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Admicom Oyj (market capitalization: €274.63M) reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2025, revealing a 7.8% increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR), bolstered by a 5% inorganic growth from its acquisition of Bauhub OÜ. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company is currently trading above its Fair Value, with a P/E ratio of 48.83x reflecting investor optimism about its growth prospects. The company maintained its adjusted EBITDA margin at 39.6%, while operating cash flow improved to €2.5 million from the previous year's €1.8 million. Admicom's stock rose by 2.84% in pre-market trading, reflecting investor optimism despite the revised full-year guidance indicating a cautious outlook.
Key Takeaways
- ARR grew by 7.8%, with significant contributions from Bauhub OÜ.
- Adjusted EBITDA margin sustained at 39.6%.
- Full-year guidance revised downward, citing market challenges.
- Stock price increased by 2.84% in pre-market trading.
- Continued focus on AI integration and international expansion.
Company Performance
Admicom's performance in Q3 2025 demonstrated resilience in a challenging market environment. The company's ARR growth of 7.8% was driven by both organic and inorganic factors, including the strategic acquisition of Bauhub OÜ. InvestingPro data reveals strong fundamentals with a gross profit margin of 48.88% and healthy cash flows that sufficiently cover interest payments. InvestingPro subscribers can access 5 additional key insights about Admicom's financial health. Despite a flat headcount, the company reorganized its sales team and simplified its administrative structure to enhance operational efficiency. The Finnish construction sector's negative growth posed challenges, yet Admicom managed to acquire over 70 new customers, strengthening its competitive position.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue growth: 5-8% (revised from 6-11%)
- Adjusted EBITDA: €3.7 million (39.6% margin)
- Operating cash flow: €2.5 million (up from €1.8 million YoY)
- ARR growth: 7.8% overall, including 5% from Bauhub OÜ
Outlook & Guidance
Admicom revised its full-year guidance, projecting ARR growth of 6-10%, down from the previous 8-14%. Revenue growth expectations were also adjusted to 5-8% from 6-11%. The company maintained its adjusted EBITDA margin guidance at 31-36% of revenue. Looking forward, Admicom is focusing on AI development and international expansion, particularly in Estonia and the Baltic markets. With an Altman Z-Score of 24.63 indicating strong financial health and minimal debt (Debt/Equity ratio of 0.01), the company appears well-positioned for its growth initiatives. Discover more detailed insights and valuation metrics with InvestingPro, including exclusive ProTips and comprehensive financial analysis. A Capital Market Day is scheduled for December 2nd to outline the strategic roadmap.
Executive Commentary
CEO Simo Leisti expressed confidence in the company's ability to navigate the tough market conditions, stating, "We want to be the first choice of partner in the European construction software ecosystem." CFO Satu Helamo acknowledged the challenges, remarking, "We are not immune to the market situation." These comments highlight Admicom's strategic focus on maintaining a competitive edge through innovation and expansion.
Risks and Challenges
- Negative growth in the Finnish construction sector.
- Increased insolvencies and aggressive pricing from competitors.
- Challenges in acquiring large new customers.
- Potential impacts from economic fluctuations and market saturation.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the recent billing model change affecting 400 customers and the impact of AI on product development. The company clarified that no significant mergers and acquisitions are expected in the near term, and emphasized the importance of AI in enhancing internal processes and product offerings.
Full transcript - Admicom Oyj (ADMCM) Q3 2025:
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Admicom's Q3 2025 interim report webcast. My name is Simo Leisti, and I'm here with Satu Helamo, our Chief Financial Officer. Let's jump into Q3 highlights. Key takeaways from Q3: we were able to deliver 7.8% ARR growth against our year comparison to last year. We will go through the growth metrics in more detail because we also had, in our previous year comparison, certain things like Bauhub OÜ ARR not reflected in Q3 numbers. We will give you more information about our profit warning that we issued yesterday evening regarding our annual recurring revenue and revenue guidance for the year. Our adjusted EBITDA was very well in line with our expectations.
