Welcome to the Upsales Technology Audiocast Teleconference Q4 2021. For the first part of the call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a Q&A session. Please note that this call is being recorded. Today, I am pleased to present Daniel Wikberg, CEO, and Elin Lundström, CFO. Please begin your meeting.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today for the Q4 of 2021 for Upsales. I will start by doing a short company presentation and talk about what's driving our growth and what we are doing in the future.
Elin will then cover some of the financial highlights from the Q4 report. Let's move to slide number two. Upsales is a software company, a software as a service company. Our mission is to help the fastest-growing B2B companies find new opportunities and win more deals and grow their existing accounts.
We do this by providing a sales and marketing platform for our customers, which is sold as a SaaS service, as a subscription service. More than 90% of the Upsales revenue is recurring subscription revenue. The company has been around since 2003, with our head office in Stockholm, in Sweden. We are currently working with slightly over 1,800 customers in a total of 11 countries. We are a team of 73 employees. Let's move to slide number 3.
What we have seen during the last few years is that by focusing on increasing customer satisfaction and making sure that our customers get maximum value from our products, we see that this increased customer satisfaction is starting to create a really strong momentum for the growth in Upsales. All of this started with a new strategy we adopted in 2019 where we focused on three core areas.
So, The first one was improve scalability in our product. The second one was to change our pricing to a more land and expand model enabling customers to get started more quickly and remove the thresholds for becoming a customer.
The third part was to increase the effectiveness and scalability of our selling process, enabling us to hire more people to the sales team and also making it easier for our customers to get more value from the product in a shorter period of time. Let's go through these three in more depth. The first one, if we move to slide number 4, is improving the scalability and then also the quality of our product. What we have done during the last few years is to try to remove all the customizations that we used to do for customers on a case-by-case basis.
We looked at all the stuff that we needed to solve for our customers, all the problems they had, and we built standardized off-the-shelf solution to these problems, but without sacrificing flexibility. We have a very good model with. It's a plug-and-play model, but the features are very dynamic and flexible, so the customers are still able to get exactly the solution they want, without having to pay for a consulting project or to wait for a complex implementation.
The second part, if we move to slide number five, is our land and expand pricing. Upsales used to have a bundled pricing, which is very common in our industry.
We decided to remove all these bundles and make it easier for our customers to buy and to grow with us. Today we have a per-seat pricing, where our customers pay us a per-month, per-user fee for the basic package. We took all the more advanced features, which used to be part of our bundles, and turned them into individual add-ons, which makes it a lot more flexible for our customers, and they can choose exactly what they want.
We don't have to force them into a bigger package with stuff that they don't need. The final part is our selling process, if we move to slide six.
What we wanted to do here was also make it easier and more scalable to sell the Upsales solution, but also to buy the Upsales solution. We have put a lot of time and effort into creating a world-class selling process, which also makes it a lot easier to onboard new team members and get them up to speed. An important part of this, especially since Upsales is a profitable company.
We wanted to continue to grow with profitability. There's not as much room for error as it might have been if we would have raised external capital. An important part of our culture and everything we do is to learn fast from our mistakes. We experiment a lot.
We try new things and new ways to reach new customers. We are very good at learning fast from our mistakes. We are able to accelerate growth, but continue to be a cash flow generating company. I want to talk a little bit about our U.K. expansion, if we move to slide number seven.
For some time now, Upsales has been working with an expansion to the U.K. market. It's a very exciting opportunity. The U.K. market is estimated to be worth SEK 24 billion, which is roughly 10 times the Swedish market. It's still very early stage, but we closed a number of deals in the U.K. every quarter.
What we're doing with the product also is that we try to identify the specific needs that exist in the U.K. market and tailor the product. It has the right integrations, the right data sources, and the right feature sets that's specifically asked for by U.K. companies. We are getting really good feedback from the customers we're working with. It's a very exciting part of our growth plan. Something we expect to be more significant as we go forward. All right. I also wanted to talk about the importance of the Rule of 40 or E40.
If you haven't heard of this, E40 is a very important KPI for SaaS companies or software companies in general. It's used to understand how a company balances growth versus profitability. At Upsales, we define E 40 as the annual ARR growth rate and the annual free cash flow margin. If you add these two together, you get a number, and if it's about 40, you're running an effective company.
I think there's basically 2 ways of building a software company, if we move to slide number 9. The last few years, it's been increasingly popular to raise a lot of money and raise easy money and try to grow as fast as you can by burning a lot of cash.
Upsales has adopted another strategy, which focuses on scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness, where we want to have a high E40. We wanna grow fast, but we wanna grow fast with profitability. We see since we started working with our new strategy, if we move to slide number 10, that our E40 is steadily improving. Three years ago, our E40 was slightly under 30, and now we are at 60. I think that the main drivers of an increasing E40 is product quality. We also have something that's called Diamond Level Support, which is a way of measuring customer service.
