Welcome to this quarterly update for the Q1 of 2022 for Exsitec. Talking now is me, Johan Kallblad. I'm on my twelfth year as CEO of Exsitec. If you've seen these presentations before, you know that I try to be quite consistent in the messaging, maybe a little bit boring, I'm afraid, but I will at least try to keep this presentation short, 15 minutes or so. We do want to encourage some dialogue, so if you have any questions, it's possible to ask questions via the hand raise function in Zoom or by sending an email to ir@exsitec.se. We're monitoring this during the presentation. I'll jump right into it on the next slide here. This is the agenda.
Starting off, I will talk a little bit about our business and then our financial performance in Q1 and our priorities going forward. You can go to the next slide here. Looking at the company, we exist to help medium-sized businesses use digital tools to improve their operations. This can be things like reducing administration through automation or using data for better decision-making and forecasting or adopting e-commerce. We like to target a mid-market segment where the customer is large enough to really get value from investing in digital tools but they oftentimes lack the experience or the right competence internally, so we can add a lot of value by guiding them. If we move on to the next slide here, this is our approach.
We work in a modular or a component-based approach, where we've made a selection of relevant software products for different business processes and use cases, from a few vendors, where we are a reseller. We do in-house development of integrations between these software products, and we guide our customers to a good combination of software that fits their business needs. The customer gets access to software and integrations through a subscription model, and then our professional services operation configure the systems and train the users to make sure that the customer is successful in using them. Lastly, we offer a support service that's a single point of contact to everything that we deliver.
The idea with a component-based approach here is that the implementation project can be relatively small, and we earn trust and scale our engagement with customers over time. It's a learn and expand business model, and typically, we've seen that 2/3 of our organic growth comes from existing accounts. If we move on to the next slide. We have revenue share partnerships with the software providers where we market and sell their software to new customers, to customers that are new for them. They may often be existing customers to us. We make the customer successful in using the software over time. These are the primary software providers that we work with. It's a reasonable balance.
We're not dependent on only one software developer, but the largest four are around 60% to 70% of the total software revenue. We have existing relationships with a lot of customers, so selling and implementing through us is an efficient way for a software company to reach a market of scale when they're interested in reaching medium-sized companies in the Nordics. Going to the next slide and looking at some of our customer logos here. An interesting thing that we can do with this component-based approach is to combine the software components in a modular way, so we can create competitive packages to fit different industries. Our customer base is spread out over quite a few different areas of operations with some clusters.
We've seen a lot of growth, for instance, in the construction installation space over the last couple of years, but it's a good spread throughout. We use the same software components, but combined in different combinations in order to target different industries. Going to the next slide, looking at the markets that we cover. We cover Sweden, Norway, Denmark, with Sweden being around 70%, Norway 20%, and Denmark 10%, little bit under 10% of our operations. I've been in this role since 2010, so 12 years going. We set up the core of this business model around 10 years ago, and we've had a solid and profitable organic growth every year since we reached scale.
We've become, over time, more comfortable with our core business model, and we've been increasingly confident in adding growth through acquisitions, and that's to reach a larger target market faster than what we can through organic sales. M&A is an interesting growth opportunity and tool going forward also. I'll probably get back to that a little bit. On the next slide, this is a picture of our last trainee program. We're almost 500 employees in Sweden, Norway, Denmark. An important DNA for us is to hire and develop talent. We don't expect to find people that are already skilled in the exact products we work with. Instead, we try to find great people and train them.
This is also a great culture builder, and we've been named one of the most popular employers in Sweden for university graduates in the technology field over the last couple of years. Moving on, it's time for the financials for the Q1 of 2022. If we first go into revenue, overall growth, Q1 was really strong. Total growth of 72% compared to the same quarter last year, where around 18% is organic growth and the rest is through acquisitions. We're very satisfied with this. On the growth in general, there have been some areas where we probably could have grown faster if we did not have any personnel constraints. It's a tough competence market now.
It's tough to find skilled people and tough to keep and retain the people you have. We've had to prioritize a little bit, so we haven't maybe maximized the growth, but still, 18% organic and 72% total feels really great. All in all, we're super satisfied with these growth numbers. If you look at the next slide in the business areas, kind of hard slide to interpret, but to see where the fastest growth is right now. Some additional growth in the largest business area, ERP Sweden, which now is 36% of revenue.
We did an acquisition in Q4 that added a bit to this growth, but it's a strong growth for a long time in this area, but a little bit extra fueled by an acquisition in Q4. This is the operations around the product sets from Visma and Medius primarily. Also in Sweden, we have the business line we call Insight, which is 20% of revenue. It's budgeting, data analysis, and visualization using tools from Qlik, Planacy, and Microsoft. We've seen really strong demand in this area, but we've been constrained by a shortage of staff, which has limited growth a little bit, but still a really nice area for us. The customer experience business at 14% of revenue is CRM, e-commerce, and custom solutions with tools from Litium, SugarCRM, and HubSpot.
