We know that there's a lot of people also following this webcast at home or in offices, so a warm welcome to you as well. My name is Pontus Bodelsson. I'm the President and CEO of Karnov Group, and I will be presenting, of course, today. But thank God, not only me, I have also brought some, some intelligent people and colleagues from Karnov Group. So let me introduce to you. Magnus, please step up. This is our group CFO, Magnus Hansson. He will be digging into the numbers, of course. We will be welcoming Alexandra Åquist, leader for Region South. Guillaume Deroubaix, sorry, North. Yes, you still are. I can promise you that. And Guillaume, you are not in North, definitely in Region South. Welcome you as well.
And then we'll be digging into AI, artificial intelligence, and content, and who's better to present them than our Group Head of Content Strategy and Security, Anne Nørvang Hansen. Welcome, Anne. For the following Q&A, we will also invite our Group CTO, Jan Ullerup. Not presenting today, but definitely always present, is our Head of Investor Relations, Erik Berggren, as most of you know him already. So be prepared. This is a full four-time happening, I'd say. Thank you very much. I also would like to welcome three members of our board being present today. Our chairman, Magnus Mandersson. You can wave, maybe, Magnus. Thank you for that.
We have Ulf Bonnevier here also. Hey, Ulf. And we have finally, Loris Barisa, also being here. Hi, Loris. Great to have you all here. Finally, before we get started, I would like to introduce to you, moderator of the day, Josephine Edwall. Nice to have you here, Josephine.
I need the mic, because the headset was too big for me.
Oh!
I need this. Thank you, Pontus. Great to be here and meeting with all of you. Before Pontus starts his presentation, I just want us to go through a little bit of the agenda so you have some timings. I know that sometimes you want to know when there will be a break or so. Today's agenda is that Pontus and our CFO will start with the first block, and then we'll have a break, 1:25, around 1:25, and you will have a Q&A session. My mic is not working. I'm just telling the guys. You know, you can hear me? Good. Approximately 1:25 Central Europe time, we will have the first break. Then, it's time for the next block with our regions, followed by Q&A sessions with our two presidents for the regions.
The next break is 3:05 P.M. CET. Then we'll finish off with AI, artificial intelligence, and the block around that, followed by a Q&A session, and you will also have a last chance to ask questions to our CEO and CFO. For those of you in the audience who wants to stay after 4:00 P.M., feel free to do that. If you want to mingle a little bit, we would love to have you to stay. With this, Pontus, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Josephine. Okay, let us get started. Would you like, Josephine, to read through through all this, or is that just presented?
I can flip it through.
Yeah.
You all know this. You've seen it.
Okay. So I'm about to present sort of an overview of what we are going to hear during this session, and I would like to start by presenting the value we offer and also the growing demand for our services. So let's start with this then. I couldn't present Karnov Group without talking about our purpose, because something really special. Our mission, our [Foreign language] is definitely important for us and for the society. So let me go through that. We are talking about clearing the way to justice in two ways, actually. Well, we bring trust to European societies, number one, and we enable our customers to make better decisions faster. So it's two parts in our purpose: building greater justice in our societies and helping our customers making better decisions faster. And those two, they go hand in hand. Is this important?
Well, a really, a really strong purpose is definitely important, because a rainy Tuesday morning in November, it might not be that easy to get up out of bed, but having this purpose in mind, being what... knowing that we are really important in the society, makes the commitment even stronger within Karnov Group. So we are really grateful to have this purpose. Okay, let me try to explain quickly what we mean by better decisions faster. It might seem obvious, but on the other hand, what is it actually about in detail? Well, let me give you an overview of that. So we are providing knowledge for legal challenges. To whom? Well, I'd say three customer segments. The first one is the practitioners, law firms with, of course, a lot of lawyers, and also, accountant firms and audit firms.
The second customer segment is the public sector. Courts, of course, with a lot of judges, and also official administration, for example, municipalities. Thirdly, the corporate sector, with small, medium, and really large companies with legal counsels. So those three customer segments are the ones that we are serving daily with legal knowledge. So what's that knowledge about? Well, it comes from two different sources in general. The first one is the public content sources. That's, of course, the law itself, of course, and its preparatory work, and its case law. A lot of case laws, of course. On the top of that, we have maybe the most important part, and that is our own proprietary content. That's deeply important. So what do we have there? Let me give you four examples. The first one is case laws selected by our experts, the most important case laws. That's important.
The second one is commentaries by our experts, again, and authors, creating a deeper understanding of the law itself, being able to be interpreted. The third part of this, practical content and news updates, of course, for legal counsels, but also updates with the constant flow of laws all the time. Fourthly, literature, of course, written by our authors and creating references to articles, to books, and these days, of course, mainly e-books. So that's what it's all about, creating knowledge and helping those three customer segments with legal knowledge. So the Karnov DNA is basically efficiency and certainty, and we will come back to those two words, efficiency and certainty, many times during this autumn, this autumn, this session. We have been working with this for 200 years. We have been a knowledge provider for 200 years, delivering to European professionals.
We have, of course, worked a lot with innovation during those 200 years, and we will be showing that today with some totally fresh services as of today. We are supporting our clients well with their challenges of today and their opportunities of tomorrow. Yes, we are solving their challenges today, but also working ahead of their challenges, making sure that they could work on those opportunities also going forward. We need to be ahead of our customers, and also ahead of our customer's customer, of course. There is a growing demand for our services, and that is created by an ever-increasing complexity in society, and let me give you three figures on that. The first one, if we compare 2012 to 2022 in Sweden, we have twice as many laws published in those two years.
Twice as many, 2022 compared to 2012. So we can imagine a growing complexity in our society. The second one is that seven out of 10 lawyers predict that the need for legal services will grow. And the third one, eight out of 10 lawyers foresee a more complexity, a greater complexity, because of the globalization. So it's not only the laws within each country that is growing, but also from outside. So yes, definitely a growing demand, thanks to or because of the greater complexity in society. Let's have a look at our markets. And as you know, speaking about north and south, let me describe that a bit more. Well, in the north region, we have, of course, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. We see a total addressable market of SEK 2 billion, today having net sales of SEK 1.1 billion.
When it comes to Region South, France, Spain, and Portugal, we see a total addressable market of SEK 15 billion, and today we have net sales of SEK 1.3 billion, so a huge opportunity. We have the same business model across Europe, but there is, of course, different market dynamics and positions. So let me start by giving you a schematic overview of that. I've chosen to mention four countries: France, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark, and comparing them to start getting into these markets. The first one, total addressable market, we touched upon that. Let's see again. Well, Sweden and Denmark, quite small, Spain, big, and France is a huge market indeed. We will come back to that. The relative market position is the other way around, more or less. We have great, great, great, great market position in Sweden and Denmark.
In Spain, we are the market leader now with 25%. In France, we are number three, having 8%. But remember, we can see this also in segments. When it comes to labor law, and that's quite important in France, we are the market leader. We are the market leader in France when it comes to labor law. Recurring online sales, yes, definitely so. Sweden, Spain, and Denmark. France, lagging a bit behind, they hug still their offline products a bit more than we do in the other countries. But there is a change in product mix. It's coming, and that product mix, mix change is also helping us improving profitability. Customer retention in terms of, legal information solutions, well, in Sweden and Denmark, we had a churn of 2%-3%.
In France and Spain, in legal information solutions, a bit higher, approximately 10%, but a very good situation in all these four countries. What's the conclusion of all this? What's the strategy going forward? Let me start by just giving you an overview of that. Our local focus for the coming three years, starting out in France, we see that we are strengthening our value proposition. We will be strengthening the commercial focus, and we will start growing. It's a huge market. In Spain, on the other hand, it's about integration. It's about getting those two companies together, and we're getting, harvesting those synergies, and that'll improve the margin. In Sweden and Denmark, a bit the same situation for both of them. Well, we will focus on operational excellence and continued growth, because there's room for that.
We will come back to all these four markets, of course, with Guillaume and Alexandra later on. The financial profile in summary, yes, 2 + 15 = 17 billion SEK. Seventeen billion SEK, that's huge. A lot bigger than those 2 billion SEK that we had in November. From December, 17 billion SEK. We have net sales of 2.4 billion SEK, and a very high share of subscription-based sales, 85%. A low individual risk when it comes to the 10 largest customers, they represent less than 4% of our sales. So that's the starter, and I can promise you that our Group CFO, Magnus Hansson, he will dive into a lot of figures, but this is at least to give you an overview.
So having a look at Karnov Group as an investment case, what are we delivering, and how, and what stands out? Well, we are supporting legal professionals with, again, mission-critical services. Let me underline that if we stop delivering, parts of the societies actually stop. That's the level of mission-critical I'm talking about here. Because we are delivering efficiency and certainty to important institutions in these societies. We have strong local positions with very stable customers, and our products, well, they add significant value to our customers, but still it's a very small percentage of the customer's total operating costs. So this is the sort of summary of our investment case for the time being, and let me then follow up by our updated financial targets. We see organic growth in medium term, a bit higher than before, 4%-6% medium term.
Adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 25% medium term, and long term, at least 30%, and leverage, again, below 3.0 times. So that's our updated financial targets. Getting on to how we are going to do this then, because we will have to develop, and we will. So I would like to present to you six tracks, six strategic initiatives for the coming three years. The first one, gaining deep customer insights. Of course, if we are to raise the customer value, we will have to know a lot about our customers. Staying locally focused, definitely so, to be able to deliver relevant insights, relevant knowledge. The third thing, optimizing product portfolio. That'll give me an opportunity to talk about M&A, to talk about artificial intelligence. Creating global platforms for scalability.
Yes, this is about using the size that we now are, thereby lowering costs and raising profitability. Forming a common culture. Yes, it might sound soft, but this is about business success. I will come back to that. And then building on experience for integration and harvesting of synergies. So let's dig into this. Gaining deep customer insights. Yes, I was in Paris a couple of months ago and discussed customer centricity with our colleagues in Paris at Lamy Liaisons. And, we discussed what's actually customer centricity? How should we interpret that? And the marketing director of our French company, Anne Vichery, she said, "Pontus, that's easy. Customer centricity, it's about having the customer in your heart and mind in everything you do." I think it's brilliant. It's short, and it's to the point, so I'm, thank you, Anne. I'm using this, this expression all the time now.
Having the customer in your heart and mind in everything you do, I think it's brilliant.... So again, let me underline, yes, we are helping our customers as of today, but also we'll have to be forward-looking to see what's going to happen, to make sure that we are relevant and helping them in their best way, in our best way, in the years to come. So segment expertise is definitely important. Let me come back to this French company. We are, as I mentioned, the market leader when it comes to labor law. Well, how come? What's, what's so specific about that? I can tell you that our French company, Lamy Liaisons, they know everything about the HR department in the French companies. They know everything, what the workers' councils need in terms of knowledge, and they can serve that. They could help them with every question.
That is exactly the same position we should have in every customer segment we are in. That's a very, very good description, I think, that they have in France. We will be improving customer value, and thereby, of course, improving customer retention, lowering costs, raising profitability. Staying locally focused is, as you already now know, very important for us, and certainty is definitely a part of that. We consider local content to be crucial. We love local content for several reasons. We are a European local company. We are definitely today a European company, but we are also local because that is the important place to be. We have 7,000 subject matter experts. These are some nice photos on our experts. We have 1,000 of them here in Sweden.
We have 500 in Denmark, we have 2,000 in France, and 3,500 in Spain. This is definitely important. This is definitely creating value for our customers, making sure that we deliver local, proprietary content for efficiency and certainty every day. So this build high quality and definitely deliver strong brands, thanks to our partnerships with these, these experts. Local content is also a prerequisite for trustworthy AI solutions. I will come back to that, and Anne Nørvang Hansen and our group CTO, Jan Ullerup, will discuss that later on. Local content is definitely needed to use the benefits of AI. Optimizing product portfolio, let me talk a little bit about M&A going forward. We are looking at future M&As with a-- as a balanced activity. We will have to understand that what we did in the south was a huge bite.
So I can promise you, no big tickets for the time being, while focused on the integration, making sure that we reap the benefits of those synergies in Spain and includes France in a good way. Having said that, we will of course, complete some verticals and include some legal tech, like practice management and adding things to our EHS, Environmental, Health and Safety business, whatever, if we see such opportunities, but no big tickets in the near future. Let me say something about AI. I consider AI being needed to make sure that we constantly deliver customer value, of course, but also it's important for us within Karnov Group, making sure that we are really doing our job in an efficient way. It's nothing new to us. We have been working with this for several years.
Three years ago, we acquired a Danish company called Ante, totally focused on AI within legal industry. So we have been there before. We are there. We have been launching products ever since, and we will be presenting some new things today. So, looking forward to presenting those new AI solutions, and I would like to make sort of a reflection around this. AI is an opportunity for Karnov Group, definitely so, because we will, we will produce, we will develop new services, making our customers more efficient. And as long as we are increasing the customer value, we will also have an opportunity to increase our prices. As always, greater customer value, well, that gives us an opportunity to raise the prices. I would like to give you sort of a perspective on new ways of working for lawyers and legal professionals.
In the mid-1990s, I graduated from law school in, in Lund, Lund University, and we started to talk about whether there actually was an opportunity to get work in this legal industry because of the Internet revolution. Things were going on, things would happen that would, might make it impossible for us to get a job. But what happened? Now, we can see 25 years later, there are twice as many lawyers today in Sweden than 25 years ago. So the Internet revolution, great, of course, in many senses, but we have today twice as many lawyers and four times as many legal assistants as we had 25 years ago. Adding up to that, also, a survey we've done, today, only two out of 10 lawyers have repetitive work tasks. So that is adding up to this conclusion.
