Hi, everyone, and welcome to ABG Investor Days. My name is Nikola Kalanoski, and I'm an equity research analyst here at ABG. With us today, we have Patrik Settlin, CEO of Litium. He'll present to us Litium for about 20 minutes, and then we'll have an opportunity for a Q&A for about five minutes. With that said, Patrik, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Nikola, and, thanks, everyone, for joining here at the venue, and those of you joining at the live stream, and those of you looking at this, later. Like Nikola said, I'm Patrik. I'm the CEO of Litium since four years back. Prior to joining Litium, I was a few years at Visma, Visma Group, Visma SaaS, building the one of the largest SaaS companies in Sweden. And before that, I got a long background in e-commerce at, with managerial and CEO roles at, Komplett and CDON, for example. But, we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about Litium.
I'm gonna give you a quick brief of the company, and what we do, and why we do it, and why we think we are a good bet for to invest in for customers, for partners, and for, for shareholders. So let's go, let's get going. Litium, for those of you who know us, we are a software company in the e-commerce. We are building e-commerce, an e-commerce platform that we provide to the market through a solution partner network. It, it has all the... It's like a toolbox, if you will. It's got all the tools and bells and whistles to build really advanced e-commerce solutions, and it will be customized through our partner network.
So our partner network are those, the ones who sells it, and implements it, and then supports it while the customers are running it, so it's a customized SaaS solution, so to speak. It's not for everyone. It's not for simple e-commerce solution. It's more for advanced needs. It doesn't matter if you're in B2B or B2C, but if you've got sort of—if you've got millions of products, millions of customers or complex products that you need to display to a large audience, then the Litium platform and our e-commerce solution is probably a good fit for you. And we got quite a few customers. If you're Swedish or Nordic citizens, you probably recognize a few of these logos on this slide.
This also represent sort of the full range, going from left to right, from B2B manufacturing to B2C, and players who've got direct-to-consumer models. So we provide solutions to all of those, and this is just a testament to the flexibility in the platform, which is a key for us in the market and a key selling point for us to be successful in the market as well. So most parts come out of the box, but then it's customized to the specific needs of the client, what they want to do with their brand, what channels they wanna go to, what sort of business model, what kind of tech stack they got, so they can modify and adapt it to their specific needs to be successful in the marketplace.
So this goes directly into our reason for being, what we're trying to do, what we're trying to achieve. The most important thing for us is to make our customers outperform their peers in digital commerce. So everything we do, the way we build the platform, the product, the business model, how we work with partners, is to achieve this specific goal, to make our customers successful in the market. If they make it, we make it as well, so that's the whole idea of it. And this has been quite successful, quite popular in the marketplace, so we got rather good traction these days. We got 200+ customers, and counting. These, the clients of ours, they sell all over the world, even though we're situated here in Sweden and the Nordics.
And many of our clients got their headquarters here, but they are selling all over, all over the globe. So geographical markets, if that's the measure, then 100+, but also, if you diverse it into, I mean, B2B market or sub-segments of markets, it's thousands of markets, actually. Like I said, we deliver the platform through solution partner network. They customize it to the specific customer needs, and then support it and develop it further. We got 40+, going close to 50 soon, solution partners today in the market, primarily Nordic-based, but some of them got geographical footprints in the U.S. and Europe as well, so we are looking to follow them out there in other geographical markets.
Through the platform these days flows over SEK 20 billion. Gotta get the currencies right. SEK 20 billion plus flows through the platform, so it's quite a big chunk of Nordic e-commerce that goes through Litium platform, Litium solutions these days. And those customers' metrics, of course, them are translated to the business, and we got a SaaS business model, so customers they subscribe to the platform, their customized SaaS platform. Of course, in SaaS business, the main KPI is recurring revenue, and in our world, it's annual recurring revenue. And we are now we are at SEK 73 million in our ARR in last Q3 report.
We're listed at Nasdaq, in case you don't know, so we're listed at Nasdaq First North Growth Market, so I can only speak about Q3 numbers, of course. Q3, 73 million SEK ARR, which was a growth with 9% year-over-year. So we come from quarters, Q1, we had 7%, Q2, 8%, Q3, 9%. So even though it's a bit of a tough market out there, B2C clients are really facing tough market conditions, we are still able to grow, and much of this is because of the SaaS, the predictability of the SaaS model. Also worth noting is that all of our revenue is recurring, so it's 100%.
There's no—if you look at peers to us or some players that do similar things, they, it's more common than not to have also consulting in your revenue. But we have none of that. It's pure, pure product, pure, pure recurring, so that's a strength for us. And looking at the underlying sort of strength in the business model, we got close to or approximately around 70% gross margin, and been having that for quite some time. So there's room to be very profitable as we go along. Okay, some other highlights from Q3 then. It was another decisive step for us.
