I am the CEO of Dynavox Group.
I'm Linda Tybring. I'm the CFO of Dynavox Group, and will cover the financials.
All right. For some of those of you who have participated in these calls before, you might be familiar, but we'll start with a quick recap about what Dynavox Group does, and then we will summarize the main takeaways from the quarter. We will then dive deeper into the financials, and thereafter there will be a Q&A session. You can submit your questions during the Q&A session in the function here in Teams, or you can ask them live by raising your hand in Teams. Of course, unmute yourself when we will invite you to speak. Of course, you're always welcome to offline questions sent by email to the above email, which is Linda's, linda.tybring@dynavoxgroup.com. A brief overview of Dynavox Group.
First and foremost, it's important to reiterate our mission and our vision, which I know is very dear, not only to our now over 1,000 colleagues around the world, but also to our ecosystems of partners and investors. Our vision is a world where everyone can communicate, and we will contribute to this via focusing on our mission, which reads, "To empower people with disabilities to do what they once did or never thought possible." This also summarizes two of our main user stories. The first one, the do what you once did, that may refer to a person who led a normal life until a diagnosis such as ALS, which rendered her then unable to control the body or communicate like before.
The other one, the never thought possible, can refer to a child with a condition such as autism or cerebral palsy, where thanks to our solution, she can do much more than the world around him or her ever thought possible. On the picture here, you have Linnea. She's a 12-year-old girl from Gothenburg here in Sweden, and she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at early age. She's a great example of this. Linnea presented at the Women in Tech Sweden here in Stockholm earlier this week, together with our colleague, Grit, that you see on the picture. Thanks to our solution, she was able to fulfill one of her dreams, to give a lecture about assistive communication in front of thousands of people. Linnea has been a user since she was about two years old. The market that we service is hugely underserved.
Some 50 million people have a condition so grave they simply cannot communicate unless they have a solution like ours. Every year, some 2 million people are being diagnosed. Yet we estimate that only 2% of those are actually being helped, and the rest literally remain silent. The main reason for this is lack of awareness, also among the professionals and the prescribers that are tasked to assist these users and combined with poor healthcare reimbursement systems. We operate this company on a global footprint. Today, almost three quarters of our business stems out of the U.S., largely because of a reasonably well-functioning funding system that was established some 20-30 years ago.
Our comprehensive solutions are sold in more than 65 markets around the world, which 12 are markets where we sell directly, while the others are serviced by a network of some 100 reseller partners. Our staff is distributed in a similar way as our revenue, meaning some 50% of our staff are based in North America with our U.S. headquarters in Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania. Our second largest office is our headquarters here in Stockholm. We also have branch offices in several European countries as well as in Suzhou, in China, in Adelaide, and Australia. As of today, as I mentioned, we're just over 1,000 employees in total in the group. We provide a comprehensive portfolio of solutions that ranges from the content and the language system, such as the world's leading library of communication symbols. They're called PCS.
A leading solution of off-the-shelf, custom-made synthetic voices of the highest quality and a large diversity, of course, of languages, ages, ethnicities, and so forth. We also make highly sophisticated communication software that's tailored to the type of user, and that can, of course, vary greatly based on the needs. Three, we develop and design devices with cutting-edge technology, and they're typically medically certified and very durable. That includes communication aids that are controlled via eye tracking and accessories such as the Rehadapt mounting systems. If we move on, we have a services portfolio to help our users through the complexity of obtaining and getting funding or reimbursement for their solutions. Last but not least, we're there to help our users, the therapists, the caregivers, through a global system of support resources.
We operate this model globally, and it's important to note that each piece on this picture is critically important and also a significant differentiator for us, making us absolutely unique. Our go-to-market model is predominantly as prescribed aids, so that means some 90% of our revenue comes from public or private insurance providers. That also means that we have solid paying customers and have always been resilient towards changes in the overall economic climate. Now we will go back and focusing on the main topic of today, namely our earnings report for the first quarter in 2026. If I just look at the highlights, we delivered a solid start to the year with continued revenue growth in the quarter.
