Good morning and Welcome to the SmartCraft Q1 presentation. My name is Gustav Line, and I am the CEO of SmartCraft. We'll go through the Q1 in brief first, and then Kjartan, the CFO, will talk about the financials, and then we'll finish off with a Q&A. As usual, you can put your questions in the web tool so we can look at them at the Q&A at the end. For those of you who are not familiar with SmartCraft, let me give you a very brief intro. We are a leading provider of SaaS solutions to the construction industry. Today, we have a very strong base in the Nordics. We are represented in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and last year we also acquired Clixifix in the U.K.
Today we have a base of 270 employees and quite a strong base of customers and users across these geographies, which gives us a very solid foundation for further growth in these geographies, but also to expand outside these geographies. The industry has been challenged for many years with low margins and, of course, even more struggling today when the market is tough. They have a very high level of bankruptcies these days. In good times, they have a margin of between 0% and 5%. They also struggle with a high level of conflict between the construction company and their customers. There is a lot of conflict regarding price, time, quality, and so on. This is a big challenge for both their customers, but also the construction industry in general.
There's a lot of accidents and deaths as well, which is unfortunately, they are on top of the statistics of all industries. This has led to a lot more documentation and a lot more regulations as well, sort of putting even more burden on companies that are already struggling with low margins. What we do is to make sure that the people out in the field can record and make sure that they record all the information needed in different projects, from the time they spend on the projects to the materials they use, to filling in the checklist. They use a mobile phone to do this. The people back in the office, they will be able to look at the different projects that are running all the time and know that they are in control of both the revenue and also the margin.
In this way, they can also make sure that they can maximize revenue, but they can also make sure that they invoice enough and also buy materials at the right prices so they get the right margin as well. That is, in essence, what we solve. Moving on to Q1, we have an annual recurring revenue of NOK 494 million, which represents a 23% increase year-over-year. that is largely because we acquired two companies in 2024, but it is also due to organic growth. Our adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx is at 27%. When we adjust for the acquisitions and also an investment in SmartCraft Spark, that is a slight decline from last year, but actually a 3% increase compared to last quarter. Our churn ended at 9.3%, which is sort of all-time high, but still 0.1 percentage points higher than last quarter.
We'll talk more about the churn in a little while. The market is challenging, but despite that, we work really well with marketing and sales. We actually managed to increase the number of new customers by 16%, which really shows that there's a good underlying demand in the market. We do a lot of marketing activities, generating 64% more leads this quarter than we did a year ago. We also conduct 52% more sales meetings as a result of these customer leads. Again, that ends to become new customers. The thing is, when you look at the conversion rate from the sales meeting, so when we have a sales meeting and that ends up as a sale, that used to be closer to 60% and actually above 60% before the times were tougher. In Q1, the conversion rate is actually down to 30%.
It's half of what we used to have in better times. The main reason for that is the uncertainty in the market that our customers and potential customers delay buying decisions. It's not that they don't buy from us or they go to competitors, but they delay buying decisions because they're unsure about the future. All in all, we need to work harder to win the customers. We can hope that this is a catch-up effect, that when the market turns better, we will also see an effect of the leads and the sales meetings that we have conducted. We also work to see how we can improve the organization, how we can scale better, and how we can increase our margin. We're doing this across all geographies.
To give you two examples, in SmartCraft Norway, we hired a new Sales Director, started in April, and we closed down one office in Norway and relocated the sales resources to an office outside Oslo, where we already have a big sales organization so we can have everyone gathered at one place. We expect this to improve both the sales execution, but we also expect to improve the profit margin as a result of this. SmartCraft Spark, that we have talked about several times in the last quarters, is our first solution that is born or made to be a truly global solution. That is a joint effort from the development departments across the organization, across the countries. It is a great example of how we synergize our existing resources. Talking about SmartCraft Spark, the project and the solution is progressing as planned.
It's a disruptive solution for electrician companies, which is based on our platform, SmartCraft Core. We aim to build a complete solution in an ecosystem for electricians in all markets. We have started with offer and calculation tools for electricians. As you might remember, we soft-launched SmartCraft Spark in Norway just before Christmas. We launched it now in Q1 in Sweden as well. We have more than 100 paying customers and also signed up quite a lot of new partners in Norway that should be able to scale this into the Norwegian market. So far, we are very optimistic and think we are on track with that solution. Again, it has been a soft launch. We have not really sort of launched it big time, which we will do later.
