Hi, everyone, and welcome to this webcast, where we will be presenting the Q1 report for BIMobject AB. My name is Lisa Norlander. I am the Director of Revenue Operations at BIMobject, and I'll be moderating this call today. We will soon hear a presentation from our CEO on the Q1 financial results and developments.
After this presentation, we will end the session with a Q&A session to answer any questions. You can already now send your questions to our email address at ir@bimobject.com, and we will try to answer as many of these questions as we can at the end of this call.
If we do not have time to answer all the questions, we can get back to you afterwards as well. Questions, send them to ir@bimobject.com. Now it's time to present today's speakers. I'm joined here today by our CEO, Martin Lindh, and our Chairman of the Board for BIMobject, Peter Bang. Welcome, guys.
Thank you, Lisa. First of all, I'm very pleased that we yesterday, late afternoon, issued a press release that the board of directors of BIMobject has appointed Martin as a permanent CEO. Martin has been interim CEO for the last half year, and he has done an excellent job in this period, which we are very thankful about and pleased about in the board.
Martin has deep insight, or has gained a deep insight in our industry, and he has taken the organization through a strategy process, preparing BIMobject for our next phase towards a profitable future. The board of directors, we are very confident with Martin and his leadership team. By this appointment of Martin as permanent CEO, we believe we are well-suited in BIMobject for the future.
We are happy that Martin, being with me here today, has taken the challenge. And on behalf of the board, I would very much like to welcome Martin into his new role, and I'm also personally looking very much forward to work even closer with Martin in this. Congratulations, Martin, and welcome in the new role. I will hand over to you in presenting the Q1 result.
Thank you, Peter, for the very supportive words. It's great to hear. It's been an interesting and largely fulfilling period to have been working as the interim CEO for the last six months. I mean, it was an intense start in crafting and communicating the strategy.
What I've seen thereafter, and I believe also you in the board, is a very strong internal commitment to work and fulfill the strategy, which has been awesome to see. And to have a, I think, a management team like that keeps such focus makes me quite comfortable in taking this role going forward as well. To me, BIMobject is a really exciting company, and we have a super interesting position in the market.
I therefore believe it is much more up to us, and what we can do rather than the market, that will affect the long-term outcome of this company. Enough with that, let's start with the quarterly presentation instead. We first off, we have the highlights of the quarter. From a financial standpoint, our Q1 this year was another step in the right direction.
We're not fully there yet, where we have everything working as we want, but we are certainly improving. Our ARR continued to grow, reaching SEK 124 million at the end of the quarter. The same for our net sales, which reached close to SEK 37 million, which could be compared to SEK 32 million in the same quarter last year.
Our EBITDA results continued to improve by 28% versus the same quarter last year. We also had a very good growth in terms of the number of our downloading users. In terms of cash flow, we have had a quite good improvement, and we're cash positive during the quarter with plus close to SEK 4 million. This due to an initiative we launched in the quarter that has improved the dunning process quite a bit.
When it comes to the business-related events, we've not had that many press releases sent out in this quarter, which there are some internal reasons for. It's well worth noting that we have brought on Tom Dixon on the platform.
Tom Dixon is a UK interior design brand that has been one of the most searched for brands that we haven't had on the platform, so far. Therefore it is of course extra fun to get them on board on the platform. From an internal perspective, we've had much internal focus on executing on the strategy, and that I will talk more about later. We have also cautiously noted and previously also communicated about the sustained demand in the market, despite the, all the external events circulating around us.
We see that it has a more and more impact on our metrics, resulting in longer selling processes and tighter budgets on our customers that we need to plan for and handle in different ways. First, let's talk more about BIMobject and what makes us a relevant company to connect and digitalize the different actors in the building industry independent of what roads that lies ahead of us.
First of all, we are a platform company that has more than 3 million accumulated registered users, of which more than 400,000 are being active on a monthly basis. We reach relevant players in the market and have a global reach. We also connect through 3 different platforms, 2 which are focused on BIMobjects and 1 that is focused on sustainability.
On our sites, we have more than 120,000 product pages and over 2,000 building product brands. Why is this relevant and what do we do with it? I mean, first of all, BIMobject, what we do is that we connect different stakeholders in the building industry through our platforms. We help architects, engineers, and constructors find digital representations of their products, of the products that they like and also that they want to build with. They want to have easy and reliable access to accurate product information.
Building product manufacturers, they understand that they also need to be part of the digital world, where decisions and specifications are made on based on products that are not only what is physically available, but to a larger and larger extent, what is available in the digital space.
The same goes for the distributors who are selling their own white label or private label products. They miss out on being relevant if they're not where digital decisions are made. How does it work? Well, BIM has reached a late majority in terms of adoption in the Western world, meaning that design models are created with the help of BIM objects.
We also see an increasing trend that architects and specifiers are incorporating specific manufacturer-based objects into their models to improve the likelihood of those digital products will also be the physical ones that end up in constructions once they are completed. What then does the building product manufacturers miss out on if they're not part of the digital world of BIM? They miss out on having access to one of the most important specifying marketing channels there is.