Of course, I mean, growth is one thing, but profitability is probably the main thing these days in businesses coming, at least in the tech sector and e-commerce, of course, since many, many are struggling with this, but we are moving quite fast to a profitable state, a cash profitable state, not just EBITDA. But we've improved our EBITDA quite a lot from year-over-year. So in Q3, we were at SEK 3 million EBITDA, and the margin was up to 19%, so it's starting to get to quite decent levels in this. And if we look through year, the improvement is even bigger. We've gone from a bit minus to quite substantial plus in our world. So looking up ARR already talked about it, right?
If we look more to the product, the Litium Commerce Cloud, we've launched some quite significant tech updates in our platform. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but we've launched something called Headless and also called Serverless. Basically, this is beneficial to the modularity and flexibility of the platform, and also the performance of it with Serverless. It's more dynamic. There's customer values that you get better performance and you get more flexibility, which is key for us and our clients. And this has also attracted new solution partner to us with these new updates. A little bit more about the market, since we got a really, in our mind at least, a good product market fit in B2B. We're quite successful in this space.
The good thing about the B2B market per se is that it's, it's more stable. It's, it has not been that affected by the downturn or the macro situation in the econom- in the economy. The digital transformation of, you know, digital sales transformation is ongoing, and it's getting stronger and stronger. B2B companies in general are a few years behind business and consumer players, which are more sort of cutting-edge when it comes to digital sales and been so for quite some while. But now there's a generational shift, and also there's coming new demands from the buyer side in B2B businesses. So this is really starting to transform the digital sales or towards digital sales in B2B.
As you probably are, we're very, very well aware of, the B2C companies are facing more tougher, tougher, conditions in the market. So, even, I mean, it's... We, we see some signs of things looking up. Sales in, in the second, in the second part of year are starting to pick up a little bit again, and, it's, it looks, also with the probably the, the, call it the, the rent, probably topping, topping off now. So it's, it seems like the space to, the, the space for, for each consumer to, to spend more, is, will increase, in next year, which will be beneficiary, of course, for them. Couldn't find the word there, really. All right, so a little bit about our, Q3 .
Looking ahead for Litium, business resilience, important these days, for us in our business. It's the SaaS model, and the fact that 100% of our revenues are recurring revenue is a real strength for us. It makes our business predictable and solid, and growth as well. We got high stickiness. We are providing, you know, core software for selling digital, and the installed base we got is customized, and the customers are invested in this, and also it's integrated into stack. So the fact that it's core software and integrated and customers are invested makes it, I mean, the shift is a bit further away if you, if you're looking to do it.
And as long as customers are happy, which they are, there's no need to go elsewhere, right? We got a strong position and good traction in business to business. Well, like I've already said, this is less affected by the downturn than the macro sector. They're not as affected by the macro situation per se, and the digital transformation trend is a bit stronger here than in business to consumer at the moment. We are continuously improving our EBITDA, our bottom line, and the funds we got available will be sufficient for us to reach a self-sufficient growth state. So there's no need for us to get any more capital infused into the company.
Which is, so we're basically, we got a really good platform for further growth and further profitability at this, at this point. And speaking of growth, our platform, Litium Commerce Cloud, it's top modern. We've refactored it from bottom up, for a couple of years, but now we got the, the latest technology in the marketplace. We got the Headless, we got Serverless, we got basically everything that, that buyers out there are looking for from a technological standpoint of view, and then it's of course, features and functions that, that you need. And the value proposition, it's, it, it caters to both, you know, if you want to grow your sales, of course, which is obvious, but also to be more efficient in your sales or in your customer service, parts of, of the business.
So either way, if it's good times or a bit tougher times, it's we always got something in our value proposition that is attractive to the client base out there. Already talked about this, besides the sort of technology advances of this, it also improves our profitability, 'cause serverless allows us to host the customer environments more efficiently. It's better for everyone. It's more dynamic for the customers, it's easier access for our partners who's building it, and it's more efficient for us from a performance point of view as well. We got a new business model since. It's not new, but since in our world, it's two years back.
So, from 2 years back, all our clients join on this new business model, and this business model is designed to grow more with customers. So we got a base subscription fee, but then it's more of performance-based. So the more the customers sell, the more we also get in revenue, which has not been the best timing to launch this in the market, but as times get better, we will also benefit from this. So this is a bit of a maybe a hidden gem in our company. And B2B, we got a major opportunity we see for ourselves in business to business. We got a good product-market fit, we got good traction already, and we're only getting stronger here.
Of course, the market, the underlying market is strong and growing ever stronger, so things are looking up on that. So we are a pretty strong player in a good market space. And just to show you a little bit more about this, just in the Nordics, this is how digital sales distributes in the product-selling companies out there. So, 30% of companies out there do not sell anything digital at all. They don't even do sales support. They don't even have a product catalog up. They don't even have self-service for the clients, so... But this is probably the major shift happening these days. In business-to-consumer, this has already happened, right?
