Welcome everyone. Modelon just published a report for the first quarter of 2023 here this morning. With me today here in the digital studio, I have CEO Magnus Gäfvert, together with CFO Jonas Eborn. Welcome.
Thank you, Mike, for that introduction. Welcome everyone to this presentation of the interim report for the first quarter for Modelon. I think I need to see the picture. There, thank you. If you flip forward a couple of slides. Thank you. My name is Magnus Gäfvert. I'm the CEO of the company and one of the cofounders. With me today, I also have my colleague, Jonas Eborn, CFO, and also one of the cofounders.
Hi, welcome everyone.
Please, next slide. Today, after a quick introduction to the company, I will walk through business highlights of the first quarter. Then I'll hand over to Jonas, who will share a financial update for the period. After that, we'll go into a Q&A. I believe you're all welcome to hand in questions in the chat during the presentation. Next slide, please. I'll start with bullet highlights of the quarter. We are pleased to report that we continue our ARR growth in the first quarter amounting to 14% and continue also to be driven by new customer acquisitions, mainly. Also we're seeing an increasing mix of upsell business in that growth.
We're also in the quarter, we had some multiyear prepaid software transactions that contributed to an improved cash flow of SEK 10 million compared to the same quarter last year. The success of our customers and the strong positioning of our flagship product, Modelon Impact, in the sustainable energy sectors continue also to be demonstrated by new customer testimonials that we published in the quarter. Also in the quarter, we announced a partnership with a Latin American specialist, Iquant Consulting, specialist on industrial asset management systems. A partnership to deliver solutions for predictive maintenance based on digital twins. With that, let's move to next slide and a quick introduction to the company.
Modelon is a business-to-business software company in the system simulation sector. That means that we're helping industry customers across the world, and from various industries to digitize engineering workflow related to the innovation, development, and operation of high technology products and systems. That could be anything from a power plant to an aircraft or a car or parts of those. In digitizing such engineering workflows, you need to have at hand a digital representation of your product or system that can reproduce and predict the behavior and performance of this product in the digital domain before it is built and exist in the real world. This is precisely what we provide, software solution to create such digital representations or simulation models to use for those purposes.
That brings tremendous benefits to our clients. It means that they can develop their products faster at a lower cost, and also with a higher quality and better performance in the end. Our flagship product, Modelon Impact, is pioneering the simulation industry by being the first cloud-native SaaS platform for system simulation worldwide. It is based on proven technology that we have developed and also supplied to industry customers over more than 15 years, and it was first released in the third quarter of 2020. We're currently investing significantly to grow and accelerate our recurring revenue business driven by this platform. We are pleased to see that since the launch in 2020, we have consistently grown our ARR quarter- by- quarter.
We are also a very highly internationalized company for our size. We are around 100 people, we're distributed over 10 offices in Europe, North America, and Asia. That means that we have presence in the key regions, key market regions, that we are working on, which is a great benefit. We're able to meet and support our prospects and customers on sites. It also means that we're having the majority, almost all of our business outside Sweden, so even though our headquarter is located here in Lund, where I sit. The global simulation analysis market is very big. It's estimated to more than $8 billion in 2020 and growing at an annual rate of close to 8% and projected to continue doing so for a foreseeable future.
Based on this market opportunity, the strong positioning of our flagship product, Modelon Impact, and our international presence, we have set out ambitious targets, ambitious financial targets to grow our reach an ARR growth of 35% in the medium term. To turn cash flow positive after the current investment period in the short term and then to approach and exceed EBIT margins of 20% or more. And with that, we can turn into the first quarter. Again, I'm pleased to announce that or present that we have an ARR growth amounting to 14% in the quarter which take us to SEK 47.2 million.
Modelon Impact continues to be the main driver of this growth as per our strategy and plans and with the growth in the same period of 41% compared to the first quarter last year. Again, new customer acquisitions is dominating the sales mix, although we are, as I mentioned, also seeing an increased share of upsell business in this. This is also in line with the land and expand strategy that we are employing for Modelon Impact. We are typically working with large technology companies, large global technology companies, and we typically enter those accounts with a small to moderately sized initial transaction.
