Hi everyone, and very welcome to this investor earnings call from Vertiseit. We've just released our Q3 interim report for 2024. My name is Jonas Lagerqvist. I'm Deputy CEO and CFO.
My name is Johan Lind. I'm CEO of Vertiseit.
Welcome. Today we released our interim report for the third quarter, and we'll elaborate on this as well as a couple of other topics. During the call, you can ask questions in the Q&A function in the video conference, and you can also use the Raise Hand function if you wish to speak, and you will be let in during the Q&A session at the end of the call. During this call, we will look into the financials found in the Q3 report. We will also elaborate on some business highlights during the quarter, and we will also go into a little bit more into detail on the Visual Art acquisition that was performed after the end of the third quarter on the 2nd of October.
In today's announcement with the report, we can reveal that we now have reached an ARR of SEK 187 million in the Vertiseit Group, which is an organic growth of 21% compared to last year. And when including Visual Art, we are now well above SEK 250 million in ARR, meaning that we have ticked off our current long-term goal of an ARR exceeding SEK 200 million by the end of 2024, for which we are both proud and happy. And during the quarter, we had a 21% organic ARR growth in terms of fixed index currencies. Net revenue was down 15%, which was fully attributable to lower system sales during the quarter, which is in line with our strategy to expand our collaborations with partners when it comes to hardware sales.
Despite this, we did perform the most profitable quarter in the company's history, both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of margins. We have an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 23 million, meaning an EBITDA margin of 28%. For those of you who have followed our new long-term goals, which starts in 2025, we will be expressing our measuring our profitability as cash EBITDA, which for this quarter came in on a margin of 22%. By the end of the quarter, we did repay all our financial external debt, meaning that we were cash positive, negative net debt, but we had somewhat less available liquidity than last year, but also no external debt. During the quarter, we had a strong annualized growth and a churn level, which was very much under control on a low level.
Our SaaS metrics are pretty much in line with previous quarters and in line with our own expectations. We had a low churn during Q3 and a growth of just over 20%, a gross growth of just over 23%. Net revenue retention is on 111% on an annualized basis, which is well above our financial target of 100%, and we keep increasing the average revenue per brand, which is also in line with our strategy to focus on larger customers with more growth potential.
Thanks, Jonas. So we will also look into some highlights. And as Jonas described, we have a net revenue retention which exceeded 111 percentage points, meaning that the majority of our growth is actually expanding on existing brands, especially the top-tier brands. And I write in the comments, the CEO comments, that we have our normal strong contributors like our large automotive brands, of course, is a big contributor to our growth, grocery, and also the QSR segment. But I also want to highlight some new wins and also in areas and in solutions where we see a big demand. And one big trend now is retail media, where we have been selected by a Co-op in the U.K. They actually plan to build the largest retail media grocery network in the U.K.
They operate 2,400 stores, and the initial rollout is 300 touchpoints, which will be run on the Grassfish platform with the DOOH capabilities, and the retail media is very much a blend of traditional digital out-of-home and in-store experience, which is our core, but it's also how you actually sell ads primarily to suppliers, which will fund the rollout of the network, and this is a trend where a lot of money is heading because a lot of brands want to be seen and have the opportunity to communicate with customers at the point of purchase where they can interact with their product, basically. Looking into DXTA in Dubai, our partner that we communicated a year ago, they have now done a big project together with a company within the group, Hypermedia. They roll out a huge digital out-of-home network in Dubai.
Together with their digital in-store initiatives, their retail media initiatives, their DOOH initiatives, they have now reached over 1,000 licenses in one year, and their growth rate is really taking off. It's very interesting to see how in a new market within such a short notice can grow a significant footprint, which is not like in the Nordics or in the DACH region where we are particularly strong. Of course, the highlight happened just two days post the closing of the Q3, and that was the acquisition of Visual Art. Just a brief intro to the company. They add approximately SEK 75 million in ARR. They have a revenue of SEK 348 million, meaning that they have a larger component of both consulting, creative studio, but also the systems component. They have 120 employees.
But one of their successes has been a really clear focus on some core segments. So we can see QSR, where they operate digital menu boards drive-thru for McDonald's, for example, in many markets in Europe. They do all of the ICA formats. They run 7-Eleven on, I think, three different continents and Circle K also in a lot of markets and so on. Subway is a European framework agreement where they also have rollouts that cover a lot of markets. So from a customer perspective, it's really complementary to what we have. And then it comes, okay, what is the positioning? What is the offering? Will you go after the same customers' type of questions? And the strategy as of now is that we should push Visual Art even further into the direction of being the best digital in-store concept creator.
