Yes. Hi, and welcome, everyone. My name is Daniel Thorsson, analyst at ABG, covering IT and technology companies. For the next presentation, we have Proact with CEO Jonas Hasselberg. So I'll let you present the company for some 15-20 minutes, and then I will have around five minutes with questions in the end.
Perfect.
Feel free to go ahead, Jonas.
Will do. Thank you. And thank you for having me, and thank you for being here. I'll talk a little bit about the company, Proact. Not everybody knows who we are, and more importantly, not everybody knows what we do. I'll talk a little bit about the market we're playing in, a little bit of a touch on the latest financials, and then we'll try to summarize all of this. I'll try to stick to your 20 minutes or so, 25, 30. We'll see here, Daniel. This is Proact. We turned 30 years old this year. We're a little bit proud of that. Not all tech and IT companies survive that far. We had a big celebration here in Stockholm earlier this fall.
We were born in Stockholm and Oslo at the same time, but we've grown out of our home countries into those 11 or so countries you can see on the map up here. We deliver IT infrastructure to large and medium-sized enterprises across all these countries and markets that you can see here. And I'll get a little bit back into that. We have about 4,000 customers. We employ about 1,200 people. One of the things that are incredibly important for us, just like for everybody else, is that those 1,200 are incredibly skilled at what we do. And that is one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves against our competition. We don't do everything for our customers. We do the things we're really good at, and we need very - and we have very skilled people. Been growing quite well over the past couple of years.
We grow with the market, which is growing itself, and a good organic growth. But we also acquire companies at a decent rate that is adding both skills and services into our portfolio, but also market share in our core markets. You will be hearing us speak a lot about hybrid cloud, and I'll explain what it is. But it's effectively the type of technology we deliver to our customers, the underlying platforms that a lot of our customers build their applications and their transformation internally upon. So I'll come back to that here in a second. We are quite decentralized. Each of our countries is serving their customers locally, which is very important to us. We believe in being very close to our customers and also be close to our competition.
So each of our countries is quite self-sustained in terms of their operations, but we do organize them in regions, as you can see here. So organizationally, they are grouped into four regions. But we have sales, we have consultants, we have engineers on the ground in each of our markets that meet our customers. There's one thing, however, that we spend a lot of time on that is a little bit more, not so much centralized, but standardized. And that's our ability to deliver our own cloud services. And the reason here is that the more we can build scale and scalability in our own delivery of cloud services, the better our profit grows, simply. So we're now spent the last three or so years in building scalability into the cloud business, and we see the effects of it now.
We can bring in new customers and new volume of our own services without having to hire the equivalent amount of new staff and adding the linear amount of cost. Our delivery centers are centralized in four of these countries, and they are all standardized in terms of the portfolio and the technology we use to deliver those services. What we actually do is we help enterprise customers with what we call mission-critical IT solutions. One of my favorite examples, which is well known here in Sweden, Fortnox. Most of you know them. They are a software-as-a-service company. They deliver finance systems to 600,000 or so small companies here in Sweden. It is a cloud service. It needs to be up and running every day of the week, every week of the year. There is data in there that is crucial for their customers.
If that data disappears or if it's not accessible, Fortnox and their customers are in big trouble. That whole infrastructure, everything that they built, their service on top of, is designed and provided by Proact, together with Fortnox, of course. It's tailor-made for their particular needs. We deliver services, servers, storage, backup solutions, security solutions, consulting, support solutions, cloud services. So it's really the underpinnings of their own applications that we deliver as the platform for them. It's just one of those good examples. Another one that you should highlight is the hospitals in the U.K. are going through a bit of a change as we speak. All the patient records in the U.K. healthcare systems are being digitized. So obviously now we're both helping them, the caretakers, the caregivers, to be more efficient in the way they work.
But also, of course, we store now incredibly sensitive data since it's all the patient records. So that's another example of delivering a platform that is becoming mission-critical for the healthcare provider in that particular case. So we talk about servers, where they run their applications. We talk about storage, where they store all their data, networking that they get access to, security that nobody can get access to. Those are the types of products and services we deliver to the enterprises. The snake, as we call it here on the right-hand side, is trying to visualize our go-to-market model. How do we meet our customers? Well, we meet them quite early in their journey.