You can't hardly name a single player who hasn't at least self-service or showing their products online to build some sort of digital presence, but this has not happened in business to business yet. So we're looking to maybe not all of them, but probably a very large chunk of those will move to that side in the next couple of years. And from that, that sort of starts with, you know, just showing your products up and have self-service, maybe going through full-blown e-commerce. So there's a few stages to go through as well. So huge market potential, and this is just the sort of the Nordics, and we are pretty advanced. So if you look in Europe or even the U.S., it's they are further behind in general.
All right, a few key takeaways before I'll just leave it to answer a few questions. Litium, we got continuous growth, even in a tougher market, and we are improving our profitability pretty fast. We got business resilience, pretty high resilience, and we've got. We're well positioned to tap into market potential, going forward. We are on track to reach cash flow positive state, to be self-financed in our growth. So keep that in mind when you think of Litium.
Thank you very much, Patrik. Just a few questions from my end. I think you delved a bit into this, but if you could perhaps give us some additional color on how your business model allows you to scale, and what sort of costs are variable and what costs are fixed.
Yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, on the sell side, it scales through... We got the partner model, so we don't have to... The partners are running sales and support and implementation for us. It's sometimes a bit slower to get going, but when you actually get going, the scalability is very good on that part. On the delivery side of things, we are already very much automated, and we are at a high level. So I think we reached a state now, so to speak, a sort of level threshold, where we don't have to invest that much more. We got this platform to actually grow from.
So I don't think we need that much more, you know, our cost structure is big enough to grow way further than we are at now, so. But the other part of the question was, what parts were-
Yeah, what sorts of costs are fixed? But, I think you covered that, I believe.
Yeah, so, but as we grow-
Uh.
We should be able to add new customers or expand.
Mm
... existing customers at a really good sort of revenue versus cost-
Mm
... ratio.
Yeah.
So I mean, obviously, variables are hosting, for example-
Mm
... or commission to partners, but,
Yeah
... that's included over the line, over the gross margin, so yeah.
Could you say anything about whether the investment appetite among B2C and B2B clients has changed in any way in this year compared to 2022, for example?
I think 2023 and 2022 has been pretty similar.
Mm. Yeah.
There was a huge shift this summer, last summer, 2022, 'cause we have the pandemic boost still going, and
Mm
... and the, the sort of macro situation that we are in now hadn't really hit. Up until summer 2022, but after that, it's been quite, pretty much, much the same. B2B is steady, and, you know, moving along pretty unaffected, while, while B2C has been, it's been very much affected by the, by the situation. Everybody is cautious to do investments, and, it's long, long, longer sales cycles in general, I'd say.
Mm.
So it's, it's starting to look... I mean, we're cautiously optimistic, starting to see some signs of improvement.
Mm
... more optimism among B2C retailers as well for next year or late parts of next year, and B2B seems to come out pretty unharmed by the situation.
So on volumes, I guess you kind of touched on this, but has there been anything meaningful change to volumes with respect to B2B or B2C in the last, you know, H1 of 2023, and maybe Q3, compared to previous periods?
I mean, client sales are starting to pick up a little bit again.
Mm.
We see this has been quite down for B2C players.
Yeah.
B2B is a different story-
Mm
... but, but that's, those are the most affected, but it's not been a huge shift yet. I think we just need to-
Yeah
... be a bit patient, in the current market-
Mm
... in my belief, I think the markets will start ticking again, maybe late next year. There's new hope.
Yep. Is there anything in terms of the service that you offer, is there anything you'd like to change or improve to the platform? I think you mentioned headless, but, is there anything else you're looking at?
Yeah. You always want to improve, right?
Yeah.
That's, that's the name of the game. No, but I'm really happy where we're at, with the technology, from an architectural standpoint of view, from a performance standpoint of view-
Mm
... like the toolbox that we provide to the market. But then there's always, you know, things you want to do to improve the customer business, and
Mm
... we are really looking further into that, to just bring more customer value all the time.
Mm.
That's but that's ongoing work in our, in our world. It's always... We're always investing in product development to improve.
Yep, that's fair. And I think if we just wrap up with a final question, what do you most look forward to in 2024?
Ooh, in 2024? I guess from a larger point of view, geopolitical or macro, I'm just hoping that things really will bottom out, like my belief is, so we can get some new hope in and do more business when it comes into next year. But other than that, it's just, you know, just keep on building Litium-
Mm
... with my team and just keep providing, you know, even greater customer value to our customers. We just love what we do. Yeah.
Yep. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for the presentation, Patrik, and-
Thank you
... thank you to everybody else for listening in.
Yeah. Thank you.