So it has always been their core, and that's why they have been really successful in the competition. Grassfish have then the opportunity to step to take a clear focus on the IXM platform together with consulting expertise and Dise focus on the pure platform play, basically. And as we have communicated before, what we do now is also that we ramp up IXM Grid. So a lot of our development resources go into building a unified platform to support the three companies. If you look at the investment rationale, one key driver is, of course, to accelerate our growth. It's a strong brand, a really professional, high-performance team, which has had historic growth that has been way above 20%. They add top-tier customers with global growth potential. I think that was obvious when we looked through their customer list just now.
It strengthens our position in new key segments, you can say. Segments where we have been a little bit weaker in convenience and in QSR now become strengths instead. That's really important. It also adds international presence in key markets, both through their own presence, but also through partners. They have partners in Asia, Australia that we see are important for really having global coverage and expanding our footprint. Their technology also strengthens our SaaS offering. They actually got a software award this year because they have just done a greenfield approach and rebuilt their whole tech stack on Azure in microservice-based architecture. That's exactly the same foundation as we are building in Grid.
So it will reduce the time to market for IXM Grid, as we will take a lot of what has been built in Visual Art and bring that into the Grid project.
Visual Art was valued in this transaction at SEK 457 million, which is around 6x ARR. And it's a premium price for a premium acquisition that actually has a really strong momentum and will add significant growth potential, significant customers, and so on, and a very strong organization to Vertiseit. In connection with the transaction, we made a directed share issue to one of our shareholders, Bonnier Capital, who played an important part in this transaction. And so after this, Bonnier Capital will actually be the largest shareholder in Vertiseit in terms of capital, which we are very happy to welcome them to being a major shareholder.
And also Bonnier Capital's CEO, Carl Backman, who has now joined the board. We are also very happy that former owners of Visual Art choose to reinvest a large portion of the purchase price. So that was made through a directed share issue to some of the sellers of Visual Art, amounting to SEK 50 million. And together with this, one part of the purchase price was paid through issuing one million warrants to the sellers, which have a duration of three years and a strike price of SEK 65.
Valued at SEK 7 million.
Yeah.
Yeah. And the remaining part of the purchase price was financed through a bank loan with Vertiseit's main bank, Nordea. So okay, now we go into the Q&A session. So please raise your hand if you wish to speak. Otherwise, you can post questions in the Q&A function. And okay, so I will read here. Regarding Co-op's rollout of 300 touchpoints, how many stores are addressed? And what do you think about the number of touchpoints per location in retail media long-term?
Yeah, so basically, this first rollout is in prime locations. So it's their best locations, basically, on storefronts. But what we see in Sweden, for example, is that retail media is so much incorporated into the digital in-store concept. So we don't see a future where that's the foundation for digital in-store, but it's an important ingredient. So it can play a more important role in the shop window or when you exit the store, but then it also needs to be very well thought out how it should be incorporated and relevant in the customer experience in every part of the customer journey, basically. So I see in a normal grocery store, there might be like 15 touchpoints in the future in most concepts. And that will be, of course, a combination of the digital in-store communication for the brand itself.
In some of those touchpoints, there will be large ingredients, large portion of retail media.
We have Redeye analyst, Fredrik Nilsson, who wished to join the call. Hi, Fredrik.
Good morning, Jonas and Johan. Could you give us some color on the new partners in the U.S.?
Actually, we have decided for this quarter not to do so as we are really early stage. And we don't have any actual licenses or rollouts. We want that to materialize a little bit further before we communicate that to the market.
Okay, I see. Then I want to continue a bit on the questions you just answered about retail media. And if you could elaborate a bit on your offering and also the offering coming in with Visual Art joining.
Yeah, so retail media is a huge trend where a lot of FMCG brands, fast-moving consumer goods brands are willing or want to invest in as close to the actual transaction as they can. And obviously, the vast majority of those money goes into marketplaces, goes into online platforms. But we see now a trend where there's also demand in the physical space as the capabilities of digital in-store become better and better. And the approach from Dise is that it's just an open architecture, open APIs to integrate booking platforms to Dise. So Dise can carry it out, but they don't do anything more in Grassfish. We have both capabilities to connect to SSPs, which is actually where they bid for those audiences. There's also a module in the platform to handle retail media sales.