Meaning that we start working with department for a certain specific workflow or application, and then working with the customer to expand the usage, attracting more users and also addressing other teams, departments, business areas or programs and so on. The sales cycle in our industry is typically 6 to 12 months at least, sometimes longer. That speaks a little bit to the timescales of this dynamics that we see in the expand business. If we move to the next slide, we can go a little bit into drill down a bit on the activity in the first quarter. Start by also highlighting some existing customers that we have in our focus industries of energy, automotive, industrial equipment, and aerospace.
That shows the type of customers that we're working with. I'm sure you all recognize that the logos you see here are very well-renowned, leading global, often technology companies, highly innovative. Of course, we are very, very proud to earn the trust from such fine companies to deliver our solutions to them. In the first quarter, we have landed some new customers of this same character. We have, for example, a British multinational oil and gas company in the who are using Modelon Impact in the context of energy systems based on hydrogen which is very interesting.
I think most of you are aware that we have what's called an emerging what's called a hydrogen economy, focusing on the carbon-free hydrogen as an energy carrier and infrastructure and technology for this. It's a lot of activity going on here around the world. It's very exciting to be part of this. We have several customers already working in this space. We also have an American global power generation equipment provider. That's a long word. Basically, it's a company. This is an upsell. This is a company that provides equipment to large thermal power plants, combined cycle and other. Very large pieces of equipment, boilers and similar.
They are using Modelon Impact to develop next generation of technologies, for example, using different working fluids such as CO2. We also have an upsell to a German fuel cell innovator, a specialist company, again, related to this hydrogen economy activities. We in the quarter landed an American multinational beverage corporation, very exciting. They are using Modelon Impact in the design improvements and design of beverage coolers and also, I believe dispensing machines. Again, driven by needs to make these devices more energy efficient and sustainable. We have upsell in the aerospace sector to a German National Aerospace Research Institute.
Overall, looking at the pipeline development in the quarter, it's steady compared to the previous quarter, and we see notable activity in the U.S., continue to see that, and also in the HVAC&R, that's heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration sector and sustainable energy sectors. As demonstrated by the wins, and also represented in new leads in the quarter, we have been focusing on those sectors also in our marketing activities, attending industry conferences, industry events, and similar. Next, next slide, please. Why are these companies coming to us? Basically, again, it's the strong positioning of Modelon Impact to help these companies address the current and future challenges that they are seeing.
Those challenges and requirements can be categorized into these three, let's call them mega trends, that are also driven, driving the overall growth of the simulation and analysis market, really. The first is that of digitalization. It basically means that to be competitive, a competitive technology company, you need to shorten your development times. You need to get technology quicker on the market, and you need to do that with a higher and higher quality and performance. This is simply impossible to do working in traditional ways with physical prototypes and test bench and so on. To move more and more of the engineering workflows into the digital domain is a key strategy for many of these companies. Again, we're very well positioned being offering this solution to create the models and to use them for these purposes.
We have the next trend related to clean technology or sustainable energy. It's not only the energy industries, but all technology industries essentially are under very high pressure to deliver improved products and systems to meet the higher and higher demands of sustainability. Very high, very rapid innovation rates and taking things, new solutions to the market as quickly as possible. This is only possible by working extensively with the type of simulation technology that we are offering. This is also why we're seeing the majority of our users using Modelon Impact for such purposes. We have the SaaS cloud. Of course, accelerated during the pandemic, the need to work collaboratively in distributed teams and sharing data, working with centralized data. That's one aspect in the simulation world. Another important aspect is the almost infinite access to computation resources on the cloud.
Again, we are very well positioned here to being pioneering our industry on the cloud with Modelon Impact. I should also mention on this, the mid thing, the clean technology, sustainable energy, Modelon Impact has a lot of built-in functionality model components that are very well suited for this type of applications. Again, extremely strong positioning. Next slide, please. This is also highlighted then by some of the customer testimonials that we published in the period. Some of you may be aware that we had our first ever user conference, international user conference in Stockholm in October last year, where we attracted more than 50 leading technology companies from around the world, from 15 countries actually. From those attendance, we have produced some testimonials that we're showing here. Three of those were presented in this quarter. First one here is MAN Energy Solutions.
MAN is an energy technology provider, global, really large, more than 14,000 employees and over EUR 3 billion in turnover. They are using Modelon Impact in the context of large scale industrial heat pumps. Those, again, we're talking really, really big equipment used in the process industry, energy industry to manage and transfer heat from one place to another. Basically being able to not waste heat with flue gases and similar, but to reuse it in the process or to reuse it for purposes of district heating and similar. This equipment is extremely, first it needs to be adapted to the new energy technology available, meaning for example, intermittent renewables and so on. Also it's very, very expensive to test and validate in test bench.
