Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's Q3 2021 interim report conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Thomas Heath, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, operator, and warmly welcome everyone to this Q3 2021 conference call with Sinch, or discussing the Q3 results we released this morning. With me in the room today is Oscar Werner, our CEO, Roshan Saldanha, our CFO, and Ola Elmeland in the investor relations team with myself. With those opening introductory remarks, I'll hand the word over to Oscar.
Thank you, Thomas, and thank you all for listening in to this Q3 presentation from Sinch. Without further ado, operator, if you go to slide two, please. Sinch revenue past 12 months, SEK 14 billion, and adjusted EBITDA SEK 1.2 billion in the past four months, 2,424 people, present in 49 countries. This is excluding the obviously recent acquisitions. We're up to almost close to 3,556 people if you include all of those acquisitions. We do customer engagement through mobile technology. We do communications in messaging, voice, and video today. As you've seen, we have significantly strengthened the voice part.
We are adding an email part, and we added a strong business unit focusing on the SMB segment as well. We're rapidly expanding outside this definition, and we will update it as the acquisitions close. We do 190 billion B2C engagements per year. This is close to 20 per mobile phone on the planet, and as you can see, this is going up gradually quarter-over-quarter. Again, this is on the messaging side. We serve eight out of 10 of the largest U.S. tech companies. We're typically one of their top providers or the top provider of cloud communication services. This is a testament to our quality. They are the quality conscious buyer who really wants a global high-quality delivery. That's when they choose Sinch.
That is where I think we truly stand out against any other player on the planet. This market is fascinating because it's got 100% consumer penetration. We're talking about the communication between every single enterprise or every single business in the world, every single consumer in the world, over every channel that you are using. That's the size and the scope of the market. It is an extremely large and very attractive market that we're in, and we're one of the top two players in this market. We've been profitable since our foundation. We have never needed one single dollar to fund the operations of the business.
Apart from the $10,000 share capital that the founders invested in the first round, every single dollar that we brought into the company has been for M&A. Very high profit focus, very high cash flow focus that we had during the business from its inception. If we go to slide three, operator, please. Third quarter highlights. We had total revenues growth of 122%, organic growth at 41% from the revenue level. Gross profit up 86%. Organic gross profit growth is 20%. We're continuing investing in OpEx in product and go-to-market, and we had adjusted EBITDA up 64%. The number two is acquisition of Pathwire and MessengerPeople.
Pathwire is one of the largest email providers in the world, based out of San Antonio in Texas, present in a set of countries. They also have 100,000 paying customers each month. They had a proven developer-centric go-to-market model, truly addressing the developer persona with their go-to-market model, which is something Sinch has not been strong at and has not been focusing on.
We're truly adding two things with this acquisition. One is a very, very strong email platform, and the other one is a very strong go-to-market model to especially the email developers. They have broadened this out and started to do the same for text messaging for developers who wants text messaging as well. They're clearly taking the steps to broaden this developer go-to-market.
MessengerPeople is a pioneer in customer care through messaging. They are based out of Munich, Germany. 700 businesses as customers. It's a relatively small company, around 50 people, but innovative and one of the conversational messaging leaders in Europe, and we significantly strengthen our conversational messaging business and our, especially our European go-to-market and volumes in this segment. MessengerPeople closed on first November. We're also doing investments in scale systems and people. We have a fourth quarter where we project to close four transactions. We have closed MessengerPeople. We are forecasting to close Inteliquent, MessageMedia, and Pathwire all during this quarter. As you can imagine, we're moving from, if you look at Q2 2020, we were 820 people round about.
If you look at end of Q4 2021, we're gonna be close to 4,000. This is in principle over 18 months scaling the business, 4 x, 400% in terms of staff and in terms of most other financial metrics. As you can imagine, when you do this type of extreme growth over this short period of time, you have to take investments in order to just scale the business. I don't know how I could do that otherwise, right? Also, the investments that we take, we need to do it before the deals close because otherwise we can't handle the close of them. Obviously, the investments we take now hit our EBITDA now, but they're actually geared towards handling a much, much larger organization.
The proportional share of them when these acquisitions close will be much, much smaller. This may be building out capabilities like ERP, CRM, HR, process innovation systems, data platforms, et cetera, in order just to handle the scale. We only take the straight integration OpEx as integration. We're diligent about that. It's only when it's true integration, we take it up. But we also have a set of scale-up costs, right? Just a new ERP system, a HR system, et cetera, right? And those we typically or we don't, you know, label as label as integration, so they come to the EBITDA. You see parts of those investments here right now. The context you should have is going from 820 people to some 4,000 over 18 months, that's the context. We're preparing day one activities.
I think we're doing well on these. We're gradually improving. We have a well-structured process for that. We're also, as you know, in Inteliquent, we see their growth being lower than the Sinch growth, which we've communicated since the acquisition. We're preparing to invest part of their cash flow and profit to increase their growth to match the Sinch Group growth, right? That's the $15 million-$20 million US investments that we're taking out of the Inteliquent EBITDA, if you will, in order to increase growth. We think that's highly possible, and it's very, very concrete. Operator, slide four, please.
We see continued broad-based growth as something we worked on for a long time, and we communicated it, you know, many quarters ago, and we also communicate that we see now a broader-based growth outside the biggest customers that we have, the big techs from the U.S. We see that continuing this quarter, which I'm very, very happy with. On the gross profit level, 86% Q3 to Q3, organic gross profit 20%. The majority of this is coming now from the broader base, while the bigger tech customers in this quarter having a lower growth than average because we have some volume discounts with them.