We were able to deliver €3.7 million adjusted EBITDA, and this very much demonstrates the fact that we are now at the end of our, or we have done the investments that we have been planning in the beginning of the year, and now we were fairly satisfied with the ability to deliver in net euros more adjusted EBITDA profit than we did a year ago. It demonstrates that we are now starting to have the cost base in, and we're able to start to see, in a way, change in the profitability scenario. I also want to highlight that we had a very strong operating cash flow from our activities, so we were able to deliver €2.5 million operating cash compared to last year's €1.8 million.
Of course, a key indicator for us for the remaining of the year is the development of our core construction market, and unfortunately, many of the indicators are remaining very weak, and we will be covering that also in the call. We're also now focusing a lot on our operational activities and how to accelerate that so that, given the challenging market condition, we're focusing on the topics that we can influence ourselves in our operations. In Q3, also, Henna Kotilainen, our new Chief Strategy Officer, started in her role, and with the help of her coming on board, we are now preparing for Capital Market Day to be on the 2nd of December so that we can lay out our strategic next steps. There were a couple of key takeaways, but here's the agenda for today's call.
We will go through a few customer highlights, we will look into the situation of our strategy execution, and then Satu will shed more light into the Q3 financials, and also, of course, go through the input or the information regarding our updated financial outlook for the year. We will have time for Q&A. Let's go to the customer cases first and customer highlights. In Q3, we launched to the market a new portfolio-based pricing, incentivizing customers to use more of Admicom's software capabilities. We were able to close first deals with the help of the new pricing scheme, and we're now using this in terms of accelerating our cross-sell momentum.
Also, in the new customer acquisition, we were able to get more than 70 new customers, which we were fairly satisfied with, so that it demonstrates our ability to bring new customers from the market, even though the market conditions stay tough, and we're able to also protect our market share. During my time at Admicom in Q3, we saw most competitive replacements won in the market, meaning that we were replacing existing ERP vendors, either construction ERP vendors or generic financial ERP vendors with our solutions. This is, of course, important for us so that during the tough market, we're able to do competitive replacements and also improve our market position through that. During this time, we're focusing on improving our customer intimacy with the help of cross and upsell.
We were able to get a lot of new cross-sell deals, upsell deals, which, of course, is great for us, so we're able to grow our customers and customer accounts. Of course, that drives our average deal size a little bit lower. We were able to transact quite a large number of deals, but now, during this time, the average deal size is comparably quite low. I want to highlight that we have been launching a new Raksa Talk podcast series where we discuss the construction industry, and we highlight some of our customer success cases. In the recent one, we had Franklin Oy, one of our customers, explaining how they have been able to grow 50% of their business in this challenging market. I really encourage everyone to look into those customer testimonials and the Raksa Talk podcast.
It's a series of podcasts really explaining how the market is evolving and how our customers are getting the benefit from Admicom's partnership. Also, regarding the customer activities, we will be hosting on the 10th of February the Nordic Construction Forum, which will be the second annual construction forum where we bring together customers and construction ecosystem members to discuss the productivity of the construction industry and also to discuss the challenges and how to solve those challenges together and help everyone to build better. Let's go into the strategy execution highlights for Q3. First, I want to remind you of our vision. We want to be the first choice of partner in the European construction software ecosystem, and our mission is to help our customers to build better, and we do it together with our customers and with the different other stakeholders in the construction ecosystem.
We want to make our customers be more productive than their peers who are not using technology and software and data and AI in their construction business, and we want to do that by providing a comprehensive AI-enabled platform. We have been focusing a lot on superior customer experience, but also we're focusing on improving our employee experience so that all the Admicomians feel like they're doing a great job for the customers and they are happy to work for us. Of course, we want to extend our reach over the next years to be present in numerous markets, and today we're active in Finland and Estonia with our own entities and existing businesses, but we're doing sales activities across the border. Just reminding our mission and our current North Star.
