A warm welcome to the Modelon Q3 investor presentation on back of the report showing ARR growth on track with the plan. Without further ado, I would like to introduce you to the CEO, Magnus Gäfvert, and the CFO, Jonas Eborn. Please go ahead. Next slide, please.
Thank you, Jenny, and good morning, everybody. My name is Magnus Gäfvert. I'm the CEO of the company and also one of the co-founders. As Jenny said, with me today I have also Jonas Eborn, our CFO, and also one of the co-founders. Today, after a quick introduction to the company, I will walk through some of the business highlights of the third quarter. After that, I will hand over to Jonas, who will provide some detail on the financial development in the period. We open the floor for questions in the Q&A session, and I believe you're all invited to provide your questions by email during the presentation. Let's start with a quick overview.
Modelon is a software company in the computer-aided engineering sector, where we provide systems modeling and simulation solutions for our customers. That means that we're helping our customers to digitize engineering workflows related to the innovation, development, and operation of complex technical products and systems, which can be anything from a car to an aircraft or a power plant. In digitizing such workflows, you need to have at hand a digital representation of that product that can reproduce and predict the behavior and performance of your product in the digital domain, and that's precisely what we provide with our software solutions, tools to create such digital models and then also to simulate those models in various design options and operating conditions before they necessarily exist in the real- world.
This comes with tremendous benefits for our customers, i t means that time to market can be shortened substantially in that working in the digital domain is much faster than traditional methods. It also means saving a lot of cost in that you can reduce or even eliminate the need to work with expensive physical prototypes. Also, you will end up with a product that is of higher performance and higher quality because of the methods that you can use in the digital domain.
We are serving technology companies worldwide with these solutions in a range of industries, and I will give you some examples further on in the presentations who our customers are. We are a Lund-based company, headquartered in Lund. We have around 100 employees distributed over 10 offices in six countries, three continents: North America, Europe, and Asia. We were founded in 2005, and we have around 20% of PhDs among our employees, which speaks to the fact that we're working in a very high entry threshold technology domain, and our software is of a very highly sophisticated nature.
We have been doing this for 15 years, and we have been growing with our own profits over these years until a couple of years ago, where we decided to bring in investment capital for the first time. The reason for that was that we identified a huge opportunity for us to put our technology in a cloud-based solution, and thereby pioneer our sector with offering a system simulation solution for the cloud under a Software as a Service business model. This investment started a couple of years ago and resulted in the launch of our flagship platform, cloud platform, Modelon Impact, in the third quarter last year.
We are currently investing heavily in that platform and in commercial expansion to fuel our growth based on this plan. Given the size of the simulation and analysis market globally, which I will elaborate a bit on later in the presentation, we have set out ambitious financial targets that in 2024 we are to reach an annual recurring revenue of SEK 100 million. That means a compound annual growth rate of ARR of around 35% until then. At that point, we also plan to leave the current investment phase and turn to positive cash flow and start approaching the long-term EBIT margins of 20% or more in a more mature phase with the platform.
With that, I'm shifting into the third quarter highlights, and I'm very pleased to inform that for the second consecutive quarter, we show an annual recurring revenue growth rate quarter- to- quarter of 8%, and that translates to an annual pace of 36%, which means that we are on track to the target growth rate of 35%. Modelon Impact's growth, ARR growth is 13% higher than the total, which means that it is becoming an increasing share of our total ARRs as planned. The third quarter is typically a weaker quarter of the year seasonally, b ecause of the summer holidays, the order intake is usually a bit lower. We're also very pleased to see this growth rate sustained in this quarter, which means that we have strong confidence in this trend that we have now established.
We also continue to see in the third quarter a healthy generation of new leads building up the pipeline for the continued growth in the coming quarters. As elaborated a bit in the last quarterly report presentation, we are using a land and expand sales strategy for Modelon Impact. That means that new accounts dominate the sales mix, but we're also seeing an increased contribution from upsell expand business on our early customers. One example here is the fast-growing renewable energy company in the U.S. that during this year alone is increasing their Modelon Impact contributions to ARR by 29%, which is of course great.
