Good afternoon and welcome to BIMobject, the Q2 2021 financial report audio cast. My name is Carl Silbersky, and today I'm I got Martin Lindh, our CFO with me on the call. Let's go to the first slide and a recap of BIMobject and what we are. We are a global marketplace for the construction industry. What we primarily do is that we help our manufacturers in the building product to reach influence and understand the building designers worldwide. Without further ado, let's go to the next slide number three. I wanna dive into the highlights of the Q2 report and some reflections on that. We saw a growth of 10.3% year-over-year ARR growth. The very important ARR growth for us is something we'll be focusing on.
It's an area where we have started to transform ourselves to become a pure SaaS company. Quarter-over-quarter, we had a 3.2% growth. This is despite the tough cost and company transition that we have done over the last 7 months. More on this with Martin . It's important part is that we're turning back into growth again after a couple of hard months in the past. Couple of other points worth mentioning in the quarter, events that are significant. In May, we passed 2.5 million registered users, and that represented annual growth of 25%. We are undisputed the number one BIM source in the world in terms of traffic end users, and we continue to grow our position in the market is very important. This is really the foundation for BIMobject.
Without the massive advantage we have as a platform globally, we're unable to capitalize on it. It's a positive trend to see the platform growing. We're happy with that. You can also note that in April and May, we recorded the highest number of downloads from architects and engineers and contractors in the company's history. We had 3 million downloads in each month, and this is despite that we're coming out of COVID, we're still seeing an increased activity in the platform. It also has to do with the development team has put in tremendous amount of effort into getting a higher attraction of the platform. More to come on this one to watch out in Q3. More to said is that in July, we passed a mark of 100,000 product pages.
Again, this is an effect of the hard work we put in place in the last six months that we established a customer success team that's continuously helping our customers to launch more product pages and to continue growing our platform. That's short a couple of highlights from the Q2 report. If we go into slide number four, we continue to powering, like I said earlier, the digital building design worldwide. To -date, we have 2,150 building product brands listed on the platform. We have every month, 100 of the largest 100 architect firms as users on the platform. That means that more or less every large building getting built around the world is using BIM and more and more. It's a positive trend.
We are ranked in, according to Similarweb, in traffic, we're the number 1 in the world. In the quarter of Q2, we had approximately 8 million files downloaded. Operator, if we go to slide number 5. Just to recap on what I just said, we are the most influential brand in the industry with a factor of 20x versus our competition. This is something important for us is not only to be the largest, but also to make sure that we continue to maintain that position. As we are convinced that BIM is the future of to go in the construction, we need to maintain our position, and we're doing it very much in both the brand awareness. As you can see, we are 20x larger in brand awareness versus our competition.
This is not just any luck. This is hard work put in in many areas, perhaps areas where investors don't see them, but definitely our users. We're also excelling in engaging the visitors. We're proud to say that we are definitely beating some of our competitors pretty earlier on both. If we go to the next slide, sorry about that. If we go to the next slide on slide number 6, we can see that the flywheel growth for Q2 2021. We see continued growth in the number of registered users, 25% growth year-over-year. We had 8 million downloads, that means a 24% growth year-over-year in the number of downloads that is mentioned. Again, worth mentioning that our brands on the platform grew 15% year-over-year.
The flywheel growth is continuing to spinning. We're seeing that manifested in what I just mentioned. We are at the end of quarter, 99,000 product pages now crossing into 100,000 at an estimated 24% year-over-year. I've been repeating this slide a couple times in our previous calls. This is really what's building the value into the company and platform. Finally, I want to leave you with something good before Martin dives in. That's slide number seven. Please, operator. We have a new report out by BIMobject on the topic of why sustainability is the key to getting specified. The report come on the back of the new demands and the new laws emerged to promote sustainable construction and cut the industry's rather massive contribution to the degradation of environment.
This report goes into the urgent need for green shift. The hard truth is that the building and construction sector is responsible for 39% of the energy and process-related CO₂ emission in the world. Worth repeating that. We are responsible for 39% of the CO₂ related emission in the world. It's a tough pill to swallow, of course, but hope is far from lost, I can say here. In fact, we can make quite a big impact for the planet and for humankind. For business, of course, that we are interested in, we know that BIM and the building information management is a way to move to a greener planet where you make choices on the digital level.
For you, who are interested in this report, I urge you to go and look, go download at bimobject.com and really get a pulse on, which climate-related industry challenge we are facing and also learn about the digital tools that are needed. Again, I cannot highlight and emphasize it. Of course, BIM is part of that and very much in the tools. With that said, I want to hand over to Martin for more information. Martin.