Yes, AI might change ways of working, but not the need for lawyers.... Creating global platforms, of course, an opportunity for us being a bit bigger now for scalability, for reducing costs, for raising profitability. So what we see is that we will have local content on our group-wide platforms. We will have a lot of common products, and we will pour in the local content in those common products. That's an important strategy of ours. We will also have group-level systems, of course, reducing complexity, securing quality and efficiency, so that'll also be important. But it's not only talking about the future. We are already there, because as an example, we will have workflows tools from Norway coming to Denmark. You might remember that, a little more than a year ago, DIBkunnskap, our Norwegian company, launched a bit of their services also in Sweden.
Now, they will be getting into Denmark. They are, as we speaking, preparing for launches in Denmark. They will be launching their services in Denmark. They will be launching together with our publishing company in Denmark called Forlaget Andersen. They will combine their services and deliver in Denmark, and they will also deliver Karnov Group 's content on their platform. So huge opportunities for this Norwegian company, DIBkunnskap. The next example is from EHS, Environment, Health and Safety. We have a French company, Echoline, now starting to work closely together with our French company, Lamy Liaisons. In Paris, they are preparing their common targets. On the top of that, I'd like to mention also an internal product of ours, and that is, that we intend to use the state-of-the-art CMS, content management system, that we have in south, also in the north.
That's a wonderful CMS system. Now a few words on our common culture, and I would like to underline that this might sound as soft things, but this is to improve execution, attraction of talents, keeping those we already have, and of course, creating business success. I always talk about this: a strategy without a culture is weak. On the other hand, a culture without a strategy has no goals. They work in pairs, having a strong, wise, forward-looking strategy, adding culture to that, well, that releases energy, that releases commitment, engagement within our team. That's extremely important, and we work hard on that, to attract new talent, to keep them, and of course, boosting strategy execution thanks to culture. Let me talk a little bit on our culture, because we are working hard on this.
So what we see is, of course, customer centricity. You remember the marketing director in Paris, having the customer in heart and mind in everything we do, we talk a lot about that. We talk a lot about curiosity and knowledge, of course. Why? Well, because, we are a knowledge company, and we will have to stay curious in order to produce knowledge, to be on our toes. Number three here, collaborative community. Well, starting to work even closer together in teams, starting to work between teams, tearing down those silos between departments, and making sure that countries and countries work closely together to gain new knowledge. Then trust and openness, of course, and that might sound soft, but let's have a look at the Professor Paul J. Zak's numbers here.
In organizations with high trust, we see 50% higher productivity, 76% more engagement, and 40% less burnout. So these are no soft things. These are important things, making sure that we keep our talents, making sure that we all are engaged and committed to contribute to the society and to help our customers make better decisions faster every day. So this is actually a nice little photo, management by selfie, you might call it, from Madrid, discussing, having a really good workshop with our colleagues at Recoletos. That's our office, really in the city center of Madrid, close to Plaza Colón, with a big Spanish flag. You might remember it if you have been in Spain. The day after, I went to the northwest of Madrid, to our office, Las Rozas. Again, lovely people. Going to north of Spain to Pamplona office.
The day after or the week after to Paris, we had two workshops on culture there. The day, the week after that, I went again to northern Spain, to Burgos. Two days later, I was in southern Spain, visited Valencia, the home of the paella. Really nice people, by the way. And then back home, close to Sweden, Copenhagen, Oslo, and finally, in mid of September, here in Stockholm. Meeting all these colleagues from different kinds of company from the very beginning, forming together a common culture is a wonderful task. Then we are releasing energy, commitment around our strategy. That's deeply important. So we build on experiences. That's, of course, to harvest the synergies and to really make these different companies coming together. First of all, let me tell you that we have done this before. We have done it successfully already several times.
I'll give you two examples of this. First of all, the current Spanish IT team has done this before, the things that we are now planning to do in Spain. Well, they did it by integrating Lamy Liaisons, the French company, onto the Spanish IT platform a couple of years ago... with success. I would also like to highlight when Karnov Group acquired Norstedts Juridik from Wolters Kluwer, the same company, by the way, here in Sweden, 2018. What happened? Well, it was a successful integration of two competing organizations. That's exactly the same situation as we are having in Spain. It was a merger between two legal information databases, exactly the same thing as we are having in Spain. And finally, we created a strong player and generated strong, profitable organic growth in Norstedts Juridik.
Let me show you some figures on this, because this was started 2018, and by 2019, looking at the profitability, this is the development. 2019, we had an EBITDA of SEK 135 million. In 2022, it was SEK 203 million. This is the development, this is the development we will be working with in Spain and France as well, of course. We will try to harness. We are harvesting already those synergies in Spain. Back to Region South then, a merger based on experience, and I'll give you four examples of actions that we are taking based on learnings in Spain. The first one, keeping the legacy brands as they are, because they are very strong and they are securing goodwill. In Madrid, we have Aranzadi, and we have La Ley. They will become Aranzadi La Ley.
They used to be called Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer, Aranzadi La Ley. In France, we have Lamy Liaisons, used to be called Wolters Kluwer. Lamy Liaisons is the new words. We will prioritize customer data quality. Of course, it's easy to get inward-looking just thinking about this merger. We will have to, of course, also keep in mind that we are delivering every day to our customers. Therefore, such a thing as customer data quality is prioritized. We will have a balanced approach to tech and content migration. We are having that, and this is a very good evidence of that, this little nice photo. On this photo, we see the content department from Sweden, Spain, and Denmark being in the northwest of Madrid, the Aranzadi La Ley office. We see not only content, we also see a tech department from Sweden, Denmark, and of course, Spain.
This is actually a very good picture of showing how we work, how we use those experiences to make this synergy a total success. Again, of course, it's also positive when you try to work hard on that culture, getting people together, forming the same culture. The harvesting of synergies has started in Spain. Let me give you a first high-level introduction to this by showing two graphs. Guillaume Deroubaix will deep dive into this, I can assure you, so he will come back to this. The first, the start of this, this is the cost synergies by category that we are harvesting. The yellow one is about content. That's a huge part of it. The second biggest is sales, and content and sales together stands for two-thirds of those EUR 10 million. Yes, and when are they going to come?
Well, this is a way of showing that, and we will get deeper into this, definitely so, showing that, it has started, of course, and it will be finalized by the Q4 2026. But on the way, things will happen, and in a year, a little more than a year, in December 2024, we have harvested EUR 7.5 million of these 10. There are certain interesting timings here, and Guillaume will describe them in depth, that's for sure. So we are winning in Europe. I would like to tell you what we saw in these companies, those three companies that we have acquired. We got the keys in December last year, and we are really happy what we saw then, and it's coming true.
Well, we saw outstanding proprietary content, our own proprietary content coming from these, these three companies, and it's within the civil law system. It's not common law, used to be in, of course, Great Britain and the U.S. No, we are talking about the civil law. That's kind of a, a border that we won't pass because that's, that's more similar products if you use civil law system. We saw great legacy and very, very strong brands, definitely so. In Spain, we saw the general market leader. In France, yes, we saw the market leader in terms of the very big labor law segment. Of course, we saw an opportunity to improve margins by raising the value proposition, lowering churn, and trimming the operational excellence. If this is what we saw in Spain and France, how will we look in the future?
What are we looking for going forward? Well, definitely more or less the same things. We will be looking for outstanding proprietary content within civil law. We will come back to that again and again, because when we are seeing a possibility of raising the customer value with the help of AI, this will be, this will be wonderful. It will be not so easy without proprietary content. This is definitely so. We will be looking for strong brands. We will be looking for market leaders, and of course, opportunities to improve margin in coming M&A search. So we are winning in Europe, and we are winning the Karnov way, let me put it that way, because we are replicating the Karnov Group recipe for success within this industry. What's that about? Well, it's about content, it's about tech, and it's about leadership.
Content, again, local content is crucial to strengthen customer value. Tech, well, we will be developing on local insights, best practice, and then we will start sharing, of course. Locally focused customer value on global platforms, products to share, and then we pour in the local content. Leadership, these companies, they were small parts in giant global groups. Today, they are important parts of an agile group. That's something completely different. We have done this before, we are doing it now, and we will definitely be doing it again. That's the story of Karnov Group for the time being. Let me summarize the key takeaways for Karnov as an investment. Legacy matters. We have been in this market for 200 years, and thanks to the proprietary content, we are able to deliver certainty, efficiency, and certainty. Our services are mission-critical.
You remember, if we are not delivering, parts of the society actually stops. Our products represent a very small percentage of our customers' operating costs, and the results of this will then be, well, a business with high retention rates, economically insensitive end markets, and serving a growing demand. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Pontus, and you will be back for the Q&A with Magnus Hansson. Welcome up on stage.
Thank you, Josephine.
The CFO of Karnov, and you started in June. It has been a hectic month?
Yes, quite hectic start to my, now four months into Karnov.
Yeah.
Yeah. But good, really good. So-
Good. Now we will actually have a big, deep dive into our financials.
Yes.
The stage is yours, Magnus.
Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. During my 30 minutes, I will try to present the financial profile of the new Karnov Group. I will talk about our financial targets, and of course, briefly touch on our ESG strategy. My ambition is to try to describe where we come from, where we are, and give a glimpse into where we're going. Starting with our customer base, the same picture you saw Pontus present earlier. We typically divide our customers into three segments: practitioners, legal, and corporate. With the acquisition of Region South, this split between the segments changed somewhat. Practitioners stands for about 40% of net online sales, and corporate and public sectors are quite equal at about 30%. With the acquisition—oh, sorry.
The profile changed slightly with the acquisition of Region South, and in summary, you can say that the corporate sector is slightly larger in Region South than in Region North. Of course, the public sector is slightly larger in Region North than in South. Did I say that twice? Sorry.
Once.
All right. Okay, turning to customer concentration. We continue to have a very low customer concentration. So the top 10 customer stands for less than 4% of our net sales. And finally, then, the number of users increased from about 100,000 users to 400,000 users with the acquisition of Region South. Turning to net sales. So we reached SEK 2.4 billion last twelve months, Q2 2023, of course, including pro forma numbers for Region South. By the acquisition, we not only doubled in size, we also changed profile slightly. So we went from 83% of online sales in 2021, down to 80% in 2022. Again, including pro forma numbers for Region South. I will say that many times today.
Of course, our ambition is to continue the transition, going from offline to online. Moving on to net sales by segment, and then starting with Region North. Online revenues are about 85% of total net sales in Region North. We continue to see steady growth in online sales, and we have a low churn. The growth in our core solution come from pricing increases, of course, but also from a steady increase in number of users. But we also see growth in some segments, like the municipality segment, and of course, in our two verticals, DIB and EHS. The legal training business in Sweden was divested in September 2023. That was a very small part of our of our offering. Turning to Region South, the share, sorry, of online sales are at a steady 76%.
Guillaume will come back to the commercial plan later on, but as we have stated before, the net sales in Region South, we expect it to be quite flat in the near term. As we improve our offering, we see some great opportunities to increase sales, not least in our online sales. Churn in Region South is about 10%. The churn has decreased in 2023 compared to 2022, and the main driver for our offline business is the legal training business. Turning to seasonality. Net sales seasonality is in large related to the seasonality of the offline sales. Again, the revenue seasonality changed somewhat with the acquisition of Region South. Starting with Region North again.
We had a one-off sales in Q3 2022 of SEK 18 million, based on school curriculums, and another SEK 3 million in Q4 2022. This will not reoccur in 2023. Offline seasonality in Region North is following the school, school terms, typically then larger in Q3 and Q1. Turning to Region South. Net sales seasonality in Region South is slightly different than in Region North, and by that, we're flattening out the seasonality in the group as well. A large share of the offline sales in Region South is related to legal training and to professional services. Typically, net sales from legal training is large in Q4 and Q2, again, flattening out seasonality. Printed material follow the same seasonality as in Region North.
In summary, you can say that we have a wider product range of offline products in Region South than we do in Region North. 85% of our revenues last twelve months, Q2 2023, came from recurring revenues, invoiced annually in advance to a large extent. And again, the acquisition of Region South changed the profile slightly. So we went from 88% in 2021 to down to 84% in 2022, and now slightly increasing again last twelve months. As I mentioned on the previous slide, we have a high retention rate in Region North, about 97%-98%, and the churn we have is mostly unvoluntary, so it's the lawyers retiring, or it's law firms merging. And the retention rate, again, in Region South is about 90%. A slight improvement from 2023.
Then moving on to profit, and starting with the Adjusted EBITDA. The Adjusted EBITDA increased slightly in last twelve months, Q2 2023, going to 46.7%. This is, of course, related to growth, it's related to the improved product mix, and also related to the operational excellence. Turning down to Region South, again, the EBITDA margin increased slightly. Despite the large integration project that's ongoing, we managed to increase the EBITDA. Important to mention is that we harvested no or very few synergies in Q1 and Q2 2023. Of course, our main focus at the moment is the integration project, and not least harvesting the synergies in Region South. Pontus gave a glimpse into that previously, and Guillaume will give a more detailed description of those synergies.
I would like to mention, however, at this point, is that when we talk about harvesting synergies, we talk about annual run rates, not to forget. Since 2022, we have done a number of projects to improve our group functions, necessary for the new Karnov Group, including Region South. Those initiatives are, of course, a direct effect of the acquisition. Finally, we arrive at the EBITDA margin of 25.3% for the group last twelve months. Moving on to Adjusted EBITDA . Again, starting with Region North. The EBITDA margin have decreased slightly in Q... In the last twelve months, and that's a consequence of increased amortization of development costs. We have finalized some significant development projects during the last twelve months.