Our strategy execution this year has been focusing on seven different execution streams that we feel like are the change roadmaps to us to create the ability to drive growth and to move towards the 100 million ARR goal that we have set for ourselves. Here I want to highlight a few topics that we have been recently accelerating that demonstrate our ability to execute in this current market situation. First, in the growth acceleration, during Q3, we did a lot of work in terms of activating our growth and sales teams to be more active towards the customers and have more customer meetings so that we are able to understand better the customer requirements and their needs and different opportunities. In September, we recorded the highest customer meeting activity level for the year.
We had more than 600 meetings during the month, and this is just one KPI that we're following to make sure that our customer activity level is at the right level. We're able to, through that, drive the pipeline development for the rest of the year and for next year as well. In the internationalization, we have been now focusing our activities to explore a little bit more deeply certain next market opportunities, and especially we have been now looking into the Estonian and Baltic markets where we are now planning our next steps in terms of increasing our customer base and also to enable cross-sell for other products.
In our unified platform experience, we have been accelerating the cross-functional capabilities of our platform, meaning how do we create more user-friendliness in terms of using multiple products so that the navigation between the product functionalities is more seamless and the customers have a good customer experience from using multiple products. We have been launching in certain products a common header navigation bar to help in the navigation of the different products, and we are now finalizing and pushing forward our single sign-on and Admicom identity to enable one single Admicom identity to be used in all of our products. We have many other activities in the cross-functional capabilities that we're pushing now forward in Q4 as well. In our target operating model, we're now finalizing our Finnish subsidiary mergers, and during this year, we will merge all of our existing subsidiaries in Finland under Admicom Finland Oy.
This helps us to simplify our operating model and our administrative structure, and this is, in a way, giving us a good baseline to also turn that into a positive customer experience so that the entities that the customers are interacting with, contracting with, and getting invoices from is consolidated into one entity. In our equity story, we have been now starting the planning of the Capital Market Day, which we will be discussing a little bit more later in the call. We have been doing a lot of work around the people and the culture, so we have been launching our common Admicom role framework that helps us to really understand what skills and capabilities and what roles do we need to be successful now and in the future.
We have been working on doing different kinds of skills assessments and development plans and roadmaps for our people to make sure that we are building the right talent for our future success. When we are now merging the different subsidiaries in Finland, we are merging the different business units that we had before into one Admicom platform play. We do have a lot of work around the culture and creating more one Admicom culture and also the ways of working to support the one Admicom future. Accounting service is an important element of our business, so we are serving customers with the accounting and payroll services, and with the help of new leadership in accounting service, we have now multiple different automation initiatives, development initiatives, and we're turning our accounting service into a more customer-centric delivery model where we have already first signs of improved customer experience.
We are aiming towards creating even more value-adding service from the accounting service complementing our technology portfolio. Across Admicom, we have a lot of acceleration in our operation, acceleration in our strategic execution, and we will be focusing on this and also giving more concrete, in a way, roadmaps for the different areas of our business in the upcoming CMD as well. With all the work that we have been doing, with all the customer activities, we, of course, get some financial results, and I'll hand it over to Satu, and I want to congratulate Satu because today is, I believe, your second anniversary at Admicom, so great to have you on board and over to you, Satu.
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Thank you. I guess it's true what they say that time flies when you're having fun. Indeed, I have been with Admicom now for two years. Before we dive deeper into our own results, let's have a quick view at the market. Since we last released our quarterly results in July, we have seen actually quite disappointing growth rates in the Finnish construction sector. While the growth rate statistics for early months of 2025 have slowly been updated upwards as the year has gone forward, the latest figures from summer are back to negative year-over-year growth rates. In September, the Confederation of Finnish Construction Industries published their latest economist view, and unfortunately, as the headline of the slide also says, the expectations for faster market recovery have been postponed.
Internally, we are monitoring both leading and lagging indicators, and I would say that although the direction of the leading indicators is right, the pace of improvement is very slow at the moment. The economists' forecast for 2026 total growth rate for the construction sector is 3.5%, and that's a really low number and much lower than we were anticipating and hoping for. On the positive side, good news is that Admicom's customers continue to grow faster than the market in general. This proves their flexibility in this environment. Obviously, as we have stated in all our quarterly releases throughout this downturn, we are not immune to the market situation, and especially the market impacts us through elevated churn numbers. There are a lot of insolvencies, bankruptcies in the customer base, and also, as Simo said, lower average deal sizes in sales.