I think it's very natural as well when customers grow very, very large. Well, they come and negotiate price, and this is one of the quarters where we did negotiate the price fairly because their volumes are very, very large. That said, in this quarter, they don't contribute so much to the organic growth, and that's mainly driven by the broader base growth. As you can see, higher growth in transaction volumes and revenues up 41%. There are three things that are affecting the gross margin. First, it is carrier pass-through fees. Basically, operators have increased prices. What happens is they increase one quarter, and then we increase our prices in the coming quarters.
It is also the renegotiating existing volume discounts with some of our largest customers, which has an impact when it happens, and then it tails off in the quarters after. And then you have some mix effect as well, depending on in what countries do we send and what margin do we have into the specific countries. That's the three main reasons to the gross margin effect. That's the reason to the difference in revenue and gross profit growth. Operator, slide five, please. We're adding to volumes in messaging. We do 46 billion transactions in Q3. It's a 229% increase year-over-year. And 97% higher revenues with 35% organic growth and 67% higher gross profit with 19% organic growth.
Continued broad-based growth in customer types. You should know the SDI customer base is still growing slower than Sinch, which will affect the combined growth in Q4 when it's first quarter that they are actually, you know, reported as non-M&A. We are, however, seeing positive effect. We work hard with that customer base and the sales team, and we're seeing positive effects in turning that growth as we had projected from start. It's taking a little bit longer to get up to the full Sinch growth level than the 12 months. We see no structural reason to why this base would grow slower than the Sinch base when we're applying all the same models as we're doing on the Sinch side. Operator, slide six, please.
We are extending our Conversation API with Apple Messages for Business, with Telegram, and KakaoTalk, so making this even broader, covering a lot more channels, basically. You can see the number of channels we're covering. For an enterprise, this is very powerful. The communication landscape gets more and more complex with more and more messaging apps, and handling all of those and understanding how to handle them in various jurisdictions and various processes is pretty tough, and that's why we combine them with our Conversation API. Again, there's no reason why we couldn't add the email services or other services to this as well, going forward, basically. All right, operator, next slide, please. We have healthy growth in the voice and video segment.
As you saw, this had a very strong growth before COVID, and then took a hit during COVID. It's very, you know, logical because a couple of our largest customers are the ride-hailing customers in the segment. Obviously, during COVID and lockdown, that's a slower growth. It's been a little bit lumpy over the last quarters here. We're now seeing them coming back to a healthy growth projection with 23% revenue growth, organic at 26%, and 44% gross profit growth with organic at 44%. Previously, we communicated that we had a temporary traffic at low gross margin. That has now ended, so gross margin is going up from 18%-28% as per previous communications in Q3. Also preparing for the Inteliquent closing.
This is Sinch voice business, and this is when they combine with Inteliquent offering. It's a good combination where we're getting strong both in the higher levels of programmable voice, more software, and the lower layer, level voice network. We see very strong growth opportunities for this business going forward, but we're investing in growth initiatives, both on the product and the sales side. Just a couple of examples, like Inteliquent going into them, they have the best voice network in the U.S., our broadest reach in the U.S., they're the highest volume providers in the U.S. They only are spending, I think it's around about 10% of their OpEx in sales and marketing.
Kind of relative to what we have seen or what any other CPaaS player have, a very low investment in sales and marketing. We just say, "Hey, this fantastic network, if we invest more in sales and marketing, we will get more out of it." It's things we have done before, things we've proven before, applying the same models, but selling more of a very good asset that we have. All right, operator, slide eight, please. We have this quarter's strong performance on the operator segments, and this is the Sinch operator segments. Growth since Q4 2020 are driven primarily by the SDI acquisition, which had, you know, an operator business in them.
Healthy growth and profitability in both Sinch and SDI businesses in Q3. We do expect continued earnings volatility between quarters in this segment. We have Inteliquent is around about half of the gross profit is geared toward operators, so that will be added to the operator segment going forward. That's a significant piece, which is gonna be the largest piece of our operator offering, going forward. Very stable, very high profit on the Inteliquent side, but lower growth than the general CPaaS side. All right, operator, go to slide number nine, please. These are the acquisitions. I must say we're extremely happy about all the acquisitions we made lately.
I think we have truly moved Sinch to be one of the top two players in this business on all accounts. You can count revenue, profit, adjusted EBITDA, message volume, call volumes, mail volumes. On any metric you would count, we would rank as one of the top two players in this very attractive market. I think we've gone from being a messaging provider and then adding Inteliquent, being the largest voice provider in the U.S., adding MessageMedia, being the largest provider to SMB segments in the world, adding 65,000 customers and a strong online go-to-market model to SMBs. Adding Pathwire, adding a strong email product and a strong developer go-to-market, and thereby covering the three biggest channels that I think we all use as communication between ourselves and enterprises.
We all use messaging channels like text or WhatsApp or ABC. We all use sometimes voice, and we all use email, and none of those channels are gonna go away. Being one of the very few companies on the planet that can offer all of these three services at scale on a global level is a very powerful position to be in. MessengerPeople, smaller transaction, really moving us forward in the conversation messaging space. We're looking back, I'm super happy, and all our teams are very happy, and the excitement in the sales teams about the ability to cross-sell these different services is very high. Looking at slide 10, the pro forma here illustrates the greater scale. You can see the very significant moves we're making. We're very decisive about being a leader in this industry.