They're using Modelon Impact to do test and validation in the digital domain using trusted models built using the model components provided with Modelon Impact. We have another next one here is Fondazione Bruno Kessler. This is a top Italian research institute focusing on sustainable energy solutions. They have a lot of activity in this hydrogen economy context. They are using Modelon Impact to analyze and assess complete hydrogen energy systems from steam generation to hydrogen generation production with electrolysis to storage and then conversion to electricity and fuel cells, et cetera. Assessing the total balance of those very complex systems. We have Iquant Consulting using Modelon Impact for the purpose of having physics-based digital twins to combine with their asset management solutions for the purpose of predictive maintenance.
Combination of physics-based digital twins with this predictive maintenance solution is an innovation that results in much more accurate failure prediction. This actually also manifests, if you go to the next slide, please, in this partnership that was announced in the period where Iquant will combine their platform with Modelon Impact for the purpose of having those physics-based digital twins and thereby offering a much more accurate and higher performing predictive maintenance total system. It's again, it's very exciting to be part of this another emerging sector of digital twins in industry. This partnership will focus on power plants and energy infrastructure. As a first step, is intended to deliver a number of pilot projects driven by Iquant. Next slide, please.
Modelon Impact essentially is a platform to create digital models of these technical industrial systems, and then use these models in workflows from early engineering workflows from the innovation and research, and then into the detailed design of the parts, combining the parts into the whole again, and then verify and validate that the engineering design meets all requirements, and then put this into operation. It can be used throughout all these phases. We take this value proposition, and we package it in a cloud solution, and that's unique then for us.
In that, engineers get access through subscription services, and we can offer also computation services, exploiting the computational resources available on the cloud, and also integrations and web apps based on the platform here. We have then a business model to monetize on this value that's also leverages the cloud. Currently in our product development, we're focusing on the upper part here to strengthen the robust scalable aspects of this platform as we have also guided previously. It's basically taking us to the next step in going towards a scalable SaaS business.
In the quarter, we have put down a lot of work here. We expect to have new capabilities included in the upcoming release in the second quarter that will help us to drive growth going forward. We also had a release in the first quarter that was more focused on the lower part of the picture here. That's user improvements related to the supplied model libraries used by engineers, almost like Lego bricks, to build their digital models, and notably improvements also in addressing these sectors of sustainable energy and hydrogen economy. Next picture, please. Yeah. I conclude my part here with another case study we presented in the quarter. This is also very interesting.
This is Honda Motor Company. You're all aware. It's a leading international manufacturer of cars, motorcycles, and power equipment, shipping on close to 30 million power units a year, which is a lot. They have a target to transition their manufacturing plants to become carbon neutral. This means that they need to convert those significant plants by new technologies for energy. Could be on-site renewable sources. It could be connecting to grids and then storage solutions and so on. It's a very large selection or array of different configurations you can think of. Also you will have different constraints and needs for each individual plant. This is a complex thing. How will they address this?
They use Modelon Impact to have a framework for managing this process. They build essentially a digital model of a complete plant, and they include all these options, more sustainable energy options, carbon neutral. They use the built-in sophisticated algorithms to optimize and simulate the different options to come up with one that gives the carbon reduction while also meeting all the constraints and minimizing the operational, the total cost of ownership, really, while providing the desired performance. This, they conclude basically Modelon Impact was the right choice for this job.
If you look at the picture here, you see the digital model of a U.S. plant to the left and to the right, you see what's called a Sankey diagram of the energy flows over a year for the converted plant. This is very interesting because the need to convert existing plants to become more carbon neutral is not by any means unique to Honda or the automotive industry, but really all manufacturing industries. This case study has attracted quite some attention, and we're in discussion with several prospects based on this. It's a, it's a great story. With that, I hand over to Jonas.
Mm-hmm. Can you move forward? I'll give the financial update. One more slide, please. Just highlights and a brief development of our financials. First item is the annual recurring revenue, which is growing consistently. We're at SEK 47.2 million at the end of the first quarter, which is a 14% growth annual compared to last year's value of SEK 41.4 million. And this is reported at constant currency. The historical value there is FX adjusted, as shown at the bottom of the slide. And this is to show the real volume growth. What is the underlying volume, sort of stripped of any foreign exchange effects. And within this, of course, Modelon Impact is the main growth driver, increasing by 41% annually.