Customers tend to prefer these add-on capabilities and smaller cross-sales types of deals. In the third quarter, we were especially happy with the profitability development. Adjusted EBITDA landed at 39.6%, which is only 1.8% points lower than our previous year in the third quarter. If we further eliminate the negative impact of the decision to ramp down the external software services development revenues, the gap to last year's Q3 is only 0.7 percentage points. In euros, we delivered higher EBITDA than in Q3 2024. This shows that the strategic investment period is now behind us, and we are extremely happy to start delivering on the promise to scale the profitability as we continue to grow. Also, the cash flow, very good this quarter, grew by over 20% compared to the previous year.
Obviously, the higher profitability contributed to cash flow, but on top of that, we had some positive development in the networking capital items, which also drove the good cash flow development. Our sales struggled a bit in the third quarter. Before summer holidays, we transitioned our salespeople into new roles according to the new organization, and unfortunately, when we returned from the holidays, the pipelines were not in as good shape as they could have been. Towards the end of the third quarter, we had improvement in the sales results. I would say that we are ready for the last quarter of this year, but if you consider the whole second half of 2025, the gap that was generated with the sort of unsatisfactory sales results in the third quarter is too high to bridge fully during the last quarter.
Last quarter, we announced the change in the Ultima European Accounting Billing model that we have started to execute on, and the plan is progressing according to the original timeline. We have issued first invoices for about 400 customers according to the new billing model in September, and this will now be recognized as revenue in October. They are not yet impacting our Q3 growth numbers. Maybe finally, what was a little bit unusual for the third quarter was the fact that we had quite high churn from different types of company transactions, meaning that we had, for example, mergers in our customer base, and these have now led to an increase in the rolling 12 months churn rate.
Going forward with some key figures, ARR growth in the third quarter, year over year, was 7.8%, but it's good to acknowledge that in Q3, this still contains 5% inorganic growth from Bauhub OÜ acquisition. We acquired Bauhub OÜ in December 2024, meaning that we calculated Bauhub OÜ ARR into our numbers at the end of 2024. The inorganic growth supports us still in this quarter, but when we come to the end of this year, the ARR growth will be purely organic. Last 12 months churn, 6.7% as said, a bit high, a bit high also compared to our own targets. Looking ahead to the next quarter, for example, in the third quarter, we also saw again some elevated insolvency-related terminations, and these will realize in churn in the last quarter. We are not expecting the churn KPI to dramatically improve for the full year of 2025.
Although the EBITDA was higher in euros compared to the previous year, in EBIT, we are still about 5 percentage points lower than last year. The reason is the accounting standards that we follow. As a reminder, we are not an IFRS company, so all the acquisitions we have made throughout the years, we are recognizing amortizations for the goodwill. The goodwill amortizations have increased for 2025 because of the Bauhub OÜ acquisition that we made in 2024. Additionally, an important thing to understand when analyzing our performance is the seasonality between the quarters. Here we have visible the two last quarters of this year, and they are different from two main perspectives. In the second quarter, we have issued the majority of the annual adjustment fees, and they explain the high revenue and also, of course, have an impact on the profitability in the second quarter.
In the third quarter, we also have some adjustment fees, but also the holiday season in Finland, which helps by reducing the personnel costs. If you compare revenue of Q3 against Q1, there's one topic that could be explained a bit. In the first quarter, we invoice the financial statements fees for our accounting services customers. Those contribute about €200,000 to €300,000 in the first quarter revenue, which is not in the revenue anymore in the other quarters. Q3 revenue looks like it's not growing against Q1, but if you eliminate the financial statements fees, which are also calculated in our ARR, we have growth against Q1 also. Maybe one final metric to highlight from this slide is the headcount. I think this is important because it also supports the fact that we are past the high investment period. Our headcount is basically flat against the previous quarter.