The growth compared to the same quarter previous year sums up to 15% after adjusting for currency effects. North America, our largest market, was hit, however, by unusually severe winter weather in January and in February. That led to closures among schools and institutions, and this, of course, impacted our ability to meet with customers and deliver products. These effects are, however, expected to normalize and the deferred business to be regained during the remainder of this year. The month of March, isolated, for example, was back at historic growth levels in North America. Our business in markets outside of North America continued on the good trajectory from the previous quarters. The underlying demand for our solutions remains high, and that's proving the solidity of our underlying business, and we see robust underlying growth across basically all markets where we operate.
EBIT came in at SEK 57 million, and that's a 35% increase compared to the same quarter last year, despite continued FX headwinds and, of course, the named weather impact in the U.S. Our product and solutions development hub, which was formed last year here in Stockholm, is now fully operational, and then the global rollout of our new ERP system is now almost concluded. Now with also our Swedish parent company successfully transitioned earlier this month here in April, leaving only a few small local entities remaining. On 1st of April, we also completed the acquisition of our Italian reselling partner, SR Labs Healthcare, and we welcome new colleagues to the team. That's very exciting. Last but not least, we announced a couple of changes to the executive management team.
On March 1, we welcome Marie-Josée Leblond, or MJ, as we refer to her, as the new Chief Digitalization and Information Officer, and also we welcome Luis Mustafa, who joined as our new Chief Operating Officer. He's replacing Tony Pavlik, who's about to enter retirement. We also announced that Linda here will leave her position as our CFO but will remain in full capacity until the end of January next year, 2027, hopefully boding for a smooth and structured transition after we have recruited her replacement. Now I actually do hand over to Linda, who indeed is still here and on top of things to take us deeper into the financials. Linda.
Thank you, Fredrik. Yes, still alive and kicking. Let's take a closer look at the Q1. Revenue for the first quarter, which is typically our seasonally weakest quarter, came in at SEK 588 million, a 15% year-on-year growth after adjusting for currency effects. Recent acquisition contributed with 3%, and the organic growth was 11%. Currency fluctuations had a 14% negative impact on revenue. Sales continued to grow across all markets, and the gross margin ended up at 69%, a decrease of 0.9 percentage point. Gross margin benefited from favorable currency effect, but it was offset by higher component cost and higher cost base following increased staffing to support the continued growth journey.
I'll make one correction. The gross margin was 67%.
67%? Okay.
Yeah.
Did I say something else?
Yeah.
Sorry about that. Before we move on, I would like to take a little bit deeper dive into our typical seasonality patterns. Over the past couple of years, we have seen a recurring pattern over the quarters that is slightly connected to our access to public and private reimbursement system. We maintain some 675 contracts with private and public payers, and Fredrik mentioned before, 90% of our revenue comes out of that. In January, many payers, specifically in the U.S., are resetting their insurances, which means that the funding process slowed down in the beginning of the year, which impacts our revenue in the first quarter. The pace is then picking up, and we normally see an acceleration over the following quarters that end with a sprint in Q4 when the fiscal year closes. Hence, the fourth quarter is typically our strongest.
As you know, there's no rules without exception, and as you can see in the chart, we had an exceptionally strong Q1 last year. This was due to good business momentum and the successful product launch that we did in Q3 2024, and we then allow existing orders to be replaced. Consequently, delivery and revenue was pushed forward to the following quarter. This is a pattern that we recognize and have seen before in conjunction when we do product launches. To sum up, we have a clear seasonality pattern impacting our revenue distribution. This is also why our financial growth target is set to annual average growth of 20%. We clearly see variations over the quarters. Moving back to the Q1, EBIT for the quarter was SEK 57 million, and the EBIT margin was 9.8%, which is a growth of 56% FX adjusted.
