very pleased to be here today. It has been a year with a number of changes in BIMobject, but I must say, over the last six months, we have defined a strategy, and we are definitely progressing in the right direction towards profitability. I'm very pleased to hand over to Martin, our interim CEO, to take us through the numbers and the situation we're in right now. Martin.
Thank you, Peter. Yes. Wow, this has been an intensive year, and perhaps even more during our final quarter with a lot of stuff going on. Thank you everybody who are participating and continuously being interested in how we perform as a company. First of all, if we move forward to the next slide. First of all, in 2022 has been an eventful year to everyone in the industry. This is for all listed company and also for us. Especially tough thinking about that we started off in an early post-COVID environment, subsequently followed by the Ukraine conflict, we've seen resulting shift in valuation levels, surging inflation, and subsequently also changing interest as well as currency rates. Despite this, we at BIMobject have been focused on continuing to grind on and make sure we continuously grow in this environment.
Early in the year, we entered the sustainability space by the acquisition of prodikt.com. It is a product-based platform in which architects, engineers, constructors, as well as property owners can easily analyze and compare building products based on various sustainability parameters. The board was slightly modified, with Peter Bang stepping in as chairman of the board, while Christian Lindfors also entering as a board member. Later in the year, we outsourced our content production, as this market is becoming more and more commoditized, and it no longer needed to remain in-house. Instead, we focus more and more on having technical BIM advisors supporting our clients to guide them on their technical needs, while the creation of the BIM objects itself is done externally.
In late September, BIMobject had a transition of its previous CEO, Carl Silbersky, leading to me stepping in as the interim CEO. One of my first tasks was to design a sustainable strategy to move BIMobject forward towards profitable growth. From a financial standpoint, our contract portfolio grew with 21% versus the end of last year. That means that our AR increased from SEK 99 million to SEK 121 million. The development here, as well as for our turnover, was partially positively affected by the depreciation of the Swedish currency versus both the U.S. dollar as well as the euro. However, if adjusting for the currency rates, we achieved a growth of 9%, which is a clear step in the right direction, especially considering we in 2021 had a corresponding growth rate of 2%. Our turnover increased by 10% during the year.
Inflation adjusted, this represents a mere growth of 2%. This modest development is due to we have been forced to re-negotiate license fees with the partnerships in Japan as well as in Thailand. On a profitability level, EBITDA, we had a quite positive development. Despite having acquired the sustainability platform , Prodikt, which burdened us with approximately SEK 10 million during the year, we still reduced EBITDA by 32%, reaching minus SEK 51 million at year-end. When it comes to our platform performance, we continuously saw an increase of our monthly downloading user, which grew by 22% since the end of last year. We also passed a total of 3 million accumulated registered users during the year.
Finally, at year-end, we are still well-funded with approximately SEK 240 million at our disposal. We see no near-term need of seeking additional funding. For the next session, we will talk a little bit about our position in the market, how the market is developing, also a bit about our strategy. First of all, when we look at the market, we can look at BIM adoption. We can see that the industry was positively affected by the COVID. Now is reaching a late majority. This, we believe, is quite important because it makes more and more important for different stakeholders in the industry to participate in the digitalization trend that BIM is for the industry.
Furthermore, if we go to the next slide, we also, through research, know that architects and engineers move more and more to the online space in their search for the right products. This is even more so for the specifiers who need to discover which products they need to specify online. On the BPM side, we see a lot of actors are following suit. That means that they change their marketing spend more and more towards architectural platforms and websites, and that is, of course, important for us. We, as a company, have come quite far in many aspects. We have a strong user base with over 3 million accumulated registered users, of which around 400,000 being monthly active, and we're also being widely used across the industry.
We also have three well-functioning platforms, two within BIM and one within sustainability, on which there are over 120,000 product pages connected to over 2,000 brands. This is, of course, a good starting position. We want to be even better at transforming the industry, meaning we want to grow faster, we want to reach profitability, and we want to achieve success within certain strategic areas. To do this, we need to have a clear goal as well as a clear direction to follow. As such, we launched what we refer to our revitalization program during Q4 last year. In this program, which we see ourselves as solidifying our position as being a world-leading provider of building product information preferred by architects, engineers, contractors, and property owners.
To do this, we need to get our stuff in order. It is actually not uncommon for SaaS companies to face certain barriers in their growth journeys, if processes are not accurately in place, the companies will have difficulties to scale appropriately. Therefore, we designed a program to correct these barriers for which the first area repositioning is all about. It includes building a clear and aligned view of our identity and purpose from a group perspective. Furthermore, it also included a cost program of SEK 20 million, as well as several reorganizations and process improvements to improve roles and responsibilities within our organization. The second area, create growth, is about ramping up sales and improving our local competitiveness. It also focuses on supporting Prodikt to accelerate their growth within the sustainability space.
The third area, the revitalization program, covers new initiatives and relates to increased focus in generating additional income from our user base, as well as enabling tech integrations with other platforms to further improve the amount of data we can connect to our objects. Overall, we're quite well underway in getting our strategy in motion. The cost program of a total SEK 20 million was silently started earlier during the year by not rehiring for certain positions. By year-end, we have managed to capture most of the costs. Still, there are a couple of resources about to depart in Q1 this year. Some of the costs are not able to being reduced until subscriptions end later this year. Within repositioning, we have worked quite a lot to make adjustments and clarifications for role and responsibilities.