There's nothing that will stop us from that, and we're really going for that. We think the market is very attractive in CPaaS, and we have our eyes set on being one of the top two providers, and that's what we are with these acquisitions. You can see going from the strong organic growth that we have and then adding Inteliquent, MessageMedia, and Pathwire on the gross profit and adjusted EBITDA side, you can see the monumental shift that we're doing. This is also why we need to and think it's prudent to take the scale-up investments in order to handle all of these acquisitions. Here we can also see the power of our growth model. We have strong organic growth.
We have been ranging between 25% and 35% over the last quarters. This quarter, it's just 20%. There's no reason we don't see any structural change. It's just one quarter becomes super good, like last quarter, and this quarter a little bit lower, but there's no structural change in that. We see the very strong organic growth that we have had over the last, you know, many quarters, over the last five years. Then we're adding the very strong M&A growth engine that we have. Combining these two, we have had, on average, the last years, the last five years, 25% growth year-on-year. You know, roughly half of that 25% being organic and roughly half of that being M&A driven.
I think that growth model is just very strong. We count on gross profits, and it's a very simple reason for that. You cannot compare these business units or these businesses on a revenue basis 'cause Pathwire has like 80%-85%, 90% gross margin, while a messaging business has 20%-25%. Comparing those on revenue, you would overweight on the messaging side and underprioritize the Pathwire side if compared to revenue, right? We need to compare it on a like-to-like basis. The like-to-like basis is the value you create, and the value you create is basically the gross profit. It's as simple as that.
I think it risks very much screwing any comparison if you compare it to anything else. The pro forma last twelve month revenue is SEK 21.3 billion. You can see the scale-up we're doing here. I think it's reported 14, around 14 or 12, sorry. Roshan was giving me a look there, sorry. Pro forma is 21. The gross profit of 6.7 billion and adjusted EBITDA of 3.2 billion. You can really see the growth in the business that we're driving here. All right, operator, slide 11, please. We're also adding structurally here, right? This is not only, you know, adding companies on top of each other. It's very carefully selected, and we're adding structural competence to the business.
You can see, Sinch has been strong on the enterprise go-to-market, where MessageMedia and Pathwire were actually pretty not so strong. Pathwire being very strong on the developer go-to-market, signing up thousands of developers each month, having 100,000 customers. They're really adding that go-to-market motion, and we will let them run the developer go-to-market for all our products. 'Cause frankly, they're just so much better than Sinch is on that. The SMB market is basically, you know, MessageMedia. SMBs are business users. Think of a hairdresser on the corner who goes in online, signs up with a webpage, but is not a developer, right? It's a business user who use an online graphical user interface, basically.
Got 65,000 customers, so that's also an online go-to-market model, which MessageMedia is the leading player in the world. Really adding true competence as well on the go-to-market model on both of these acquisitions, which we're very happy about, and adding true online rapid customer acquisition go-to-market in two very important segments. All right, operator, slide number 12. MessengerPeople. We're extending our strong position in the conversation messaging space with MessengerPeople being one of the leaders in Europe. They're selling an integrated applications to midsize businesses, primarily focusing on the VP of customer care, which is a customer or persona segment that we have not focused on so much.
Basically operating the customer care for medium-sized businesses in a more efficient way via WhatsApp, RCS, Viber, KakaoTalk, et cetera, right? In a very integrated way. It's like an online self-sign-up. You can sign up online if you will. You can test the product and see what it is. It's a really good and interesting experience, which is growing significantly. All right, integrations, TWW and Wavy. We closed TWW October 2020, Wavy in February 2020. We're migrating customers and supplier to our shared global platform as we speak. On the supplier side, we've gone pretty far, and on the customer side, we're almost midway. That's happening as we speak, and we're going through these projects, and we have engineers and operations people and product managers on these projects right now.
The goal is at the end to shut down the platforms and reap the operational synergies from that. We're also having initiatives to scale Wavy's conversation messaging business, which is very large and leading in Latin America, in other regions, with good results. ACL, we closed the deal in September 2020. We are terminating the international traffic to India, leveraging the ACL direct connections. We have waited strategically to integrate the platforms because we think that can be done later, and there are so many specific things in India. We have prioritized TWW and Wavy over that, so we waited with that in order to not do too much at once.
We're then selling Chatlayer Conversation API offered via WhatsApp in India to Indian customers via the ACL sales teams with good results. We're really seeing the cross sales there, even though we're prioritizing the platform integration on TWW and Wavy before the ACL platform. SDI closed the deal in November. Sales teams are already merged. You cannot see the difference across 19 countries, and we mix the leaders, pick the mix. Our Spain leader is from SDI. You know, a lot of the account management leader in the U.S. are from SDI, et cetera, and you have this mix all across, so it's fully integrated.
We're migrating customers and suppliers onto our shared global platform with the aim of shutting that platform down as well. The P2P messaging products for operators are aligned with Sinch operator software offering and moved into that group from an operating control perspective. Scale up, rapid increase, as you can see, going from 820 people to 3,800, 4,000 over 18 months requires scale up in core functions, and that's what we're doing. It's all across various different areas. Operationally, it is relatively undramatic. We need to do it before the closing.
Obviously we take a little bit too much cost now compared to our EBITDA amount right now, but that will obviously, when we get the new EBITDA, be much lower in proportion to the EBITDA that we have then. We're also taking a little bit more cost now, which we don't need to take later, as we intend to kind of slow down the growth of the OpEx investments in this area going forward, because we've already taken the cost to scale to that level, right? Long term, we're just saying we're gonna grow you know OpEx in line with GP. Obviously in this type of situations, you need to take it a little bit up front in order to handle the very rapid scale up.