Adjusted EBITDA in Region South is in line with 2022. Turning to the Karnov Group, the last twelve month EBITDA margin has decreased by 0.3%, again, mainly as a consequence of increased amortization of development costs. But also, as I mentioned, the projects we have had on a group level. I will stop for a drink. Turning to the seasonality of the EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA in Region North, of course, followed the offline sales, so no surprises. And as I mentioned, before, we have harvested no or very little synergies in Region South. We consider 2022 pro forma numbers in Region South as the baseline for when we talk about synergies.
We will have synergies of EUR 7.5 million by the end of Q4 2024, and another 2.5 million by the end of 2026. Again, annual run rate. The EBITDA target margin for the integration project in Region South is 16% by adding the synergies and the baseline. We expect limited growth in sales in the near term before we then finish our integration project and also increase the power in our product offering. Looking at the new group profile for operating expenses. Again, I have included pro forma numbers for Region South in 2022. Cost for goods and resale have decreased from 15.8% to 15.3%. The profile is quite unchanged. The decrease is in large part related to the improved product mix.
In relation to net sales, employee benefits have gone from 32% of net sales to 43% of net sales in 2022. The average cost per employee have decreased, so the increase to 43% is related to an increase in number of FTEs. Other operating expenses have also increased from 10% to 15% of net sales. That's in large in relation to the TSA we have, to rent, to contingent workers, and to marketing. As I've mentioned a few times by now, amortization of development costs have increased also in relation to sales. Then finally, the increase in PPA amortizations is, the increase in PPA amortization is, of course, related to the acquisition of Region South. Moving on to cash flow and leverage, and starting with operating cash flow, adjusted operating cash flow on your left-hand side.
Karnov has a very strong cash flow and cash conversion. The average cash conversion has been above 100% on average over the last couple of years. The cash conversion of Region South is quite similar to that of Region North. We estimate that we expect that the cash conversion will remain at approximately the same level going forward. However, the acquisition of Region South has changed the profile of the operating cash flow slightly. A large part of the invoicing in Region North is done in Q4, hence concentrating our operating cash flow to Q4 and Q1. In Region South, the invoicing is spread more evenly across the year, still concentrated around Q4 and Q1, but more evenly spread.
We also have a larger share of our net sales in legal training and professional services, also, of course, flattening out our operating cash flow. On the right-hand side, we have our historical leverage between Q1 2021 and Q2 2023. We have some distortions to this graph. We had a capital injection in Q4 2021. We had a debt increase in Q4 2022, the acquisition of Region South. And of course, we have the not-so-great Swedish SEK affecting the graph slightly. Despite those distortions, the effect of the strong cash flow in Q4 and Q1 become apparent. Just as an example, given the current last twelve month Adjusted EBITDA, every SEK 100 million in increased cash will decrease leverage by 0.2.
By that, implying that the strong cash flow will affect the leverage positively in Q1 and Q4. The strong operating cash flow will enable us to reduce our debt and net debt, and then capital can be allocated to other areas. Speaking about capital allocation, Karnov is looking to have a balanced capital allocation strategy. As I've shown on the previous slide, we have a strong cash flow, and then our first priority is to bring debt down. When we reach our net debt target, we can start allocating capital to organic investments and M&A... and by that, improving productivity or future growth. These investments follow a very structured governance model. Then we hope that with excess capital, we can start paying dividends and or starting to buy back shares.
Even though we've heard mentioned Pontus mentioned a few times that we are not prioritizing any big tickets at the moment, I would like to spend a few minutes on our M&A strategy. So when we're looking into acquisition, we are focusing on four key enablers. So we're looking at digitalization, we're looking at people and culture, go-to market, and brand. Based on these four strategic enablers, we are then looking into three different categories of possible acquisitions. So starting with the geographic expansion, Region South is a typical example of that. So we're looking at targets to acquire that are leading providers of our core offering in new geographies that we then can include in Karnov's leading technology. So we would like to include content, and brand, and author base, and so on. The second category is legal tech.
By acquiring legal tech companies, the ambition is to strengthen the existing offering by improving workflow efficiency for our existing users. And then the third category, adjacency. Our target is to find and integrate companies to existing verticals or gain leadership in new verticals on the Karnov platform. Just some words on the financial rationale on the acquisition of Region South. We paid a multiple of just above 7x EBITDA for the acquisition of Region South, post-merger synergies, and including cost to achieve. So the multiple without synergies and cost to achieve would be around 10. And then adding synergies, we would drop to a multiple of about six, and then adding cost to achieve, we end up at the seven, the multiple seven.
And as I mentioned before, the target EBITDA margin for the integration project is 16%, and of course, with the clear ambition to improve over time. So in summary, the acquisition of South has led to an increase in total addressable market from two to 17. We have reached net sales of SEK 2.4 billion last twelve months, Q2 2023. We remain at a very high level of recurring revenues, 85%. Our 10 largest customer stands for less than 4% of our total net sales. We have a stable margin with a very, very clear plan to improve. Our cash conversion in average over the last couple of years have been above 100%.
We went from 300 employees to 1,200 employees, and finally, the number of users increased by four, from 100,000 users to 400,000 users. I hope I've given you some insights into where we come from and where we are, and now by moving on to our ESG strategy and our financial targets, I hope I will show some insights into where we are going. As I mentioned several times by now, the acquisition of Region South has changed our profile. Same applies for the ESG strategy. Since the acquisition, we have put a lot of efforts into aligning that ESG strategy between North and South, and also aligning how we collect data. Luckily, we have the same common vision: to clear the path to justice by contributing to a robust legal system and democratic, democratic principles.
The aligned ESG strategy was approved by the board in August. The strategy is, of course, supplemented by a long list of actions and quite substantial framework. But the next, the next large steps for our ESG work is to establish a common set of targets, and of course, getting ready and finalizing the work done on the CSRD reporting. Moving on to the financial targets. As press release this morning, we have resolved new and updated financial targets to better reflect the new Karnov Group. So Karnov's target is to achieve an annual organic net sales growth of 4%-6% in the medium term. Karnov further aims to achieve an annual Adjusted EBITDA margin in excess of 25% in the medium term, and an annual Adjusted EBITDA margin in excess of 30% in the long term.
The objective is that net debt, excluding leasing liabilities relative to last twelve-month Adjusted EBITDA, shall be less than three. The ratio may temporarily be exceeded, for example, as a result of acquisitions. We have a dividend policy. Karnov intends to distribute available cash flow after consideration has been given to the company's indebtedness and future growth opportunities, including acquisition. The target is to distribute 30%-50% of the company's annual net profit. What are my key takeaway from this? Of course, the updated financial targets are really important to us. Our ambition is to achieve an annual organic net growth of 4%-6%. Our ambition is to achieve an EBITDA margin of above 25% in the medium term and 30% in the long term.
Karnov Group has a very strong operating cash flow and a strong free cash flow, not least in the first and fourth quarter. That will help us decrease our leverage. Once we've harvested the synergies in Region South, we will have an even stronger cash flow going forward. And finally, the very foundation of the Karnov business model, subscription-based sales to a wide and resilient customer base. Thank you.
Thank you, Magnus. Now I would like to welcome up on stage our CEO, Pontus, and we will soon open up for the Q&A session. But I want to start with you, Pontus, because you talk a lot about having customer in mind in everything you do, customer centricity, we have mission-critical products for our customers. How often do you meet our customers?
As often as possible, I have to say. It's the easiest part is, of course, in Sweden, being a trained lawyer at Lund University and knowing a lot of people here, but also opening up doors to, let's say, the police, to different judges, to lawyers, of course, to librarians, to really to get to understand how we are delivering. Also in Denmark, of course, I met a lot of lawyers in Denmark. Next week, we will have a customer event in Spain, Madrid, and, well, in the beginning of the summer, I met with a lot of French customers in Paris. It was really nice, even though I have—I'm not that talented in French, I have to admit that. I promised to give a speech in French for, like, 10 minutes, and I did it.
I was very nervous, of course, as my old French teacher would have been also if she knew what I was doing. Nevertheless, after that, those 10 minutes, I started to talk about the customers in English, and they said, "Pontus, that was very brave." So they didn't say I was speaking good French, but at least I got to know all those nice French customers, and I'm looking forward to speak Spanish next week then.
Okay, good. Also, when you do a huge acquisition, the due diligence is crucial, but if you're going to succeed, it's all about the integration. Have you used anything of your best practices from when you led integration projects in the Media House Bonniers, when you did that some years ago? Have you seen similarities that have been useful?
Well, there are general learnings, definitely so. Content is, of course, also important to a media house delivering newspapers. When we merged the two media groups, there were definitely content challenges. Also, bearing in mind, tech perspective, not only online tech, but in those cases, also a printing company.
Mm.
So, tech and content going hand in hand was relevant, though, and that's one deep learning, definitely so.
Mm.
Of course, culture. They were actually competitors-
Mm.
So starting talk about how we should merge our efforts was deeply important already then, almost 10 years ago.
Magnus, you will have one question, and then I will open up for the floor, but you have a lot of more users in South-
Yes.
But still about the same turnover. How come the price is so much lower per use?
I think the answer contains several factors, and of course, the market is more fragmented in Region South. There are more suppliers, more niche suppliers, and that implies a different market mechanism, a different pricing mechanism. Another difference is that the content we provide in Region North is very comprehensive, whereas we provide thinner solutions with less content in Region South. For example, ComplyLaw with the whistleblower function. That could have many users, but very little content, and then the pricing would be different.
Okay, thank you. Now we will open up, first starting from the audience and then from the web, and please state your name and where you are from.
... Thank you very much. My name is Daniel Levin . I work as a sales analyst at Nordea and cover Karnov. So my first question is on the churn, which I found quite interesting, that it was this big of a difference. And I just wonder if you could talk about during the acquisition process, if that changed anyhow, did that come up, or was it stable or, or perhaps even come down? And also following on to that, how can you detail a little bit more how you intend to work to get that churn rate down? Thanks.
Should I try?
Yeah, feel free. Feel free.
Okay, I'll start. So, the churn rate in 2022 was slightly higher than in 2023. About the same, but slightly higher. The second thing I would like to say is that the market in, for example, Spain, is much more fragmented than it is in Region North. For example, lots of single lawyer law firms in Spain, and they behave slightly more like B2C customers than B2B, always looking for the best deal. That's not our customers. We still have some, but it's not our customers. So there is a different dynamic in Region South.
I guess, Guillaume will definitely go deeper in this, but let me just add that there is one very good way of getting the churn down, and that is, of course, improving the customer value and making sure that the relevance is 110% all the time. So I guess Guillaume will also touch upon these things.
One, one final question here also, and that is on the, you mentioned here the lower pricing in the South region, which also seemed quite interesting. I think this all echoes about your acquisition from Karnov of Norstedts in, in Sweden. So perhaps can you remind us, or maybe you can hint what the price difference is today? Then perhaps also, after now merging the-- one of the largest player in, in Spain, for example, how big market share do you have now in, in Spain versus, previously? The, the, the biggest co-- the biggest player, how big is the share versus previously, basically?
So if I'll start with the last part, you can take the hard part. So, the two companies we bought in Spain were the number two and number three, and now we have about 25% of the market share. Then the second largest now is Lefebvre, with about 17%-18%. I'm looking at Guillaume to confirm, but yes.
Again, please.
Sorry, confusing.
The difference in price-
Could you repeat?
-between the Nordic region and the South region, because you mentioned it was lower.
Thank you. Yes, there is definitely a difference, and it's not that easy to talk about it in general term, because as you said earlier, the product portfolio is different in South and North. We definitely have the same kind of products. We have legal information solutions as those broad products, attracting many of the users in the legal field, but also, as you mentioned, the whistleblower product and so on. So it's difficult to say straight off. And it's, they also, as you mentioned, having more, they have a specific product for those big law firms and then specific ones for the smaller law firms. A simpler product, so to say, to put it bluntly.
So it's really difficult to actually point out, but that the level is lower, yes, definitely so. Let's try to prepare Guillaume to answer that question in detail when he enters the stage. But overall, you're perfectly correct. And also, your reflection about Norstedts Juridik is also correct. We have been working hard for many, many years to make sure, since 2018, to make sure that we are adding customer value so that we can also raise the prices, because that's the way we have been doing in Sweden. But let's come back to specific details regarding Spain. Thank you.
That's great. Thank you very much.
Then if we can have a microphone here on the... Okay. We take the third row. We take the third row. The third row now. Yes, yes. The gentleman in the middle.
Yes.
I think he need help.
Is that me?
Yeah.
Okay, thank you. My name is Predrag Savinovic. I work as a sales analyst at Carnegie. First, a very simple question: Can you define medium term and long term in the targets?
I mean, I, to me, I consider medium term to be within a couple of years, so it's not defined in that sense. After that, we talk about long term.
Okay. If we-- I mean, the big update is, of course, you put a growth ambition down and a margin ambition down. If we can reason, is the margin ambition easy to reach or hard? Is the growth ambition easy or hard? Which is the tougher one, so to speak?
Yeah. I think both targets are quite ambitious, but it's also something that we believe very strongly in. So, if we take the margin target first, and of course, the integration in Region South is a large part of that target. But we also see some additional costs synergies to achieve going forward. So it's ambitious, but I also believe it's quite achievable. And, of course, the organic net sales, again, ambitious. We have about 8%-9% in Region North, year -to -date, Q2.
... and we've mentioned that we will—we foresee a flat sales growth in Region South in the near term. So it is ambitious, but we also see so many good things that we're doing in the integration with the value proposition and with the products, that we also feel quite confident that in the medium term, it's achievable. Ambitious, but achievable. And-
If you were to allocate this, this target to North and South, think three-four years ahead?
We'd like to look at Karnov as one group.
You have Anne's modeling this work.