We meet them when they try to figure out how to solve a business problem or how to pursue a business opportunity, whether that's Fortnox to deliver an application to their customers or the hospitals. And then we work through with them, well, how can that business opportunity be solved or addressed with the right infrastructure underpinnings? So we are that bridge between the business needs and the business drivers, and how do we solve it with technology? And then we do the architecture, the design, the implementation, the migration of all the users, all the data, all the applications, all the way until we actually run and operate the infrastructure on behalf of our customers.
So it's a journey starting with the business dialogue all the way down to they put their infrastructure and their mission-critical building blocks in our labs to deliver it for them on a 24-hour basis. Good. When you look at us, we have four revenue streams, and I'll just fly through them. The biggest one is still what we call systems. This is a reseller business. We resell other people's products. Dell would be a typical example. Cisco is another well-known example. Good business model because it's very transactional, very quick. We don't sit on any inventory. We buy and sell at the same time. Very quick turnover in terms of cash. Decent margins. On top of those, we deliver support services. So this is our own technical support on top of those hardware solutions. Typically, three-year contracts. So there's a contract over multiple years. Customers pay upfront.
The full contract value, so cash flow perspective, great, and then we defer the revenue of the length of the contract. Very good margins. Our own cloud services, which strategically, of course, is the most important. This is where we see growth. This is where we deliver the same technical functionality: storage, compute power, networking, security, but we deliver it as a service, so the customer doesn't have to bother about the operations. Again, contracts over multiple years. Customers pay on a monthly basis, and then last and least, consulting services. Anything from design, architecture, training, implementation, those kinds of things, so four different revenue streams, four business models behind those revenue streams. Highlighting a couple of things here that are very important in this day and time. Obviously, cybersecurity, top of mind of everyone. It's not the most positive thing, of course.
We would like it to not be there, but since it is one of those things where we help our customers a lot, and one of the most important things, as we see right now, nobody can guarantee full protection. No customer can trust that the crooks cannot get into their system, so there's a lot of dialogue now with our customers on very basic things like backup, disaster recovery solutions, and the ability to ring-fence their infrastructure from the internet, for instance, so this is super hot right now. Application development services, very hot. AI, of course, very hot, and last but not least, anything on top of Microsoft. All our enterprise customers use Microsoft for a lot of different things, and that's another area of competence for us. Good, the market is driven in terms of growth by five growth drivers, you could say.
The number one is that all our customers are doing some sort of business development. They try to evolve their own business, and they use technology to enable it. Technology is underpinning practically all business development activities within our customers. That's a constant driver for us. Cybersecurity, mentioned already, it's clearly a driver, albeit not the positive one. One that is more positive is sustainability, because everybody now realizes that the infrastructure they run, their IT on top of it, is consuming a lot of energy. And if they use someone like Proact, they get the most energy-efficient data centers, the most energy-efficient equipment, and will run everything on renewable energy, so just moving your workloads to Proact makes you, the customer, more sustainable because we can run it more efficiently and with renewable energy.
And then technology trend, that everybody's moving to different cloud solutions and trying to get out of owning and operating things themselves, but rather use people like Proact or people like Microsoft for the matter. Strategically, we're moving towards our financial goals. We want to grow by 10% per year on average. Half of that at least should be organic, and we're trending roughly at that level, and the rest through acquisitions. We should get to an EBITDA profitability of 8%. We're roughly at 6.5%, 7% right now, so we're on our way. And we're strategically moving our portfolio, our revenue mix, away from that reseller business towards a higher portion of services. This is where customers are going. It gives us better predictability in our business, and it gives us better margins.
So there's a lot of things we do here in terms of moving the brand, evolving our portfolio, building that scalability in our delivery of cloud services to achieve those financial goals. And we have been growing. I touched on that already. We're tracking roughly at that 10%. And we think, as we look in the market looking forward, we think it's accelerating a little bit. People are coming out of COVID and economic downturns and high inflation periods. So we think, as we look forward, the market's actually accelerating a little bit here in Northern Europe. We speak a lot about something we call annualized recurring revenue. So all the revenue we generate out of our own cloud services and our own support services, we call it recurring because they're under contract.
We've had a good growth path of that over the many quarters, and this is a growth area for us continuing. So the more we move to services, the more we shift to our contracted services, we also get into a more stable and predictable business, which is positive, and a higher margin business. Good, just quickly on financials. It's been a couple of weeks now, maybe even months. We announced the Q3 report in the end of October. Great growth. We grew almost 9% organically in the quarter. Very good growth also on profit level by 9%. So in general, good momentum in the market, fantastic cash flow generation. We'll see a slide on that as well.
