Hi, and welcome to this presentation today with Careium. With us today, we have the Chief Executive Officer, Christian Walén, who will do a presentation, and then we'll follow up with some Q&A. Please go ahead, Christian.
Thank you, Oskar. Can you all hear me well? Very good. So fantastic to get to be part of meeting all of you. This is actually a bigger crowd than the last time we were at ABG, so clearly we've done something right. Very thankful for that. Also recognize some faces, which I think is phenomenal. Maybe you will recognize some of what I'm about to say also. But my name is Christian Walén. Clearly, the presentation here is not doing its trick. Do it like this. And I'm proud to serve as the Chief Executive Officer of the Careium Group. And before we head into what we actually do, I'd like to just take a couple of seconds and highlight why I think we are one of the most important companies found in the European technology landscape.
Because in the world we live in today, if you turn on the news, it's quite clear that we are in the midst of a climate crisis. We are most certainly in very challenging geopolitical contexts, but if you think a little bit about both those two extremely impactful sort of movements, you also understand that they can be solved or reversed. There could be peace, and there could be technological achievement advancements, state regulation to really manage the climate situation if the will is there. However, behind both these two huge movements impacting our newspapers and everyday lives, and not in the list of financial markets, it is the quiet revolution, constantly ongoing, completely unavoidable, and that is the fact that we are getting older, and we are older for longer, and in very stark contrast to both geopolitics and climate, this cannot be reversed.
It can probably only be prolonged. And that is really at the heart of what Careium is all about. It is being a part in managing the shift to an aging population in as positive a way as possible. Come 2060, 1/3 , it's you. Come 2060, 1/3 of all Europeans will be over the age of 65. Let that sink in a bit. One third of the entire population of Europe will be above the age of 65. Now, you can be super healthy as a 65+ year old. Absolutely. We have great advancements in healthcare and medicine that can ensure that we can live long and do really well and live really rich lives. But at the end of the day, something happens to us as we age. And that is something that we take very, very seriously because we foresee a huge challenge to Western societies.
The costs for providing the care will go up. And unless we accept huge tax hikes, we need to find smarter ways of servicing people to ensure that they can live good lives without burdening the systems. Key among these will be to have people being healthy and at home. That will be the number one thing to save costs. Second, we are in for quite a shock because the political systems will change. People vote differently as they get older. We will have a completely different tax base, which will further increase the push for using technology to solve these types of issues. And it's very easy to think that in many cultures, predominantly in sort of Southern Europe, this is less of a problem because you have strong, close-knit families who sort of do a lot of the care themselves.
But in reality, that's not what the data is telling us. Yes, you might physically live closer to your friends and family in, for example, Italy, but you don't necessarily live with them. And thus, the need for solutions that keep people healthy and secure in their homes is only increasing. And this is very much what we do. We are trying to lead the European landscape of what is affectionately known as technology-enabled care. And we do it with three pillars. First, we develop really innovative hardware, the alarms, the sensors, the technologies in the homes of the individual that can provide meaningful data on her care situation and ensure that whenever there is an issue, we can highlight that and put the right resources in place around the individual. Second, we build really good software to facilitate this.
We are not that many companies at somewhat larger scale that are actually all in on just working in this domain. For us, this means that we are creating our own ecosystem in a digital sense with all the backends to run age-specific IoT, all the platforms required to get all the data into a meaningful kind of dashboard or usage platforms for the care services and so on. Last but not least, in many of the markets we are in, we also provide certain services. This could be everything from running installation activities to actually providing the monitoring or even doing the response that is you actually pick up the phone when it rings and you go out and solve whatever situation is at hand. We do this in a very market-centric way where we do it ourselves.
It's if it's financially meaningful to do it, and we let someone else do it if it's not. Our vision is to enable millions of people all over Europe to live really rich, safe, and active lives thanks to our technology that we can adapt around that individual to make sure that he or she is cared for in the best possible way. At present, we're halfway there. 515,000 people all over Europe are, as of today, reliant on Careium technology for their care. Out of those, 500,000, we service around 340,000 with direct services, and the others are where someone else is providing the care, but they are using our technology. That is where we are today, and this is a really interesting market, and the reason is, of course, that there are really strong megatrends. We are getting older.
We are getting less money in care systems, so they are forced to move into innovative solutions and so on. And we also have a very, very interesting digital shift as we shift out our infrastructure. If you go to France, for example, you will find a lot of analog phones because they still use the copper infrastructure for analog transmissions. We don't do that in Sweden anymore. So we are forced country by country to completely change out and swap out the installed base of whatever care systems are currently in place. Now, over the upcoming years, it's about a 7%-8% CAGR for this sector if you go to the analyst.
