Welcome to this quarterly update for the Q1 of 2023 for Exsitec. Thank you all for joining. Talking now is me, Johan Källblad , and I have been the CEO of Exsitec since 2010. I expect this presentation to be around 15 minutes. It is possible to ask questions via the chat or the hand raise function in Zoom. We have some time for questions at the end of the presentation. As usual, I will start off by making a short recap about our business and a reminder of what it is that we do, and after that, we'll cover our Q1 financials and a short market update and a recap of our priorities going forward.
We exist to help medium-sized businesses in the Nordics use digital tools to improve their operations, and this can be things like software for reducing financial administration through automation, using data for better decision-making and forecasting, or adopting e-commerce, or managing a sales force. We like the medium-sized companies because they are large enough to get a good return on their investments in automation, and they're small enough to actually listen to our advice. There are also many of them, and they usually need someone like us to assist them in their ambitions to use digital tools because they may not have that much experience. We think there are around 37,000 possible customers in our markets, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and we have around 4,000 active customers today. A little bit about our approach and business model.
We have made a selection of software components for different business use cases where we act as a reseller for the software developer. We do in-house development of integrations between these software components that we sell, and we sell that as a subscription service, and we add professional services and support on top. The customer gets the benefit of a faster implementation because of the reuse of integrations, and they can spend less time on software selection. They also get a good single point of contact for assistance after the project, and they can do a step-by-step implementation using this modular approach, which reduces risk, and we earn trust and scale our engagement with the customer over time.
We sell and implement around 20 software packages today from 10 plus software developers, these are the primary software providers at this time. We have a revenue share partnership with these software providers where we market and sell their software to new accounts and make the customer successful in using the software over time. It's a reasonable balance today where we're not dependent on only one software developer. Our ideal customer would probably use 5-6 different components delivered by us, but our average customer today is only at just over 2. There is a lot of work remaining in growing our footprint on existing customers, also. Here are some of our customers.
Customer base is spread across many segments, and this makes us less vulnerable to changes in the market conditions, cause we can move our sales efforts between different industries with relative ease. The top 10 customers combined are less than 10% of our revenue. An interesting thing we've been able to do is combine sets of software products to fit different industries, where we do a somewhat pre-configured combination of software. So we can also reduce implementation time and reduce risk for the customer by doing this. We set up this business model more than 10 years ago, and we've had solid and profitable growth every year since we reached the scale. As we've become comfortable with the core business model, we started adding growth through acquisitions over the last 4 to 5 years.
At this moment, we're just under 550 employees. Head count is a little reduced from last quarter. We have been hiring in some segments, but we've also reduced staff a little bit in overhead and somewhat in Norway and in the e-commerce business unit, where we've seen weaker demand. Yeah. Over time, and all the time, hiring and developing talent is a critical DNA of Exsitec. We don't expect to find people who are already skilled in the exact products we work with, so instead, we try to find great people and train them. We've been named one of the most popular employers in Sweden for university graduates in the technology field over the last three years.
In the fall of 2022, we added more than 85 people to our trainee program, and we have similar ambitions for 2023. Let's dive in a little bit to the financials for Q4.
For Q1, sorry. First, some analysts picked up on the fact that the Swedish organization went to Salem for a large kickoff; they were worried about cost and losing work time compared with last year, when we still had the pandemic restrictions. All of that is true; it was a very valid point. It's also really good for culture that we are finally in a situation where we can do things like this together. We've done a lot of small things to work on our margins, going back to Q3 and Q4, like price adjustments and more actively working on improving performance, for instance, through less use of subcontractors. We felt that we actually could afford this activity.
It's true, we've been optimizing a little more for margin rather than maximum growth. That's one of the key takeaways from this quarter that we see in the financial results. We also saw a lot of improvement in Norway, where we are actually seeing pretty good growth and a clear margin improvement. On the disappointing side, the demand for e-commerce solutions is still weak, and we've been and are still doing some reductions in capacity to fit the current market conditions as we see them. Overall, we feel good about this. 23% growth in the quarter. Around 8% is organic. Somewhere in the range of 4%-5% of this is due to price adjustments.
Its total growth is also lowered a little bit because we've been working actively to take out some business and projects that were low margin, like deliveries done through subcontractors. So we actually reduced our use of subcontractors by almost 30% in the quarter. This reduces organic top-line growth a little bit, but overall, we feel good about total growth, and we feel that the market remains pretty strong. Margins of over 21% was really nice in the quarter. It wasn't one of those quarters where everything fell into place. We had our fair share of challenges also, but still growing EBITDA with 26% on 23% revenue growth means that our improvement in the core business paid for the entire kickoff cost that I mentioned before. I'm happy about that.
We also reached 100 million SEK in adjusted EBITDA LTM for the first time. Strong earnings quarter. Going through the segments in a little bit more detail. Sweden, again, had a really strong quarter with good growth and solid earnings. EBITDA margins are a fraction lower than last year, caused by first, obviously, the travel expenses that I mentioned, and also by weaker demand in a business unit specialized in e-commerce that we acquired in Q2 of 2022. We think that long-term growth in business-to-business e-commerce is a great opportunity for us, but the short term has been challenging. The stability and growth in financial automation software, primarily from Visma, from Medius, and from Planacy, has been great, however. The actions we've taken in Norway in Q3 and Q4 feel good.