Our OpEx increased by 7% organically. The OpEx increase relates mainly to continued investments in sales and marketing staff, but also within our IT organization. During the quarter, we continue investing in systems and tools, including a new ERP platform to strengthen scalability. These non-recurring investments totaled to SEK 9 million, a decrease of SEK 5 million versus last year. Acquisition contributed with SEK 40 million increase over operating expenses versus prior year, and we saw a decline in long-term incentive cost of SEK 5 million year-on-year. Cost for research and development after capitalization and amortization decreased by SEK 24 million compared to the same quarter last year, mainly driven by higher costs in prior year related to organization and restructuring.
Higher capitalization related to launch of new products and lower amortization contributed further. In addition, currency effects both from lower exchanges versus prior year and together with transactional timing effect had the negative impact of SEK 7 million on our EBIT for the period. If we look at the basic earnings per share, it totaled 0.33 SEK per share compared with last year, 0.23 SEK per share, which is close to 60% improvement. For the quarter, cash flow after continuous investment was positive with SEK 56 million, more than doubled. It's encouraging to see that our work improving processes and operations have had positive effects on our cash flow compared to last year. Cash at hand by the end of the quarter was SEK 243 million. Net debt was SEK 865 million.
The total unused credit facility at the end of the quarter was SEK 300 million, and the net debt over last 12 months EBITDA was 1.7x. Fredrik?
Yes.
Back to you.
Thank you, Linda. Okay, so before we open up for questions, I'd like to reiterate some of the main takeaways and bring further nuance to our performance and outlook. We continue on our strong growth trajectory, a trend that started the early spring of 2022, so that's almost four years ago. We grew revenue by 15%, adjusting for currency, and despite the North America being temporarily impacted by severe weather in January and February. We see that sales continue to grow across all our markets. Our profitability and cash flow improved notably, reflecting strong operating leverage as investment-related costs continue to taper off. We also note that the currency headwinds have decreased as we enter now into Q2 with the SEK versus the US dollar fluctuations seemingly having stabilized.
We deliver a very strong cash flow, further underscoring the improved operational efficiency, which we have put a lot of energy into achieving. We continue to expand our direct market presence by closing the acquisition of our Italian reseller partner. Our overall exposure to import tariffs to the U.S. remains limited since our products are classified as medically certified assistive devices, and that exempts them from tariffs under the Nairobi Protocol. We continue to monitor, obviously, all macroeconomic and policy changes developments closely. While currency effects and the broader macro environment can create volatility quarter to quarter, Dynavox Group is well positioned to continue delivering long-term sustainable growth in a severely under-penetrated market while of course advancing our mission to provide life-changing solutions to those who need them the most.
We reiterate our current financial targets, which were communicated in February of 2024 with a time horizon of three to four years. The first target reads to, on average, grow revenue by 20% per year, adjusted for currency effect, including obviously then contributions from acquisitions. In local currencies, the first quarter growth was 15%, which means we continue on the growth trajectory. As Linda talked about earlier, we have clear seasonality variations over the years. The market that we serve remains hugely underserved, but also quite immature. With the example of growth levers such as sales teams expansion, adding direct markets, and then of course, operational excellence, we continue to build on our growth journey. The second target reads to deliver an annual EBIT margin that reaches and exceeds 15%.
We feel that we have proven to build strong growth with incremental improvements in profitability, this quarter too. We need to continue to invest in future growth with improvements in scale. The recipe for achieving this is rather simple, continued revenue growth, high and stable gross margins, and then operating expenses that increase at a lower pace than the revenue growth. As a consequence, we see good opportunity to further leverage how revenue growth translates to reaching and exceeding a full year EBIT of 15%. Then lastly, we expressed our dividend policy, and we have an attractive cash flow profile. Given the growth opportunity, we need to maintain a capital structure that enables strategic flexibility to pursue growth investments and also, of course, acquisitions.