We're also seeing some of our existing long-term software customers starting to adopt Modelon Impact, and that means migration from our other earlier software solutions. An example here is a large aerospace company, also in the U.S., that purchased their first seats in the third quarter. I want to finalize this slide with highlighting also that we are in a transition phase from our previous more service-dominated business to the recurring revenue business, which is driven by this subscription-based cloud platform, Modelon Impact, and the progress is demonstrated by the growth in our ARRs that we see here.
Looking a bit at our target industries. We have four target, main target industries, that's automotive, energy process, industrial equipment, and aerospace. Also shown on this slide is some sample customers in these industries, and I'm sure you all recognize most of the names listed here as being very well-renowned and leading companies in their respective industries. We are, of course, extremely proud to have earned the trust from such companies to provide them with solutions for critically important activities in innovation and product development. We're also happy to see in the third quarter that we have a good spread of activity in the pipeline across those industries.
Regionally, we continue to see largest momentum in the U.S., and to meet that, we're also adding more sales capacity in that region. We are also adding sales capacity in Japan, and that is in line with more activity in that part of the world and not the least also targeted to targeting the Chinese market, which is huge and very interesting for us. All our customers and these target industries are subject to big trends out in the world that poses challenges to them, and that means opportunities for us because with our solutions, we can help our customers to address these challenges. The first I a little bit mentioned in the opening, the digitalization, the general trend to digitize workflows.
Here, I want to emphasize again that a requirement to successfully digitize many engineering workflows is that you have at hand this digital model, digital representation of your system, and that puts us right in the center of this trend. We are providing the necessary technology in order to do this, and this is a long-term trend. It has been going on for years. It will go on for yet many years but i t's a long-term opportunity. We also have the aspect of sustainability, and that's of course not, I mean, that regards all industries.
Our target industries, tech industries, what it means to them is that they are subject to new, very tough requirements in transforming their products into more sustainable versions, and t hat means that they are subject to an innovation pace to come up with new ideas and realize them and put them on the market at such a pace that it's virtually impossible to meet that without working extensively in the digital domain and using the type of tools that we provide. We're also extremely happy to see that the, I would say, even the majority of our customers are using our solutions in the context of clean technology applications of various sorts. We'll exemplify a little bit further on also.
Then we have the general trend of SaaS cloud, bringing software to SaaS cloud. Again, I want to repeat here, we are pioneering our sector with systems modeling and simulation with Modelon Impact, and that's of course a very good position to be in this. On the sustainability aspect and also relating to the recently closed COP26 summit in Glasgow, I thought it was a good opportunity to highlight a bit how our solutions are used broadly to support the transition towards increased renewable energy production, transition to clean energy. Modelon Impact has very strong support for the application and technologies that are involved in these type of transitions and w e are very proud to be working with several of the dominant players and newcomers in on this playing field as highlighted on this slide.
This transition means, of course, the introduction of the renewable energy production or sources, and that's technologies related to wind, solar, thermal and photovoltaic, hydro, wave power, fuel cells, etc . Most of these sources are of an intermittent nature, which means that the variation in production needs to be managed in various ways. One important necessary way of doing that is through large-scale energy storage. There is a lot of activity going on in the industry to come up with solutions to store the energy from renewable plants, and that includes applications such as battery, electrochemical, pumped heat thermal storage and molten salt or phase change materials, mechanical, like pumped hydro, liquid air or chemical and hydrogen.
We have solutions to support all these types, this broad array of technologies. As also demonstrated by the recent customer testimonials we have published from the French energy company, ENGIE, and also the U.S. renewable energy storage company, Malta. We also have, during a long-term transition period or phase down period, the conventional plants. Their existing plants need to be adapted and to take into account the increasing volume of renewable source on the energy grids. That means adapting them for more flexible operation and control.