Today, we are also launching, having an official launch of BIM features for our solution in Finland, Congrid, which is a quality and safety solution. The solution has been running for several months, but it's now that we're actually launching it broadly in both Finland and Sweden, which will increase customer stickiness and also provide upsell opportunities to existing customers and also enrich our existing solution to new customers. The market that we are operating in is massive. It's a massive total addressable market. These customers need to digitalize. It's going to happen. Today, very few, especially of the SME construction companies, have good solutions to run their business. We are very well positioned to grow in the future. Today, the market is challenging, as you probably have read in the newspapers and are aware of.
If we look to Finland and Sweden, we can see that it is looking slightly brighter. In Finland, they've been through a downward cycle for some time, and now it seems to be improving slowly. The Swedish market also seems to be improving. There's been four interest rate cuts, and also there are some incentives by increasing the ROT, the deductible amount that private people can use to refurbish and service their house or renovate their house. In Norway and the U.K., we still see high interest rates, quite a lot of uncertainty, and really doesn't look a lot more promising in the short-term future. We're still waiting for some better results. Two countries are looking better, but the U.K. and Norway are still looking a bit challenging.
To summarize before I leave it, before I hand it over to Kjartan, we do experience strong demand from potential customers, but our growth is dampened by customers churning and downgrades that Kjartan will talk about in a second. We also are very excited about SmartCraft Spark, which is a very important investment for us, and that's going as planned. We also launched SmartCraft BIM, which we are also very pleased about, which we think will be a good addition to the solution we have in the Finnish and Swedish market. With that, Kjartan, I'll hand it over to you.
Thank you, Gustav, and good morning, everyone. ARR at the end of Q1 grew by 23% to NOK 493.5 million. The growth is, of course, driven a lot by the acquisitions of Locka and Clixifix, which now has a focus on transitioning non-recurring revenue to ARR. I will come back to that in a few slides. Our organic growth in Q1 is 6%, which, of course, is well below our ambition level, but it's important to keep in mind the macroeconomic backdrop we're currently experiencing. We are very pleased with new sales, which is at a high level. As Gustav said, we have 16% more customers from new sales, but that is hampered by increasing churn and downgrades. If we look at what's weighing down on our organic growth, bankruptcies now are at a lot higher level than we have seen previously.
The negative effect from customers churning due to bankruptcies has a negative effect in the range of 4-5 percentage points. What has turned out to be an even more effect on our growth is downgrades from existing customers, which, when their business activities slow down, they downgrade on number of seats and/or functionality. Depending on how far back we look, that has a negative effect in the range of 5-8 percentage points. As you can see from the chart, downgrades the past three years have actually tripled, a bit more than tripled. We, of course, have also the price increase effect compared to last year. Total revenue ends at NOK 137 million in Q1, and we have a 94.7% recurring revenue share. We aim, of course, mid-high 90s, and we're well on our way there.
Looking at profitability, we said in Q4 that we expect the same level the next six months, and we do roughly be in line with Q4. A slight increase in EBITDA margin, but a 3 percentage points increase in EBITDA minus CapEx margin. We do have still quite high dilution from acquisitions, now 4.5 percentage points. And the investments we did in SmartCraft Core, Spark, and BIM still have a 1.9 percentage point effect on the margin as well. Total development spending is at the same level as before, but depending on the project life cycles, the capitalization varies. In Q1, we capitalized a bit less. We are now at 7.3%, but still we are expecting at the range of 9%-10% for the full year 2025.
Looking at Sweden, we see a strong growth, of course, affected by acquisitions there as well, but we see good performance in new sales. As the rest of the markets, organic growth is hampered by churn and downgrades. The transition from non-recurring revenue to recurring revenue and ARR, in particular for Locka, which has the longest way to go. For those of you who joined us for the Q4 presentation, we presented the Locka growth at 9% quarter over quarter. This has now increased in Q1 to 17% quarter over quarter, which is 90% annualized. Locka has a very high momentum on ARR. Of course, both Locka and Clixifix will be included in organic growth when we go into Q2. Adjusted EBITDA margin is reduced compared to last year, of course, as a result of the acquisition.