It's still expected to over time generate excess cash and our policy is therefore to distribute at least 40% of available net profits to the shareholders via either dividends, share purchases, or similar programs when so allows and when we deem it's the right prioritization. As you could see for the Annual General Shareholders Meeting that is happening on May 8th this year, the Board of Directors earlier proposed that a cash dividend of SEK 0.5 per share shall be distributed for the shareholders. All right. With that said, we are now inviting our Corporate Communications Director, Elisabeth Manzi, who will help moderate and also enable us to take questions from the audience. Hi, Elisabeth.
Hello. Thank you very much. Please ask your questions either by typing them in the chat in the Q&A in Teams, or raise your hand, and then we will see you, and we will call you in. We do have a couple of people who have raised their hands, and I will then start with the first one, who is Daniel Djurberg. Daniel, can you please unmute yourself and if you want to also turn on the camera?
Yeah, why not? Good morning.
Hi, Daniel.
Can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Super. I have a question on the growth, and importantly, you said that March growth level was back at historical levels in the U.S. I was wondering is it possible to quantify what is the historical growth level in the U.S. and/or possibly also quantify the negative effect from the winter storms in terms of deferred revenues or the impact on the organic growth level is seen in the U.S.? It would be super helpful. Thanks.
I understand that. I can't quantify it precisely, but what I can say, if you look at historic growth levels, we're leaving a period where we've been actually quite well above our FX-adjusted target of 20%. We saw, obviously, that in total, the revenue growth FX-adjusted for the quarter was, how should I say, only 15%. That is a consequence of weak order growth in January and February, and then to some degree, partially mitigated by a strong March, but not all the way back to where we think that the business should operate at. I don't have specific numbers in dollars or SEK to help you quantify that, I'm afraid.
Okay. Would it be fair to assume that you have deferred revenues coming from Q1 into Q2 then? Or how should we think of it?
Yes. Our assumption is that none of the lost revenue, if you will, that didn't happen due to weather impact, et cetera, are actually lost. They will happen later on in the year, whether it happens in Q2 or further down in the year, I cannot specify that, because these are quite slow and, call it bureaucratic systems, and of course, if you miss the first date, it might take some time before you get a second chance. Typically, we do not see that weather, or these kinds of short-term impacts, have lasting impact. There will be a rebound one way or the other.
Perfect. If I may ask you also on Europe, showing off 40% organic growth, can you comment a little bit on the variation seen in various segments like Nordics, Germany, France, Italy, et cetera, and if what is needed to secure a little bit higher growth also in Europe?
If you take Europe as an example, it's actually quite difficult to quantify the difference between organic and acquired growth because of the fact that when we acquire companies, we acquire our own resellers. It's not like we buy a completely new business unit where there's new revenue. In totality, if you adjust for FX in Europe, the underlying growth was 32%.
Yeah.
Of course, part of that was us acquiring a reseller, but it's the same products being sold in the market by the same people. It just happens to be that they are now employees of ours and not owned by a third party. If I would answer your question on where do we see growth, there is still a fair amount, these markets differ from quarter to quarter and market to market. The market that we currently feel maybe the most excited about is, for sure, Germany, where we aren't going direct since, is it September 1? Right, Linda?
Yep.
Yeah. That's a market where we believe there is a lot of potential in many ways, and that's also a market that did perform well.
Fantastic. I will just finish off with the ERP. It was SEK 9 million in the quarter. Should we expect a similar level in Q2, or will it be even a bit lower than this SEK 9 million? Will Q2 be the last quarter with any highlighted negative impact?
It's very much a Linda question.
Yes. It will fade off during Q2, and our hope is that majority of our existing entities will be over in the coming months.
Congrats to a strong ERP implementation then.
Thank you. It's fantastic work by all the members in the team, I would say. It's a true team effort.
Super. Thank you, and good luck in Q2.