We're planning asset integrations. We're having an asset integration team with a leader coming in from Thomson Reuters. She is used to handle Thomson Reuters, did 40 acquisitions a year when she was there, right? This is a you know an experienced person who really really drives this, really loves every integration comes in and wants there to be more, which is a very positive thing, right? We're now doing integration planning with Inteliquent, signed in February, expected to close in H2. The regular approval processing ongoing, and we're doing integration planning with the teams in regular cadence meeting. We're not allowed, and we're not doing integration execution before closing.
Focusing a lot on cross-sales of voice and messaging to Sinch and Inteliquent customers. In principle, 100% of Sinch customers want voice, and 100% of Inteliquent customers want messaging. I think that's, you know, a very good opportunity. MessageMedia signed in June, expected to close in H2 2021. We're happy to say that we just received the regulatory approvals for MessageMedia, like we have asked before, and we projected in Q4, now we just received them. We're then obviously, you know, preparing for close. We're shifting their backend to Sinch connectivity and then assessing joint growth opportunities. They want a set of our products like Chatlayer, Conversation API, et cetera, integrating into them.
MessengerPeople signed in September, closed in first November, and we're assessing integration options while also driving how can we drive their growth into other regions faster. Pathwire signed September 2021, expected to close H2 2021.
Regulatory process is ongoing, and we're also doing integration processing, you know, projects here, getting to know the team, what are we gonna do, who sells what, and identifying cross-sales opportunities. Here there's also very large cross-sales opportunities. I would say like 100% of the Sinch customer base is using email. There's not a business on the planet that is not using email in some form of communication, or maybe there are a few, but very few. In principle, 100% of our customer base have an email service, and we obviously intend to cross-sell.
100% of Inteliquent customer base have an email service, and we intend to cross-sell. Pathwire is already selling text messages to their base, and they will add the voice messaging, voice offering as well. Very interesting and exciting cross-sell opportunities. Our sales teams are very, very excited. When we talk about the opportunities to them, they're almost drooling over the opportunities, and they're really saying, "Hey, you know, I can sell that, and I can sell this." Right now we're putting the structures in place in order to handle all of those cross-sell opportunities that we can.
Revenue-wise or GP-wise, it's gonna take a little while, a couple of quarters 'cause we gotta close in Q4, we gotta address the customers in Q1, Q2, and then the customers are gonna sign the customers, and then you need to port the traffic, right? That takes a quarter or two to port the traffic. That's how it is, but we already have very strong signals from the cross-sales opportunities. All right, Roshan, financials.
Thank you, Oscar. Yeah, looking forward to close all of these transactions here in Q4, as communicated earlier. Happy to comment some present some comments on the financials for Sinch in this quarter. We start with page 16, which shows the gross profit bridge. As you know, a significant part of our revenues are paid to as cost of goods sold to mobile operators. We pay them to send messages and place calls, but the rates they charge can vary differently between markets, and therefore, we focus on gross profit as a key measure. Here you see again high growth rates in Q3 and Q4 2020 imply tough comparables for us.
We still have organic growth rate of 20% for this quarter, which we are happy with. Acquisitions on top of that contributing 70%, and then we have FX effects reducing the growth by 4% to give you the total growth rate of about 86%. If you break this down into the segments, we have messaging growing at about 19% organically. We have voice and video growing at 40% organically, and then you have the operator segment, and since we're only talking about the organic piece, it's the Sinch-operated software business that's growing 16% organically. Inorganic growth contributions from SDI, SEK 247 million. Wavy, SEK 58 million, and ACL, SEK 32 million.
Note that the ACL inorganic growth contribution is for the two months that they were not included in the base for 2020, since we closed that transaction in September of 2020. Moving on to page 17 on the income statement. Adjusted gross profit coming in at SEK 896 million for the quarter compared to SEK 481 million last quarter. EBITDA coming in at SEK 157 million for the quarter versus SEK 215 million last quarter. Now, EBITDA is including acquisition costs, integration costs for share-based incentive plans, as well as operational exchange rate gains and losses.
Excluding these items, we report adjusted EBITDA of SEK 298 million versus SEK 234 million for the same quarter last year, which implies a growth of 27%. On EBIT, we reported an EBIT of SEK 25 million versus SEK 155 million last year. Again, EBIT includes, in addition to the extraordinary items affecting EBITDA, also includes depreciation and amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets. Excluding those, adjusted EBIT was at SEK 270 million for the quarter versus SEK 219 million for the same quarter previous year. Net financials are affected by currency transactions and currency hedging ahead of upcoming acquisitions where payment is due in U.S. dollar and in Australian dollar.
Moving on to the next page, where we try to reconcile cash flow with adjusted EBITDA. Here you see that adjusted EBITDA is then reduced by paid interest, paid taxes, and other items. Other items are primarily consisting of foreign exchange-related transactions due to the large cash balances that we have in U.S. dollar. Cash flow before changes in working capital amounted to SEK 244 million for the quarter versus SEK 145 million for the same quarter last year. Again, super happy with the strong cash flow generation in the underlying business at 82% for the quarter and 69% on a rolling twelve-month basis. Moving on to the next page 19, you'll see the full cash flow statement.
Again, the cash flow before changes in working capital coming in from the previous page at SEK 244 million, which is then reduced by a change in working capital of SEK 735 million. We have, of course, seasonal swings affecting working capital from quarter to quarter. In addition to that, as we have commented previously, the SDI business, which has come into the group, has had a negative working capital development due to old balances related to pre-closing, which we are working through, but we still have some way to get through that.