Locka is still operating at a low profitability given the revenue transition. In Norway, we see still a very challenging market, and we have a lower growth in revenue. We do see improved sales in Q1 compared to 2024. Q1 was a higher new sales quarter than all the other quarters in 2024. This provides us with a good revenue pipeline going forward into 2025. In Q1, growth is, of course, as we have said, hampered by increasing churn and downgrades. We see a decrease in adjusted EBITDA margin year-over-year, which is due to the lower revenue growth and capitalizations. Compared to Q4, we see a 2 percentage points increase. As Gustav said, we launched SmartCraft Spark December 1st, and in Q1, we're really getting traction.
At the end of Q1, we closed in on 100 paying customers, and we see great interest in the product, and several large franchises have signed on. SmartCraft Spark comes with a one-month free trial period, so revenue recognition is a bit delayed still. That gives us a very high number of non-paying customers as well. Our SmartCraft Spark team is now focusing on converting free trial customers to paying customers. We are very pleased to see a very high conversion rate. Let's see. In the Finnish market, we do see positive signals. We have improved growth further, and we expect the improvements to continue. For those of us who remember the case with the customer downgrades, we see that now coming in Finland, and we expect the previously rapid bounce back to be at a bit slower pace.
We do see several signals, positive signals in Finland. Amongst our existing customers, we have seen an increase in user activity of 33% in the last six months. Hopefully, this will mean activity really rising, new customers also coming in. We see a decline here as well in profitability year-over-year due to the investments in the BIM development. The decrease quarter on quarter is due to lower capitalizations. If we look at Finland, EBITDA minus CapEx margin is stable from Q4 to Q1. The operating cash flow, we have always been very strong on operating cash flow. We have always had a very good increase. At the same time, we have done improvements in our invoicing routines that we started up back in 2023.
Looking at Q1 last year, we had a more flat development, just 0.6 percentage points increase, while Q2, Q3, and Q4 increased quite a lot. The effect, of course, is that in Q1, we see a decline, but that is because of the improvements we have done previously. Going forward, we expect the quarter to be more evenly spread out. On the balance sheet, we, of course, have a very strong financial position still, net cash positive and negative net working capital as before. We hold now roughly 5.1 million shares, SmartCraft shares. Worth mentioning here, in Q1, we delivered just less than 200,000 shares to the sellers of Clixifix as part of the acquisition. So, Gustav.
Great. Thank you, Kjartan. We will focus on what we can do in a challenging market, and that is to make sure that we are visible in the market and we have sales excellence, and we continue to build customers and convert them to a customer pipeline and convert them to customers. Also, to capitalize on the investments we have done and the investments we have done in SmartCraft Core. We have done that for several years. Firstly, we will see the capitalization coming out of SmartCraft Spark, where we hope to give you more information in the second half, or we will give you more information about how it is progressing and what it looks like. At the moment, we are keeping the information a bit to ourselves.
We will continue to see how we can realize synergies and to make sure that we are flexible and prudent on costs in order to make sure we maximize our people, the way we do business, and also see that we have a good margin. We will also look to do good acquisitions. We have a strong balance sheet, and we are in dialogue with several companies as we speak. We expect to be able to do acquisitions at the same pace that we have done in the past. That is progressing as well. Like Kjartan said, we do expect our revenue to improve and also our margins as we see an improvement in the market. We have quite a lot of headwind from customers going bankrupt and also from customers needing to downscale their business.
When the market gets better, that will improve and we will see a higher growth. We reiterate our guiding of 15%-20% organic growth in the medium term and also expect our margins to increase as we scale the business. This is a slide that is a bit difficult to speak to simply because it has been a very difficult decision for me to step down as CEO after seven years at SmartCraft. I will join another software company in Norway that does not compete with SmartCraft. I will join as CEO. Why and when should you leave a company like SmartCraft? I think SmartCraft is one of the best software companies in Norway and one of the best software companies in Europe. When I joined, we were just over 30 people. Today, we are 270 people. We have IPOed.
We have gone from Norway to now being represented in four countries. We have an international leadership team. I think we have a fantastic team in place with the whole group. We have a strong leadership team with a lot of trust, and they work really well together. We have some fantastic solutions, and we are in a market where our customers are in desperate need for good solutions to run their business, and we have those need-to-have solutions. We also built a great strategy. We got two new board members in place, and we also got a new leader of the board, chairman of the board. I think this is a fantastic time to leave because everything is good. I mean, the company is really running. We have never been in better shape.