In ARR, the quarter-over-quarter growth was 2.8% in the third quarter, and in the third quarter, we did not have any negative impacts from the adjustment fees anymore in the growth rate number. When we look at the ARR bridge, you can see some elevation from previous quarters for upsell, and partially, this is due to the price increases that we have made for some of our products. The majority of the price increases are still coming in the last quarter. Downsell in the third quarter was a lot less than in the first two quarters of the year, and this was according to our expectations because we no longer do the contract updates for Ultima and accounting customers like we did previously, and that's because of the billing model change that we are currently executing.
If you look at the churn element of our ARR bridge, you can see that it's already above the previous year total. Q3 was the lowest of all the quarters so far this year, but especially Q1 churn was really high. If you remember, we had 70, so 70% more insolvencies in the first quarter compared to the previous year. We go forward with the agenda and talk a little bit about our last night's profit warning. Yesterday evening, after careful scenario analysis, after reviews over our forecast, we made a decision to issue the profit warning. We have stated in the CEO letter that we still see a possibility to meet the original growth guidance range minimum, but the top end of the original guidance is far out of reach at this point.
We believe that it was best for us to also update our own expectations for the market. The original guidance for ARR growth was 8 to 14%, and yesterday we updated ARR guidance to 6 to 10%. For revenue, the original guidance was 6 to 11%, and we updated the guidance to 5 to 8%. Adjusted EBITDA original guidance was 31 to 36% of revenue, and yesterday with the profit warning, we did not move the minimum of adjusted EBITDA, but we narrowed the range. The new guidance is 31 to 36% of revenue. There are two main reasons for the profit warning. Originally we estimated that the market recovery in Finland would start at a faster pace towards the end of the year, and the second half would be we would already be in a growth track.
As we have discussed, that has not happened, and that's the main reason for the guidance update. When we started to prepare for the Ultima and accounting billing model change, we also expected the market recovery to start benefiting us from the revenue-based model. Of course, when we transition or roll out the new model for our customers, we will still get a sort of like a one-off increase in ARR, but after that, the model itself will not start contributing positively to our revenue until the market starts growing faster and our customers' revenues start growing fast. Market-based reasons, obviously one of the key things, but secondly, we wanted to be open about the fact that during Q3, especially, we have had some slowness caused by the quite vast organizational and operating model changes that we introduced at Admicom in the first quarter.
This is temporary, but the gaps that have been sort of generated after summer, they are difficult to compensate this year. For that reason, we anticipated to have a small negative impact in our growth rate, but on the longer term, we are still very confident that the decisions that we made are good for our long-term performance. Finally, here's the sort of the same slide that you have viewed in our previous quarterly releases, but some of the financial guidance or outlook-related drivers have been updated to reflect the current guidance based on yesterday's profit warning. That concludes my session. Back to Simo and maybe some advertising related to the Capital Market Day next.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: Thank you, Satu. In order for us to have a more concrete roadmap for the upcoming years, as our strategic period is now ending this year, 2025, we will be hosting Capital Market Day on the 2nd of December in Helsinki. This will be a hybrid event with a live webcast and also a live event in Studio Eliel. There is a registration and invitation on our investor relations website, and we would be very happy to have you listening in to our concrete plans for next year's strategic roadmap and also our financial expectations for the upcoming years. As said, we are more than happy to have also a live audience in the room and have good networking during the event. Please register to the event, and we will then discuss more about the upcoming years and the strategic choices and plans moving forward.
This concludes our presentations for today, and I'm very happy to tell that we have a lot of questions now in the activity feed. Please do send questions if you have. We will be taking them from the activity feed, and I will start with some topics that have been asked many times. Of course, related to our guidance update, and we mentioned our own operational performance, there are questions related to the sales performance, and there are questions about what are the topics that we are not fully satisfied with and what have been the challenges there. I would say that, like Satu mentioned, we did quite a significant reorganization in our sales as well.