A margin in Q1 is at an acceptable level. We also have double-digit , or about 10% , organic growth and a pretty clear path forward. It was Q2 and Q3 of 2022 that were really weak last year. Of course, the proof of lasting improvements is in the coming quarters, but so far, so good. We have new leadership in place in Norway since Q1. Denmark is performing really well on a smaller scale. The improvement is that we divested the point of sale business in Q3 of 2022, which gives us a better focus, and we've gotten better traction in sales of ERP, especially Visma.net. It's a nice growth and nice margins, albeit in a smaller business unit.
The recurring revenue stream from software is a nice consequence of our business model that helps us have more stable results and cash flow than if we were strictly a professional services company. In Q3, we divested our FlexPOS point of sale business in Denmark, which reduced these revenues a little bit. We have not gone back and made adjustments for that in the graph, but that is one of the reasons for what looks like a little bit slower growth in the last 2 quarters. Several of our suppliers made price increases at the start of the new calendar year, and we do get the.
We actually, we get a positive effect from that that will, that will, this is LTM numbers, so we get a positive effect from that that will last all of this year. We have somewhat of a feeling that the churn in Sweden is a little bit higher this year than in the last few years, where it has been extremely low. All in all, a solid and growing revenue stream with total growth of 38% year-over-year. Short update on market conditions and our priorities. Only two slides remaining here. Early in 2023, there are obviously a lot of challenges and uncertainties in the world around us, but what has remained strong for many years is the demand for digital solutions.
So far, we have not seen this changing. The sales cycle is a bit longer than our historical average. There is a shift where we have relied a little bit more on selling add-ons to existing accounts and less new implementations to new customers, but the total volume is actually solid. In terms of acquisitions, we've felt for a few quarters that it has been very hard to find price levels that work for both buyer and seller, given the current interest rate environment and the new interest rate environment. We feel towards the end of the quarter that some of the discussions are opening up a little bit more and that the expectations for valuations are a little bit lower. Maybe there will be some attractive M&A opportunities going into the coming quarters.
Summarizing our business priorities here. Overall, we think that we are in a really good shape. We've taken actions to improve margins, and we intend to keep on doing this. There will be challenges, of course, but we have a lot to work with on developing existing accounts. No changes in terms of strategy. We're executing on a business model that we've implemented and refined for over 10 years. The plan is to continue on a long-term profitable growth journey. The macro environment may become challenging, but we think we will be mostly restricted by our own ability to execute. All in all, solid quarter, and we think we are in really good shape financially. That concludes my presentation. Do we have any questions?
Yes. We have a question that you had SEK 4 million of intangible investments in cash flow in Q1, which was 0 last year. What is this? This is actually when we bought the customer base in our ERP system , Visma Business, from our colleague Amesto. So this is what the SEK 4 million is from in the cash flow.
In Swedish, we didn't acquire the entire company, but we acquired a customer base of around 45 customers. So far so good. I think not maybe almost. I don't think it's been performing better actually than expected this customer base or at least as good as expected and so that feels like a really. There was actually the only acquisition M&A activity deal we closed this quarter, and it was very, very small.
Next question is Norway seem to deliver ahead of plan. Any reason to not assume a continued gradual improvement in Norway going forward?
Any reason? Yeah. Historical performance is a reason to not take things for granted. 'Cause if you, some of you remember here, it was in Q2 and in Q3 that we had really poor performance in Norway. We do think that we've done things to create a lasting change, and we do feel good about the new, the new head of the business unit, the new managing director. I mean, we do expect a continual improvements, but we know that it also takes a long time to do long-lasting to make a long-lasting effect. I wanna set a reasonable expectation.
I mean, obviously, we hope, we all hope for proof in Q2 and Q3 that we've been doing the right things.
Next question is about acquisitions. You mentioned price look better. Can you say anything on your pipeline?
Yeah. We can't talk too much of that into detail, but I can say some things. We've continued to talk about We decided in Q3 that we weren't gonna do any big acquisition activities unless a special situation arises, then we also have to look at that. We decided to focus more on margin improvements and to make sure that we've taken care of the acquisitions we had already did. We've kept in touch. We have some things that we feel are lower risk, like for instance, buying this customer base.
Looking at improving market positions in areas where we already have a presence or we're adding things, adding volume , competence and customers to something that we already know in a market where we already are, that's something we always want to do. We are talking to quite a few companies about possible business opportunities. What we saw in Q1 was that we were very or actually early Q1 and in Q4, that it was a far, a big distance between the multiples and the valuation that the sellers expected and what we think is a reasonable price. It does seem over the last month, maybe actually, that this has changed a little bit. This has shifted.
People have gotten used to a new interest rate environment. We do feel actually that we have a decent pipeline going forward. Again, making sure that we get these lasting improvements in margin is a higher priority than maximum growth. There, at some point, I do expect actually. I'm more optimistic about M&A now than what I was three months ago.
Next question is, could you touch upon cash flows and changes in working capital?
That's a good question, actually. The other ones were also good questions, but that is we have an increase in working capital. It's actually that has increased more than the total revenue has increased, so we are tying up a bit more money in working capital. Almost all of that, and I think actually all of it is it's on accounts receivables. We have not seen increases in late payments and such. It's actually, we did a lot of invoicing in March. We had a really, really strong March, and we did a lot of invoicing around month, and a lot of that is coming due.
We don't actually. We were a little bit, we saw that as a risk also, so we did a deeper analysis on the accounts receivables, and it was just an unexpectedly strong March compared to last year, and a lot of invoicing due to that . We think that's a temporary effect, actually.
That concludes all the questions.
I hope that was enough of a detailed answer. Feel free to ask if anyone wants more clarification; feel free to send an email to ir@exsitec.se, and we'll be happy to elaborate.
Well, that concludes our call. Thank you for listening in.