The market is challenging, but we are in a very good position to execute going forward. The board is already looking to find a successor. That's going to take a bit of time. In the meantime, I will stay on, and it will be full speed ahead. Rest assured, the company is super motivated. The strategy is great. I'm still a big investor, so it is in my best interest that SmartCraft goes well as well. With that, let's open up for Q&A.
Very good. Thanks a lot for that transition. How are you planning to work with SmartCraft Spark? Will you migrate current customers to SmartCraft Spark, or is it mainly for new customers?
It's a great question. First of all, SmartCraft Spark has been addressing new customers to see how they can utilize the solution because we have great solutions that already work with existing customers. Going into the Swedish market, we have a very strong and solid base of existing customers, but they use different tools. They will hopefully really have a great motivation to start using SmartCraft. That will be an upsell opportunity. In Sweden, we will typically go after new customers. In Norway, we will most likely go after—sorry, Sweden will do both new customers and existing. In Norway, it will probably be more new customers in the short term.
On the sales there, there's a question here. Will you sell through partners? What kind of partners will you, in that case, partner with?
We do not really have a partner strategy as such today, simply because we want our solutions to be very affordable for our customers so that it provides them a great return on investment. Having a partner in between, then we give away quite a lot of that. It makes the solution more expensive. We do partner with some franchise companies, like Kjartan mentioned, where they have a set of maybe 100 member companies, and we will then provide a good solution and a good price for those member companies. That is one way we partner. Other than that, we do not really have a partnership as such.
Thanks. There's one more question on SmartCraft Spark. How many of your current customers are potential SmartCraft Spark customers? Do you have any sort of overview of that?
I would say roughly a third, roughly. Maybe slightly higher than a third of the customers.
All right. There is one question on the info you gave about ARR growth and the drivers for that in the chart that you showed. On the downgrades, is there anything you can do to offset the downgrades, or is this entirely due to market and hard to sort of influence for you?
I think there are two main factors, like Kjartan just said. There's the people that you have less people. That's one factor. Basically, if you lay off people, then it's difficult to do anything about that. The second one, or actually there are three factors. The second one is number of projects. How many projects do you have? If you have less projects, then obviously you want to downscale. The third one is functionality. The third one is maybe something possible to do something about, where the customer says, "Look, I need a little bit less functionality than I have before." In general, it's a little bit challenging when customers are, some of them are on the brink of bankruptcy to uphold their solution if they need to downscale. I don't know if you have anything.
No.
No.
Good. A couple of more questions. Meanwhile, just a reminder, please submit questions to the webcast player if you have any. How do you consider M&A opportunities in the current market, and will you prioritize M&A during this year?
Definitely, we do prioritize M&A. It's important for us. It is still a bit high prices, as we have talked about before, for decent companies. There are more companies that are facing challenges and need funding, but they are maybe a little bit out of scope for what we're looking for because we don't want to buy turnaround cases or companies with high risk. We are, as we said, we are in dialogue with several companies. That hasn't changed a lot over the last year, I would say. It's still a fairly stable M&A market.
Thanks a lot. Final question for now. You gave an update on new sales. Kind of linked to that, do you have any update on the competitive situation?
From what we hear and perceive, I think the competitive situation is quite the same. I've mentioned this before, that in a tough market, it's good to have a good financial backbone like we do so we can continue to be visible in the market and so on. I think the smaller players without that financial backbone and solidity struggle and sort of have to cut back on several things. We don't want to do that. We want to be in a strong position to continue growing and also to be in an even better position when the market turns better. I think there are some bigger players, but I think everyone is facing more or less the same. There's quite a lot of headwind, but competition in general is quite stable, I would say.
Perfect. There are no more questions from the webcast now, so I'll hand it back to you, Gustav and Kjartan.
Great. Thank you very much for joining in. I think as we talk about, I think the company is in good shape. There is a great demand in the market. We have excellent solutions. Things will turn better. Things will. We will start to get wind in our sails instead of headwind. We will be in a great position to pick up speed, which we will. Thank you very much.