Great. Thank you, Carl. All right, we can go to the next slide. I'll start a little bit to give a brief update on the transformation that has been part of BIMobject's journey over the last year. Could we please take the next slide?
Yep.
Yes. Thank you. All right. First of all, I mean, over the last year, could be a little bit more than that perhaps, BIMobject has been in a cost reduction program, which has been quite successful, where the organization has been trimmed down. At the same time, it's especially the sales organization has been restructured. This has been a necessary move for the company, both strategically but also tactically, when we go to the market. What we see now, despite these big changes, is that we again see the ARR going back to growth from a quarter, the last quarter where it was more flat.
This is important for us because then we really get a first proof of the new model is working. Now I think we're in a mode where it's a lot more calibration of the sales organization that is taking place rather than more restructuring related improvements. At the same time, we of course do a lot of platform related initiatives. We're changing ERP system and also a lot of other initiatives. There's also a lot going on within the product organization. As you can see, the platform is working quite well.
We do have a very stable and strong growth in the platform, we see that there's a lot of things we can improve on that side as well. At the same time, we have retained control of cost in relation to the restructure that we did, meaning that in the terms of number of FTEs, we's not growing significantly. That's not related to cost increase in this quarter, I will come back to that on a future slide. The last point is quite important for us, that's related to the employees that we have in the organization.
It's also a part of a transformation when you shift a lot of people and that there will be some sort of transition. But what we can see already now is that very new people coming in are delivering quite promising, that's partly related to the increase we see in the ARR. Next slide, please.
Martin, there's a delay in the slide. You can just continue in the.
Okay. Yeah, okay. Maybe I can continue a little bit quicker. Sure.
All right. The reason why we focus so much on ARR is because this is the most important metric for us to understand growth in the company. As you can see, we had a flat quarter last quarter, and this quarter we had a growth again, of around 3%, 10% on a year-over-year comparison. This is obviously not where we want to be, but it's still a very good improvement.
Since we're doing a lot of calibration in the sales organization, we expect this go up as we go forward. The reason why it's so important metrics for us is because if you look at net sales, there are some differences in how that turns out when in the reported numbers. In this period, it's mostly related to currency, where there's like a 10% effect on a year-over-year basis. That obviously gives a little bit different view of how the company is performing. Whereas if you look at the ARR, you can more and better see the development of the company. Next slide, please. Okay, when it comes to net sales, we had an improvement in services.
Services is where we do content production in BIMobject. Content production or services was quite much affected by COVID. We see a recovery, but it's not back at the historic levels. We're very happy of the improvements that have been made. In previous quarter, we have also mentioned the shift we have in other platform revenue, which is related to a joint venture which we have in Japan. There was a transition of the contract where we lost some recurring income. It's a new model where we still get income, but in a little bit different form.
In Q1, we started to get a new joint venture contract in Thailand that is continuing also going forward. Yes, next slide, please. When it comes to the cost development in the company, we had a quarter where the total operating costs increased. There are some good explanation for this. As I previously mentioned, the cost level in the company has been roughly the same when it comes to quarter-over-quarter increase. One of the main important factors, and this is we see as a really good thing for the company, is we have launched incentive program. That was in cost related to that, around SEK 7.9 million.
At the same time, also, we had almost 100% participation in this program. Also, we had investments into the company over SEK 6 million. We see a very positive sign of the engagement level we have internally with employees. At the same time, we also had around SEK 4 million non-comparable costs in the quarter that is also affecting the operating costs of the quarter. If you do adjustments for these, we see that we have very good control of the costs also going forward. Next slide, please. In relation to cash flow, there is the same effect basically from the incentive program we have affecting us in the quarter.
In addition to that, there's also effects on that working capital related to government support program that we received related to COVID. If you look at a year back ago in Q2 2020, we had correspondent positive effect in that quarter. Which means that if you look at a year-over-year perspective, the difference is quite significant. These are the main contributing factors to that. Next slide, please. Well, Carl, will you?
Yes. Thank you very much, Martin. I'm very apologetic here, Martin, I didn't introduce you to start with, and I maybe should have done that. Martin is new CFO, for those of you who haven't noticed. Martin comes with extremely strong background, and maybe if you wanna share some words on that. Martin has a background from several years at McKinsey and then continued as an Investment Banker and ended up and was spent a couple of years at private equity company before joining us, and we're super glad to have Martin on board. Especially strengthening the deeper analysis that's needed on the financials as well as other areas that we are looking into executing on going forward. Thank you very much, Martin, and welcome to the first call here as you did.