For the quarter, we also have effects from a few operator-related contracts where we are prepaying operator charges in order to get both exclusivity as well as preferential terms into these operator networks. This is something we have done quite often previously, and we have products that are quite unique in the market to give us these advantages with operators. We don't see this as a frequently recurring kind of transaction, and especially at this scale. Right. On page 20 then, you see a summary of the cash flow reclassification that we have done this quarter.
We saw that in Q1 and Q2 in our cash flow reporting, we had part of the financing for Wavy, as well as the significant currency effects, being recognized under operating activities and investing activities. We have now reclassified the financing for Wavy as a new share issue, and also moved the significant currency effects, down to the bottom part of the cash flow. We believe this reclassification now gives a better understanding of the underlying development of our cash flows. You can see here sort of the numbers for all three quarters, hopefully helping you in your analysis. Moving on to page 21, you see the financial targets. Our financial targets are unchanged.
We want to grow adjusted EBITDA per share with 20% per year, and we wanna keep net debt over adjusted EBITDA at under 3.5 x over time. Adjusted EBITDA per share grew 19% in Q3 2021, measured on a rolling 12-month basis. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, adjusted EBITDA per share reduced related to the fact that we have completed share issues for the financing of acquisitions of Inteliquent, Pathwire, and MessageMedia, whereas that adjusted EBITDA is not included in our reported figures. That trend will then change as we go into Q4 and we consolidate Inteliquent, Pathwire, and MessageMedia. Of course, those numbers will be included in our adjusted EBITDA for Q4.
On net debt, we have a reported net debt, which is negative, which implies a cash position of 8.9x, measured on a rolling twelve-month basis. Moving on to the next page, on page 22, you see how that would translate on a pro forma basis if we completed all of the announced acquisitions, and essentially ending up at 2.8x adjusted EBITDA, which would give us a net debt of, on a pro forma basis, of over SEK 8.5 billion. The updated financial target, which was announced earlier, so it's not updated as of this report, but updated earlier, is to maintain net debt to adjusted EBITDA under 3.5x.
That is what we continue to report here, even on a pro forma basis. Finally moving on to the last page 23, where you see the key financials and the key KPIs for the consolidated group, post-closing of the announced acquisitions of Inteliquent, MessageMedia, and Pathwire, where we see that gross margin on a last twelve-month reported basis with the announced acquisitions would be 34% instead of the reported 24%, and adjusted EBITDA margin would be on a combined basis 15% instead of the reported 9%.
In the table on the graph on the right, we also represent then how our gross profit mix would change, where on a reported basis today, we have 83% of our gross profit coming from messaging, a small part from voice and video, and then 12% from the operator segment. If we had included the announced acquisitions, we would have 52% of our gross profit coming from messaging, 15% from voice and video, 12% from email, and then 19% from operators. Much more diversified gross profit mix as a result of the announced acquisitions. That being said, I'd like to hand over to Oscar for final closing comments.
Thank you, Roshan. From our perspective, we do believe that we see a very strong position created by our continued organic growth plus these acquisitions. We feel that all of these have turned out very well. We're super happy, and we think we are getting a very strong position in a very attractive market. Number two, we do see. I mean, on the gross profit growth, it's been a big discussion of course today. We see no underlying change or structural change in the business. We see that quarters sometimes come in a little bit higher, like last quarter, sometimes come in a little bit lower like this quarter.
It has its reasons, like we have explained, with the operators raising prices in a specific quarter or big customers renegotiating, you know, volume banding in specific quarter around some mix effects. There's no underlying structural change in our trajectory as we see it. It's obviously hard to always plan exactly, you know, what happens in a specific quarter, basically. We're confident of our market position. We're very confident about market position and very confident about the market and our growth or our continuing our growth agenda with a strong organic growth. That's, you know, truly how we see it operationally, right? We are very happy to see the very strong market that we're in.
It's a market that's really turning, where enterprises are increasingly wanting to talk to us, not only about their messaging needs, not only about their email needs, but they wanna talk to us about how we engage with customers, how to reduce their churn, how to reduce their customer care costs. We're getting one layer up in a much more strategic discussions with a lot of the enterprises. That's, I think, a very interesting trend going forward of us supplying, becoming a more strategic partner. We're also supplying a lot more software and SaaS services on top of the high volume transaction volumes. That said, thanks a lot for your interest. I'll leave it back to Thomas.
Thank you very much, Oscar. Thank you, Roshan and Operator. May we have the first question, please?
Thank you, sir. Just a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. To cancel the request, you may press the hash key. Please limit your questions to one per participant. Your first question comes from the line of Predrag Savinovic of Carnegie. Your line is now open.
Thank you, operator. Thank you for taking my questions. This is on the pricing dynamics. From a competitive standpoint, you mentioned in the report it's a fierce market, but we're happy to hear more comments on that. We know this is a scale game, of course. We know Sinch has the highest scale when it comes to messages terminated. We know their U.S. peers that start at a high gross margin feels unlikely that they want to combat you on core customers with lower prices. There's lower or certain European players which are quite insignificant compared to you in size. Wondering on the pricing side. Are you proactive toward your key accounts? What is it about? Is there something happening new on the price side?
Really reasoning on why you offer this to your key accounts.
I think it's a very natural thing. When accounts grow as much as they do, and when you are the biggest brand in the world, you often sometimes say, "Hey, I have tripled my volumes over the last three years," or, "I have doubled my volumes." You start to go, "Can I get a better price?" I think that's prudent to do so. It's not so that the gross profit is shrinking. But when you buy at scale at this volume, then I think it's a very natural thing, right? Of course we also see, I mean, these accounts are the biggest brands in the world. It's not like any of the competitors don't know about them.