Thank you, Daniel.
Thank you very much, Daniel. I also have a question here from Mikael Lasséen, who's asking, "Gross margin was 67% in Q1 versus around 69% in H2 2025. Could you break down the key drivers behind the decline and comment on how we should think about the gross margin ahead?
A couple of things. Comparing with H2, then you have a higher revenue as part of that, which means some of the set cost is still the same going into Q1. We're going into a new quarter, and we also added more people to be able to handle the growth. I think the gross margin will continue to be stable. Of course, we wrote that in the report, seeing some challenges when it comes to components and freight, but we should remember it's a small part of our gross margin, considering that it's close to 67% and 78%.
I think we sometimes try to help that. What's the portion of fixed cost as part of our COGS?
About 20% is fixed cost.
That should scale quite well as revenue go up, and then of course, the remaining is related to how many products we ship, et cetera.
Yeah.
Good. Thank you. We have someone else who would like to ask a question. I do invite Jakob Lembke. Please unmute yourself.
Thanks. I have a few questions. I'll start maybe on North America, if you can elaborate on the weakness you saw in January and February, let's say how much sales declined maybe in those months?
This is the same response as to Daniel then. No, we don't quantify exactly the weakness. It's actually a little bit difficult to quantify what was the consequence of that, et cetera. We can just summarize that in totality of two highly impacted months of January and February and then a normal month in March, didn't bring us all on top of the bar. At the same time, we don't see any changes in reimbursement. We don't see any changes in demand. We believe that the effects are more or less temporary and exactly how temporary something is. In a different setting earlier this morning, we also quantified the fact that if you think about the North American business, we deliver every day. We ship devices almost up to $1 million per day.
Of course, if you have a day when roads and streets and institutions are closed, we will not ship anything that day. The question is how much can we make up for when the business is back to normal? That is difficult to quantify, but that's how vague I can be on that, Jakob.
Okay. A follow-up on that, I guess, is just the growth you're seeing now in North America. Is that in line with your sort of targets or above your targets, sort of implying that catch-up effect and also if you're seeing the same trends into April from March?
I think we do a pass on commenting on the current quarter, but I just want to reiterate the fact that we believe that this is a business that should deliver an FX adjusted or in local currencies growth of 20%. U.S. is a market where we do not have resellers to acquire, et cetera. So it is kind of same store sales also going forward. We believe in that. I think we can definitely say that 2025 was a very strong year. We obviously then delivered way above the 20% FX adjusted growth. We reiterate our target, and we believe in it.
Okay. Another one, just, I don't know, can you see that, let's say that in California, the growth is exactly in line with the targets or normal, and that in maybe Massachusetts, it's way down. Do you see those sort of variations?
Oh, now you're putting us on the spot here as I actually don't have that. What we did learn was that the winter weather that was unusual and that was affecting 50% of the U.S. states. You had sub-zero degrees Celsius in Texas and some of our biggest states. It was nationwide, but I don't have a number off the top of my head whether California was untouched. I think we need to also understand that our operation, which is based out of Pennsylvania, that was probably in one of the epicenters of the storm. It's not necessarily just on the client side, it's also our capabilities.
Okay. Maybe one more, just that you seem quite confident that you will regain all of these sales, but at the, on the other hand, you don't really know how much you have been impacted. Just maybe some more comments on that you are confident in regaining this and how you can be that maybe, I don't know. Can you see internally that you have a larger backlog now or more processes ongoing or something like that?
Sure. One of the reasons why we can't tell whether a specific order was not happening because of weather, because there is no such check in the box in our CRM systems, et cetera. We don't know whether it was that or something else. What we can say is that nothing has changed. The reimbursement rules and laws are the same. Reimbursement levels are the same. The under-penetrated market remains as under-penetrated now as it was a year ago, et cetera. None of the fundamental fact, and there is no new competitor or other type of macroeconomic impact that affects us. All things alike, we should be able to deliver on the target. We do indeed remain confident. I also want to stress the fact that we express our targets on a full year basis. There will be fluctuations between quarters and months, et cetera.