We basically split our sales force into two, so we have half of the sales force focusing on new customer acquisition, and half of the sales force is focusing on the customer success and account management of our existing customers. During that transition, many of our salespeople either inherited or got a completely new territory to work on. During that transition, we were not able to utilize the summertime to pick up on those new territories maybe as fast as we anticipated or hoped, and we had a fairly low activity level, especially in August after the summer holidays. This was a major point to our growth leader, Pekka Pulkkinen, and our sales leaders to ramp up the activity levels.
I was very happy to see that we had the highest level of activity in September that we have seen during the year, so that has really been now activated well. If I'm being a little bit more precise in what areas were mostly in challenge, we had some challenges, or first, let's say we had a very good performance in our small and medium-sized business new sales. We were able to acquire a lot of new customers, especially in the small and mid-sized customer segment. In our large customer segment, where we have the customers with a turnover or revenue of more than €5 million in their business, we were able to do a lot of those cross-sell activities. We were able to extend our portfolio use within those larger customers.
Where we did not see fully satisfactory results was in the large customer new customer sales, meaning the volume of the competitive replacements or the new deals in that segment were not fully satisfactory. We were not able to get the smaller customers to do the cross-sales as much as we anticipated for Q3. There was a question related to the competition, which I'm going to continue right after explaining the sales performance and the areas of maybe where we had good things and areas of improvement. Regarding the competition, we have seen a very high intensity in the competitive activities. We have a lot of competitors who are using pricing as a mechanism of accelerating their new customer acquisition.
We have not done any, let's say, overly aggressive pricing decisions in our new sales, but we are more relying on the value-based selling and delivering the value, delivering the broader portfolio to our customers compared to the competitors. We are seeing competitors being active, but like I said, we are also ramping up our own activity levels. During the tough market, of course, there is a competition of the new customers and also very, very aggressive pricing decisions. Related to the competitive replacements, it's actually quite a new sales area for us to go to the larger customers and start discussing about the financial ERP, about the overall construction ERP, and replacing existing systems. I was very happy to see that we were able to get multiple of those competitive wins through this activity to go for existing competitive installed bases.
There was a question related to who are we replacing in those. We are both replacing some of the existing construction ERPs that are available in the market. I could say namely EG, Udacom, and also Biodata, part of Aseve Group at the moment. We are also replacing existing generic financial ERPs, namely some customers are using ProCountor or they're using, for example, Lemonsoft. These are the typical competitive technologies or software that are being used for some of those customers, and we have been sharpening our messaging and our sales activities to be able to win market from some of those competitors. That was the question regarding the competition and the sales performance. Maybe I'll give this one, Satu, to you. There are a few questions that are related to our new billing model. What have the customers told us about that?
Do we have anything new to say about that, or what are our expectations regarding the impact for the next year? If you could just give us some insights to those two questions.
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Sure. If we start from the customer feedback, like in July, still very little feedback, I would say. One thing that we were very carefully monitoring is that will there be sort of like silent feedback in terms of terminations so that customers would have started to prepare for ERP change for January, for example, and we would have gotten a lot more terminations in September because there's this three-month notice period for the customers. Luckily, that did not happen. I think that solidifies our understanding that the customers are fairly, I would say, indifferent to the change. I guess that for some cases, the customers want to see sort of like customer-specific calculations, how it will impact their billing. When we are able to demonstrate it better, that proves also to the customers that this is a more stable way of invoicing them in the future.
I would say that the feedback, there is not that much feedback in general, and nothing sort of that would cause us to be cautious or worried about the change. Questions about the impacts. This is a difficult one, and one of the key items that we were analyzing late yesterday to see what kind of a range we should give for our ARR. We have 1,500 Ultima customers, and in the first batch, we rolled out the new model to 400 of them. We know how much the impact will be for October, but going forward, when we roll the new model to new customers in November, in December, and going forward month by month, we don't know exactly before we see the rolling revenue for the customers. I'm not comfortable giving any growth rate numbers.