At all times, our competitors are always trying to get into them, right? That's also how it is. Then we try to be proactive but not afraid, but also knowing our quality and valuing our quality, right? We also, at some point, it's very proactive. We can't, you know, we can't only react, so we're also proactive and taking the steps that we think is to get to a reasonable and balanced price model, price level.
All right. Thank you. One on operator costs and the pre-buying of A2P traffic and the working capital impact. In you doing this and pre-buying, does that imply that you expect more hikes going forward? Or what do you think on the carrier side for the coming quarters?
I mean, Roshan here, Predrag Savinovic. I think firstly, you know, what we have to say is, I mean, we have a wide operator network, right? I mean, I think at last count, we had more than 450 operators that we are directly connected with. Now we're talking about a few selected ones where we have the opportunity, you know, to various technical and financial solutions, you know, get better terms, and then we use our size and our position to actually obtain that. This is by far not yet a widespread phenomenon.
You know, I think, you know, it's difficult to draw from these individual deals any kind of broad trends on operator price changes, you know, across all of our connectivity kind of portfolio.
All right. Just one final in your reasoning long term.
Sorry. We'll keep you. You'll have to go back to the end of the queue. We have a lot of participants. Sorry, Predrag Savinovic. Operator, next participant, please.
All right. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, just a quick reminder, please limit your questions to one per participant. Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Thorsson of ABG. Your line is now open.
Yes. Thank you very much. I have a question regarding SDI. It seems like they have been growing sales slightly over the one and a half years since you acquired it, while it declined around 8% on gross profit. Can we get a feeling for the current organic gross profit run rate in SDI, as it will have a dilutive effect on organic growth in the coming quarters?
Yeah. I think just a very brief comment. I mean, you know, in a way, continuing what I've said, what we've said previously. If you look at the SDI business, we report, you know, we've reported that in three segments. We have the A2P messaging reported as part of the messaging segment. We have the operator interconnect P2P business reported as part of the operator segment, and then we have the contact center business reported in the other segment. From a current trends perspective, you know, what you can see in Q3, and you saw a little bit of that in Q2, is that we have a good development on the operator interconnect side. I mean, that business is developing to our satisfaction.
You know, I think we still have time to see if that is a long-term trend. You know, we're obviously working to make that a long-term trend. On the A2P messaging side, you know, we said that business grows around 10%-ish when we announced the transaction. What happened between signing and closing is that the growth actually declined in the A2P messaging side, and that, you know, without speculating, may have to do with, you know, the lack of attention during that period from the SAP group on this business, et cetera. What our focus has been is to get that trend, you know, up.
Really, you know, what we can see in terms of the underlying customer communications and discussions that we are having with the customers is that there is no reason for us to believe that it should not grow at the same rate as our organic growth. You know, it's gonna take us a bit of time to get there. Right now I would say, you know, that it is still weak compared to what we said at the time of signing. I think that's sort of where it is currently. Oscar?
Yeah. I think it's weak but improving, right? We see good trends. We're doing the things we are doing, and we see that traction taking effect. The things are very concrete.
It's like, okay, SDI didn't have any new salespeople. If you don't have any new salespeople on your base, you're not gonna grow as much, right? They didn't work as much on the account management side, didn't have you know any significant marketing plan. It's a very concrete thing to improve in other areas. We implement them, we see the effect, but it's not at full scale yet.
I see. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you very much. Next question, please.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Fredrik Stenqvist of Nordea. Your line is now open.
Hi, good afternoon. Back to the question about sort of carrier fees and price pressure. Just if we think about the organic sales growth for messaging was 35% and gross profit was 19%. That discrepancy there, is that could you comment anything about the split, sort of, between higher carrier fees and how much is sort of GP value capture that goes from you to the customer? If you understand my question.
Yeah. Thomas here. I think, you know, I think you're trying to break down the discrepancy between the growth rate of organic revenue and organic gross profit, where we've said the larger part is carrier pass-through fees, which, you know, will annualize after four quarters and sort of drive up revenue growth during that time without really affecting gross profit, right?
You have a knock-on effect that, you know, you might not be able at every single point in time to pass that cost on to every customer immediately, at which point you will actually see a, you know, detriment to gross profit, right? Even if the largest part is more a dilution of margin than impacting gross profit. The second big aspect, of course, as you alluded to, is where we've renegotiated our volume bands over pricing for incremental traffic on larger customers. The carrier pass-through fee is the larger part. It's but the other one is a key factor too, and that, of course, you know, brings some optimism as you annualize that in the beginning of 2022.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Stefan Göthlin of DNB. Your line is now open.
Yes. Could I first just follow up on the previous question? The volume discounts, I mean, that is, I guess, a regular part of the business, but is that sort of something that you do on an annual basis with these customers? Or do they happen once in a while? I mean, will you benefit from the larger volumes you're seeing now, driven by these volume discounts, for a period? And then just a question on the cash flow impact from the prepaid mobile operator traffic tariffs. Is this expected to bounce back as you use volumes on these contracts? And are you actually taking any risk relating to volumes?
Right. If we start off with the price negotiation, there isn't a particular cycle. You know, when you work with some of the world's largest companies, you know, you have a continuous dialogue and reassess, right? There's no particular timeline. I think why you're seeing this, you know, perhaps a bit more pronounced now in Q3 and Q4, is to recognize where we were 12 months ago, where, you know, we were quite open that the majority of our growth in absolute terms were generated by a subset of our customers, our very largest customers, right? We also said, you know, in the beginning of this year, and we said throughout this year, that we're increasingly seeing a broader base growth.