That's part of the business. We also have then the more seasonality patterns that Linda talked about. We look at this business on a full year basis, and hence we do reiterate the target.
Okay. Maybe just a final question on the cost.
Well, final.
Yeah. Sorry. Just on the R&D expense, both the sort of gross expense looks lower, and then there's also higher capitalization. Just the question is what is behind that and if that is representative going forward?
I mean, mainly the big discrepancy is that we don't have the restructuring costs that we had the last year, the same period. We also launched more products, which means that you have a higher capitalization. We launched a product in beginning of April. We are also ruling out there some, not end of life, but from an amortization is actually lower amortization in the quarter as well.
Okay, thanks.
I think you can read between the lines that the new R&D organization that we have here in Stockholm is not just fully staffed, they're obviously also delivering.
Yes.
Hence there is more innovation coming out of that, and that's obviously quite reassuring.
Very good point.
Yeah.
Thank you very much, Jakob, and I think this was also the answer to a question that Mikael Lasséen had on the capitalization of R&D. I hope you also got that answer, Mikael. We do have some more people that would like to ask questions, so I invite Philip Vetekvist to join.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my questions. Just one short one on sales. I know it's repeating, but how does the paying pattern look like from customers? If sales accelerated in March, shouldn't trade receivables be up more?
Yeah, absolutely, but you had a strong Q4 as well, and it takes a little bit longer than to see that. We've also received payments during the quarter for our trade receivables since Q4 is higher in that perspective.
Got you. Then you touched a little bit on the R&D being down, but I also noticed the selling and admin expenses being up quite a bit in percentage of sales from previous quarters, comparing quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. What's the reason behind that? Yeah, some color on that would be really helpful.
Yeah. A couple of things. When it comes to, you have to remember, going into a new year, you enter with the same OpEx level as you had in Q4, which means that if you have lower sales, the ratio will then go up. Of course, we continue to invest in sales and marketing to be able to continue to grow. That's one of our key. We have also invested more in our IT organization.
Can you say anything about how big a part of selling expenses and admin expenses that are fixed or variable?
A majority of our OpEx is salaries. I would say almost 80% of our OpEx is salaries.
Maybe to add on that, commissions is obviously.
Yeah.
Specifically in North America, but then you need to take it down to just the field reps, et cetera. We typically say that commission as a part of salary is in the range of 5%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
4%-5%.
If you sold less in Q1, shouldn't selling expenses have been down a little bit then?
We have more people.
We have more people.
Okay. Fair enough. All right.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Philip. I would like to also invite Nicola Kalanoski, who is on the line. Nicola?
Right. Thank you very much. Now I can unmute myself. Perfect. All right. Thank you. Yeah, just a few questions of a clarifying nature from my end. Would you say that the bad weather in the U.S. in Q1 has also caused a delay in the recruitment or, say, onboarding of new U.S. solutions consultants?
What a good question.
Yeah, that's a good question. I would say no, it hasn't.
Yeah, fair enough.
No, I got feeling, I agree.
Yeah.
We have no chart to prove that, but that's not.
You have to remember a majority of our salespeople are remote, in that perspective.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
True. They don't necessarily have to come in physically for interviews, et cetera.
Yeah.
It's a remote machine to a large degree, well, ready from the start.
Yeah. That sounds very good. This is maybe a more difficult question, but has there been any notable direct or indirect impacts from the situation in the Middle East in your case at all? Is there anything we should keep in mind going forward that you think, just so we don't miss anything?
I can look at more of a macro. I think the uncertainty that we are looking at, that affects us all.
Yeah.
We are, of course, waking up every morning to new news, et cetera, and then you start to kind of, how will this impact us?
Mm-hmm.