We can assess when we come out with the Q4 results if we want to specify what was the impact for 2025 in total, but as of now, we are not disclosing the exact growth rates.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: There is also a specific question related to the billing change and the fourth quarter expectations. I think the same there applies; we do see that there is a positive contribution to our Q4 ARR growth, but we're not disclosing the exact numbers for that.
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Yes.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: All right. Regarding the end-of-year numbers and the guidance, there's a question that does this include some potential end-of-year M&A activity, or is this mostly now or fully organic one? At this stage, I can tell that these are based on fully organic numbers, no M&A impact expected. There's also questions related to Bauhub. There is an ARR growth in the Bauhub numbers, and the question is that how the integration has gone and where is the growth now coming from? Is it coming from the Estonian market, or is it coming also from Finland? I could answer the first question that the integration has gone very well, I would say. Both technically and culturally, we are able to work more seamlessly together with Bauhub.
We have done during Q3 the administrative integration, so from the group, we are now fully supporting the Bauhub business, and the Bauhub team can focus on delivering and developing the product. I think also we have been able to engage the Bauhub team more closely to our generic overall product development activities, and also some of the key members are contributing to other business initiatives. Maybe, Satu, do you have some few words about the Bauhub growth and how do you see that in a way evolving?
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Yes, so a majority of Bauhub ARR growth is still coming from Estonia. Although the Estonian market is in a fairly similar state as we are in Finland, they also had a very sort of disappointing Q2 numbers after an okay Q1. For us, ARR growth for Bauhub mainly coming from Estonia, and we would not disclose that as inorganic if we got it from Finland because that would be under our own legal entities also. The number that we disclose is the Estonian legal entity contributed ARR.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: Very good. Speaking of Estonia, there are questions regarding the international expansion, and there are questions related to Estonia versus, for example, Sweden and other Nordic countries. Why are we focusing on Estonia and also making a reference to the other Baltic countries instead of looking at the Nordics? The strategic rationale for looking at Estonia is that we have an existing entity there, we have an existing team, we have an existing customer base of hundreds of customers there. We want to start to leverage that on a greater scale, and we want to start bringing additional products to the market. The other Baltic countries have already been accessed by Bauhub OÜ even before the acquisition. We already have an existing customer base also, for example, in Latvia. Now we're making this very, I would say, very logical next step there.
Since we have the existing business there and we have the existing installed base, we want to start to use that for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. This does not take away our focus from, for example, the other Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway, or Denmark. For those markets, we continue our opportunity-by-opportunity market entry, and we are actively working on certain opportunities there to test our competitiveness in those markets to see how our product-market fit is working. In the CMD, we will be discussing more about our internationalization steps and also the preparation for more extensive international expansion. That was a good question from the audience. Maybe still a few questions related to Q4. There are a number of activities that we're mentioning, for example, to implement the billing change and different kinds of internal work.
Are we expecting some cost increases in Q4 because of some of these internal activities, or do we expect that this billing change will hinder our normal sales performance where we have more account managers assigned to help us with this one? I would say that I'm making the same remark as we did in the Q2 earnings call. We're now quite invested in, as you can see from the headcount number development from Q2 to Q3, and we're not expecting any major increases or cost increases in the remainder of the year. Of course, a lot of the internal resources are now focusing on delivering the billing change so that it will be implemented successfully and we get the benefits out of that.
It does take quite a lot of the resources, but this has been a resource allocation decision from us so that we want to make sure that internal resources are now supporting this to a greater extent. This has been in the plans for Admicom for quite a long time to be able to make this billing change, and now we have been very determined to implement this and execute this change. We have been assigning more internal resources to make sure that this will be successfully completed. Regarding the billing change and our sales force, like I said, we have approximately half of our quota-bearing salespeople focusing on our existing customers. Of course, those account managers are now helping us to onboard the customers to the new billing chains, but we also have a central team doing the customer communication, doing the approval processes.
That team is now fully assigned to support us in this one. It's not the field sales going through hundreds of customers, but we also have a process that is enabling us to do it successfully. Maybe, Satu, the next one again for you. We have been discussing in our previous earning calls about our price hikes. How would you describe that? How much of that is visible in the Q3 numbers?