First of all, our marketing team has been centralized, so has our remaining content advisory team. Our development organization has been streamlined into AEC and BPM segments and also been awarded more and more mandate to influence the way we sell our products. We have further deployed a new structure of our management team with split responsibility in implementing the strategy. Boy, we have really a great management team at BIMobject, which is working diligently on getting us geared up for the journey ahead. Basically, all areas are now moving forward in different ways. Currently, there is a lot of focus on accelerating sales and onboarding by rolling out a pod strategy, which we know our local teams look forward to.
Other progressions worthwhile mentioning is Prodikt, which gained increasing traction during the fourth quarter, and especially on the AEC side, which has resulted in our first AEC-related ARR being built up. In addition, Prodikt secured several key partnerships. They signed a partnership with CCBuild, within recycled materials, as well as with several key distributors, and they now are serving more than 50% of the distributor market in Sweden. In addition, BIMobject entered a partnership with Eurovent, a European association within HVAC, for which we aim to support their members in their digital journey, through BIMifying the products. Let's go over to some quarterly financials. During the fourth quarter, we saw a positive continued development.
As earlier mentioned, we reached SEK 121 million ARR in the fourth quarter. It was also the fifth consecutive growth quarter we had, reaching a 9% currency-adjusted growth. Net sales continued to increase as well. Here we both have an increase in the recurring revenue contribution as well as from services. When it comes to the other platform revenue that is from our partnerships in Japan and Thailand, we unfortunately had to renegotiate agreements there and receive less contributions. Our operating costs remained fairly stable. We do have some severance costs related to the cost program. We feel that we are on a stable and good projection in this area along with the strategy plan.
On the P&L side, we had 11% increase year-over-year in net sales. Other operating income was lower in the quarter due to the low contribution levels from our partners in Asia. Personnel costs in the quarter included approximately SEK 2 million in severance payments. On EBITDA, we improved 15% versus the same quarter last year. On the balance sheet, we remain in a strong position. At the year-end, we had SEK 240 million cash or cash-like items. The reason for why we only have SEK 101 million at our cash and cash equivalents in the balance sheet is because we have transferred SEK 139 million to quite liquid fixed income funds, therefore, those should be seen as cash as well, as well.
In terms of understanding potential future funding needs, at this point, we don't see a need of any further cash to succeed with our strategic ambitions. Furthermore, we have a higher than normal accounts receivable position that we're working on getting down. This due to a change we have made in the financial operations in the U.S. We are now having qualified resources in place that are working hard to get these receivables down to normal levels. In summary, the year of 2022 was a year of progress. We increased our ARR by 21% or 9% if adjusting for currency effects. Further, BIMobject entered into the sustainability space with its acquisition of the platform, Prodikt, which is now being deployed in Sweden and will in the future be rolled out to other markets in Europe.
We have also a clear strategy leading us towards profitable growth, and we are doing well on this implementation. Thank you, everybody, for listening. By that, let's open up for questions.
Thank you, Martin, for that. Let's head over and see if we had any questions coming in. We had a first one here. It was about the numbers on platform revenue, where we had a minus post for SEK 1.3 million. The question here was if that is the correct way to interpret it, and if so, why is this post negative?
Yes. It's correctly reported in the report. I think it's the other platform income or something like that. The reason for this is that the renegotiation was about the second half of the year 2022. Since we already had recognized revenue there in the third quarter, we had to reverse it in the fourth. That's why you have a minus post in the fourth quarter for that post. We are in continuous dialogue with our partners and to make sure that we have some types of agreements also to rely on going forward for this year.
Great. We had another question here that was more related to the strategy that you presented. You mentioned that we'd roll out this pod structure. The question is here, what do we want to try to achieve with this that we weren't able to do before?
Yes. That's a really good question. Actually, that is, I guess, something for you, Lisa, that you might be able to answer since you not only are a host on these talks, but also our revenue operations manager, heavily working with the pods.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. This is one of the things that we are rolling out with the strategy. I think we've always seen that we have very strong commercial teams. What we saw was that we needed even to, like, further foster the sense of collaboration and alignment with these teams. We're moving to this cross-functional team model. Basically, what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up teams to be focused on a specific market or geography. Basically, what we're trying to do with this is it's a way to internally clarify the targets and metrics and also really make sure that we run each of our market that we operate in a very optimal way from a commercial perspective.
We really have that alignment. And then there's also a dimension of having a very strong local presence, which we've seen is really important for local partnerships and networks, especially in some of the markets we operate in. That's also something that we really try to achieve with this. It's, yeah, we're really excited about this. We think it's gonna be a great model that we're gonna come back to and collaborate or, you know, align on during the year. It's gonna be great.
Then a follow-up question from me then. Does it feel like a complete reorganization of the sales organization, or does it feel like a calibration?
No.
How do you view it?
It's more of a calibration. I think we do feel like we have a strong commercial team, a good organizational setting. This is more a calibration where we also try to capture that market or geography dimension to it. Yeah.
Yeah. A slight adjustment to increase market fit.
Exactly. I think that's actually the questions that we had for today, that's been sent to our email anyway. With that, we'll conclude this audiocast. Thank you, Martin.
Yeah. Thank you. Maybe we should say also that you're always welcome also to continuously write questions to the IR email.
Yes.
We will revert to you when we can or capture it in these types of settings.
Yes. That is ir@bimobject.com if you have more questions after the call. All right.
Great. Thank you very much, everybody.