As I talked about earlier, our best-in-class sales effectiveness, where we learn fast from our mistakes, we don't spend money, you know, years before we realize that something's not working. If you do all this, you will end up with a very effective company. One result of the increased customer satisfaction is lower churn. We have seen in our operational KPIs a steady increase in customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score and so on. However, churn is kind of a lagging KPI.
Once you start, you know, solving the problems or the issues that result in churn, it will take a while before it end up in your actual numbers, in your actual financials due to contracts, contract periods and so on. What we see especially from the Q2 and going forward is that we are starting to see a significantly lower churn than what we have had in the past.
That makes it also easier to grow faster. We expect to see a further acceleration of our growth during 2022. Before I hand over to Elin, I wanted to finish with just some exciting stuff we're doing in the product.
If we go to slide number 13, we're doing a lot of stuff related to Account Growth. It's been an increasingly popular feature or popular area when we talk to our customers. We just released this feature which helps customer to visualize which companies bought product A but not product B.
It's a very effective way of identifying upsell opportunities. On the same theme, if we go to slide number 14, we are building a very exciting feature where we use our customers' data, and our customers are able to combine that with third party demographic data as well as data from their accounting software to use a data-driven approach to identify which other companies that buys or pays us X amount of money today, but based on their demographic data, should be paying us more.
So these are two features which are very exciting and yeah, it's a small snapshot of everything we're doing in the product team. With that said, I would like to hand over to Elin for some of the financials.
Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. Let's continue to slide number 16. Our annual recurring revenue grew by 29.4%, compared to the Q4 of 2020. The ARR, as of the end of the year, was SEK 111.8 million compared to SEK 86.4 million during the same period in 2020.
The quarter-over-quarter growth in terms of ARR was 7.9%. Our net sales increased by 34% to SEK 26.9 million. Let's continue to slide number 17. As you know, our ARR grows with new clients and with expansion, and it's also reduced by churn and contraction.
Going forward, as Daniel mentioned, we see that we have lower churn and also lower contraction, which supports our future ARR growth. This is what I'm trying to highlight with this figure in the slide, that a lower churn will lead to a growth acceleration in itself, everything else being the same.
This is why we're very happy that we have decreased our churn and that we can see a positive trend going forward, as lower churn will help us to boost our growth acceleration. Let's continue to slide number 18, looking at profitability. In terms of EBITDA, we had SEK 4.9 million compared to SEK 4.5 million in Q4 2020.
The EBITDA margin was 18.1% compared to 22.2% during the same period last year. EBIT for the period was SEK 3.3 million, and we had a net income of SEK 2.5 million. Let's continue to slide number 19, looking at cash flow. As I've mentioned previously, we have some seasonality in our cash flow with a large proportion of our contracts being renewed during Q4 and Q1.
During this Q4 , we had an operating cash flow of SEK 18.4 million compared to SEK 10 million during the same period in 2020. The total cash flow was SEK 13.7 million compared to SEK 8.4 million in 2020.
We're very happy that we've continued to grow without any debt and with positive cash flow during 2021. The net cash as of the end of the year was SEK 66.4 million compared to SEK 35.4 million at the end of 2020. That was the financial highlights. Let's continue to slide number 20 and the Q&A section.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press 0 and 1 on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing 0 and 2 to cancel. There will be a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question is from Rikard Engberg of Erik Penser Bank. The line is now open.
Good morning, and congratulations to great numbers.
Thank you. Good morning.
My first question is regarding the annual recurring revenue growth. Can you please dissect that a bit? Is there a certain component that looks, well, really good this year? For example, increased ARPU, or is it an even mix?
One aspect of our land and expand model is that we sort of postpone part of the deal size. We close slightly smaller deals with new customers in the beginning, and then the customer grows over time. This also shows in our if you dissect the growth. We're moving from previously around 50/50 from existing compared to new customers with slightly more from existing customers. I don't have the exact number, but it's more towards 60/40 than 50/50 as it used to be.
Okay, good. Fair enough. My next question is regarding cash flow for the full year. Looking at the statements, I see that the accounts payable increase quite a lot compared to sales. Can you please dissect this a bit?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Well, it's regarding the cash flow. Can you please discuss the working capital management a bit? Since we see an increase in quite significant position in short-term liabilities.
Yeah. I would say there's nothing specific or material that's changed from previous quarters. Although, I mean, we always have a quite high level of working capital because of deferred revenue. As we bill our customers on a 12-month basis. All our customers pay us their annual fee upfront, which always creates like a large portion of working capital because of deferred revenue. Did that answer the question?
Yeah. That was all for me.
If there are no further questions, I can thank you.
All right. Thanks again for joining the call today, and we hope to see you next time. Have a good day.
This now concludes our conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.