The only kind of little dent in that quarterly report was that our services revenue shrunk a little bit, partly because consulting has been a tough market, and we haven't filled all the headcount we could have filled with consultants because we want to be a little bit careful, and we see a little bit of a timing effect of our incoming cloud services, but that's a short-term effect, and we're going to see that come back again here in the future, so on cash flow, we're doing quite well. We're cash positive. We have a very strong balance sheet, which is gearing us up for acquisitions again, but you can see we generate a great amount of cash in operations, so it's a very strong financial situation and a very strong balance sheet as we look past and also look forward.
So we have a good amount of ammunition in our cash. We use that, of course, for dividends. We use it for M&A, and we have, over the past year, done a little bit of share buyback as well because we're so financially strong. And here we're then trending on our financial targets. We touched on them, some of them. Sales almost at a 10% rate. It's been a little bit slower in the M&A market over the past year and a half. So if we would have been able to do a few acquisitions, I think we'll be in there. The M&A market is looking much more positive now, so that's good. EBITDA, good trend upwards. And you can see the latest there at a little bit over seven. And then I touched on it as well.
In terms of our leverage, we said we should be below two times our EBITDA. Now we're cash positive, so we're very good in that and good return on capital. So we're performing quite well on our financial targets. Good set of shareholders. We like engaged shareholders, which means they're all more than welcome, of course. We've got a couple of new ones here during the spring, which made us quite excited. Handelsbanken, also Fidelity, came in here. We still have a very trusted shareholder in our largest in form of Martin Gren, at Grenspecialisten, and was also engaged on the board. And obviously, we've had a good positive development of our share price over the past few years. So good shareholder-based, good track record in terms of the share price.
Which leads us to the summary. Why is this a good company from an investor's perspective?
We are living on a growing market. It should be growing by, if you look at that cloud space, roughly 10% per year. If you look across our full revenue mix, five-ish % per year, we are in a very strong position in all our markets. We are very good at what we do in that little area of specialty where we have our competencies, very strong financial profile, and it's very clear what we need to do for the future. We have those plans in place, and we're executing on those plans.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Jonas.
Quick and efficient.
Yes, that's very good. We have plenty of room for questions. I have a couple of you. You showed a map on Northern Europe where you're operating, the Nordics, U.K., Central and Northern Europe. Can you give us some flavor on regional development overall?
We talked last in September, and you said that Germany was the least growing market, so still growing, but the least growing. Yeah. What do you see right now during the fourth quarter and regional trends? Yeah, I think the market. I was a little bit more positive, I must have said, before the summer, I think. Germany is definitely still struggling, not Proact Germany, but Germany as a market. You all see it the same way I do. It may still grow, but it'll be a few single-digit % in terms of their IT spend growth. U.K. is probably the second most challenging market, a little bit better than Germany, but still kind of stomping to get out of that. I don't know what it is, Brexit hangover maybe. Nordics looking quite good. Netherlands at least, maybe also Belgium or Benelux in general, quite okay actually.
So if you look at our map and the way we're organized, two regions that are okay, Nordics and Baltics and West, as we call it, Netherlands, and then Germany, U.K., still not fully out of their blocks.
And then if we compare you to peers a little bit, we have hardware peers. Everybody has seen Dustin's profit warning. We have seen consulting companies struggling this year, etc. But you are starting to grow now. You have been growing here for the last year. What do you think differs you versus them, and what's your discussion with customers when you talk about IT spending ahead?
Obviously, they're cutting down on some IT hardware and cutting down on some IT consulting.
Where do you see them actually increasing spending?
No, there is a constant spend on what I call here digital transformation, that whole business development activity.
We've definitely seen some incremental spend in the area of particularly cybersecurity. It's like they have a big, not big, but a different pot of money when you go in and start talking about cyber. I still see that there is a bit of, there's definitely a more careful investment strategy with our customers, which, and you and I have spoken about it before, for the last few years. So the cycles take a little bit longer. The investment decisions are a little bit more convoluted, more people involved in making those decisions. They go higher up in the organizations. So still a little bit slower pace than we were used to a few years back in terms of making those decisions. And then, as you know, and very important for those of you who don't know us and follow us, that reseller business is a volatile business.
We get some quarters where a big company can make a very big investment, and the next quarter, there's not a big investment. So that particular part of our revenue stream is a little bit volatile, which makes it slightly more difficult to just kind of predict our, if you're standing on the outside, predict our revenues.