Of course, they need to have the products available where the choices are made. They should also make sure that they have direct connection with the AECs and the specifiers. They would also miss out on the opportunity to be supportive and help the AEC community through our marketing services. Secondly, they would miss out on a quite good market intelligence platform.
Especially in times of uncertainties, it is quite important to understand how changes in demand shift, shifts between markets, and between brands, which we can provide based on daily data updates. Finally, and perhaps most important, BIM is an enabler of building a more competitive strength versus competitors in the market.
By communicating directly to users through our platform, they can lift up relevant arguments that are not easily communicated by resellers and distributors, meaning they can compete on different factors than just price.
They can also make sure that they have an optimal product portfolio that covers the most relevant markets with accurate product information. It is also an enabler of going into more complex areas like developing configurators for more complex products and or engaging in advanced production and delivery methods like prefab.
Let's get back to our strategy, where we are and what we are focusing on as a company going forward. Our strategy has several components, but it's designed to move us forward to be the world leading provider of building product information, which is preferred by architects, engineers, constructors, and property owners.
This we aim to achieve while at the same time moving towards profitable growth, meaning we want to be continuously a growing company, but with a profitable operational result. The strategy contains of three main pillars, and was launched in the last quarter of last year.
In the first pillar, we have repositioning, which includes both communication as well as operational initiatives. In this initiative, we're moving forward quite well, except for some unexpected staffing challenges within the marketing organization that we're currently working on.
When it comes to the cost program, we implemented that quite swiftly and had also had some time to prepare and take out some cost even before the product was even launched. We are having quite good traction and have clarified roles and responsibilities in the organization, which has improved focus and execution internally as well. In the second pillar, create growth, we are well on the way of implementing our pod program that will improve the local agility of our sales team.
We do see some remaining challenges on in how we operate in our customer success team and our content team, but we will launch separate initiatives to address those areas. Simultaneously, we are also moving forward in establishing more and more partnerships, and we see better and better traction from the product platform.
In the third pillar, new initiatives, we started off by doing quite some research and to evaluate different approaches to start monetizing on our users, which now have been concluded, and we will, as of June, have a dedicated development team focusing on these initiatives. In the last initiative, we are working quite hard at rebuilding our platform this to enable us to connect more and more with other types of software platforms in the market.
Now let's talk more about the financial development in the company. As mentioned in the beginning of the call, the Q1 was another positive quarter for BIMobject. We continue to grow our ARR, also our net sales, as well as having control on our cost base.
The sales as well as the costs have been affected by a weak SEK currency. We still see that we're on track in regards to our strategic direction. When looking at the income statement, we see that, I mean, the net sales has increased by 15% since the same quarter last year. Also the EBITDA has improved by 28%. This is, of course, a very good step in the right direction. Also a bit positively affected by changes in currency rates.
What is affecting us in this quarter is that we have renegotiated terms with our joint venture partners in Japan and in Thailand, which negatively affects the sales in this quarter, but we are still moving forward with growth, which I'm quite happy about. Worth noting is that Prodikt, our sustainability platform and its company, Carbon Zero AB, was acquired and first incorporated into the financials of March 2022. Looking at the balance sheet, I think the most important improvement we've had here is on the cash and cash equivalents, where we end the quarter at a positive cash flow of close to SEK 4 million.
We mentioned earlier that this was due to the Dunning process, and this is quite good to see. We had that as a bit of a concern, part of last year, where we saw that we were going in the wrong direction, but that we now have managed to take care of in a very, very good and efficient way. Yes, let's move to the concluding remarks. For me, the Q1 could be concluded as it was another positive quarter, which we're quite happy about.
We see that the strategic implementation is progressing and moving in the right direction, but a bit cautious about the future indicators which we see are starting to affect our operations that we of course need to plan and create some mitigating actions for. By that, I would like to thank you for listening in and we are ready, I guess, to open up for questions.
Okay. We had a few questions coming into our email address, so we will see if we can go through them all now. If there's any question that we don't answer now on the call, we can circle back to you afterwards as well, via email. Starting off, Martin, we had a question here on the external costs that are SEK 5 million higher compared to Q1 of last year. What are these costs related to?
I understand it is a little bit hard to follow here because there are several factors affecting this. You can say that our external cost sometimes varies over time. In general, I think we are very good in control of our cost base. Factors that can affect this type of cost can be attributed to non-recurring costs. In this quarter, we had around SEK 1 million of those that we didn't have last year. That's one difference. It's also due to the fluctuation of currency rates. When the SEK weakens, the cost we have in other countries, they affect us more. That has certainly happened this quarter versus the same quarter last year.
Finally, affecting other external costs is that last year we didn't own Prodikt until beginning of March. For two extra months this year, there are costs related to Prodikt that isn't really comparable to the same quarter last year.