We will, Alexandra, we touch on the opportunities in North, definitely so. There are opportunities, and let me just, as an overview, give you those. We can see that small law firms is a segment that we could address better than we have done. Also, the corporate sector, and then we tend to forget those emerging companies that we have, the Norwegian DIBkunnskap, as I mentioned, getting into Denmark now. Echoline and Notisum, the EHS companies, are within the North segment, and those are growing rapidly. There will be support definitely for growth also in North.
Okay, thank you. Just one final on AI. I appreciate that intro you made. AI can, of course, drive efficiency. I appreciate the stat you made with... Was it two in 10 lawyers do repetitive tasks, so a lot of them do a lot of stuff, right? The number of lawyers have doubled in 10 years, yeah?
Twenty-five.
25 years, sorry. But the number of lawyer assistants had gone by four.
Four times, yeah.
So what if your product drives so much efficiency that you don't need as many, like, the lawyers are going to use their licenses, but the assistants, you know, maybe you can half those? So what if you, you know, this AI initiative is, is not a positive driver, but a neutral because you lose customers?
Yeah, I... The best answer, I would say, is the fact that we, we saw the same things. We discussed those things 25 years ago, coming with, into internet, and said: Well, there will be no room for lawyers anymore. It, again, it's the total opposite. You could also say that, yes, simple tasks, really simple tasks, might be automated by junior lawyers, definitely so. What we see constantly is that we dig deeper into those really relevant questions, and the lawyer becoming more of an advisor also in other parts of the client's perspective. I-I'm not worried at all, having in mind what we've seen in the recent 25 years.
But we will get deeper into this also, Anne presenting our thoughts around AI and what kind of products we are focusing on. Because some parts, let's talk about drafting and summaries, may be easier, but the parts we are contributing with, it's not those things. But again, Anne will focus on that. So let's remember, Anne, to give that a good question answer also on that question.
Pontus, if I may add, which you normally talks about also, is that the world today, for our customers and the legal professionals, is getting more and more complex. You know what kind of world we live in, the amount of new laws and everything goes so much quicker. So, so it's also that the burden for them and the complexity increases, which means also they need legal assistance, et cetera. So I, I think that's-
Absolutely.
You normally say that as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, next question. You're fine there? Okay, we take the fourth through there. Andreas, you see. There, we have a mic, and we take that. Perfect.
Hi, this is Stan Kerner from Target Fund Management. Very shortly, you highlight that you have, that you're a market leader in the labor law segment in, France. What is your estimated market share in the, in that segment?
Oh, wow, wow, very interesting and specific question, which maybe, Guillaume, do you have it on the tip of your tongue?
In an hour, we got that. Good question. We'll come back. Thank you.
Okay, then here in the middle. Yes.
Thank you. My name is Isak Lenholm , and I work for Carnegie Fonder, as a buy-side analyst. I was just wondering regarding the employee benefits, this is a long-term question, but looking at the employees in South versus North, currently it's almost three times the employees in the South region versus the Northern region. I was just wondering, over time, is there any need for scale-up in the South, or are you fine with your current workforce there? I mean, looking at the synergies, those should be pretty easy to achieve by just scaling your employee base over time.
Yeah. So, again, a couple of answers to that. It's not an exact one-to-one comparison, because, for example, in Region South, we have authors and journalists employed, and in Region North, they're paid by commission or royalty. So it's not an exact one-to-one.
Mm-hmm.
Also, it's a slightly different market situation, so it requires a slightly larger sales organization, for example. So, there are some differences, so we can't compare Region North-
... straight to Region South, some differences. But of course, in the integration project in Region South, there is an organizational optimization part of that, of course.
I was just not talking about firing people either. I was just talking about scaling-
Yeah
-over time. So maybe in the northern part, you will have to hire, while in the southern, you could do some re -organizations, so.
To me, that's more about operational excellence, so we do that continuously. We make sure that we have the best employee for the task, and to me, that's more of an operational excellence part that we do continuously, of course, that's our job as management.
Okay, thank you.
Maybe this is a question for the board. My name is Ben Teke. I work for AFA Försäkring , a small insurance company. Maybe this is a question for the board, but which are the three main elements of the management incentive programs in order to achieve the goals that you have stated?
Well, if I may answer, Magnus, in our long-term incentive program, we have four parts. That's growth, profitability, reaching the synergies, and ESG parts in that. So, growth, profitability, realizing synergies, and the ESG.
Okay.
Simon Jonsson from Berenberg. What will drive the margin from 25% midterm to 30% long term?
Yeah, so, a few things. Of course, growth is part of it, but we also see some really good opportunities to optimize our organizations even further.
Okay, and to follow up, how are you thinking and allocating between dividends and buybacks?
I think that's more of a question for the board than for me. Of course, depending on the fair value of Karnov, we have to decide on either repurchasing shares or paying dividends, but again, I think that's more for the board than for me to answer.
Understood. Thank you.
I do understand we have no questions from the web. A final question from the audience before we break, and then you can mingle as well and ask questions. Any final question now? Yes.
Yes.
In the middle.
Thank you once more. So I had a question regarding the debt reduction strategy. Currently, I'm getting some pushbacks on Karnov from a debt-
Mm-hmm
standpoint. I think the market is quite scared of debt as of now. I was just wondering if you are seeing that you will reach your leverage target quite quickly, or if you're worried that this will take some quarters?
The answer is that, given the last 12-month EBITDA, adjusted, we have at the moment, every SEK 100 million increase in cash balance will delever by 0.2. So my assumption is then, or this is implying that we would have a deleverage, in Q4 and Q1, given the historic operating cash flow in those quarters.
That will mean that there is no need for any type of equity issue and-
No
-similar?
No, no. No need for equity issues.
Thank you.
Okay, good. Spot on time. Thank you for listening. Now, we take a 15-minute break, and we'll also get back to you who's calling in from the web then. So thank you so much, and we'll be back in 15 minutes. So welcome back, and I wonder, do we have everyone from the webcast with us? I'm looking at the technicians. Thumbs up. Good. So now we will have a session and have a deep dive into our two regions, and I would like to introduce Alexandra. Alexandra Åquist from Norstedts Juridik.
To start with, yes.
You are really the guru on Norstedts Juridik, and also very much behind, together with your great colleagues, about the successful recipe that we will now bring into the South. So, Alexandra, with this, I hand over to you.
Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody, because it is afternoon now, isn't it? So a warm welcome to a great part of Karnov Group and this presentation of Karnov Region North. We are the part of Karnov Group that recently went through a merger and came out on the other side, strong and with lessons learned. We are also a part of the group that continues, delivers organic growth, and improved profitability over the years.... To start with, we have a very solid subscription business. We are so much more than that. Region North also includes fast-growing emerging ventures, such as Notisum, Echoline, and DIBkunnskap, with higher yearly growth and further potentials. On top of that, we have a very strong commercial agenda.
The management team in Region North consists of people with a long background and passion when it comes to customer centricity, sales, and business development. I believe strongly in putting Sweden and Denmark closer to each other, because I think we have so much to gain when it comes to best practice and efficiency by being a region. So that is something that gives me energy every day. So, the ambitions for Region North. Our ambitions are high. It's in our DNA. We see that we can continue, deliver sustainable growth from our core products. On top of that, we put innovation and business development very high. When it comes to operational excellence, we are now taking one further step, adding the North dimension. It will create cost savings, and it will increase efficiency in the long run.
So starting up with the market for our main companies, that is Karnov Denmark, and it's Norstedts Juridik in Sweden. When it comes to revenue, legal information services provider, both companies are a clear number one in their markets. It is a consolidated market when it comes to legal information systems. We have competitors. Like, for example, in Denmark, we have competitors as Djøf and Schultz. In Sweden, we also have some, you might know Blendow, Infosoc, and JP Infonet . If we start to look more at legal providers in tech, the market is more fragmented. Some of you might wonder why Karnov Norway isn't in this slide, and it's mainly because we are a minority owner in Karnov Norway. We have 40% of the business.
Right now, we are working with upscaling sales, but we have an option of becoming a majority owner going forward. So that's why. So we have a long history and presence in both markets. In fact, Norstedts Juridik have a very important birthday this year. We are turning 200 years, and if you look at Karnov Denmark, they are not so far behind. So our long history, it shows a long tradition on the market. It shows that we have a lot of knowledge, local knowledge, so we are very proud of our history, but we don't want to be defined by our history. We see ourselves as forward-leaning companies with future ambitions. If we go down to brands, we did a brand survey not long ago, and that shows that both brands on their respective markets are superior.
They are superior both when it comes to strength and awareness, both markets. Our customers are quite similar. They are law firms, small, medium, large, and they are corporates, and then it's the public sector. It's the same in both countries, but the shares of the segment differ a little bit. We have two flagship products, and they are almost similar. It's Karnov Online and JUNO, and it's our legal information system that is going towards legal professionals in the industry. And we also have an up-and-coming problem, product that is actually my favorite product, if you can have one of those, I have. It's Karnov Municipality and JUNO Municipality. It's quite similar to JUNO Karnov Online, but it's one difference. The target group is caseworkers within municipalities. So to start with, we have a stable business with profitable organic growth.
I would like to start by mentioning, maybe you understood that already, that the slides that I'm going to show will only include our main companies, Karnov Denmark and Norstedts Juridik. For example, our emerging ventures, I will show on a separate slide. Our foundation is a very solid subscription business, and it's a business that is resilient regardless of economic cycles. And I cannot show you a recession in close time, but I could show you a pandemic, 2020 to 2021. And I also get the question: Do you think that you are going to be able to deliver continuously, sustainable growth from these products? And my answer is yes, and it's yes, mainly by two reasons. The only... The first one is that history shows that we can. But more important is that all the foundations are in place.
To start with, we have a high customer satisfaction when it comes to our flag products. That is NPS, Net Promoter Score, and it's 50 in an average between Sweden and Denmark. As you might understand, this is a crucial figure for long-time loyalty from our customers. Our services are mission-critical, and I will repeat it as Pontus repeated it. They are mission-critical, and I would like to tell you a short, promise short, real-life story. A couple of years ago, I received a phone call from a very high representative from the legal community, the legal industry within in Sweden, and they had noticed a default in our flagship product, JUNO. Luckily, it's a very unusual default for us, that the human factor had caused a comma to... No, a period to become a comma, and with that, the sentence slightly changed.
This person was upset and said that such a fault, default on our behalf, threatened legal certainty in society. We don't like to do mistakes. In fact, we hate to do mistakes. We're proud specialists, but her phone call made me understand how important we are to the legal business every day and to our customers. Moving on, we have a low churn on 2%-3%. It's a very low churn, and I think as Magnus say, main reason for that churn is either our customers are retiring or closing down business. We also think that we have ability to increase price delivery yearly, if, and that is extremely important, if we continue to deliver on customer value.
We now have a process for this that is called a value-based pricing, and our customer demand all the time for more content, so if we could give them, that to them, we think that they are willing to pay a little bit more. So going over to the financial figures, the most important things. How have Karnov Region North developed after the merger in Norstedts Juridik? And that is 2018, and that is why we show 2019 to 2022. To start with, we have a stable growth over the years, and I would like to add that all is organic. The growth is almost twice as high in Sweden than it is in Denmark, and why? The growth in Sweden is mainly supported by the integration of Norstedts Juridik, but also very strong growth within the public sector.
If we look at Denmark, most of the growth is due to added value in our existing products. Looking at the next graph, it makes you even more happy because you can see that we are not just a top-line story. Everything we earn on top and more to it falls down all the way to Adjusted EBITDA, EBITDA. Same thing, the increased profitability is almost twice as high coming from Sweden, and we work with operational excellence every day. We try to be more efficient today than we were yesterday. But of course, it's also due to cost savings in the integration from Norstedts Juridik, with full effect from 2020. So our merger, the merger that we have been talking about, we've done it before. Was it a successful merger? I would say yes.
We managed to deliver on our financials, we merged two companies, and we came out with a strong culture. One team, one company. Were there bumps in the road? Yes, most definitely. Is it something we would have done differently today? Yes, of course. But a little bit of our learnings and experiences from this merger is that a common corporate core culture is crucial. Of course, it is. But the Karnov Group culture is strong, and it is very clear, and that really helped in our merger. If we could say that we did one mistake, one thing that we could have done differently, one of those things is that we should have started the migration of the content earlier. That caused us a temporary goodwill loss with our customers, and also some budget increases.
But this is something that me and Guillaume have talked a lot about, and I know that they are not going to repeat our mistake again. Also, key factor, I think it is that we are keeping the legacy brands, brands. I showed you my history. It's a strong history, it's a strong tradition. They are very locally anchored. The same goes for Guillaume's companies. So it would be a stupid mistake not to use that. Something I would like to add as well, that I think is extremely important, is that this is a time where a company can show their real colors. They could show that they are a customer-centric company. It has all to be, to be extremely available, and also give the customer a super customer support when they call us. That is extremely important.
So this is a little bit about our learnings, and this is also some learnings that have been going on in the south case. So new opportunities. It's always my favorite part. I say, once a sales director, always a sales director.... So who are we? What is in our identity? Are we just two companies far up in the north, slowly walking around on a mature market? Of course, we are not. We are working extremely hard every day to take our companies to the next level, step by step. And I would start to show you some unleashed potentials that we see in our market, and I will start close. I would like to start with our customer portfolio. Starting up with my favorite product, as I told you it was, and why do I like it so much? I'm from Sweden.
Here you could say that the municipality product on the Swedish market, it has been a huge success. Last month, we also had a breakthrough in the Danish market because we were approved by SKI. And who is SKI? It's a purchasing central for municipalities. Why is that important? It is important because the municipalities now is going to be able to buy our products in a simpler and easier way, without, for example, have to go through a procurement process. The total addressable market is around SEK 159 million. It's a different market dynamic than we're used to, because here in both countries, we are second mover. We have a first mover, JP and Schultz, in the different markets, and we choose to use that to our advantage. Because what we have to do is to do a very good value proposition for these customers.