Now, when you look at the comparables and you look at the impact year-on-year, you know, recognizing that, you know, a large part, an outsized part of the growth contribution came from these customers one year back, and it's exactly those customers where we have started, you know, some new pricing, right? That's why, you know, you get a little bit of a pronounced effect in Q3 and Q4. Of course, as we broaden our growth, you know, that type of concentration decreases, right? We already see that. You know, it's a little bit special with this, you know, one or two quarters based on the concentration we had one year back.
Both on the organic side, that's changing, and even more so with the acquired agenda, of course, there's a greater breadth of the business. On the other question, Roshan?
Yeah. I mean, I can try to answer that. I mean, you know, obviously when we do these transactions, you know, we are, you know, we have a number of risks, obviously, that we try to mitigate and manage. I mean, you know, we have obviously clauses in the contract, that you know, could protect us, for example, in certain types of force majeure situations or in a tech shift situation, et cetera.
You know, we also, I think in the case of these contracts very often, and I think, you know, in at least talking about the transactions for this quarter, you know, in all of these cases, actually put in software solutions in terms of a firewall at the operator that makes sure that we can secure that all of the traffic is ending up with us and, you know, that there are no ways around it. But at the end of the day, yes, I mean, there is a certain volume commitment that we make, and there we rely on our long expertise. Many of these are repeating customers with us also, so we have a good insight into the history of the traffic.
There is an underlying sort of volume, you know, risk that is inherent in these kind of transactions.
Yeah. There is, but there also that we think obviously making this transaction, we think the risk is very manageable, right? This is made by the, our longest standing experts with 20- 25-year messaging, you know, veterans having seen this many times, right? We think the risk is very manageable. But yes, there are risks in certain types of deals, and this is one of them. We think it's very manageable.
Relating to the cash flow impact, should we see this coming back?
Yes.
As you use the volumes?
Yeah. I mean, I missed your answer on that. I mean, that can vary a little bit, you know, depending on the clauses in the specific contracts. It does come back over the lifetime of the contract, whether it comes down, you know, evenly over the lifetime of the contract, sometimes more tilted towards the beginning and sometimes more tilted towards the end. That is, you know, really an individual contract decision. Yes, it comes back over the lifetime of the contract.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Djurberg of Handelsbanken. Your line is now open.
Thank you, operator. Yes, two questions. You might have touched upon this, but, again, on the volume discounts, is this only part of the big U.S. tech companies or only a few of them? Also, is it impacting the full quarter, or is it just part of the quarter? Will it be a similar Q4, or will it be, you know, increasing the fourth, being more evening out, so to say? If also you could comment on how large a part of the messaging revenue that came from these U.S. big tech in Q3 versus one year back. Thank you.
Thank you, Daniel. We got a very poor line, but I believe you asked about, you know, how many of our larger customers, you know, we're renegotiating prices with. Oscar?
That was the first part. Subset of the large customers. This is not a regular event. We have regular weekly, daily meetings with these customers, right? It's very large customers and very large buyers. No, it's not all of them, it's a subset. But it's not regular, right? It's very large deals. The second and the coming two questions you had was there?
I think the second-
About the part of the messaging revenue that came out, or from the U.S. Big Tech in the quarter one year back.
We haven't disclosed that figure.
Okay. May I ask you about Sweden? It was not your focus market, but still it was quite locked down year over year, especially messaging. Is there actually impact on market share or anything else that we should be aware of?
No, Daniel, I can take that one. You know, we have customers that have you know invoicing addresses in different countries. We essentially base that you know that information on the customer's invoicing address. Really what it has happened in that specific case is that we have large customers that have moved invoicing addresses, which means that revenue has moved you know moved between sort of jurisdiction in that reporting. That can happen from time to time you know in that position.
Perfect. Thank you for that clarification. Good luck in Q4.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Andreas Joelsson of Danske Bank. Your line is now open.
Yes, good afternoon. Just curious about these sort of scale capturing investments. For how long will they last? Then secondly, or what about M&A ahead? How do you see that in terms of size and perhaps timing also with regards to the integration work that you do now?
I can maybe start just with a brief comment on the first question, and then I'll hand over to Oscar to elaborate further and answer the M&A question. You know, I think what we've said previously is that we see that the ramp-up that we've seen in previous quarters of the costs will decelerate. I think that we're happy to see in the Q3 numbers that that's the case. I think, you know, when you look at these scale investments, I mean, some of the investments that we're making, you know, is just needed by the fast growth of the business, right? We've gone from 800 people to more than 3,500 people.
You know, the ERP that we chose to operate the business on, you know, when we were 800, may not be the ERP that we choose to operate the business on when we're 4,000 people. I think we have to look at these decisions in the context of where we are at every point in time. That being said, you know, Oscar.
We're taking them now and then scaling them off as we bring in these companies, right? We do think we take a little bit too much cost now, to be honest, but we just have to handle the extreme growth, right? We see that, okay, we're not efficient in all functions. We need to overstaff a little bit. We need to bring in consultants, et cetera, because it does go so fast. There are plenty of opportunities to optimize that going forward. We just need to handle the growth, and right now it's more important to close these transactions than to optimize growth in these two quarters, right? That's very clear. Long-term, again, we plan to grow OpEx in line with GP.