We can move forward to the next slide. Thank you. The net revenues also grew slightly compared with the last historical period. The main thing is that also the software revenues are growing in the quarter to SEK 12 million from SEK 11.6 in Q1 2022. There's a slight decrease from Q4, which is due to paid-up licenses. There are, within the software revenues, there's both recurring revenue from our sort of repeat sales and also in some cases paid-up or one-time revenue, which is primarily in the Asian market. There are still companies there that stick to the sort of traditional business model in software.
The recurring software revenue in Q1 was SEK 11.8, so that's almost the entire software revenue, and increased 20% on an annual basis. That's solid growth for the recurring revenue. Services are relatively flat, around SEK 6 million, we do see many new orders, there's a good, a healthy pipeline with a good order intake. Main point with services is that there is a lot of synergies between the service business and the software sales. All our service engineers, subject matter experts, as we call them, are engaging and supporting new sales within the different verticals, in our focus industries. Development costs in Q1 are growing at 16% compared with last year.
Roughly also, same rate for the rolling-12-month period, arriving at SEK 59.6 million for the last four quarters. This is included in the EBIT. The primary cost that we have is, of course, for development. The EBIT for the quarter was -SEK 18 million, which is much lower than the Q1, also roughly the same as in Q4. We're sort of at the turning point for EBIT in our historical development here. Important to note is that the operating costs in the first quarter include some one-time costs, SEK 1.9 million, which are for staff changes, for updates in our organization, primarily in the development organization, that has happened in Q1, we're taking the costs up front here.
If we adjust for those one-time costs, the corresponding EBIT in Q1 was SEK -16.4, and the corresponding margin would be -91%. This is in line with our expectations, and we're investing, of course, with our development in accelerating our software sales and growth. We can move forward to the next slide. Final slide from me. Looking at the operating expenses, they increased by 19% compared with 2022. This also is partly due to the one-time cost that I reported. If we take that into account, the operating expenses increased by 13% in the quarter, which is more sort of guiding for the future development here. Main part of the OpEx is, of course, the product development, as I mentioned.
All of those costs are taken as OpEx for our ongoing development. If we're looking at the cash, the current liquidity is SEK 110 million, roughly, at the end of the period. We're maintaining a high investment pace with our development. The cash flow is better in Q1 than we've seen before. This is each quarter influenced a lot by changes in working capital. In the software business, we're taking a lot of customer payments upfront. This is reflected as a change in higher deferred revenue, which is typically at the beginning of the year at a high point. In the current quarter, there's also the effects of a multiyear OEM software deal. These are not every-quarter transactions.
Typically, these are 2 to 3-year periods. The payment is made upfront when we have the transaction made and the contract signed. Then the revenue of course is reflected over the period for 2 to 3 even longer time periods sometime. That affected the cash flow by roughly SEK 10 million in the current quarter. I think that, with that I will stop, and we'll move on to the Q&A.
I think we have actually a short wrap up slide here also.
Yep.
Just repeating the bullet highlights. We're having ARR growth continuing at 14%, new customer acquisitions mainly, and then this, what Jonas mentioned, the multi-year prepaid software transactions that contributes to improved cash flow in the Q1. Also highlighting the confirmation of the strong positioning of Modelon Impact from these new testimonials published and use case published in the period, and also this partnership with digital twins predictive maintenance with Iquant. Highlight here also of course next to Q1 Q2 report is coming up on August 23. That concludes our presentation, and we could move into the Q&A.
Thank you very much, Magnus and Jonas. I'm curious rather, the Honda Motors, the testimonial that followed, that concluded that Modelon was the right choice for their project. I'm curious what you had to compete with there. What does your competition look like?
I will have to respond that to that question on a more general sense, because I really don't recall exactly in that case which the competitors were. Overall, generally, there are, let's call them, more traditional system simulation tools out there. Many of them are developed in the 1990s timeframe, so meaning that they are adapted, you could say, not really for the current needs and the type of applications that industry work with now in terms of renewable technologies and so on. Often those established tools are on the radar.