Another question related to the numbers we presented here, on the difference between what we present as ARR and recurring revenue. If you look at the rolling 12 months ARR, that is now up to a very good level. If you look at then the recurring revenue, there's a smaller difference there between Q4 and Q1 of only SEK 0.2 million. Can you share on what is the difference between these two metrics?
Yeah. The ARR is, you can say like the theoretic metric of the portfolio value we have in the company. That is the total value of the contract. If we have that value today, over the next 12 years, that's the revenue we're gonna get over time.
What happens in reality is that there are some differences in terms of when the contract starts and how much they are, because in the end of each month, we know exactly what the portfolio size is. What we report here is what the AR in at the end of the period. Obviously there are some differences there that has some effect. Also, when we do revenue accrual, we do it linearly over the year.
You have quarters with different days in the different quarters, and that also can affect these numbers a bit. I would say that these two factors are the main reason for that, why we might have some discrepancies in between the two.
Thank you. We have another question here that We have improved on the process for accounts receivable, which have improved the cash flow during the quarter. Could you elaborate more on what are the changes we have made there?
Yeah. I think we've mentioned a couple of quarters ago that or for some quarters now that we've had some challenge with receivables. First of all, we have had some internal changes in our finance functions, which I think was necessary.
Also we have internally developed a tool that helps us and coordinates the work in the whole dunning process or meaning that how we collect receivables from our customers. Thirdly, we have also put better management attention on it so that we have someone really focusing on it and coordinating and leading the efforts in collecting cash. Yeah, that's basically what we have done.
A follow-up question on that then, Johan, our cash conversion cycle, how has that changed after we started this work with receivables?
Yeah. It has, of course, improved. We typically measure this through the KPI, days sales outstanding. Over the last year, that has been an increase in this metric. That increase we have recovered now in this quarter, which is really good. We of course hope that we can increase it further, since we are improving the way that we are working. Both now we have a solid process, but also a good supporting tool in place to help us with this.
Mm-hmm. Then we have some questions more centered on the future here. Looking ahead, we can see that the industry is facing challenging times if we think about Q2, Q3. The question here is what type of preparations are we making for that, and what do you think of our possibilities to grow ARR throughout the rest of this year?
Yeah. You can say that the future is always hard to predict. We, therefore we closely monitor the development, of course. We fundamentally, we want to grow, and we should grow. I mean, it's part of our strategy, and it's important for us.
That's why we do a lot of work on sales and also to improve the efficiency of how we do sales. I think that will be very useful and important in any scenario we would land into. We also try to prepare by also adjusting our communication and our offerings to make better sense for the clients in any type of scenario. I talked a little bit about that today. We will, I mean, we will also adjust the cost base if and where needed, if we were to come into a completely different scenario that we are in today. Yeah.
As we mentioned in the beginning of the call, we announced yesterday that you have been made the permanent CEO, and we have a question here if there's any change to the plan in relations to that nomination.
Yes. You can say that, for sure the underlying plan remains. We will continuously adapt it, of course, when and where needed, but, the overall direction will remain the same. This, I believe, is quite important, especially for this company, as it sometimes, takes time to get things right, and, in those cases, persistence is, especially important.
Yeah. One of the tasks that we listed here as part of our strategy plan was to, quote, "Increase focus on user value creation and monetization." Can you elaborate on what we mean by that?
Yes, we can do that. I mean, first of all, we have a good traction when it comes to our user monetization, when it comes to our product platform in Sweden. Independent of that, we're also of course working on monetizing our users on our BIMobject platform. As this area is rather new for us and more opportunistic, we are working on a couple of tracks here.
We've also done a lot of research during this period and now also have a development in which I mentioned that we will deploy as of June this year. Hopefully we'll start to launch some small features during H2 of this year that we will build upon thereafter.
Mm-hmm. That's great. We had a question about Prodikt, the sustainability platform that we purchased last year. What was the turnover end result for Prodikt in 2022?
Yes. We're currently not sharing the top line revenue from Prodikt to the market on a quarterly basis. We will look into if we're gonna do that going forward. However, Prodikt is progressing in terms of revenue. We are at the same time also quite much in control of the costs that are related to that to make sure that they don't increase too much, which is sometimes the case for growth companies.
We want to make sure that we're still in line with our strategy both in terms of reaching profitable growth. In last year, Prodikt had a negative effect on our result of around SEK 6 million. That we actually share in the P&L earlier presented. As you can see, it's broken down in what type of, or what share of the result is related to minority owners.
Thank you. Perhaps you already sort of answered this one, but we got a question on the call if you could say a little more on how we're planning to tie in the AECs to the platform.
Yeah. I'm not sure exactly how to answer this one because the platform is basically for AECs as it is, but I guess this is related to monetization. That is, I believe I've already answered that on the initiatives we have ongoing. Of course, this is something that we find quite interesting and are pursuing.
Great. I think those are all the questions that we have got so far. With that, we're gonna wrap up this call. We will be available to answer questions continuously on this email address if you felt some of your questions weren't answered. With that, I'd like to thank everyone for the time today. Thank you for your interest, and, we'll speak to you soon. Thank you.
Thank you.