Hi, and welcome to this financial update for Vertiseit. Today, we have disclosed our quarterly report for the first quarter of 2024. And due to today's Capital Markets Day, well, this is a recording, and there will be no Q&A session by the end. But as always, you're always welcome to contact me or Johan and get your questions answered. So I'm Jonas Lagerqvist. I'm CFO for Vertiseit, and with me I have?
Johan Lind, founder and CEO of Vertiseit.
So today, we have disclosed the quarterly report for the first quarter, and on this financial update, we will go through the quarterly highlights of Q1. We will go through the priorities for the year that we are in, for 2024. And we will also elaborate on Vertiseit's new long-term goals, which were disclosed last night, and will also be presented more in depth on today's Capital Markets Day. So, please, Johan.
Yeah, so we continue to grow in a really steady pace towards our goal. The goal that are already in places that we aimed for SEK 200 million ARR by the end of the year. The report now in Q1, year-over-year we grow our ARR with 18%, and if you look at the pace of growth in Q1, annualized, we actually grow at the pace of 19% in Q1, so really steady and strong result for a Q1. So, really happy about the progress and the growth that we have in the market, even in, like, a tougher climate than what it has been before.
Looking into some operational highlights, of course, now we have a completely different infrastructure in place when it comes to enabling scalability and global reach. We focus a lot of growth with sell-through partner, and definitely we have delivered on that in Q1. I think I mentioned some projects, especially like in the metro in Dubai, for example, which is a sell-through partner in this quarter. We also have another organization in place to ramp up the IXM Grid project, which the project now has a name. It's the Unified Backend Initiative that we now focus a lot of our efforts into, and we will elaborate on the strategies during the day in the capital markets session.
Yesterday evening, we also launched new long-term goals for the period from next year and onwards, and we will have a sneak peek on the goals later in this presentation.
So during the quarter, we had an ARR growth of 4.4%, which annualized is a growth rate of 19%, which we are quite satisfied with, and is well within what it takes for us to reach our long-term goals. We continued to increase our profitability, which in during the quarter reached 25% on EBITDA level. And if we look at the last 12 months, it amounts to 14%, meaning that we keep increasing our profitability.
This leads to that we also have an improved cash flow, which have made it possible for us to lower our debt during the quarter. So we go from SEK 116 million in net debt to SEK 94 million, meaning that we're on a leverage level of 1.3. One of our financial targets is the Net Revenue Retention, which basically means that reflects our capacity and ability to grow on existing customers. And there we had a Net Revenue Retention of 103% during the quarter. And looking at that, it's for the last twelve months the level was 109%, which we are also satisfied with.
Looking into the SaaS metrics, the growth was slightly lower than last quarter, 4.4% in the quarter, compared to 5.5% in the last quarter of 2023. But still on good levels. We're keeping the net revenue retention on a stable level, and increasing the average revenue per brand, meaning that the customers that we churn are smaller customers, and we grow on our larger customers, which is also in line with our strategy of improving scalability and global reach. And a slightly higher churn during the quarter, which is like a normal variation.
Looking at it on a 12-month perspective, we're still on very low churn levels and are comfortable with that.
Okay, so looking into priorities for the year: so from an operational perspective, we really focus now on strengthening our partner network, and we focus a lot on North America, where we do initiatives to fuel growth on existing partners and help them expand and land new brands. We want to expand on existing brands and expand them into new market. We see a huge opportunity when we map our existing customers and see, like, what brand potential there is, growing concept from market to market, even though they don't have a global concept yet, which is really a few that actually have.
We focus now on the joint backend initiative, IXM Grid, to improve development synergies within the group between Grassfish and Dise, and we see really nice progress there. As I said, the organization is now in place to ramp up. The financial priorities, Jonas?
Yes, there is a clear focus on keeping improving both profitability and cash flow. Now that with the one ERP in place, we also focus on optimizing internal processes and making all operations scalable and effective. So moving into new goals for 2025-2032, Johan.
Yeah. So first of all, the existing long-term goals will remain in force for the rest of the year. And then we have spent some time now looking into the next goal period, and a lot of the initiatives that we take is really long term. But I will guide you through a little bit on the background to why we ended up with the goals that we actually press released yesterday and will dive into during the Capital Markets Day today. So the market opportunity is huge. Basically, every retail space is a potential customer for In-store Experience Management. But that is, like, too hard to grasp, especially it's a really immature market.
But what we can see is that the top 50 brands in our 5 strongest segments operate 1.5 million stores altogether. With 10 licenses per store, it means a core addressable market, like a tip of the iceberg, of 50 million licenses. And with today, 150,000 licenses, it means that we only have 1% of the core addressable market. This has of course served as a foundation when we look at, like, the potential for In-store Experience Management, also the potential for Vertiseit and where we want to be in the future. And our ambition is clear: we want to be the global number one IXM platform company.
We think that we can go from 1% of the core addressable market to 5% in, like, an 8-year period, which will lead to an ARR of SEK 1 billion by the end of 2032. So that's the main long-term goal, and we will continue to invest a lot in both product, in acquisitions, and in growing our organization. But yet, we will improve our profitability in a good pace, and the goal is to reach 35% profitability. We have slightly also changed from measure it purely on EBITDA to measure it on EBITDA minus CapEx, meaning that we will not deduct the investments we do in our products.
Then we have financial targets, which will be the targets that we will follow on the way to, towards long-term goals, and maybe you can elaborate on them, Jonas.
Yeah. So, during the period, we shall have growth in ARR exceeding 20%, and this also includes acquisitions. Profitability-wise, our financial target is to always increase the profit per share by at least 25% year-over-year during the period. And the profit here is also measured as EBITDA minus CapEx to make it a really relevant and as close to cash flow as we can. And we also keep our current revenue retention goal to always be above 100% when it comes to keep growing on existing customers.
So by this, we will now go into the Capital Markets Day and elaborate a little bit more on these targets. The day will be recorded and made available on our website. After this, we look forward to meeting many of our shareholders on our annual general meeting, which will be held in Varberg on the 2nd of May. And after that, I would say that it's the Q2 report, which will be the next possibility to meet in this forum. Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you so much. Bye-bye.