We don't have to build any need in the market, and then this is the sales case. We have to be out there meeting as many potential customers as possible, show them what we have to offer. Of course, we have a very good knowledge exchange between the two countries, and this is an opportunity that I really feel very, very strongly for. Oh, so moving on, we have the corporates, and we are underrated in these segments in both countries, and it's due to priorities in the past. The segment has grown within us. You see, it's an increased growth over the year, but it's quite modestly. And you could also see on the next picture that we have more potential left in the market than the share that we have in our portfolio.
Also extremely interesting, I think, maybe it's just me, but it's the legal segment within the legal industry that grows the most. If you look 10 years back in time, there are 58 more legal professionals working within the corporates, and we now have an increased work against this segment, especially from the Swedish market. Moving on. When it comes to law firms, we have three subsegments: it's small, medium, and it's large. And this is the kind of our portfolio that we most often call our core. It's where we came from. And when it comes to large law firm, we have them all, all top 20, both countries. So a good market share, high NPS, and high retention rates. But if we start to look at the small law firms, the picture is a little bit different.
Once again, the growth is increasingly, but once again, it's quite modestly. Also, you could see the same thing here. We have a bigger potential left in the markets than we have in our portfolio. When we look at this segment, we see two roads going forward. One is more easy, and like here and now, is that we could give, that we could strategically, offer more licenses per customer. This is something that we have done in a very good way in other segments. We can do it here as well. But if we look at it long term, we have to think a little bit more, because we think that we have to tailor a little bit of a new offer to target this group a little bit better.
We're right now looking for new packaging, and we have came quite far. This is work that we are doing from the Danish office right now. As a foundation, we have a very solid subscription business. On top of that, we see further potential when it comes to our own customer portfolio. But can we introduce new products in the Scandinavian legal markets? We're positive people, yes, we can. To start with, and that is a huge enabler, it's a foundation, we have a very, very strong brand in both markets. Going down on consolidating regional capabilities, we are part of a group, and we're not part of a group by coincidence, we are part of a group with different capabilities.
Here, for example, we have a product now that we're building that includes content from Denmark, from our tax and accounting content. It includes literature from Forlaget Andersen, that is a small part of our company, and it contains the workflows and the platform from DIBkunnskap in Norway. This is something we can do more with. Also, cross-market product leverage. You haven't heard Guillaume?... But when you hear him, you would understand me. We have the same history, and they have a lot of products in their portfolio that we like very much, that we think would also be applicable on the Scandinavian markets. Incorporating AI. We see AI as an opportunity, and you're going to listen to my colleague, Anne, soon. Our unique content and AI, it's a match. It goes hand in hand.
It's certainty, and it's speed, and this is something that we are going to have an increased focus on going forward. Operational excellence. These are some focus areas when it comes to Region North, and first and foremost, the ones in the middle, our customers. We believe extremely strongly in customer centricity. As Pontus said, we should always have our customers in heart and in mind, and we said that we shouldn't have one meeting when the customer is not present in the room. Also, it's very important to never see customer centricity as a cost. It's the foundation for growth. I will start at the top, because I'm very proud of that, and I believe in that change so much. Since April this year, we have a regional product organization. It's a small step for humanity, but it's a huge step for Karnov Region North.
Going forward, we have a cross-functional, cross-country roadmap for developments. It makes sense. We have the same customer-facing platform. We have the same content management system, and our customers have similar needs. Why do we do this? Efficiency, of course. You could see before, all development goes into tech. Denmark comes with their needs, Sweden comes with their needs, and it gets full quite fast. Now, we try to be efficient, and we try to develop our products together in the same direction. We think it will create space for more product development, but also to create even more space for AI initiatives, for example. So that is a huge step for us. We are also going to have more focus when it comes in customer and user insights. Didn't we before? Of course, we have, but we do it in a more strategic way.
It's also a North function, and it's important for us that we have one truth with them in our company. All analysis and all product development should have the same first step. Going to coordinate a streamlined regional production, what is that? That is mainly our content production. To start with, do we do the right things? Then we have to start to look at our processes. We say that every process we had should start with a customer need, and it should end with a customer with a fulfilled need. Drastically speaking, everything else should be taken away. We say as well, that the local content is king. That is our treasure. It's our, our goldmine. The local content is king, but the workflows and the systems should be regional.
If we do that, we have so many possibilities of, for example, automate some of our processes and be more efficient going forward. We also have a focus on profitability. One good example of that is that Norstedts Juridik, a couple of weeks ago, sold their training business, and we sold it to a company that is called JUC. And why did we sell it? It was a low-margin business, so we were looking at either divesting or upscaling. But the business case for upscaling wasn't there, and that's why we sold it, and we're looking over our portfolio all the time to try to be more efficient and to try to maintain our margins. I said that the regional thought gives me energy every day, and it does, but I also put local on a pedestal.
When it comes to the closest layer, the customer and our go-to market, it should always be local. We say that we're, like, 85% similar, but 15% is market specific, and we say that those 15% is going to make a difference. We have to continue acknowledge those differences, because it's our ticket to maintain first legal information service provider on both markets going forward. Our emerging ventures. A common question: What is the logic behind emerging ventures within Karnov Group? Is there a logic? To start with, they operate in areas very close to legal, such as compliance. Their business logic is also quite like ours, because they combined public sources and public information with author material or with expert material, so the same business logic in our companies and in the emerging ventures.
They are also much more fast-growing than our more mature companies, and as such, they are growth engines for Region North. They have had a strong growth the last three years. It's both due to acquisition and organic, and now they start to become a bigger part of Region North. It's like 14% of net sales. I'm going to look closer on three of those count, companies. They have been mentioned before, but one of them is DIBkunnskap, and it is today a Scandinavian expansion case. They started in Norway in the 1990s. Good growth in Norway. Went to Sweden, now upscaling. From 2024, they are going to have presence in Denmark, and as I told you, we are going to combine content from Karnov Denmark, Forlaget Andersen, on DIBkunnskap's platform, where they have a very strong workflow.
So it's going to be very interesting. From 2024, DIBkunnskap is seen as a Scandinavian business. We also have the EHS segment, and EHS stands for Environment, Health, and Safety. And here we are standing in front of a European expansion. Two companies I would like to mention a little bit more, it's Notisum and Echoline. Notisum have operations in Sweden and Denmark, Echoline in France. And Notisum, they created a new app, SHEQAPP. That is something that could be used from all the companies within Europe, and SHEQAPP is a compliance software monitoring EHS laws and regulations. Ooh! So key takeaways. The first one, Region North is a great part of Karnov Group, and we will continue deliver profitable growth on our existing portfolio and from our emerging ventures .
We have unleashed potential in the Scandinavian market, both when it comes to our existing segments, but also products. We also think that our new organization is a foundation for further growth and expansion. Thank you.
Thank you, Alexandra. I said before, Alexandra will be back on stage for the Q&A session.
She will.
Good. But now I would like to welcome up on stage Guillaume Deroubaix, our CEO for Region South. Before you start, Guillaume, I was a little bit intrigued when we spoke yesterday, and you have so many years of experience within content and the legal information industry, business development, working in major companies. And you also said your mantra, and you make sure you meet with customers every week. Can you really keep that up?
Yeah, of course.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe the first thing to say is, finally, why I'm here joining this project.
Mm-hmm.
I think that this project is for sure, this integration project, for sure, demanding, and a bit complex, but at the same time, I do think that, it is, in our opinion in Europe, the most ambitious and the most, promising project. And as I do like the entrepreneurial changes, I thought, "Well, I should be part of that." So this is why, I'm here, and this is why I'm continuing to meet with our customers every single week, of course, to make sure that they understand this project and they're with us.
Sounds excellent. So the stage is yours.
Thank you, Josephine, and good afternoon. So I'm very glad to have this opportunity to provide you with an in-depth presentation of the business we operate in Region South. Specifically, I will be discussing this afternoon the integration and transformation programs that we are leading in Spain and France. We have two objectives. The first one is to deliver on time the financial target we have committed to, namely, an additional EUR 7.5 million additional EBITDA run rate December 2024, for a total additional EUR 10 million in EBITDA in December of 2026 run rate. The second objective is to go beyond this additional EUR 10 million in the long term.
I will dedicate the next 40 minutes to present you with the very solid plan we have put in place, and I'm very confident in that plan, and I hope that at the end of this Capital Markets Day, you will be sharing this confidence. The market dynamics. Before we deep dive into the details of our strategy for the Region South, I'd like to take a moment to outline the market dynamics in those two countries, and then provide some key information about the three entities we are integrating. The overall addressable market is EUR 1.4 billion, including legal information solutions and workflow solutions.
As you can see, we have a potential market of EUR 400 million in Spain, including Portugal, and almost EUR 1 billion in France, integrating workflow solution again. We have a clear, very clear number one position in Spain. We used to be number two and number three in Spain. With the integration, we are now a clear number one in Spain. In France, we are number one in the Lefebvre vertical, with a market share of around 20%. We have a strong position in the corporate market, with a market share of 15%, and we have a, an overall position of number three on the overall market. Competitive landscape.
It is composed by a series of legal publisher with a heritage in print and online information, and a more fragmented set of legal tech providers. Regarding the competitors, we face two very robust players in both markets. Lefebvre is present in both countries, and in Spain, we also have competitors such as vLex or Tirant. In France, we face LexisNexis, a major and very solid competitor. Of course, the landscape is very dynamic with the emergence of some legal tech and RegTech companies. Another remark is about the market structure. As you can see here, the market is much more fragmented in Spain than it is in France. Now, let's go deeper into the business.
You can see our figures, EUR 121 million revenue for 950 people, and an EBITDA margin 14%. You can see on this slide the overall coherence of those three entities. First, a very long history. We are all those companies very well established, very well known, very well respected. In Spain, Aranzadi has the strongest brand in the market, with an unbeatable reputation, while La Ley is known for having the most advanced technology. So combining both, we are very, very strong. And referring to Pontus this morning, it's about certainty and efficiency. In France, Lamy Liaisons has a reputation of very strong legacy, pioneer in digital information, and it's a brand with a premium reputation.
In terms of size, there are also a form of coherence with a very similar number of employees, around 300 per business. In terms of EBITDA percentage, the distribution is not that even. France provides a better EBITDA. This said, we have a significant room for improving the margin in Spain, of course, but in the total Region South. What about the core clients? As you can see, it's interesting to notice the fact that the La Ley and Aranzadi businesses are very complementary. Aranzadi addresses large law firms, large corporate, and large administration, while La Ley addresses small, medium law firm, local public, and advisor. So we have such a great market presence combining the two companies.
In France, with La Ley, we address medium, large law firm, and again, a strong presence in the corporate market with both the legal department and the HR department with legal materials. And if we have a look on the product portfolio, you will see that again, we have this coherence with the legal information in the three businesses, the training activity, the training business in the three businesses, and in Spain, we also have the software solution activity with our flagship product, which is Fusion in Aranzadi. We don't cover so far the workflow solution in France. So now we have the right context. The starting point is that Karnov Group is the natural owner of the three businesses. Why? First, we share legacy and values.
We have, with Karnov Group, a 30-year legacy in the Nordics, being loyal in content, and we know the industry. Aranzadi, La Ley, and Lamy Liaisons have the same legacy. Customer-centric innovation. We will bring our experiences from Scandinavia to France, Spain, and Portugal to create better customer offerings than any of us could offer on our own. By acquiring Aranzadi, La Ley, and Lamy Liaisons, we have a kind of natural and coherent geographical expansion, all in Europe, only in civil law system. Now, Karnov can offer its product to a wider range of customer. We have started this very exciting journey. One journey, but two stories. A margin story in Spain with the integration, and a top line story in France with the transformation program. We have a clear vision to do so.
We have a detailed plan for each business, and I think that we have a fantastic team to achieve this goal. So, introducing you to this team. So you know Pontus now, you know Magnus, and we have in France, Palmyra Andrade, the Country Manager. Palmyra has been working for Lamy Liaisons for more than 20 years. She used to be the COO of this business, and now she's the Country Manager. Vicente Sanchez is the Country Manager for Aranzadi La Ley. And, Vicente, he's been working for La Ley for 20 years. Well, he was the Country Manager and CEO of La Ley. We have Magnus Svernlöv here in the room with a very important role as seeing the coordination between the north and the south.
Pepe Medina is leading IT and tech for Region South, and Pepe is a very experienced CTO, used to lead Southern Europe for Wolters Kluwer. You will be meeting Anne in a few moments. She's our group content strategy, and Charlotte Arup is our Group Chief HR Officer. We are dealing with the business as usual, but of course, we work a lot on the integration in Spain and the transformation in France through two offices. In Spain, we have the post-merger integration office, the PMI office. In France, we have the ACT office, adaptation, croissance, growth, transformation at ACT office. And those offices are leading the integration tracks. We have six integration tracks: technology, content, product, sales and marketing, finance, and HR.
We have exactly the same work streams, the same integration tracks in the two countries, and each of those integration tracks are led by local manager, very experienced local manager. Pontus and Alexandra have mentioned this integration that we have made in 2018 about Norstedts Juridik. And we think that we can benefit from this experience, and taking lessons from what has been done a couple of years ago. So we have done it. We'll do it again. What did we learn? Culture is vital. When going through a merger, forming a common corporate culture and related values has been highly prioritized by our teams. And with Pontus, we have invested a lot of time in explaining our vision, our purpose, our values to all the teams.