In the period, we published the work that we have done in China on a reference power plant owned by China Huaneng Group, which is one of the larger energy companies in China, for the purpose of adapting design and operations to the increasing volume of renewable energy on Chinese energy grids. This is, of course, very good for us to have this footprint and exposure into the Chinese energy industry, which is very dynamic and very large. Also technologies that we provide solutions for on commercial plants is what's called carbon capture and storage. That means retrofitting technology on plants that will extract the carbon dioxide from the flue gases in different ways.
Also, retrofitting different types of combustion or heat sources on existing plants to make them more sustainable. There are also technologies related to what's called direct air capture, and that means actually pulling carbon dioxide out from the atmospheric air. This paints sort of a broad picture of how we support this transition and collaborate with a lot of interesting good companies in this domain. I'll also touch a little bit here on the market development. Again, the trends that I highlighted a couple of slides ago are driving growth of the simulation and analysis market. The data shown on this slide is from CIMdata, which is the U.S. analyst house that are very good at our domain, our sector.
They projected or they estimated the size of the simulation and analysis market in 2019 to $7.2 billion. They are estimating until 2024, a compound annual growth rate of 7.6% of this market. Interesting here is to relate this to our ARR growth performance, which corresponds to a 36% annual growth rate, which is then more than four times the market growth rate. We are confident in setting targets of that size because the trends that drives the market growth, some of them listed to the right here, involves, for example, to use simulation earlier in design process. That means in innovation and research phases and so on.
Our technology is very good at supporting that. We have what's called democratization, means to put simulation tools in the hand of many more engineers than just simulation specialists, which has been the traditional user group, so much broader user base. Interoperability and collaboration means that tools must adhere to standards. It should be possible to share information models within and between organizations. Our solutions are completely standards-based. Simulation-driven engineering means that you should have all these digital tools to use on your models to optimize, simulate, and so on. We have a very broad array of algorithms built into our tools to support this. Of course, cloud and moving to cloud.
We are with Modelon Impact taking these major trends very clearly and n ext picture here illustrates that in a little bit more detail. Modelon Impact being cloud-based, we support engineering workflows throughout the whole product life cycle illustrated to the top. We address a broad range of industries. We're focusing right now on the four core ones we have identified, but there is the possibility to expand broader later. The fundamental technology is the same for simulation for all tech industries. We're addressing not only the simulation specialists, but also the general engineers and broader audience of even non-engineers with the platform. The platform is designed for that.
We also have a scalable pricing models that supports the business growth, where we charge for new users coming into the platform, but we charge also for the amount of work that each user is doing on the platform. In the phase we're at right now, this land phase, we are mostly driving growth by adding more users to the platforms and more seats. We're also seeing with these early expand customers that I mentioned a couple earlier, we're seeing also the expansion into these new user categories identified by analysts in the trend.
This is a demonstration that our strategy and plan is functional. Currently, we're also investing a lot in the cloud functionality of the platform, since that is one of the key differentiators for us where we want to keep our advantage or lead. I do believe with that, I'm handing over to you, Jonas, to talk a bit about the financial development.
Thanks a lot, Magnus. Can you move to the first slide? Thank you. The ARR, as Magnus mentioned, is growing consistently. We have the last two periods, consecutive periods, corresponding to an annual growth pace of 36%. This is, of course, on track to our long-term targets. What's very visible in the graph here is the lead time in those sales activities from the launch of Modelon Impact in the summer of 2020, and then the growth of the annual recurring revenues starting really from the Q1 numbers here but w e're confident that this will continue. We have a healthy pipeline of leads, and this will. The Modelon Impact sales in particular will drive the growth going forward.