As our infrastructure look like, the markets that we are exposed to, but of course, cost base. I think Linda covered a little bit on freight costs and inflation components that might have some impact. I don't know if you want to quantify that more, but it's nothing.
It's not material.
Major material, yes.
Yeah. There's nothing direct to keep in mind, at least.
No, I think you should also, if you just from a very practical perspective, our products are typically produced in Southeast Asia. Taiwan is a big market. They are shipped predominantly by boat to the U.S. West Coast, hence they don't go through any straits. They pass Hawaii. That's how exciting that trip is. There is no physical impact on our ability to produce and receive products. Of course, it's likely so that the part of our COGS that is represented by freight costs will to some degree, go up.
Yeah. All right. Very good. That's it for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Nicola. We have a question from Eric Larson. He's asking, how do you think about the balance sheet here, acquisitions versus giving back to shareholders?
The board is proposing to AGM, which is in two weeks, that we are doing a dividend of-
SEK 0.5.
... SEK 0.5 per share. We are definitely, that's part of our dividend policy, and we have said that net available profit of 40% should be either paid back in dividend or share buybacks.
I think we can say, if you look at the cash flow in this quarter, for example, it's very strong. It pretty much more than doubles.
Yeah.
Compared to the same period last year. We have what we feel is a totally acceptable debt leverage. We have additional credit and RCFs that we can use. But more importantly, the type of acquisitions that we're doing, they are small. We don't buy massive companies, which will affect us. It's largely these reseller acquisitions, and these are small companies, and that's a business which, A, has a very low risk in terms of acquisition. We know exactly how to do it, and we pay it more or less through our own cash flow, at least over quarters. We feel quite confident in our ability to, going forward, being able to share whatever is left or the excess cash with our shareholders in some clever way.
Good. We also have another question on acquisitions from an anonymous user here. The question is: The acquisition of SR Labs Healthcare in Italy was completed shortly after the quarter. Given your stated strategy of increasing local presence to organically scale the business, are there other key European markets where you still rely on resellers, and where we should expect similar direct acquisitions during the remainder of 2026?
Oh, good question.
Good question.
We're probably not going to open up our M&A playbook fully. With that said, I think it's also important to us that we feel that the big markets with well-functioning reimbursement systems are still very under-penetrated. We have very little reason to go far away and try to find new money elsewhere, because most of our growth for a long foreseeable future will probably happen in the established markets. I think it's a function of GDP, population, and the reimbursement system. If you look at the markets where we currently operate, the Nordics, U.S. obviously, and Canada, adding now France, Italy, and maybe most notably Germany, that's where we feel that there is ample opportunities to grow. Our stress levels to just for the sake of doing it, add more markets is, if there is a good opportunity, we will do it.
Otherwise, we feel that we can keep ourselves busy and run both a fast-growing and profitable company.
Remember that when we acquire this company, it's important of the organic growth after acquire them.
Correct.
Yeah.
I think that's maybe one thing that should be deciphered from this report. When we acquire a company, like I mentioned, it's mainly just the difference between what we sold to that reseller and what then they sell out on the street in that specific market. That's actually what's gaining, and it's quite small.
I do believe the question was actually from Jessica at Redeye.
All right.
Who also has another question. You reiterate that the rules have not changed for financing. Furthermore, the weather affects the sales. What, if any, would indicate that there are more competitors taking market share?
We don't feel that. I think if there is anything, I think the biggest competitor that we have is lack of awareness, and then bureaucracy is probably a competitor, too. We cannot say that there is any changes to the dynamic on the players of the market, and we don't see that there is any changes in market share or anything like that. That's as good of an answer, Jessica, that I can give at this point.
Also a question from Jessica. Last year, you communicated every quarter that the demand was constant throughout the quarter. Am I understanding it right now that this was not the case in Q1 due to weather and other?
Yes.
Yes.
100% correct. With a small nuance. I think the demand is definitely, it's the ability to turn demand into orders that was impacted.