These are tool softwares that our customers or prospect may be aware of. They're often coming up in the purchasing processes. The sector, again, speaking a bit to the positioning of Modelon Impact, the combination of the simulation technologies that we employ, which are state-of-the-art and novel, the focus on sustainable clean technology and clean energy functionality, and also being on the cloud is pretty strong to meet this competition. It doesn't mean we always win, of course, but we're very confident with the positioning and direction we have.
The development costs are trending upwards, as we saw in the presentation. Could you please guide on what we can expect from Modelon in the coming years, and in the second quarter when you release the new version?
As a general guidance, the development costs will increase, or the operating expenses will increase less than our revenue growth, in sort of the short to mid term. For the near term, we are looking to reduce costs, so we're sort of flattening out the growth curve of development costs. One reflection of that is the one-time costs that were taken. This is from updates of the organization aiming at at least trimming a little bit our organization, so that we can meet the expectations also going forward.
Could you say something about where you what your goals are currently on the long term and your financial strategy there?
Yes. It's basically that's what we're communicating with the financial targets that we have published. The goal is mainly to drive and accelerate the growth on the ARR, and this is also what all the organization from development to the commercial activities and marketing and sales is aiming at. Really identifying what are the key investment areas, capabilities we need to focus on building up and strengthening to accelerate the growth rate. That's really the key to also meeting those financial goals that we have set out.
We have been, for those who are, who knows us, since before, we have been growing this company with profit for around about 15 years, and then to jump at this fantastic market opportunity with a cloud-based simulation platform, we chose to go into this investment period to bring in the capital needed to build this platform quite rapidly and bring it to the market and use the, what we perceive as a time window available right now where we, that we, Very well positioned to exploit. Yeah.
We'll move over to the analysts then, and we'll begin with Redeye. Alexander Fleming, what is your question for Modelon?
Thank you, and hi. Thank you for the informative presentation. You already addressed many of my questions, but I still have a few areas where I need more clarification. Firstly, you mentioned that the growth was mainly attributed to new customers and that upselling is increasing. Could you provide some more insight into how much of the quarter's ARR growth was driven by upselling as part of your land and expand strategy?
Yeah, I understand that there is a lot of interest since we have the land and expand strategy and for, we have really in the sales mix been dominated by new sales. I'm, It's very interesting to see when the upsell start to really build up. I would say we're not in a position now where we're ready to sort of share the split, quantitatively, but in describing the activity in the quarter, we're reporting that we see an increase of activity on the upsell. It's too early to say if this is a more significant trend change, but it's something we're at very closely.
I mean, it's in line with our ambitions and what we're focusing on and of course how we're engaging with our existing customers. Again, it's also fairly well matched in a way with the typical sales cycle. Well, of 6-12 or sometimes longer. Basically, when we win a new customer, they will use the tool throughout the duration of some project or initiative or engagement. They will evaluate how did this work out, should we use this tool more, and then you engage with another department and they start evaluating as well. It is a process that typically does take time.
If we look at the customer where we see upsell, they typically started using Modelon Impact, say, one to two years ago. Within that's the timeframe, quite well aligned with the typical sales cycle is where we start to see the shift. We're monitoring this closely, and we will of course continue to report how this evolves in the following quarters.
Okay. Continuing on that subject, I observed that Impact ARR growth decreased in comparison to the previous quarter. You know, could you provide an explanation of the possible reasons for this?
Can you please rephrase?
Yeah. Impact ARR, the Impact ARR growth decreased in comparison to the previous quarter, with the contribution to total ARR. I think it's about 20 percentage points.
You mean the growth of Modelon Impact is 41%?
Yes
... compared with, I believe it was 63% in Q4.
Right.
This is of course reflecting also that, the, it's a growing share of-
Mm
the total ARR. So the absolute growth is roughly the same, although the percentage points decrease slightly. This will vary. There's also the OEM deal that was mentioned, which is a recurring revenue. It's included in ARR, but it's not counted as Modelon Impact ARR because this is a sort of a platform deal with OEM partners.
Right. Thank you for that clarification. Do we have time for more questions from me? Thank you. You also mentioned that the development of the major Impact update is on track for its planned release the second quarter. Could you speak to this update and provide any details on the development process and if any challenges have arisen along the way?
Details on the development process. Not exactly sure what you're asking for there. What?
Has there been any delays? Has been challenges that has arisen?