But what I think is most interesting is the fact that the penetration rate, which is measured as what percentage of people in a given market over the age of 65 have access to these solutions that actually have them in their home. You can see that there's a huge difference between the European market leader, the U.K., which sees around 15%-16% of all people aged 65+ having access to this technology. And you compare it to the sort of giants of Europe, like the Germans and the French, where it's about 5%. So very, very likely we will see positive growth in select markets that is probably a bit more explosive in the years to come than, for example, in the Nordic landscape, which is fairly stable at around 10%. And this business area or industry is actually divided between different facets.
There's the hardware part where you either provide the hardware directly to a municipality or an insurance company, or you provide it as part of a service offering, and you do it for individuals in their homes. That is about roughly 2/3 of the market, and then we have the assisted living side, which is when you are in a care home or care facility. There are many variations of this all over Europe. We have the Swedish Seniorboende, for example. That is something that is commonly used in the U.K. as well, but in general, the elderly care facilities, which is its own subsector of the industry. This is an industry that we are currently not in, but we are looking to move into it.
We focus fully for now on the individual living and the associated software and hardware components, but very keen to break into assisted living. This is not just a business-to-government operation. It certainly is in the Nordics, where that is more or less 100% of the market, but as soon as you move away to other countries, you will find that it dwindles in the Netherlands, for example. You don't have any governmental contracts whatsoever. Everything is straight up B2B, and in many markets such as France, the U.K., and the Netherlands, there is also a very healthy B2C market, so you basically buy these solutions on Amazon if you're in France. You don't get them provided by your local or state municipality, and what we see is that many of these markets, they actually have a mix of all of this.
You might have about 40% that is attributable to the B2B segment, and then you might have 40% that is related to the governmental or municipality-centric contracts, and the rest is pure play B2C. The B2C channel is something we are looking very much into because we think that it's maybe the most attractive margin profile compared to these longer but safer governmental contracts that often span many years, of course, but maybe at a slightly reduced margin. Us as a business in this industry, we were spun out of Doro making the senior phones. Careium used to be a business area within Doro, spun out in 2021. For those that follow it, we'll get to that in a little bit. It was quite a rough start to life as an entity on its own two legs.
We had last year a turnover of SEK 824 million. We've had a pretty decent growth over the last couple of years at around 15%. That includes both the organic and the inorganic growth generated. And the company was, to quite a large extent, built by a series of acquisitions, around 8-10, depending on how you count them in the U.K., over the span of about 15 years. That happened as part of Doro. We're around 900 in terms of the headcount. That doesn't mean full FTE, as many people don't work full time. And what's really interesting, I think, is that about 70% of all our revenue is recurring, which means that this is a contract that we service for someone that features hardware, services, monitoring, everything we do rolled up into one sort of monthly installment for servicing a set amount of end users.
Now, the counterpart could be a municipality, or it could be an insurance company, but it is of a recurring nature. We are based in all the key markets in Europe. We don't foresee geographical expansion in Europe as something that is high on our list of strategic priorities. Spain is probably the exception where we want to really emphasize our commercial activity a bit more. But apart from that, we are in the markets where around 85% of European spend in this sector is going to. So we're pretty happy with where we are. And for those that have been following the company, you can probably see around here that just following the split, when the company was set to stay on its own two legs, it was basically a very, very rude awakening. The company was probably not prepared for that. Neither were management.
The structures weren't there. And the resulting effect, combined with the fact that the aggressive pace of acquisitions had led to a lot of integration issues, mainly in the U.K., led to the company performing really poorly. Since then, we made a decent turnaround. That is fairly evident in the numbers. And we feel that we are now in a place where we have stabilized ourselves. And what we mean by stabilize is not that we are very happy. It is that we now think that now we can start making the real initiatives in terms of development, in terms of inorganic growth, and a whole portfolio of things that will create a better future for us. And this is something that's taken a lot of hard work, of course, but we've been fairly successful and delivering fairly consistently ever since.
It took us about a year to get ourselves in order, which is pretty fast, but we do feel that we've been quite successful in that journey. If you look at us as an investment, you could see that we, this is from the other day. It goes a bit up and down. You could see that the stock development fairly well matches the internal workings of getting things back in order. So the adage that the market is always right is probably true. I don't know how they could have this insight into the inner workings of Careium, but I think this is quite reflective of the journey we've been on. It was probably fair to see the stock price that SEK 7 per share there when we were in the worst of circumstances.