Yes. Mikael Lasséen has another question. Could you elaborate on how you are leveraging AI across your offerings, specifically to enhance speech generation, language personalization, and user experience, and whether you also see opportunities to streamline clinical workflows and the reimbursement process?
Sure. If I start with the product and et cetera, AI and machine learning has been part of our DNA for decades. Obviously, we in the same way, specifically now with a partly brand-new organization on product and development here in Stockholm, we also see the magnificent impact of the cloud code and the likes to basically speed up the ability to increase quality, but also launch new features. In all honesty, though, I don't think that is the biggest impact on us. The biggest impact that we currently feel and see with AI is more on the administrative functions. The reimbursement systems, which is a perfect example for how to operate AI. You have complex high volumes of bureaucracy, et cetera, where, of course, up until now, we need to have human eyes and humans sitting in phone lines, reading 50,000 pages of fax every month.
The advancement that we're doing on applying AI to that, I am genuinely excited, and the engineer in me is quite excited. That being said, we can also apply it on how we operate more efficiently within the company with a new ERP system, with a much more data-driven platform. There's, of course, all kinds of operational improvements that we can do on anything from accounts receivable to financial reporting or data.
Which we already see.
Which we already see.
Yeah.
Yeah. I would say that, to summarize, AI within our products, that's what we do. We can just do it faster, but I think we're quite mature and have a good understanding. Whereas to me, at least, the bigger impact is operating leverage on the internal processes, doing more with less.
Good. Thank you for that answer. Jakob Lembke has a follow-up question here also. "When you say that growth has normalized, does that mean that we should expect you to grow in line with target in coming quarters, or that you should go faster than your target to recover the lower growth in Q1?
We believe that we will meet our financial targets on a full year basis, and that is 20% in local currencies. If you start the quarter with 15%, that obviously means that there needs to be some sort of acceleration there.
Good. Let's see. There was actually another question here, and I think it might be also from Jessica. "I asked about the demand during the full quarters. If the awareness increased day to day, which is totally reasonable in such an area of which you operate, then the demand for new sales would increase from any given time to any given time.
Yes. You're right, Jessica. I think if you compare this quarter with last quarter, the underlying demand is obviously higher. We also have more people on the street to educate the market, et cetera. Maybe I'm a little bit stuck on the word "demand," because in my world, the demand is enormous. It's just the market isn't really there to capture it. That is unfortunately, to a large degree, our responsibility, because this is not a market that happens by itself. We have to be out there, educate, train, and to some degree, hand-hold the prescribers of these products, at least for the first couple of times they work with the patient. In absolute terms, the activity level, which is maybe a better term, is higher this quarter versus the past quarter. Just as you note, it's higher in March than it was in January.
This is not a pattern that is different this year. This is our standard operating model.
A last curiosity question here relating to the AI, also from Jessica. "How effective is your clone within the organization? Does it actually help solve problems and support employees?
Jessica is referring to the fact that I have taken the leading flag on creating an AI version of myself that is available to every staff member. I think that we should read that as a conviction that AI has to happen, and I want everyone in our organization to fully embrace it. The way for me to lead by example as the CEO is to make an AI clone of myself. I would doubt that a huge part of our current or future revenue or profitability growth is a consequence of that. Hopefully indirectly, by having an organization where everybody feels that automating, digitalizing, and applying AI to pretty much every piece of work in this company is not optional. It's something we have to do, and it's part of us being able to meet our targets. That's how I see it.
As of today, no, it's not a magnificent revenue nor profitability driver.
Very well.
Yeah.
I think that was all.
Okay. Thank you. I love that there's so much questions.
Yeah.
Glad that technology seemed to be with us today. Now we're going back and continue to deliver every day. The next time that we will meet in this fashion will be on the 22nd of July, when we will present our quarters and our quarterly earnings for the second quarter of this year. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.