Yeah, I see. And also related to that, how should we think of where we are in the cycle of the systems business? Is it kind of accelerating a little bit here? We're talking about cloud accelerating a little bit as well, but where are those two moving at the moment?
I think we've seen a couple of quarters of very strong systems, but stronger than we anticipated. Usually, we say that the system business should grow by a few percentage points per year, and we've seen much more rapid growth.
So I think we've seen more growth than the market is actually able to carry. So I think we're not going to see those growth rates going forward. And we do see that shift to our customers to buy more as a service and have Proact deliver more of the functionality as a service rather than as a piece of equipment. So those two together, I think, are when we look forward, definitely doubling down on the services side of things.
Yeah, I see. And of the cloud revenues that you have, how much is third-party cloud space, like Amazon Web Services, and how much is private hybrid cloud solutions?
Yeah, and it becomes a little bit technical. I'll try and explain. So we deliver, I'm going to simplify a little bit. We deliver two types of cloud services.
One of it is we own the equipment, we manage the equipment, and we deliver it as a service to our customers. And the other is when we deliver services on top of a Microsoft or a Google or an Amazon public cloud. So the actual underlying infrastructure comes from Microsoft, but we deliver the management of the applications or management of the end user experience or management of the security services on top of Microsoft. In both cases, we make good margins. We deliver the value add. We try not to resell Microsoft licenses. Not that we don't think Microsoft should get paid. They should, but it's better somebody else does it. It's a low-margin business to shuffle licenses. We try to get out of it. It's not zero, but it's a small portion when you look at our total cloud revenue.
Yeah. If you were to estimate how much of your business today is kind of pure cybersecurity-related operations, it's obviously part of lots of the offering, etc., but to get a feeling of how much of the value to customers or...
Well, I won't give you a number, but I did touch on it already. A few years back, security services pretty much were things like protect from somebody getting access, monitor the systems, firewall systems, virus type of protection systems. Now it's much more about, all right, I've been attacked. I need to restore my environment and knowing that the data and the applications that I bring back are not infected. Now it's all about backups, disaster recovery, air gap solutions that are completely disconnected from the internet, clean room applications where you can test everything and verify them before you put them in production.
So the borders are so blurred now between what we've been doing for 30 years, backup, storage, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity. But we've seen a huge amount of interest in those types of services, even if they've been in our portfolio for a long time. I won't be able to give you a particular number, but it's definitely a key driver.
Yeah, makes sense. And then on M&A, you mentioned that the M&A market is starting to wake up a little bit here. What kind of discussions or targets are you trying to look for? Will you buy a consulting company and try to get them selling your products or that way around? Or how should we think about M&A?
No, it's two types of companies.
If you look at a business model, consulting companies are great because they're typically super skilled, and they can get into that front end of the snake picture that I showed before, and cloud services companies, those are the two primary ones. We want them to complement us with new skills, so we're looking at people with even more security skills, definitely need more competence or more breadth, I should say, in terms of Microsoft skills. Application development would be a third area. We're looking primarily in our existing markets because we're still a relatively small player when you look at U.K., huge IT market, Germany, huge IT market, so we'd rather grow in markets where we have leadership in place. We know our customers. We know the competition, so we're looking at existing regions, service-centric companies in a couple of areas of specialty.
Excellent. Final question on cloud and the cloud momentum. You mentioned that it was a little bit weakish in Q3. Could be temporary. If we look at the three big cloud players globally, they are accelerating growth rates right now. They were around 19-20% a year ago. They're growing now at 25% growth rate. So do you expect, you mentioned that you expect cloud growth to come back again, but do you have any more visibility into that? Customer discussions that you know that that's going to come in what kind of form is it coming?
Yeah, we don't give forward-looking prognosis. I'm going to step down a little bit, but yes, it's looking pretty good. So the types of services we deliver won't grow at the same pace as Microsoft's do.
Now, Microsoft is effectively limited by the speed they can build data centers with, which is impressive, but still good growth rates. And yeah, we have a lot of good dialogue with the customers, and I think we're very well positioned. Our portfolio meets exactly what our customers need. We built the scalability into our delivery mechanism so we can onboard customers without having bottlenecks in terms of recruitment or anything else. So we're quite positive about the intake of new contracts and new contract value.
Excellent. That was it from Proact and the CEO Jonas. So thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Thank you.