I know many people thought that we would probably not be able to get back on our feet without serious capital injections. We broke our covenants and had to communicate that and so on. We've actually managed to get the company back into shape. Really tough work, of course, a lot of tough decisions, but hopefully we will now continue on a good trajectory. We've been very fortunate to have some really good owners who've been supporting us all along. Number one is Cidro Förvaltning, which is Peter Lindell's family office. It used to be [Rite] Management. Number two is Accendo Capital, a Finnish activist fund, and number three is Nordea Funds. We've been very, very fortunate to have this backing throughout this and a strong belief in that we were able to get the company back on its feet and deliver on its potential.
That potential to us, it is first and foremost to really focus on doing better in these huge markets, the Frances, the Spains, and the Germanys. The reason for that is that we are very, very strong in the Nordics, but it's also dangerous to be a small company out of the Nordics. Sometimes you don't see the potential that's out there because it's just a bit more convenient to look at what's around you. We are transitioning heavily towards making a bigger splash in the big markets out there. For those that have been following our quarterly reports, you can see that the growth rates in, for example, DACH or France are pretty impressive. We're very happy that we're doing that organically without putting a lot of funds behind it.
We're just doing it better, adapting our products to better suit these markets and so on. Number two is, of course, to become more relevant to more customers, and this means investment into our product portfolio. This could mean many things. We launched not that long ago in September what is known as the i-Care Center, our end-to-end alarm receiving platform built specifically for this industry. Probably not so relevant to all the other guys out there who are maybe more trying to combine this industry and security and whatever they want to put in there to access more customers. We're thinking completely different. We are going to focus on the seniors and all the work around those, and thus we build custom-built solutions that we use ourselves and that we sell to other customers.
We also communicated that, as part of getting one of the largest German organizations providing these types of services as our first external customer on this platform. Last but not least, this is a funny little industry. It's not that many companies that are doing a really good job. We're the third biggest in Europe. Number one is a company called Tunstall out of the U.K., which has a horrendous debt situation and had for many years. Number two is a business area of a large French technology conglomerate called Legrand. They do all sorts of things. You can barely find our little sector on their web page. And we are the third largest company across Europe in this industry. So given that, there are quite interesting acquisition opportunities. This is how Careium was built.
We've communicated many times that we would like to get back to these types of activities, but we would not do so before we felt 100% confident that the company was stable and that we were able to integrate the target companies in a good way. It's very much an integration play, and you can create some really, really strong cost synergies. Yes, it's fantastic to talk about commercial synergies. They are probably there. But when you do your business cases, it's usually better to just look at the costs because that you can really control. So this is something that will form a pillar of our future here. Hopefully, we will be able to use the fact that we are now, from an EBITDA net debt kind of perspective, at almost a bit too low level. Oskar sometimes complains that it's too cautious.
I would believe that you are right. We need to be a bit more aggressive here because there are a lot of good opportunities that are fairly moderate in scale, and thus they are something that we can both afford and control. From a pure investment perspective, we have a really well-growing market that is not something that is just here for the upcoming one or two years, but rather a long, long trajectory of Europe changing and us being perfectly positioned to capitalize. We are doing it differently. We are one of the few companies that wake up every morning only focused on this. Yes, there are some others, but there are not that many. That is a huge advantage where you can direct all your efforts to create the sort of best-of-breed solutions for this population. Third, we have a very substantial recurring revenue base.
Yes, some of this might be contractual, so you have your recurring revenue for six years for 9,000 people in Örebro, for example, if we take a Swedish example, and then after four or six years, this is up for a new tender, and then, of course, someone else might get that recurring revenue, but I'd argue it's still pretty stable to know for four to six years that we will have so and so much coming in from so and so many people, so the other 30% that varies is more related to the direct sale of products, which happens in France, Spain, U.K., and Germany, so software and hardware bundle can be sold in a non-recurring manner, and that is the non-recurring component, so if you look at our reports and you see services, that's the recurring component.
And then you see the products, and that's the direct sale of products for those that are following us closely. And last but not least, we are very much, very much positioned to be a part of creating a better tomorrow for millions of people across Europe. And this is something that I think is slow from the European states to realize because this will be a snowball effect where fertility rates are going down, people are healthier for longer, and we have increased senior populations. And sooner rather than later, we will wake up and realize that we have almost reached an inflection point where we cannot not invest heavily in creating a different kind of Europe because the demographics have completely changed. The only thing that is not making this as fast as you would expect is probably the fact that it's gradual.
We, as human beings, tend to be a bit slow to pick up when changes are gradual over time. Frogs boil slowly. And that would be my presentation of our phenomenal business. Happy to take your questions, and even if I'm not allowed to, also questions from the audience because I think that's almost even more important than your questions, Oskar.