And especially when it comes to retail media, the vast majority of the sales is for their current suppliers. So they need a tool for that. And when it comes to Visual Art, as many of you might know, they actually sold their digital out-of-home business to Ocean Outdoor many years ago. But it means that there is a lot of know-how within the organization of Visual Art. So that also means that they can be consultants and expertise and assist retail brands in putting out the best strategy to capitalize on this opportunity.
Okay, great. And lastly, what is driving the 12% increase in growth in average revenue per license in the quarter?
Mainly, it is that we actually keep growing on our larger brands, which we focus on. And the shared licenses and the shared MRR during the quarter is concentrated on smaller customers. That is the main driver, I would say.
So the biggest growth on the largest brands also means that it has been direct customers in the quarter, especially in automotive, where average price per license, when it's a direct sale, it's so much higher than, for example, if we resell a license through Dise.
Okay, great. That's all for me. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you, Fredrik. So a question which is related to the split in the ARR growth between price increases, more modules, and volume. And here we can say that it is volume, which is the absolute major driver here in the growth during the quarter. Okay, Johan, in the CEO letter, you are confident to sustain current organic growth going forward. Does that include Visual Art as well?
The quick answer is yes, as Visual Art was in a really strong momentum. And we see no signs of that slowing in. And we see a really stable demand in both Dise and Grassfish. So we see no signs of slowing in.
There are some questions regarding ARR development in Visual Art. As you can see, the number SEK 75 million, which is stated in our reports and in our presentation, is the ARR as of Q2, meaning that we have not yet presented any numbers for Q3 from Visual Art. This is because in the integration work, we now work with actually going through all the agreements, all the contracts, and verifying all the SaaS revenue so that we can be certain which can be qualified and included in the ARR going forward. That will be communicated in the Q4 report.
Yeah. And for those of you who don't know the split here, for example, in the Vertiseit reporting, we want to be 100% sure that what's included in the ARR is pure SaaS license and support. And it should not be consultancy services, even if that is recurring. And one thing that we actually do in every acquisition is that we go through all the contracts and see if there is anything that should be put in the consulting retainer category instead of SaaS so that we keep a very, very high standard on our ARR. So if there is deviation on the 75%, it should be on the upside. That's the only thing we can state right now.
Complementary to that, there can be a difference between SaaS growth and ARR growth. It is directly connected to the fact that we are very strict when it comes to what revenues that we actually do include in our ARR. We constantly go through, especially the acquired contracts and acquired SaaS revenue, to qualify what can actually be included in the ARR. A follow-up question on the U.S. market, even though you do not reveal any details on the U.S. partners, can you elaborate on your plans for expanding on the U.S. market?
Yeah, so that's actually work that is on the table right now as we are in the budget process for next year. And what we can say is that there will be more investments into the market with we just now are in the discussions like we know now Visual Art has a presence in Chicago. We had plans to establish a presence ourselves with Grassfish. And now we have a really nice traction with Dise, where we also need some sort of partner support. So we are just in the decision phase on priorities so that we don't run into many parallel streams here when we step into the market.
One question that net revenue decreased for the quarter, which was attributable to lower systems revenue. What can be expected going forward from this revenue segment?
From systems.
Systems, yeah.
System size was lower. Yeah, and it's basically in line with our strategy that we want to have a bigger and bigger and bigger portion of SaaS revenue. And that comes from working more with partners that actually carry out a lot of the installations and act as full-service providers in many cases. And when it comes to Visual Art, we will apply more and more of the same strategy so that they work, especially in their international business, more together with partners side by side, where you have integration partners that take care of hardware. So we work hard to actually increase the share of SaaS revenue. And for those who have followed Vertiseit since we listed the company, knows that we had 25 percentage points when we listed the company. And now we are way above 50.
So it's the same recipe that we, of course, want to use for Visual Art.
The last question is, when can we expect a next acquisition?
Visual Art is a large, important acquisition for us, and we will make sure that we integrate that fully and properly when it comes to management system, ERP infrastructure, licensing management, but also IXM Grid and the underlying technology, but also the strategic offering, so there is a lot on our table right now to work with. If you look at historic numbers, we have more or less done one acquisition per year, and so I think that is the best guiding going forward, but we want to make sure that this one, the Visual Art, is taken care of before we put more acquisitions in the making.
Thanks. And that was it for this earnings call. We will return in this forum when it's time to disclose the Q4 report, which we're looking forward to, where Visual Art has been integrated and consolidated in the group for the whole fourth quarter. So please check in with us next time. And thank you very much for watching today.
Thank you.