Two, content and tech are the most important tracks for success. And this is why, in this case, we have decided to go with two different tracks instead of one for the former integration, content being a subtrack of the inside tech. This time, we have decided to have two tracks to be able to prioritize both of them, and of course, ensuring alignment and constant communication between the two integration tracks. Commercial, marketing, and customer support. Keeping the legacy brand is important. We are keeping Aranzadi and La Ley for now, and in a bit of time, we will become Aranzadi La Ley, the two strong brands gathered. Keeping two products offering and separate commercial teams until full integration is key for business continuity. Yes, we do exactly the same, but on top of that, we are starting, we have started three to cross-sell different products.
Customer service team is crucial. Yes, it is, and this is why it was last January, the first department that we have decided to put under a single management. Customer data quality is key to success, yes, and we have a strong plan to ensure it, also because we think that we, we need to be a more data-driven company. So, the integration programs are, was also built on these learnings, and on this experience... So now let's have a look on what we have done so far. First of all, implementing corporate culture. Pontus talked about that, Alexandra talked about that. We do think that for a successful integration, forming a common corporate culture is absolutely key. So we have prioritized very highly this this objective, focusing on early alignment and fostering collaboration. Why?
Well, France, Spain, Portugal, we come from different countries. We speak different languages. When we speak English, maybe it could be with a slightly different accent, and we don't have exactly the same culture, the same stories. Let's not underestimate that. We take it, and I personally take it very seriously. But at the same time, we form this new culture on very strong common points and assets. We are European. We are all from legal publishers strongly involved in the legal tech, and for years and years, and we come from large and prominent international groups.
I have invested a lot of time to meet this last month almost 600 employees out of the 1,000 that we have in the in the Region South, by group of eight to 10 people. Explaining the purpose, explaining the values, explaining the business principles, explaining the priorities. And I can tell you that our people are in a very positive mood. They strongly believe in this in this integration and they are fully involved in the success of this integration. Two, we have kicked off the integration and transformation program, like I've mentioned earlier, so the the PMI and the ACT program. So the PMI, focusing on achieving the synergy while leveraging in Aranzadi expertise and La Ley advanced technology, and in France, to focus on the on the business opportunities and growth.
There are constant and numerous points and contact between the different integration tracks within the country, but also between the two countries to make sure that we are fully and permanently aligned. Three, we have put in place a single IT organization covering all the whole Region South, so France and Spain, under the leadership of Pepe Medina. Why? Because IT and tech are really the key component of this project. So now let's deep dive in this Spain integration project, and I will start with presenting a set of three sides: cost synergy structure, cost synergy effects, and cost synergy and cost to achieve over time. So the cost synergy, the cost synergy by category.
As you all know, the plan supports the harvesting of EUR 10 million in yearly cost synergies on EBITDA from December 2026 run rate. So I will take a bit of time to explain in detail where these EUR 10 million are distributed. Maybe I will start with the first very important message: we are on track. We are on track on this program. So the content, the big bite. Content, it's about deduplicating some activities. I can give you some examples. We don't need to tag to enrich the official sources twice anymore. So it will be done only one time, of course, in the future. It's about business process reengineering and automation. It's about providing the team with improved editorial tools. We are moving...
You remember what Pontus explained, we are moving the content, we are migrating the content from Aranzadi on Altamira, the content management system, the CMS of La Ley. We are also improving all the processes because we think that this operation is a fantastic and unique occasion to review all our processes, to make them much more lean, and to integrate automation every time it is possible. It goes also through a product portfolio rationalization. We will integrate some of our product to others. This is something that we have done with Jurimetria, that used to be a standalone product, now integrated in La Ley Digital. And of course, it will facilitate content supply for our product. And on top of that, we will stop commercializing some non-profitable product with, of course, some positive impact on the content production.
Vendor renegotiation, we are bigger, so in a better position to negotiate in better conditions. Sales. Sales, it's about, of course, streamlining our sales team management, and we'll have a single sales team enhanced by technology. What do I mean by that? We have a plan to increase our sales representative productivity. For that, we are implementing the same CRM shared between La Ley and Aranzadi. We will be implementing some self-service for some specific sales, and we will increase the overall the number of digital resources to be much more efficient. Just to give you an example, in order to make the renewal much more easier, we'll have, we'll implement very, very soon some usage monitoring tools.
We will, of course, deduplicate some distributors of our and book operations, so only one contact per distribution channel means also one fees be paid, not two. Regarding now the marketing and customer service, we will deduplicate some activities, reduction of similar events, maybe less events, but bigger events. We will we'll have some print material that will not be produced anymore, and we will have some deduplication of certain tools. For instance, all our tools about the lead generation. The product portfolio rationalization I was mentioning before has an impact here. Onboarding cost and customer support cost will come down when there are fewer products for the team to focus on.
Reduction of suppliers again, cost efficiency gains, when reducing the number of suppliers as the volumes with those vendor increase. Legal and finance. We will have a common ERP tool with common ERP processes. Microsoft Dynamics to be used for ERP in the whole Spanish organization, and in a couple of years, extended to France as well. We will be structuring the finance processes, with simplification of, back office systems, and we will stop the collaboration with some contingent workers. Procurement efficiencies, for sure. Here we talk about, provider consolidation and rationalization and other procurement, deduplication gains. We will be also reducing the number of legal entities, merging the Aranzadi and La Ley legal entities, into, at the end of the period, one, only one, legal entities, following the Karnov Group strategy. Finally, the real estate.
We will be consolidating our offices. We have actually two offices in Madrid, in the center of Madrid, and in the northwest of Madrid. We have taken the decision to close our office in the center of Madrid, and our Aranzadi's team, they will be relocated to Las Rozas, starting in January 2024, before having a common building in the coming years, in Madrid. We will be closing our office of San Sebastián by the end of the year, and we will be relocating our teams of, in, in Burgos, in November, this year, and in Pamplona, in Pamplona next year. On top of that, of course, it will allow us to better renegotiate all the facility management. So now we have analyzed the cost synergy by category.
Let's have a look on the cost synergy effect over time. So the improvement of the EBITDA will come progressively over the whole period, but you can notice here that we have three peaks. The first one, Q4 2023, this is about the office consolidation. Then we have another peak in Q4 2024 with the common tech platform, when we will be sharing in Spain all the different tech platform that we have. And then we'll have the single sales team, Q4 2024, this is the third peak. And to finalize with the cost synergy, we have a different view here of the timeline, integrating the cost synergies with the cost to achieve of EUR 24 million.
As you can see, here, it's growing progressively, of course, and for your information, the biggest cost to achieve are, of course, IT cost, with the IT carve-out, with the business platform integration, with the enterprise system migration, but also with the support to all the other integration tracks. The other cost is about the streamlining of the organization, and the third one is about real estate. Well, so now let's have a more detailed view... 2023, 2024, about what we are doing on a daily basis in this PMI program. Reorganizing and harmonizing. We have talked a lot about this, culture harmonization. I will not insist more on that, but let's move to the pre-integration single organization.
We are preparing the future organization, with, of course, from the day one, gathered executive committee, balanced between people from Aranzadi and people from La Ley, of course, and to make sure that we work with all the best talents, across the two businesses. So the question for us is how to make sure that we become, we become one team, one company, and so to do so, we are progressively implementing single management before we will be implementing single organization. So we are started to implement the single management last January with the customer service I was mentioning before, and that, and now it's done with the content.
It's it has been just announced a few days ago about the product, the product management, about the marketing, about the finance, and then we'll go progressively in this direction to have the single integrated organization in September 2024. Of course, it's also about operation processes and tools to make sure that we work the same way and, in the same way, we do things. Then we move to another very, very important part. It's the integration of infrastructure and platforms. And we all know that in this type of integration operation, IT could be the thorny component. That's why we take it, of course, very seriously with Pepe Medina. And the good news is that after week 39 of the PMI program, we are ahead of schedule. Three reasons for that.
The first one is that we have a greater compatibility among Aranzadi and La Ley that we had initially identified. There has been a lot of collaboration between teams from the very beginning, lots of enthusiasm and lot of skills, which has definitely facilitated the process. The carve-out has been also, and especially the carve-out with WK, has been easier than expected. And finally, we know now that we will be able to accelerate the migration of SAP to Microsoft Dynamics. So that's the first reason. Now, if I go to the content migration, the content migration also a very big and important part of this process. It's going well. We have already migrated 34% of the Aranzadi content on the Altamira platform, the CMS platform.
More broadly, we are migrating and integrating all the different business platform, all the different enterprise system, of course. So it involves that all the systems for the functioning of the company will be aligned at the same moment, in a few months, to make sure that we are sort of continuity of the business. And regarding the big system, Microsoft Dynamics, which is both the ERP and the CRM, it will be fully in place in March 2024. So it's coming very, very soon. A few words about cybersecurity.
We take this cybersecurity topic very, very seriously, so we have a dedicated sub-workstream on cybersecurity, and we are doing very good progresses as well on this one. Then we are talking about building a joint offering. Here, what we are talking about? We are talking about having a cross-selling plan. We have identified 13 possibilities of cross-selling our respective products in both businesses, and out of the 13, we have started to cross-sell six of them. Mainly, it was mentioned this morning, ComplyLaw . ComplyLaw , which is a fantastic product with a very good result from the beginning of the year, with this whistle blowing tool.
We will continue, of course, to optimize our product portfolio to make sure that we have the best coverage possible of all the different segments of the market, taking the best product from the two businesses. But at the same time, of course, we cannot stop innovating. We continue to imagine, to create the future products. So it's doing both at the same time, making sure that we have the right portfolio with the existing products, making some rationalization when it is necessary, and then to create the future of this company with new products and with new features. And we also, of course, achieve some efficiencies. I will not go into details here, but we have some low-hanging fruits that we are benefiting right now. Some quick wins in the execution.
It was, for instance, what I have explained with the real estate. If I move to the midterm ambitions, so after 2024, what do we want? We want, of course, this is our main target, our main objective, to increase the EBITDA by SEK 10 million by December 2026. I will not explain again the bottom line story, but on top of that, of course, and there were some questions about that this morning, we are working on moving the sales towards more recurring sales, but also reducing the churn. It's a big part of the plan, and it will go through two main initiatives. The first one is enhancing, increasing the value proposition, always and always, with the right combination between the content, the data, and the technology.
We do think that with generative AI, we have a new leverage to make the content much more efficient, much more certain. We also have a very ambitious customer engagement program to be implemented in Q1 of 2024, and with that plan, we expect to have direct and positive results in 2025. It is also, of course, winning the market through a complete and innovative portfolio. So it's about the integration, the integrated ecosystem of different solution, legal information solution, and workflow solution for each segment, and made up every time possible of integrated pieces of software and practical content. Also, important to mention, integrating both brands into Aranzadi La Ley in the short midterm, is key to ensure a correct transition in the legal market and for our clients.
So the new combined brand, leader in recognition in all segments, enables to share the strengths of the two original brands. Customer-centric. I don't want to go too much into details here, but the resulting organization, I can tell you that, the resulting organization will be 100% segment-oriented. And of course, it goes also through optimizing synergy, forward-looking capabilities and operational excellence, developing a profitable and sustainable business by fully exploiting all potential synergies and efficiencies. But it goes through hiring and retaining the best talent. And, of course, it's also about making sure that we propose them good career in the group of Karnov . So regarding France. France, it's a different story. As I told you, it's a top-line story.
In the interest of time, I will not cover the different points that are similar to Spain, and then I will focus on more specific ones. On reorganization and optimization, we will reshape the organization to be much more customer-oriented. And for this, for example, we will strengthen our sales force. We will double the size of our sales capabilities. We will also reinforce our customer retention team, and we will strengthen also our strategy team. We will be integrating infrastructure and platform. The decoupling with Wolters Kluwer is done, and we will be preparing the migration to the new ERP, CRM and ERP, starting next year, but it will not be delivered by the end of 2024. It will be certainly delivered between 2025 and 2026.
Again, this command security I have mentioned. I just want to insist on the legal information solution, what we are doing here. First of all, we do think that we have a significant room to increase the business in France, but we have to focus on our flagship products. For that, we will be rationalizing some of our non-profitable product, online and print, both. We have started to do so.... and we will continue in the next few months. Then we will concentrate our resources, our money and our people on our flagship products. We have three flagship products, and on that product, we will really enhance the value proposition. It means what? It means more content, more technology, of course, and a better customer experience, a better UI/UX.
We will be ready to deploy the new version of this flagship product across next year. Regarding the training activity, the training activity is representing 15% of the revenue of the French business. This business, this training activity is going very well, is very, very dynamic, but not profitable enough. So we are working on making this business much more profitable, and we are transforming this business progressively toward being much more focused on e-learning. So the midterm ambition from France, unleashing the growth potential. We think that we can deliver the highest growth in the market. Why did we put it that way? We don't think that we'll be number one and number two in the next years in France. Why?
Because the number one and number two are out of reach for us. But we do think, we have the conviction that, we can have the, the highest growth on the French market. And I can tell you that the French team is absolutely obsessed with this ambition, with this target. I do believe that we can do it, and it will go by being the preferred legal information provider in the, in the market. It will go again through the enhancement of the value proposition. Value proposition, again, this right combination, finding the use cases between the content, the data, and the technology, and specifically now, the generative AI. When I talk about the content innovation, we can innovate on the content. The innovation is not only, the technology, it's also the content.
New format of content, for instance, and new combination between our proprietary content and the content of our customers. We will build up a real customer-focused approach. The objective is to cover the whole cycle, starting from the leads intensification to the ending to the retention. And like for Spain, in the future, near future, our organization will be much more segment oriented than it is today, because we need this expertise, and we need a better and a deeper understanding of the customer needs. And of course, not forgetting the profitability of this business. Again, here, we think that we have a room to improve the profitability, and we will implement forward-looking capabilities.