I wanna end up, before we go to Q&A, that I wanna say that we remain focused on the long-term value creation. There is three things that we stay focused on to despite quarter-over-quarter and in a massive transformation program. We have the platform growth in new registered users and downloads. That's really what we are strongly focused on, and you see the effect on that. We've really been on top of that one. The second one where we are not happy with the pace is increase in revenue base. We have explained it, but it's hard to see through it.
We are seeing now that we're back on ARR growth despite the much lower cost base. If you add the services part where we are not happy with the pay, we need to step that up and we have programs in place for that. New brands and the ARPA is we're happy about, especially regarding new customers being significant up trending in the ARPA there. The third part we are super focused on is of course, shareholder value. That is ARR growth for a company like ours. It is that to determine us and what we are, the long remaining revenue as well as on top of that one is the net revenue retention, maintain the customer, grow the customer. To do that one, you need to do a lot of transformation.
We have a lot of transformation in place to do that one. We hope that that will carry fruit going forward. So with that said, thank you very much for listening in to our audio cast, and now operator over to you for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now ready to take your questions. If you wish to ask questions, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. There'll be a brief pause while any questions are being registered. Our first question is from Fredrik Nilsson of Redeye. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hello, everyone. Fredrik Nilsson from Redeye here. I want to start with a question about the flywheel of growth. I mean, everything's growing at about 25% except for the brands. Why is the brands lagging behind, and what can you do to change that?
Hi, Fredrik. Good question. Important question. Yeah. Everything in brands is dependent on two things. One is the time to come onto the platform. That means that how long does it take to do, create your BIM object files. That's the service part we talked about, the one part where we have seen a drop over the last quarters in revenue, and it's a kind of consultancy fee. Fredrik, to answer your question is that as we are really been focusing on the recurring revenue, that means the subscription part, we have been focused on getting, making sure that we make money on the service part. That means that we haven't paid as much attention, and we haven't invested as much into the service part historically, since we're not able to do everything.
Maybe we're lagging them to get the brands quicker up onto the platform. That's part of the explanation. The second part of that explanation is that we have been strict on getting non-paying customers on the platform. Of those 2,153 brands, some of them have been tests and some of them have been there for, haven't been paying. We're much stricter today on that they need to pay to be on the platform. That's why maybe not seeing as big growth as we do. Fredrik, you've been with us, you know that it's important for us that we are cutting costs and increasing revenue, making sure we profit the long term. It's an important part of the transition.
Okay, thanks. One more question. You mentioned that the retention is improving, month- by- month. Why is that, do you think? Is that sustainable?
Martin, you or me? You want me to take it?
I can take it. I mean, the retention rate, I mean, I think it's part of the reorganization we have been doing that we are getting into place. Obviously you're never like 100% completed, and we're very well aware of that, and that's why we do a lot of recalibration and optimization of the sales organization. We see the long-term trends very positive. That could also be said that during this transition we've had, inflow has been relatively stable throughout the transition, which we also see as a very strong sign. I think where we have been lacking is more on the churn side and that we are improving also quite much during the last quarter.
Okay, thanks. One last question from me. I mean in the report, you just seem quite optimistic going forward. You mentioned a very strong pipeline, good retention as we talked about, and also strong new sales. However, while you're back to ARR growth, it's still not at levels where I suppose you are happy with. I mean, you're not giving any guidance of course, but my interpretation is that you expect a higher growth rate going forward considering your statements about the new sales pipeline and retention.
To use the hard word here, of course. Hell yes, we are. This is not good enough for us as a company, and it's definitely not where we wanna be. We have a massive market ahead of us, but it's so sometimes complicated to explain why the old model wasn't sustainable when you saw the growth. The growth wasn't sustainable from a cost perspective. It definitely wasn't sustainable as we're accelerating now. We hope that as we put this in place, the new models, new price list, new all across the company and invested into that renovation of the house, it will pay off and getting back to much stronger growth rate. As I see it from the inside of the company, Fredrik, I can see some of the extremely positive momentum.
We need to turn it into, I guess, the net sales since the market always looks at that. Also importantly, we really want the ARR growth to always be at the best in class. By class I mean, best SaaS company on the stock exchange eventually.
Okay, thanks. That's all from me.
Thank you. There are no further questions on the audio line. I'll hand back over to our speakers.
Thank you very much. I'll ask you, Martin, since we are on different locations, any questions in the email?
No, I have not.
Okay, great. In that case, I wanna conclude our audio cast. I wanna thank you very much for listening in and we cheer for the women soccer team right now. With that said, thank you very much from BIMobject.