It's also showing good growth. Norway made up 22% of the business. If this was in Sweden, it would primarily be an ERP business area, and the same goes for Denmark, which is 8% of revenue in the quarter. Going forward to the next slide, looking at profitability, Q1 is normally a good quarter, and it was last year, and this year was no exception. Our most profitable quarter to date, by far and away with an EBITDA of SEK 34 million. By far and away, like I said, our best quarter ever. We do feel really good about the margins here. At almost 90% margins, we're almost back at the same level as Q1 last year. That was 20%.
The reason why we're satisfied is that the margins have been lower the last two quarters due to some acquisitions we made last year where the acquired units operated historically at a lower margin. We do feel that we should be able typically to reach the same marginal structure in an acquired business in maybe 18 to 24 months. We do expect it to take some time to get to optimal margins, but we also get support from a long-term movement in the underlying business model with an increased share of recurring revenue. We're good with the margin improvements in the acquired units, even if it's still a way to go before we're at optimal levels.
19% margin in the quarter was we felt really strong and a really nice improvement over the last couple of quarters. All in all, after losing 4% to 5% of margin in the last two quarters, getting back to margin closer to 20% is really satisfying. Moving forward, recurring software revenue has been increasing for a long time. Q1 is seasonally a very slow software sales quarter for us, but we're keeping up relatively well with our overall growth here growing 68% year-over-year.
In the short term, a large amount of new sales like we had in Q4, new project sales, new software sales, actually reduces the share of recurring revenue a little bit because implementation project work is built on delivery and shows up in the revenue numbers right away, whereas the recurring revenue is built on usage, and there's a lag from software sale to product revenue. This will vary a little bit over time. The long-term trend, if we go forward to the next slide, looking at the totals here in the revenue breakdown, recurring software revenue is slowly but surely growing as part of the total business. It's around 28% looking at LTM revenues.
We also see good growth in contracted support and infrastructure revenue, which is another recurring revenue stream that has been a priority for us over the last year. This is an add-on service to the software we deliver last 12 months. This is 7% of our revenue, so a total of 35% recurring revenue. Still largest revenue source is the revenue from professional services related to implementing and maintaining the software that we sell. To be clear here, we do not sell consulting services outside of our own product delivery, so this revenue stream is mostly dependent on having strong software sales and taking care of the customers over time. This made up 62% of our revenue LTM with around two-thirds being on existing clients and one-third for new implementation.
Quite a stable revenue stream, that one also. If you go to the next slide, looking at growth in general and the recurring revenue in particular, there are several drivers. First, of course, when we're successful in selling to new clients, it will drive this since all our offerings contain a significant portion of recurring revenue, both software integrations and support. This is more true for new sales now than what it was for new sales that we did five, six, seven, eight years ago that was more based on one-off software billing. Now we only sell software that's on recurring models. Where we're growing with customers or expanding our scope with successful cross sales, this also helps.
Some of our product vendors, like Qlik and Visma, are incentivizing partners like us to convert their old perpetual licensed install base to newer tools on a subscription-based license model. Lastly we're also actively adding services that are in a recurring revenue stream, for instance, cloud infrastructure services. A lot of drivers build a long-term growth opportunity here. It's a slow-moving transition, but over time we're moving in a nice direction. Going forward, some short words on our priorities going forward, if you move on to the next slide. This is not new, I hope.
We do want to increase our footprint at our existing customers by having a relevant offering, making it easy for a customer to grow with us by having out of the box integrations and a single point of contact for support. We wanna invest in people, for sales and marketing, for professional services, and in talent development in general. We do want to strive for business excellence and improve our margins over time. The solutions that we deliver may be complex, but it's not a complex business model. We've done this for a long time, and we have a great feedback loop with our customers on what their priorities and needs are. Especially for acquired units, we like to implement the same business model and the governance model that we worked out over time to gradually reach business excellence.
Lastly, we do feel that there are still significant opportunities in continuing the selective M&A to add a customer base or to add to our competence and what we can do for existing customers. Going on to the next slide, looking at M&A going forward. Our number one priority is to get access to a larger customer base that can be a target for our current offering. The other thing we're looking for is to get a better offering that can benefit our existing customers. An example here is the acquisitions of Vitari in Norway and Zedcom in Sweden that added a large number of customers on a platform that we know really well, financial systems from Visma. Organic growth and sales right now is very strong.