Yeah. This is, I mean, we're developing software of a fairly new type, so we meet challenges all the time, and we have fantastic teams to be able to cope with those challenges. I'd say that's one of our maybe strong points to be able to take. This is this technology that we develop is, I think you probably categorize it as deep tech. It's really sophisticated software. To put that on the cloud, it's the combination that's new. It also, we see some new challenges that are different from doing, for example, a CRM system or similar. Absolutely, we're breaking new ground every day, and we cope with challenges and we make progress.
As you say, we're on track to release functionality as planned in the upcoming release. If we're talking about challenges, we are, as you know also, we have been working with software development for about say close to 20 years now. Only a few years ago we adopted the cloud, and we started to transform our business into SaaS. Of course, we are evolving. If we talk about development processes and so on, we are continuously evolving, improving to work in a cloud, SaaSer fashion. This is evolving and ongoing all the time. We also have, related to the development, like everyone in our industry, we.
You need to fight for the top talent, all the time. That's also something we're focusing on, continuously, to attract top talent for our development teams.
A follow-up on that. You expect ARR increase following the release? Do you expect this growth to be predominantly driven by new or existing customers?
That's a good question. Well, we expect to continue to have a mix, of course. It's correct that some of the capabilities that we're focusing on now is aiming, is targeting the upsell prospects. It's the capabilities that we aim to drive the upsell part of the business. That's the plan with these new capabilities to accelerate that part of the sales mix.
Okay. To move on to cost, Jonas, you mentioned a one-time cost of SEK 1.9 million in that streamlining the organization for continued growth. Could you provide more details on how this investment will help the company achieve its targets, and how will it impact the company's operations moving forward?
This is personnel costs from people leaving with agreements. This is, of course, changing the organization, updating it for more efficient operating, more efficient development. We choose to take this upfront. We will see then lower costs for our organization moving forward. I would say in we will continue to seek efficiency improvements, not cutting costs blindly, but definitely with the current landscape, high inflation, we need to keep a close eye on the costs.
Okay. one final questions then. Given the weaker economic climate, are you observing any effects on your ability to acquire new customers or conduct upselling activities in any specific industry that you target?
A good question again. Yeah, we're really having our ears to the ground there to see if we see any patterns or trends. In terms of budget spend, we don't really see any effect from macro. What we are seeing is a little bit of slower deal flow, and sometimes this is attributed to things going on on the customer side, people moving around or sometimes a bit more sort of conservative on spending, meaning that you have a more time-consuming, longer approval processes and so on. We're seeing, we've seen some effects in timing so far we believe, and that's really I believe across industries, so no sector standing out that we are working on.
Again, it's, we need to keep a close eye on this.
Oh, good. Well, thank you. That was all I had for the moment. Yeah, thank you for taking my questions.
Thank you, Alexander.
Thank you very much, Alexander. We'll move on now to Pareto Securities, Stefan Ward. Do you have any questions for Modelon?
Hello, thanks for taking my questions. I have a couple of questions. Start off with the R&D expenses totaled SEK 15.6 million in the quarter, up a couple of millions from Q1 last year. If I look at the run rate last year, it was SEK 57.4 million. This looks like, should we assume an increase of about SEK 8 million-SEK 10 million on an annual basis in R&D, or can you help us with any clarity there, please?
No, I don't think we would expect a significant increase on run rate. There is some push at the moment in development as we're talking about the Q1 release, Q2 release. We are aiming at flattening out the development costs rather compare with the 2022 complete spending.
Okay, great. Moving on, this is, sort of connecting into a next question I have on the cash flow expectations for the year, and that means basically free cash flow, and it was negative last year by SEK 62 million. You have a strong cash flow, as you have described in the first quarter, due to working capital. Can you give us a guidance here on the level of negative cash flow, so to speak, or where will the cash flow be for the full year basically?
The main thing I can say is that we have the target to be cash flow positive in the short term, meaning one to three years. We are looking to, of course, improve our cash flow also for the current year. I would say that the 2022 number was the sort of a turning year for cash flow overall. I can't give more guidance than that, not sort of how much, but we're looking to improve cash flow, yes.
Okay. Improved cash flow 2023 compared to 2022 is how I interpret.
Exactly. Then short-term, moving to cash flow positive also, sort of on a quarterly basis or also annual, in one to three years.