All right. Well, thank you for that. And we'll just start off with, I would say, one question. Just what are your key focus points during the next few quarters at the moment? So you obviously have a little bit of headwind in the U.K. and in Sweden. But what are your main priorities right now?
So for those that have been following us, we are a bit dependent since we have such a large part of our customer base in the public sector. That is great.
It's safe. It's long term. But whenever there's a chance to slow down their spending, they're going to take it. And what's been happening predominantly in the U.K., but also in Sweden in the last year or so is that there have been delays of how fast the country is transitioning out of certain types of infrastructure, 2G, 3G in Sweden and analog in the U.K. And that has put sort of a wet blanket on our sales in those markets. So customers are not as, you know, their urgency isn't so high. For now, we kind of see that returning. So I think it's really important to be on top of when people wake up to realize that, okay, if you stay and try to save some money, you are just creating a more and more problematic situation for yourself.
And you are also putting more and more people at risk because that is the dirty downside of those infrastructure transitions. These connectivity platforms tend to work worse and worse. So in the U.K., for example, in the last five months, we've had 10 major outages. So the analog net just doesn't work. And that, of course, puts a lot of people at risk when the old equipment is failing and you get tons of technical sort of call failures and that kind of stuff, which is really detrimental to the safety of the seniors. So we are just trying to amp up our efforts in when this kind of reverses, which we can see some traces of, we are to be sort of leading that wave. That is our number one priority. Second part is actually to do a lot of the investments into R&D.
Now, this doesn't mean that we are going to completely shoot our CAPEX and OPEX to the moon, but rather to ensure that we're staying ahead in terms of the position we have. We are seen as a very innovative and quality-oriented company, and we need to keep being that company because that is what wins you more business and more customer trust. So those two.
Perfect. And staying on the topic of the competitive landscape. So as you mentioned, you are one of the few with a core focus on just this market. But what is your real USP when you win tenders ahead of the competition?
So both in winning tenders and also in winning the B2B side, which is maybe more sales-oriented or traditional complex sales, I'd argue that it's the combination of the portfolio we have with the breadth.
There might be competitors out there who in this very narrow band niche, they have a really stellar product or platform or whatever it might be. But in terms of the breadth that we can offer, it's very, very hard to beat. So that is one part. And our customers tend to prefer having more of a selection of solutions rather than having one. The quality that has been going into doing this for, you know, if we have some employees on the technical side who've been with us for 30 years just doing this, they've learned a bit or two along the years. So clearly that goes into the hardware and the software that we make. And third, I think, is the innovation. We try to balance it. You could always become this sort of super smart, often quite expensive company. We don't really believe in that.
We believe that we should reach millions of people and give them really, really good solutions so we need to be innovative enough with the things that are relevant and not completely tank our profitability in service of R&D investments.
Perfect, then I'll just move on with a question on Spain, which is a very interesting market with big opportunities, of course so can you just elaborate a little bit on how you are entering that market and what challenges you see?
Well, for good and for bad, Spain is more or less a 100% tender-based market. And for those that know, a tender-based market is when the, in this case, the regions of Spain, of which there are 11, they put out tenders for the type of services and then more often than not, a consortium of entities try to fulfill that tenders and compete.
So the thing with Spain is that the good thing is that if you are tender-based, you don't need a huge sales force. So you can have very few people who can work on these tenders and create these wins. Now, the bad thing is that it's a winner takes all more often than not. That means if you don't win, you don't win. So for us, it's about setting up a very tender-centric commercial office. Now, we are very good with tenders from the Nordics. So we have our own internal centers of excellence and so on. And we're very happy to have a manager for Spain that we recruited early October, who's 12 years sales exec in this industry. Really, really good hiring for us.
So we would probably have to wait a bit to see any meaningful value coming out of Spain, big contract wins and so on. On the flip side of that, Spain is where you find the biggest contracts in Europe. So the Barcelona tender, for example, which is obviously one of the big ones, that is around EUR 250 million a year for at least three years. And you don't win that as a sole source supplier. You win there as part of a bidding entity with other partners. Someone does installation, someone does the hardware, someone does the software, and so on. But what we've said is that we expect to see revenues generated in Spain in 2025. We expect it to carry itself in terms of the profitability and cost. And that we stick by. It probably won't be monumental, but our organization is also fairly small.
But if we're lucky, we have a really big tender win to report. And the smallest ones in Spain are quite a lot bigger than they are in other parts of Europe. So that would be really, really exciting.
Perfect. I think time is running out. So I would have to thank you very much for this presentation and the Q&A. Thank you. Thank you.