Numbers-wise, we have the ARR at constant currency at SEK 34.1 million now in the last period, which is up 19% from last year. As mentioned, the quarter-over-quarter growth is 8% compared to the Q2 numbers there. As a growing share of this Modelon Impact ARR is increasing by 13% quarter-over-quarter. That's in a traditionally weak period, the summer, that also gives us greater confidence that we can continue this journey. We of course see the tables here, but I think we can move to the next slide in the interest of time. Of course, net revenues, they are decreasing in the period. This is in line with our long-term plans and targets after we've completed the co-development project that we've mentioned before and also Magnus brought up.
Now, in the graph here, we're showing the co-development service separately, so you can clearly see the underlying business like the software revenues in the quarter, SEK 9.2 million, which is showing a growing trend, although not apparent in the graph here. This is partly due to the foreign exchange effects. Primarily in the first half or the first three quarters of 2020, the exchange rates were quite different than they are today. In the last few quarters, the exchange rate effects have been rather small, but t he important thing is that the ARR is really showing the underlying growth trend. This one we have a constant currency adjustment on the revenue numbers.
Service revenues we see now at SEK 4.9 million in the quarter, and there's a minimal amount left on this co-development project. Now essentially that was stopped entirely in Q2. This is in line with the strategy that we have. We've completed the ramp down of the co-development. There are also some seasonal effects. Summer period is vacation period in Sweden, so Q3 you would normally see less service revenue and also less development costs as we're showing at the bottom of this slideand t his is shifting now to financing our development with our own capital.
This is apparent in the EBIT. For the period, we had SEK -11 million EBIT because we're investing in our products with the development costs that are growing correspondingly. The development in Q3 is 11.7 million, which is for the quarter, up 70%. For the year to date period, it's up 45% comparing with the previous period. We should note that all the development costs are taken as expenses, so we're not doing any activation of development costs. This development is in line with our planned wind down of the co-development activities, and we have also a total reduction of the service revenue comparing with the 2020 number, estimated to be around SEK 40 million for the full year of 2021.
I think we can move to the next slide. I will only touch on a few points here, and we can move to the Q&A. We see clearly that we're moving into the phase of increasing strategic investments. This is according to our long-term strategy and our plans. We're using the IPO funds really that we received in the IPO in April. In this period, we now see that the development teams have fully shifted from the paid co-development into roadmap development, so t hat's very important for growing our new accounts and also fulfilling the land and expand strategy that Magnus mentioned. The development that we're doing in the product is essential for this strategy.
A few notes on other points here. The operating expenses, coming out of the pandemic period, we've had moderate growth so far of operating expenses. They're now above the 2020 level. We do expect some further increase. We have ongoing recruitments strengthening our sales teams. I believe Magnus talked about that. Please go back, Magnus. Thanks. We're also recruiting some key competencies in the development teams. That's really the focus for our recruitment. This will strengthen our development teams and take us to the total on the path to our Modelon Impact development. Cash-wise, we see that we still have a strong cash liquidity, SEK 184.9 million and w e're confident that this will take us all the way.
Our plans is to run with this money through 2024 when we are turning to a positive cash flow and also eventually a positive result. There's some details on the cash flow from the operating activities. Of course, the EBIT, the operating result, is one major part of the cash flow. The other part is really the working capital, where we do see a positive effect, the increase in working capital. This is partly a seasonal effect because we have a lot of prepaid annual license renewals. Typically, they come around the beginning of the year, Q1 into Q2, and then also, of course, payments of all those prepaid licenses. This is a seasonal effect that we see every year.
This year, we also have a big effect from the decrease in receivables related to this large co-funded development. As all of that is now paid and in our account, as the project has been completed, this also has an effect that it increases the working capital and sort of holds up the cash flow in the period. With that, I think we can move on then. Magnus, you will wrap up with the final status on our development plans here.