M&A perhaps a little bit less vital for us in the short term, but we're always evaluating opportunities here. We do things, we prefer to implement the same governance model, like I said before, and the same models for talent acquisitions and sales. We try to keep the experience intact for existing customers. Onboarding of new units then takes some effort, but our experience is that over time, it usually works out really well. Going forward in the presentation, one last thing. Reminder, our financial goal is to surpass a turnover of SEK 1 billion in revenue with an EBITDA margin of 20% sometime in the period of 2023 to 2025.
We feel our projections show that this can be attained pretty well with the organic growth and by channeling our cash flow into acquisitions. All in all, we're extremely satisfied with the growth we're seeing right now, and we're really looking forward to keeping this momentum going. On the last slide here, this concludes my presentation. Feel free to ask any questions. I hope, Hampus, are you with me here? Did you get any.
Yes. Do you hear me?
Yeah.
Yes. Now we have one question that is, please elaborate around the margin uplift during Q1 compared to Q3 and Q4 in 2021?
Yeah. Yeah.
What was the main drivers?
Yeah, yeah. Like I said, again, this is the most satisfying part of this report of this quarter, I think. The main drivers first, as I think I've been quite open on, we acquired a relatively large business unit in Norway that we felt did the same thing that we do, but historically had been operating on a lower margin. We've done some things there. We're by far and away not at all through with the changes and improvements and the challenges that we're seeing there.
It's a lot more work remaining, but we get some early signs that we're heading in a good direction here. We do see some margin expansion in Norway. We've also had to, because of the way of the world with a high demand and also a challenging environment for getting competence, we've had to increase some of our prices in all our markets. We haven't really had any. We're not pushing that to the limit, but we're just compensating for higher costs and then maybe be a little bit more restrictive on discounting and doing and prioritizing maybe some of the projects.
If we can't do everything we want to do, maybe prioritizing things that are on a little bit better margin profile. I think it's been a lot of little things, but a lot of movements in the right direction. We feel really good about that, actually.
We have another question: can you talk on the numbers of employees? What's the momentum here at the end of the Q1 ?
Yeah. We've seen traditionally that we like to add staff in chunks so 'cause it's easier to onboard people. We always, even if we hire very experienced people, we always have to train them or almost always have to train them in the exact software packages and the technologies that we're using 'cause we can't really find the people that already have the skill sets to go out there and work right away. We're really now adding a lot of talent that's gonna start in August in a training program there. I think we should be at least 70 people, I think, in August, so that's our main priority. We're not onboarding that much now in Q2. It's a few people.
If we find people that already know these products, we can onboard people even outside of that. We onboarded about 30 people in January, and we're aiming towards getting on board around 70 people in August. Now, we're working more or less with what we have right now. I think we're gonna stick at this. A bit under 500 employees is probably where we're gonna be at for some time. We're not adding a lot of people in. It's not efficient for us to add people in Q2 because oftentimes they won't have enough work going into the summer period and so we have to work with what we have.
We have had some personnel turnover, some more than what we're used to. It's not, it hasn't really hampered our deliveries, but we've had to rely. I think I elaborated on that a bit in the last quarterly report also. We've had to use a little bit more subcontractors in order to keep our customer engagements. That takes out some margin, but as you saw, all in all, we had a good margin expansion, so it's not something I should complain too much about 'cause we've been able to run the business on decent margins even using more subcontractors, so.
Now we have another question here. How do you perceive the M&A market in general? Do you see activity from your competitors?
Yes. We've seen a little bit more structured processes, and I'm not sure whether there are more structured processes or whether it's just that some of the people that run structured processes have been targeting us as a potential taker. I'm not sure. I may have said this before. I don't think we've ever closed a deal from a structured process. We find companies that we like, and then we build relationships over time. Then when they're ready to sell, we do the deal directly with them without an intermediary. That's actually our policy.
We would be happy to work in a structured process also, but it's just not the way it's been for us. We've been targeted more by people running structured processes, but it's not what we do best. We like to do it our way. It's often tight timeframes, and you're supposed to get into a bidding war or something. We haven't been really comfortable with that. We do see quite a lot of activity, actually. I hope that was the question. We think we have some areas that we're looking into, and I think there are good opportunities out there still.
In terms of competition, all good companies get bought by someone if they get put up for sale. It's not the market where you can. If someone wants to sell their company, it's not the market where you can just wait and say that this opportunity is gonna be there in three years also. It's definitely. There's competition. Since we haven't really worked in structured processes, we haven't really gotten into any bidding wars or anything like that. So far not something really that's restricted our growth.
Great, and, that was the end of all the questions that have been asked for now.
Mm-hmm.
We would like to take the opportunity to thank you for attending the quarterly report and hope to see you in the next quarterly report.
Thank you.