We will enhance operational excellence, again, with a specific focus about developing our talents, attracting new talents from the industry and adjacent industry, and of course, to optimize the synergy, of course, with Spain, but, more broadly with the whole group. So the key takeaways, focusing and focus on improving the EBITDA margin in Spain, two, unleashing the growth potential in France, and three, to share and benefit from best practice and, strong products within Karnov Group. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Guillaume. Now I would like to introduce Alexandra Åquist, and welcome you back again on stage.
Thank you so much.
We will open up for a Q&A session, but I have one question first to Alexandra.
Okay.
You have a very good market position in Region North.
Mm.
How do you look upon potential growth?
Positive, as I told you, but I think there are two parts. To start with, we have a good market share, and we have a very solid subscription business. And the first part is to maintain the customers that we have. That is an extremely strong foundation for us. We don't take them for granted. We are very humble for them, so we work very, very strong on our loyalty towards existing customers. Going forward, we know it's the demand from content coming from our, our customers. So we see that if we could create more customer value, they could also pay a little bit more in our subscription businesses. Then we have a lot of unleashed potential in our markets. A little bit, thank you, Guillaume, as well.
But I believe in the North very much, and I believe that we can continue deliver the sustainable growth that we have.
Okay, good.
Mm-hmm.
Guillaume, Karnov North has 300 employees, and in South, it's actually around 950. But it's the same revenue. What is the explanation for this?
Well, actually, there are many different explanation. The first one is the market conditions are different. The market in Spain, France is much more fragmented than it is in Karnov, in the north, of course. More suppliers in regional south, so maybe more competition. On the customer side, it's also much more fragmented. So with more small law firm and even solo lawyers that are maybe more sensitive to price. And in a nutshell, it takes, I think, more efforts to sell and to retain the customer. So we need a larger team for doing so. We have also a wider range, needs more resources to maintain, to develop, but it's also necessary because we have this huge competition.
But of course, part of the plan is to include the duplication of some of our functions, so we do it with the team. I will not disclose anything particular here in this room, but of course, we are defining what is the ideal workforce for us in Spain, particularly with the right talents. We do it, of course, in accordance to the Karnov Group's values and ethics.
Good. Okay, I think the first question, Norma, if you give the microphone here on the second row.
Yes, it's Daniel Levin here from Nordea Markets. And I have first a few questions for Guillaume on the South region. And I think that the data we have been given since this process started for the South region, if you exclude currency, et cetera, it seems like you have been growing quite flat. It's just, it's been relatively unchanged. So I wonder, is that—is the thing here that you have been losing some share, and is that related to the merger, or is that a misinterpretation?
No, no, no particular change. I think that it's also the thing that it's a combination between the workflow solution and the legal information solution. By the way, it's the occasion for me to precise that when we are talking about you, you know, I was talking about the market share we have on the labor law and the corporate segment. It's so the 15 , 20 and 15, it's only on the legal information solution vertical, excluding the workflow solution, but no particular change.
I understand. Then also, I had one more question here on the early synergies here over the next few quarters. And you mentioned this move from two offices in Madrid to one, and it seems like that's happening quite right now or-
Yeah, absolutely.
Second half?
No, absolutely. It will happen in January, but maybe again, it's important for the teams. The idea is not to move Aranzadi's team to the La Ley's building. Definitely, it's a buffer before we, because we need now to focus on the integration, and we all know that a relocation takes a lot of energy. So we will do that in a new building, a new brand building, but it will be after the end of the PMI program.
Okay, I understand. Do you mind just to give some number there on the rent saving, perhaps, or something like that? Is that material?
Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, we'll say that immediately, yes, more than SEK 1 million on this operation. Yeah.
Okay. That's very interesting. Thank you.
Yeah.
I have one last, and then I will... If it's okay for Alexandra,
Of course.
Yes. Great. And you talked a lot about the municipality side and, and how that, seems like it's great potential there, both in Sweden and, and perhaps also taking it to the other Nordic markets. So I don't know so much detail around that. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what is the growth rate there? I mean, what is your market share? What do you think is your potential here over the next-
Yeah.
Three to five years, perhaps?
Yeah, I think it's the main growth coming from Sweden now, and we have, like, 20% of the market share within Sweden, still growing and always over-deliver against our expectations. So we have a very healthy market when it comes to Sweden, and we were the one who started the municipality product a couple of years after they went to Denmark. And you could see the potential. It's Denmark is really there. They start to take off. And also this new thing on SKI, it was very huge potential for them to be, you know, quality marked as a supplier for the municipality market in Denmark. So I think we have very good potential.
Of course, the potential is higher in Denmark, but we are also a more known provider in Sweden, so I think we are going to continue our growth here as well.
What would you say is the growth rate for the entire market? Is that picking up, or is it already a relatively stable market or?
When it comes to Sweden?
Yes, or the entire Nordic, I mean, all the markets, basically, for the entire segment, the entire market.
Yeah, I think it's more like a stable market, because it's a market that has been going on for a very long time, even if before we entered the market as well, so.
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Next question, Andreas, if you take there the third row, and Norma, you can actually get the other mic. Excellent.
Testing. It works. This is Predrag from Carnegie again. To Alexandra, you've mentioned several times-
... pricing if you deliver more content, but basically what you're doing every day is delivering more content. So indirectly, you will be raising prices every year. Is that the takeaway, we should take with us?
I think the takeaway is that for us to be able to increase prices, we have also to add customer value, and that is something that we're working very hard on. So the combination of adding customer value, and price increases are there. So, it's a one-to-one, I think.
Okay. And then one question to Guillaume or Magnus, perhaps. I think you, you mentioned several times in your presentation, we have not achieved any synergies in Q1 and Q2, or very, very little. The chart suggests, you're gonna reach some synergies already from the third quarter, and the cost to achieve is gonna be the highest also in the third quarter. So reading the charts, you should be seeing some content synergies already now this quarter. Is that correct?
Yes, we start having the first part of the synergy on the content side. That's right.
Okay. And, to clarify also on the cost to achieve, is that a part of the integration cost that you have communicated before?
Yeah.
The one-off. Okay.
Absolutely.
Super. Thanks so much.
Next question. Do we have another question? Yes.
Hi, Sarah from SCB. Just one question to Guillaume then. You mentioned that, of course, the pricing strategy depends on value enhancement in France going forward. I'm thinking about France particularly. But is there anything you can do in the near term? Would you say that the products that you have in France today are correctly priced, considering where your competition is? Or is there something you can do there?
Yeah, actually, I think that for us, I would say that the battle is not on the price increase, but on gaining market share. And maybe it doesn't make sense for us to increase our prices. I think that we have, again -- I think that we have a very, very good room to gain market share-
Mm.
Quite rapidly. When I say quite rapidly, again, it will go first by enhancing the value proposition and having a better go-to-market process with more sales representatives. So this is what we are doing now. And I think that we will benefit from this strategy in the coming months. It will take a bit of time, but I can tell you that the dynamic is already starting here now. And yes, no, I- so I think that price increase should not be at the heart of our strategy in this growth journey in France.
Okay, thank you.
One more question to Guillaume on Spain. You have a market-leading position now, so how has your competition reacted? Surely this is a big move in this market. What kind of movement have you seen? If it's very fragmented, I mean, it would make sense for some other players to also consolidate in the market.
Yeah, it's a big move, but you will easily understand that I will not comment anything about the competition.
Okay.
Okay, I think, Norma, you can take a second. Yes, you have it. Okay. You do like that.
Yes, Daniel here again from Nordea. So you mentioned here that you sold a training business recently.
Mm.
I just wonder, for our analyst that has to try to model your earnings here, is that noticeable in any way, and do you mind giving what that would impact on?
It gives a small, small effect, positive effect on our EBITDA in Karnov North, but it's not material. It's a small part of our company.
Okay.
Yeah.
Great. That's all. Thanks.
Okay.
Okay, it's time for a break. So we'll have a 10-minute break, and we will be back at 3:15 P.M., and you can continue to ask questions during the break, of course. Thank you! Welcome back. It's 3:15 P.M., and it's time for our final block about AI and taking the leap with AI. I want to introduce our great Anne Nørvang Hansen. You are Group Head of Content Strategy and Quality, and I have been impressed the last couple of days with your knowledge about Karnov, but also about AI, what it can be as a potential, but also how you mitigate the risk. But it's a great potential for us and for the customers. So with this, I hand over to you, Anne.
Thank you, Josephine. The slides are not... There we are. Could you reduce the font size of the notes just a little bit? Thanks. Yeah. As, as you can see from the slide, I've been a part of Karnov Group for a very long time, but, this is a truly new experience. And I am grateful for this opportunity to present how we in Karnov Group will, create value from AI, and how we will mitigate the potential risks that are also associated with it.
...As you can see from the subtitle, we think that the AI game is a content game. This phrase was coined by my excellent colleague, our CTO, Jan Ullerup, so with him saying it, I think it has to be true. And so before we zoom in on our AI strategy and our initiatives, I want us to zoom out a bit and revisit why content is Karnov’s core asset, and how that makes us look at AI. Our foundation is the content ecosystem. We've returned to it again and again, so far today. And with that foundation, we build our product offering, which responds to customers' use cases and ultimately guarantee that they can achieve their goals. I want to expand a bit on each of the links in this chain. In the content ecosystem, there are three interlinked elements.
There are the public content sources, the laws, the regulations, the cases. We have 8 million documents of public content across the group. Then there's the authored content. We've also called it proprietary content. It is content that is authored by some of our colleagues, but also by a lot of external authors. This content is protected by copyrights and publishing rights, and it means that if anyone else than us copies it, copies it, it's stealing. We have 6 million documents within this area. There's a third element in the content ecosystem, and that's the value add that we do in Karnov. And that's a lot. We enrich all of the other content. An example of that could be that we link the documents. It could be that we consolidate legislation to make sure that customers always see the legislation that's in force, or it could be quality assurance.
In the next element, we combine content with technology into an online product. We augment the content with digital features and functionalities. Our most important product area is the legal information solutions, of course, but we also have workflow tools and software systems where content is included. But by making this combination of content and technology, we can really add an extra layer of efficiency and certainty for our customers. And it's also from this product offering that we can feed back usage statistics into the content system, so that we can continue to improve content based on how it's used. The next element is the customer use cases that we support. It's legal research as the main one, but also compliance and practice management. At the end of the day, and this is what we strive for every day, we support customers in achieving their goals.
We've done a recent survey here in Sweden, and the three goals that you see up here were the ones mentioned. It's to be able to make decisions with certainty, to do the right thing, and to contribute to a better society. Over time, we have innovated across this value chain, and we have boosted the customer value, and we have boosted Karnov Group's growth. Now, we're working intensely on innovating with generative AI, and I want to talk now about how we look at generative AI in our context. It's not a full overview of what generative AI is, not at all, but I want to make it clear what it is that we focus on. So generative artificial intelligence is software that can generate content. It can generate text, images, code, music, and it's trained on very large amounts of data.
A subset of generative artificial intelligence is large language models. You will know them perhaps also as LLMs. In addition to being able to generate text, these large language models can comprehend text. They do it in a mathematical way, not like you and I do, but they can comprehend text. An example of that would be that they can analyze the sentiment in a text and determine if it's positive or negative or hesitant, for example… Or it could be that, it can check a given text against a template.
I think that's what we can imagine could be a great use case in a law firm, where junior lawyers or associates create lots of memos for their partners or principals, and just imagine that they could automatically check if the memos they create are in line with house standards or with the principal standards, and at the same time, check any references or citations of legislation or case law. Then there are applications of large language models. We know them as ChatGPT, Pi, Bing, Bard, Claude 2. There are many out there, and what they do is that they allow us all to interact with the large language models in a chat-based interface. In Karnov Group, we see that integrating with large language models hold a big potential for us, but we do have some considerations. First of all, these models are decoupled from reality.
They are designed to be convincing, not to be correct, and they do not necessarily know the difference between true and false. It means that the way they work is that they do not—when you ask a question, they do not go and look up stuff on the internet, they generate text based on probability. That's important to know. Another concern or consideration that we have is that there's no real insight into the data that these models have been trained on. We do not know if they have been trained mainly on Facebook or Wikipedia or something that's been scraped off a pirate website. Those two things put together mean that there's a risk of bias and also of hallucination in these models.
Bias would be, let's imagine that a model had been trained on Facebook, then it produces its output based on Facebook. Can we imagine that Facebook is sometimes a little biased? I think we can. That could mean that the output is also biased, or it could be even toxic. As for hallucination, that's when a tool like ChatGPT invents stuff. There's a pretty famous or infamous example from our field. It was a lawyer in New York, let's call him Steven. He had a case, and he asked ChatGPT about precedents for his case, and ChatGPT was very obliging. ChatGPT came up with six cases with citations, names of judges, everything. That was all good.
The lawyer took it or put it into his brief, and he took it to the courts, and then it was discovered that all six cases were actually inventions of ChatGPT. They did not exist in real life. When that was discovered, there was a disciplinary process with the lawyer, with Steven, and Steven hired a defense lawyer for that process. Here's a little twist that I think is interesting, because in the defense, the defense lawyer argued for leniency for Steven, and he said that he deserved leniency because he did not have access to proper legal research tools. A final consideration that we have is that legal matters with these models, when you use them, generally are not quite settled. There are issues about copyright, confidentiality, and privacy.
It's a little uncertain when you prompt a model like this or when you get an output from a model, who owns the copyright to that? Imagine that you get an output that's based on something that's been stolen off someone else's copyright. Where does that put you if you do that? There are some issues that are not quite settled yet, but still, we are convinced of the potential and the opportunities here for us when it's done right. We believe we have done it right. We have done it right, because yesterday we launched a new product in Spain. It's a legal AI assistant called K+ Smart Chat, and I'd like to now show you a video of how it works.