Yes. I think we touched on most of the things here, but I would want to highlight a little bit or check in a little bit. Six months after the IPO, we communicated a strategy and a plan, and how we are to use the proceeds in order to take us to the financial targets that we have communicated. That means investment in commercial capacity, expanding sales team, marketing activities, etc., Expanding into China. We also communicated investments in increasing R&D capacity to increase the roadmap development, advancements, and also accelerate the cloud deployment.
In the third quarter, the current growth pace corresponding to 36% annually on ARR is demonstrating that investments that we have done has taken us to being on track towards that target. We, as mentioned, we're also adding additional sales capacity in order to sustain and possibly accelerate that growth pace as we move forward. The establishment in China, we have had to put on hold because of pandemic circumstances, in particular, the difficulties to travel. As soon as that change, we're on standby to get started.
On the product development, as Jonas mentioned, we're seeing the increased accelerated investment in the development costs, Q3 year to date up 45% compared to last year according to our plan, and we are attracting and recruiting key engineering talent, as Jonas mentioned also. Working capital company purposes, yes, we have a solid cash balance, so we have all the flexibility we need at the moment there. We're at green light in all these three investment areas and on track to the communicated financial targets. With that, Jenny, I hand over to you to host the Q&A part of this session.
Thank you, Magnus. We have questions coming in from Stefan Ward at Pareto Securities. The first one is for you, Jonas. I believe it's for you. The service revenues from the customer finance development project are estimated to be around SEK 30 million in 2021, of which SEK 10 million has been generated in the first month, indicating an additional SEK 3 million in Q4. Is that correct? That's the first question. I think it's for you, Jonas, right?
Yes. This is referring to the indication we have around SEK 40 million decrease from previous years, SEK 53.5 million. I'm not giving any exact indication here. I can say that the number from 2020, of course, also includes foreign exchange effects. The SEK 53.5 million in 2020 currency value roughly corresponds to SEK 50 million in 2021 currency value. All of that projection has been done in U.S. dollars. We will land around SEK 40 million below the numbers from last year. There won't be any significant changes to this number for Q4, I can say that.
Thank you, Jonas. Next one is for you, Magnus. Can you describe the ARR development? Is it in line with your expectations? From how many customers is it derived? To reach the SEK 100 million goal, the growth rate needs to be increased. Can you give some comments on the timing of the acceleration?
The ARR development that we see is in line with our expectations. I think it's important here also to highlight that the forex effects have influence since we're selling a lot in U.S. dollars, etc ., which means that that's also the reason that we are reporting this constant currency ARR in order to highlight our performance and not including effects of forex. How many customers this is derived from right now, we are not disclosing that, and that's for competitive reasons.
We are pioneering our business sector systems modeling simulation with the cloud solution, so we know that we are closely monitored by competition, and this information we would want to keep confidential for now. We will continue to publish customer testimonials frequently to give a flavor of the type of customers that we work with. To reach SEK 100 million, the growth rate needs to be increased. That will also depend on Forex developments. But sure, absolutely. Most importantly, we are investing in sales capacity now to sustain and possibly accelerate from the level that we are at right now. As we are bringing in sales capacity now, we expect that to have a effect on the 2022 targets.
Magnus, I think you can mention, the ARR of course consists both of our, existing, software business, and we have customers in the range of 100-200 customers worldwide, on our, library portfolio deployment, portfolio. Out of those, we will migrate some of the customers, into Modelon Impact, which is, so far, the smaller part of the software business, but that's the rapidly growing part. The important thing is that Modelon Impact, we're both, targeting new customers, that's been the case so far, but we're now also looking, at, converting our existing customers into, Modelon Impact users.
Yeah, that's good points, Jonas.
Yeah. Good point. Okay, we take the next one, also coming from Stefan Ward at Pareto Securities. "We expect continued ramp-up of the sales force" is a quote from the report, right? On the presentation. Can you give a brief description of the strategy for the sales and marketing function, and how you expect to expand the sales force? For you, Magnus.