There's no questions there, right? On your second question, how do we see the opportunities for further M&A? Q4 is obviously a very busy quarter, I would say. We may not close four large or three large and one small transactions every quarter, you know. We do see. Obviously we need to time all M&A to our ability to integrate and ability to handle it very clearly, and we're very cautious and conscious about that. A little bit more on long term, we do see a continued consolidation. We do see a very attractive pipeline of incoming M&A opportunities going forward, and there is no change in our M&A strategy going forward.
We will, for the coming, quarters and years, you know, we project to continue to grow organically and via M&A during this very intense consolidation phase of this market. I think that's very beneficial to, us as company, our customers, and our shareholders going forward as well.
Perfect. Thank you.
Operator, do we have a final question?
Yes, sir. It's from the line of Ramil Koria of SEB. Your line is now open.
Yeah. Thank you, operator. Just a bunch of follow-ups, I guess. Looking at the gross margin, I guess everything you're seeing or everything you're saying points to Q3 being the trough. I guess sort of U.S. messaging revenues, Q3 was actually lower than Q2, which is the first time we see a sequential decrease since 2019. You're saying that you're seeing a broad-based growth, et cetera, et cetera. Then if you remove these acquisitions coming in with structurally higher gross margins, is there anything that sort of points to Q4 being in line with Q3 or even worse off, gross margin wise?
You know, I can try to start off there. You know, I think as we said, Ramil, I mean, on the gross margin front, we have a number of different effects. I mean, if you look at the mix effect obviously plays in, and that's a bit difficult for us, you know, to specifically give any commentary around. That can vary a lot from quarter to quarter.
On the operator price increases, you know, what we essentially see is that where we have bundled customer offerings, including the operator price and our gross profit, you know, it does take a bit of time for us to analyze that customer by customer and, you know, work with customer pricing to increase, you know, margins. That is something that is, you know, not just a one quarter effect, but it can take a couple of quarters to three quarters to kind of work that back up again. Again, on the volume discounts, what we've said, I mean, you know, that's at least a four quarter effect, right?
In terms of, you know, when it starts to play back. Now, that being said, Q4 is also, you know, a seasonally strong quarter, has been historically. I think it will be interesting to see, with all the news flows around, you know, sort of component shortfalls and delivery challenges around the world, you know, how we see our volumes play out during Q4 here. I mean, there is definitely a seasonal effect during Q4, which will play positively for us.
Just a clarification there. Sorry, Oscar. I mean, these price hikes from operators, that was two quarters ago, if I'm not completely mistaken, or at least in Q2. Have you started to push them out towards customers?
Yes, we have, but there have been continued price increases over multiple. We started with one, and then the other operators, you know, follow, right? It's been continued in the market, right? One operator does it, then the others feel they can do it as well. It's continued. I mean, it's longer than we expected, but continued longer than the first time we reported it, and then we reported again, right? Then we have started, you know, doing price increases on the first ones, but then obviously not on the other ones, right? Actively working on that.
This is not a new phenomenon.
No
As such, right? It's just that occasionally it gets a little bit lumpy, so we don't wanna, you know, exaggerate any trends. This is, you know, relatively business as usual.
Yeah
From our point.
Yeah. I think we had, like, 700 price changes from operators in the first, you know, part of the year or something. This happens all the time. It's part of our business. It's happened every year. Sometimes it hits individual quarters, right? Again, this is not nothing new. It's hitting individual quarters. You know, to get back to your question, it's, there's no change in the underlying structural growth of this industry.
We see no reason and no intent or, you know, we continue to drive for the same growth levels that we have seen, you know, historically and then trying, you know. There's no underlying change in that realm, but things hit individual quarters a little bit differently. That's kind of, I think, the underlying bottom line.
We do see two trends in the market and on the positive side, increased customer demand for lots of new things and, you know, extremely active market. We also see increased competition, right? I think these two are evening out a little bit, right? It's a tough market, but it's a very high growth and very attractive market on the other hand, right? No underlying change in underlying projections or from our perspective or what we believe in historic growth rate.
I think you just round that off on you know, since your question was really you know, quite near-term focused. You've got to separate out the near-term effect happening with comparables in Q3 and even tougher in Q4. The impact of SDI coming in you know, the price changes that we pushed through to some larger customers, which were in the beginning of 2022 and will have an effect also on Q4. You know, all of these things have you know, an intermittent impact on the second half of this year. Whereas you know, when you
When you take, you know, a slightly longer view, recognize there were closings for imports and transactions during Q4, which will, you know, transform our P&L. You know, we will have multiple mixed effects, including, you know, higher gross margin, higher adjusted EBITDA, you know, starting already from Q4, we will begin to see those mixed effects.
As we go into next year, you know, and again, reiterating what Oscar said, you know, we're starting to see the multiyear initiatives in broader growth pay off, right? We're not getting that payoff in Q3 and Q4, but, you know, a little bit of a rough patch, this type of quarter, it doesn't change our fundamental view of the market we operate in.
Okay, that's clear. A final one, if I may, just on the A2P monetization deal here. I mean, last presentation, I think you spoke about the turnkey customer engagement market growing by above 25%. These type of deals, should they incrementally add to your sort of ability to take market shares? Or is this sort of you being defensive, for lack of a better word?
No, this is a growth driver. I mean, very clear. I mean, we wouldn't make these type of deals if we don't see a very good business opportunity, right? You don't spend this amount, this type of cash if you don't see a really good deal. So this is a growth driver in short, which we're just saying, all right, great. This we make because we can increase growth.
That's clear. Thank you.
Thank you. That'll have to be our last question. Thank you very much.
Thank you all for your interest.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.