After a process of creation in close collaboration with customers, Karnov Group in September launched K+ Smart Chat, a new chat service based on OpenAI large language model. The new interactive legal assistant is entirely built and trained on Karnov Group's specialized, reliable, and accurate legal content, and aimed at providing precise answers to all those concatenated questions that customers want to ask in any legal domain. The service, which allows customers to dialogue with successive questions on any legal issue, obtaining a precise answer elaborated by Gen AI, and being able to expand information, if necessary, in Jurimetria. The solution has been integrated in beta in Spain as a complementary functionality to the traditional advanced search within the La Ley Digital database. It is also fully integrated with the existing AI, Jurimetria, Karnov's most innovative legal predictive analytics platform, and to be extended to Lamy Liaisons in France.
We plan to introduce similar solutions adapted to local needs in the Nordics. At Karnov Group, we always prioritize transformation aimed at facilitating the work of our customers. K+ Smart Chat is one example of the opportunities that Karnov's interactive AI will offer in the future to keep on clearing the path to justice.
I hope that this video gave you an impression of why it's so important with reliable, updated research content to ensure the quality and the value of an assistant like this. What you could see also in this video is that we are able to provide transparency into the sources of the output, the sources of the answers you get when you input a question into the solution. That's something you also do not normally get in a general model. This was one use case that we're exploring. We see multiple potential use cases ahead of us, and I'd like to talk about the ones, some of the ones that we see now. We saw an example of a use case for legal research just now. That was the legal assistant.
We think that's an opportunity, especially also, for example, if you're a legal counsel in a large corporation, corporation, you are generally met with a lot of different questions and matters that you need to attend to within a very wide area of topics. So wouldn't it be nice to have an assistant, a reliable assistant, that could help you with all of those questions that you're maybe not used to working with, but that pop up all the time? Another opportunity within this area, or potential opportunity, would be to integrate conversational natural language research into the actual research databases. We believe there's a great potential here to increase the relevance of search results and the efficiency of searching. Contract drafting and negotiation is another potential area of use cases.
It could be automated creation of contracts based on inputting facts and, yeah, putting that into a model and generating the content, but it could also be assistance in analyzing arguments. For example, you could get pros and cons if there's a dispute about a certain clause in an agreement. Yet another area is document analysis. We can use this technology to compare documents and extract trends. It could also help us create timelines of events if we're sitting with a certain matter. We also see potential use cases within legal strategies and predictions. Generative AI could be used to create tools that help you predict your chances of success and also evaluate your risks. A final area is compliance monitoring. You could use the technology, we think, to summarize new and upcoming regulations, and then draft policies or instructions or newsletters.
When we deliver on use cases like this, we are creating customer benefits, both in terms of more efficiency and in terms of quality. If you become more efficient as a lawyer or another sort of legal professional, you'd be able to take on more work. It would be easier to upskill new employees, or you could even try to achieve a better work-life balance if your interests go in that direction. Quality improvements. With a good assistant, for example, you'd be able to take on new work that you don't have as much experience in, perhaps. Perhaps more complex work, and in general, deliver advice with a higher degree of certainty and quality. That was a number of potential use cases. Let's now dive into our strategy. It's in three parts, our strategy. There's our sourcing model...
There's our product objectives and our commercial objectives, and I'll talk a bit more about all of them. Our sourcing model distinguishes between our core value creation processes and our generic processes. For our core value creation processes, we will build in-house AI capabilities and architecture, and since you can see we're already launching products, we are doing it already. For the more generic processes, we will integrate third-party AI solutions as they mature. Our product objectives are very much where we will mitigate the considerations that we have about reliability, et cetera, of AI. As we could see from the video, our solutions will be anchored in trusted content. So when we engage the large language model, it reasons over our content, not the content it's been trained on.
We use the capabilities of the generative AI to analyze and generate text, but it does it anchored in our trusted content. We include transparency by design. We could see it in the video. You could see the sources of the output. You get more references, so you're able to do the extra checking. Our models will be fine-tuned for legal matters. I think it's to do with the creativity or conservatism you put into the model, and it could be also other things where we fine-tune it for those legal matters. We will include privacy and security by design. The solution we just saw is an additional component into the La Ley Digital website, which has this included. We will develop ethical AI. We want to be responsible and human-centered in how we do this.
And then finally, we want to engage in partnerships as we go along, and we'll see an example of that in a few minutes. Our commercial objectives are to integrate AI features into our current digital solution, but also to develop new AI-based solutions, thus expanding our product portfolio. It's also a tool to optimize our internal efficiency and quality, and we'll get back to that a little later as well, and of course, it all leads to generating more profitable growth. This strategy is strongly founded in our content, and that is why we also believe that with this strategy, we can mitigate some of the potential business risks. The quality of an AI solution is increased a lot when it's anchored or when it can use long authored text , and we have a lot of that.
It's also better, as we saw, when you can check and cite the original sources. We have that, and we also have the confidentiality and the data governance. We are executing the strategy as we speak, and these are our main initiatives. There's the legal assistant, the K+ Smart Chat that we just saw. We are working on a similar AI assistant in the Nordic region for Sweden and Denmark. We're exploring how integration of AI can transform and ease the way a user identifies relevant case law. We have a tool that you can use to anonymize personal information in texts. It's available on a commercial basis in Denmark, and in a little while, we will integrate it into the pipelines we have here in Sweden, in Norstedts Juridik, to anonymize Swedish case law.
Finally, we have a product in Spain that allows you to analyze vast amounts of real estate data with integrated generative AI. It's our DocAnalyzer product, and it so happens that we have a video of that as well. Let's take a look. It's a product that's been developed in collaboration with the fifth-largest law firm in Spain, Pérez-Llorca.
Legal professionals are increasingly confronted with the need to analyze massive amounts of legal documents, where accurate insights on general structure, as well as on main aspects and parameters, need to be extracted. Aware of this need of our customers, Aranzadi La Ley, a subsidiary of Karnov Group in Spain, has created DocAnalyzer, based on a customized legal tech project developed together with Pérez-Llorca, the fifth-largest legal firm in Spain.
[Foreign language]
DocAnalyzer allows the digitization of any type of document, automating the work of reviewing sets of documents across different domains, as well as extracting relevant data contained in the documents for the automatic generation of reports, due diligence, and detection of contingencies.
[Foreign language]
The extraction of all entities associated with each contract is based on Gen AI, and more concretely, on OpenAI large language Model, fine-tuned and tested for different types of contracts by Aranzadi La Ley's team of legal experts. At Karnov, we listen to the voice of our customers and translate it into practical and reliable solutions like DocAnalyzer to make their work more efficient and productive.
We're proud of the trust that Rafael and his team at the Pérez-Llorca put into us. We're perhaps a little less proud of my Spanish pronunciations, but that's for another day. And we're certainly very glad that the result exceeded their expectations. We're just about at the end of my presentation, and I want to just leave you with a few key takeaways. They are: We have a history of capturing value from technology leaps. Local content is our core asset, and it's indispensable for AI. And finally, we have launched AI solutions and more are on the way. Thank you for listening.
So, Anne?
Yes.
Happy customer. That's the best grade you can get, and I think that's also in line with what Karnov says. Your product solutions are customer centricity, mission-critical products, and I think this is a proof point of great things, and I'm really curious to see what you will launch next time. With this, I would like to welcome our CTO, Jan Ullerup, for the last Q&A. And Jan, you've been 15 years in telecom. You're a true IT expert and also, like Anne, really on top of AI. You love AI and IT. So what would you say, what are the most important competencies you need to succeed in the AI game?
I think that you need to make sure that you integrate AI into every part of your organization-
Mm-hmm.
especially the parts that differentiate you. And that's what we're doing in our content department, in our tech department.
Mm.
You need to get to a level of AI literacy. Like, this is not something for an innovation team in a corner. It's something for the entire thing. We need to think it into everything.
Yeah. Good. Let's open up for questions from the audience. Your last chance. Am I surprised at the gentleman in the second row?
... But, I'm so eager, by the way.
No, it's fine.
Yeah. Okay, so it's Daniel here again from Nordea. And I wonder a bit about your strategy on how you thought about doing some of the development in-house and then for taking in third-party developers for some part of it. Were that based on, you know, that you didn't want to let anyone into your own proprietary data, or is it that you think you can do that better yourself? And I just wonder, is there not firms that are super big on this area globally, that could do this very efficiently?
Yeah, I think it's a good question. We did start last spring by immediately bringing in people who had the skills as much as anybody can have skills six months after a new technology is sort of unveiled on the world. We used them to do some early proof of concepts. And I mean, next year, if we have the right opportunities, would we go out and augment with the externals? We surely could. But we also very much believe that in the products that we sell to our customers and in working with the technology support for our content processes, this is core skills for us. This is what differentiates us, so we must build this competency in-house. As for the concerns of confidentiality, it is something that is always on our mind.
Anne also does compliance, so if I should forget, then I will be reminded. I don't think it is something that you cannot fix with an NDA, though. I mean, we all, we're all facing risks. I could be robbed just as I leave this house, but there's laws against that.
Great, okay. And one other question, also, because I checked a bit on your competitors, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, a few of the American ones, and they all seem to have launched AI tools pretty much. Would you say that you're a little bit behind the race here, or starting now, or can you maybe comment on that?
I mean, would we have liked to have launched earlier? Sure. I mean, I think they would as well. Anybody would. I don't think we are behind. We have to make sure that we deliver products that live up to our reputation and up to our customers' expectations. And we have our content. In most cases, these tools are more specific for what we do, and I have no doubts that we will win that AI game in our geographies.
Great, thank you very much.
Next question. Anyone? No. Yes.
Thank you. Just one question on the AI initiative, which is based on OpenAI. How... So let's say in the last two or three months, the market has said that the accuracy of all the GPT services from a, an OpenAI has declined quite a bit. How does that affect you when I mean, you anchor the product in your data, but you're still reliant on the searchability, the general searchability of their LLM. How does that relation work for, for your products, basically?
I think that's actually also a question for you.
Yeah. I mean, we are continuously evaluating not only OpenAI. That's where we're building right now, but we are continuously looking at other options as well, and use some of them for different purposes. But to get to the meat of your question, then, yes, it is a new skill that software developers around the world need to learn on how to integrate with a large language model that is constantly changing, and why is it changing, and so on. So there's a quality assurance job there to keep on top of that, for sure.
But I think in general, we mainly use, as Anne said, the AI to interpret text and generate new text, and it seems to be more in the factual-based areas that this degeneration or whatever we wanna call it has taken place. So it's not something that has immediately got us worried, but it's obviously something we are watching.
Okay. Thank you so much.
Any final questions? Yes. Okay, then we go in the back end.
Hi. So, I was just wondering, would you say that the amount of proprietary data that you have differs from what your competitors have, giving you an advantage in developing these AI tools? Or if you were to think about defining your advantage on this front versus your competitors, how would you frame it?
I think, size does matter, but I think, quality is perhaps more important. And I think it's... As I said, it's about having long-authored texts. We've done some studies on that, and we've found that that's really what lifts or increases the quality of the output of the AI solutions. So it's not really a matter of how many documents, but it's more a matter of the kind of documents that you have and the quality of them.
You would say that there's a big difference between you and other actors in your field in terms of the lengthiness of the proprietary data?
I think it's hard to say because there are different competitors, so it's difficult to give just... If there are competitors who also publish books, of course, they also have authored content.
Thank you.
Before you get the last question today, we have a question from the web, but you will get your question.
You're welcome.
Yes. So what is the impact of Smart Chat in pricing strategy? Anyone-
I think that's a really good question. It's early days for us still. We follow what our competitors do. We have noticed also the pricing of the Microsoft Copilot, of course. And we do believe that are premium, and as such, they should be, they should be priced as premium as well.
Good. And now the final question, and you have it there on the other side.
... From Nordea again. And I was wondering a bit about how it's hard to, you know, figure out. Is this, you know, easier to use on the easier cases where there's loads of documentation for the AI to learn from, and to pick, you know, more accurate help the lawyers? Or is it more valuable in more complex cases, you would say, where you can gain insights from large-- Right, that's a quick answer. Then just follow up one more then. You have also these workflow tools, and as I understand it, I mean, your proprietary data is super valuable in this aspect.
But when it comes to workflow tools, are they not very easy now to replicate through AI, and that perhaps is a little bit harder to protect?
I mean, I think maybe there, I think the way AI is right now, then I think we are pretty far from, like, fully automating, complicated intellectual tasks. We are where AI is still the assistant, and that means that you need, still need... So the workflow tools, I don't think goes anywhere, at least for now.
Great. Perfect. That's all my questions. Thank you.
Thank you so much, and thank you, Anne. Thank you, Jan. We will now conclude, so you can walk down the stage.
I would like, just like to summarize what we have been talking about in one single short slide, and you would like to help me with my mind. I'm really grateful for that. So maybe now? Yes. Thank you very much. So yes, as I just said, I would like to summarize what we have been talking about with one single slide. And this is proprietary local content, things that definitely helps build a better society. Our services are mission-critical, meaning, as I've said before, if we stop serving our customers, helping our customers with this, parts of the society stops. So our products, we have a business with high retention rates. We are an, we're an economically insensitive end market, and we are serving a growing demand. So I would like to thank you all for being here today.
I would like to thank you all sitting at home or in your offices listening to this webcast, and of course, to all, all the presenters. Please join me on the eighth of November, because then it's time for our Q3 reporting. If not earlier, I hope to see you there. Thank you very much for a fruitful day. Thank you all.