Yeah. Perfect. We've already touched upon the sort of the software revenue growth, but if you can help clarify a little bit, the target to reach an ARR growth of 35%, do you see that as reached already, due to the Impact growth in Impact, or is it for a total software revenues, the ARR part of the total? Or how do you define this?
Yeah, I could. No, the ambition we have on the ARR growth rate is on the total. We're seeing that Modelon Impact as the main driver is becoming quarter by quarter a larger share of the total ARR. And we're looking also to what's not Impact ARR, the other software ARR is basically software that we have sold our pre-Modelon Impact offerings that we still to some extent market, but also have existing customers on. We're also over time looking working to migrate such customers over to Impact. This is a journey that will take some time. Basically, the goal, the ambitions that we set out is for the total.
With Modelon Impact, at some point will be completely dominating the ARR flow.
Yeah. I got the annual growth on Modelon Impact in the quarter, but previously you also given us the sequential growth. Can you do that for this quarter as well? I can probably calculate it backwards, but if you...
We haven't done that for the past few quarters, and we will not reveal that. You can probably back calculate to sort of roughly. No, we're not sharing that number right now.
I'll do the calculation and get back and see...
Yeah
... see on how you take that. Okay, thanks. My final question is, I find the energy segment is quite interesting, and this strategic partnership with Iquant that you described also, if you could give us a little bit more detail there, connecting it maybe to the Electric Power Research Institute engagement, if there's any sort of read across there. If not, this is like a broad, vague question, but what I'm trying to get at is the how is the demand situation in the energy segment and different energy sector and if it varies between different segments in that sector? If you can help with some education on that part.
Yeah. Broad open question will get a broad open answer.
Yeah.
Sure. There were sort of several questions in there. Yeah, the energy sector is, we see it's really emerging as one of the, maybe the key focus segments for us. We're seeing that Modelon Impact and our offering very well matches the needs in that sector. We have no reason but to think that this will continue, and we're also focusing more and more of our marketing and sales efforts into those segments because we're seeing the strong match. Looking at precisely what that match looks like, you said the segments within this. There are several.
It's renewable, the impact of adding more renewable energy into the energy mix. It puts a lot of constraints both on the distribution but also on the technologies for storage, different type of technology. We have several customers working on various storage systems. It also has an impact on, say more traditional power generation technologies like thermal power plants and so on. These are machines or equipment that traditionally have been operating at a fairly constant load. You start them up and they work at, you know, at 80% or 90% constantly. What's happening when you add the intermittent renewable sources to this is that you can't really vary the wind or solar electricity production. That will vary.
Then for, to adapt the total load, you need to start operating those large, traditional power plants on part load and more variations, and they are not originally built for that. It's a lot of work going on to adapt those and also upgrade those with the things for carbon neutrality, like carbon capture and similar to make them. This is the segment where we're seeing that the capabilities in Modelon Impact, where we have very strong functionality related to what's called thermal fluid systems, so basically the type of physics that you see broadly in these kind of applications. We're very strong there, and also compared to competition. Also in this segment, we.
There are quite many companies that are not so mature in using system simulation, which also means that there are many opportunities out there to work with new customers without having to push out existing solutions. You talked about the Iquant and you talked about the Electric Power Research Institute. Iquant, I would say that's an indicator on how well-positioned we are in this space with digital twins and that they, we have a really good fit with their kind of solution. Now, again, this is a Latin American player. They are very well established. They are a strong SAP partner and work, but they're mostly in that region of the world.
I'd say this is an indicator that there is potential for us in this sector with customers, partnerships, and so on. I'm not aware of any relation between that and the Electric Power Research Institute. Not sure.
No, I understand. I just wanted you to describe the Electric Power Research Institute engagement as well.
Mm
quite interesting with a lot of connection into other entities in the segment or in the sector.
Yes. Yes. Well, that's true, again, I'm sorry I'm not fully updated. I'm quite certain that there are some prospect leads we're working on that also comes from the exposure that we have had through the Electric Power Research Institute engagement.
That's exactly what I'm looking for.
Yeah.
Okay, thank you very much. That's all for me.
Thank you, Stefan.
Thank you very much, Stefan, for your questions, as well as you, Magnus, for your answers. That was all that we had to offer here today at Direkt Studios. We've heard, Modelon, present their Q1 report, followed by a Q&A. Thank you all for watching