Yes, I can add some flavor to that. We are focusing in this phase on our direct sales force. We believe that's the fastest growth yields the fastest growth in where we are now. The way our sales team work is that we have business development managers supported by customer success engineers, and also supported by subject matter experts that are experts on the industry and the technology domains that we are addressing. The scale-up is basically adding business resources and at the same time expanding on the customer success and the supporting SME functionality. These work in sort of teams to address specific segments.
If we look at the marketing function, we're continuously evolving that also. That does include, as I also mentioned, a continued production of marketing content. We're very active in digital marketing with blogs, webinars, and things like that. Very important in this are the customer testimonials. We get great customer testimonials frequently that we can put out, and they have a very high impact. Combined, of course, with the traditional attending conferences, presenting at conferences and so on with our industry experts. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, we move on. Next question from Stefan Ward at Pareto Securities. It's markets related, and it's focused on the U.S. How has the alternative energy segment in the U.S. evolved during 2021? That's one for you, Magnus.
Yes. I hope it came through a bit in the presentation that we are seeing very good momentum in the U.S. at the moment. The alternative energy or clean energy sectors are among the most active ones. I don't have any numbers to present here, but I can say that this is one of the strongest sectors that we are addressing and working with.
Okay, then a final question from Stefan Ward at Pareto Securities, and it's regarding the profitability and the long-term target with the margin of about 20%. I mean, it's a bit away from the level, right? So can you give some input on how this target will be reached? I think we start with you, Magnus, and maybe Jonas to fill in.
Absolutely. Yes, this is the long-term target, and we have strong confidence in that, given the dynamics of size of our industry. The focus right now is to onboard customers and build and grow the user base of Modelon Impact and investing in the product. As Jonas highlighted, we are expensing all the development costs, which means they are ending up on the bottom line. In the investment phase until 2024, of course, we will be far away from these levels. In 2024, we aim to shift to positive cash flow and also a positive EBIT margin. The way of achieving this, I mean, it's relentless growth of the recurring revenue. We're building a recurring revenue business, so that's the sort of simple answer to that.
I can just also add, of course, beyond 2024, our goal is well above 20%, so it's not only around that level. As Magnus mentioned, right now we're investing, this is necessary to grow the business. The volume is really the key to get there. Of course, all the activities that we're doing now, landing new customers, working in the market to be known, this is relatively expensive, time-consuming activities. We expect this to continue while we're in the land phase. We need to talk a lot to the customers. When we get known, we can streamline these processes.
We have land and expand, which means that we can sell volume at volume without that type of sort of heavy work. Of course, also, we have an organization that we believe is built to do this transition. We can sort of go into 2024 and beyond without growing the organization at the same pace as we're growing the sales and revenue. That's the key thing.
That's a point.
Great.
Could highlight that again really, or summarize that. We expect in a couple of years to build a ecosystem around Modelon Impact, where we have third-party content providers and service partners, etc., that will help to grow the volume of our platform business. That's a key part of driving growth in a couple of years. Should say also here that for our growth ambitions that we have, the market we're addressing is really big. It is by no means limiting the ambition levels that we have set out.
Okay, that was clear on message. With that, I think we wrap up the Q&A session, and I hand over to you, Magnus, to summarize and close the presentation for today.
Okay. Thank you, Jenny. Highlights of the third quarter, again, we have the ARR growth on track, quarter-to-quarter pace 8%, again, like the last quarter, corresponding to an annual pace of 36%. We're seeing healthy activities in all our industries and among our customers, and we're seeing a very encouraging focus on clean technologies, which is sectors that we are addressing actively. To conclude, we are executing on our plan. We are in the transition from service-dominated, and we are building up the recurring revenue business based on Modelon Impact cloud-based subscription models. These are the key highlights of the presentation today. I want to thank everyone who joined and listened in, and also remind of the upcoming Q4 year-end report on March 4th next year. Thank you, everyone.