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Yeah, so in Q3, we executed some price hikes for some individual products, and in Q4, we have sort of the remaining products coming up in price hikes. We're not disclosing a singular product price hike impact, but this is again a topic that we can maybe look into with our Q4 results if we have a sort of like an effective % point number that we could disclose. I think we said it in the Q2 release also that we are expecting a similar impact from price hikes as we have had in the past couple of years, so in 2023, 2024.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: There is also a question related to these competitive replacements that we have been able to win, and there's a question that does this mean that we might have more or higher non-recurring revenue in Q4 if there's more consulting work, integration, and replacement work? I would say that the part of our existing non-recurring revenues are mainly in the area of our consulting, implementation services, additional financial services from the accounting unit as an example, and we're not expecting this to increase in any significant manner during Q4. Actually, as you can see from the recurring revenue figures, how big of a portion of our business is there, you can already see that the decision made earlier of reducing the external software development work is also visible in our number.
The portion of the recurring revenue business in our figures is higher than previously, and this is the direction we want to have so that we're not increasing or developing business models that are increasing significantly our non-recurring revenue businesses. There is one question which you already somewhat eluded in your presentation, Satu, but could you somehow explain the lower downselling in Q3 compared to previous quarters? Maybe still once more go through the rationale there.
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: In Ultima, with the current or the previous billing model, we have had an opportunity for the customers to sort of update their estimated revenue whenever throughout the year. We had a lot of those coming in in the first quarter, so we had a lot of customers who wanted to change or re-estimate their revenue expectation for 2025, and that led to us reducing their monthly fee according to the new estimation. Now that we are transitioning into the new billing model, we no longer have to do this. We have some, obviously, not all customers are in the pipeline yet, but the amount of contract updates downwards that we're doing is significantly less. That is the main reason for reduced downsell, and that was what we expected also to happen.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: Very good. There's one additional question.
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Oh, questions about AI, I think, Simo, you should set those. Very good question.
Simo Leisti, CEO, Admicom: Yes, absolutely. The question is how is AI impacting your products and your competitiveness? I would say that it is impacting us in many ways. First, of course, we're investing a lot in developing AI-based capabilities into our products that I explained in the previous Q2 earnings call. I was highlighting the kinds of use cases that we're bringing to the technologies and products of ours, and we're now at the moment commercializing some of those first capabilities to be part of our products and product bundles that our customers can consume. The first ones are going to be mainly in the area of supporting the site operations there. Also, AI, of course, is impacting our internal work. Namely, especially our software development is very actively now onboarding AI-based software development methodologies, and all of our software teams are now somehow utilizing AI capabilities to make them more productive.
This has been a major development during the year, and I firmly believe that this will have some positive operational leverage for us to support our growth and support our product development velocity. Of course, we're using AI also and different automation-related technologies in our accounting services, and we've just started to ramp up really the development roadmap there. I'm quite convinced that also in that service and business unit, we're able to get a lot of positive impacts from AI. We are continuing to deliver the research and development or research project around the AI, and we have now completed some of the first work packages of that research project, which resulted in identifying the problems we're solving for the customers, especially in the site operations that we're now commercializing. Now we're moving into the next research packages.
They are more focused on the technologies that are now evolving at a fast pace, and especially the AI agent-based technologies, how we're able to utilize those. We're doing some partner technology evaluations, and also we have a work package around our internal AI capabilities and the impact that we can drive there. The research project continues, and we will be definitely sharing more information about that as we move forward, and also in the different forums upcoming during the year, also the CMD and our Nordic Construction Forum. Great question, and it is definitely something that we're a lot focusing on. Good. I believe, as I'm looking at the questions, we have now answered all of those, and I hope you were able to get some more insights based on your questions, and thank you for those.
Thank you for tuning in to this webcast, and as a reminder, please register to our Capital Market Day. We're very happy to have you there listening into our priorities, and of course, happy to share then after the year-end our Q4 and full-year results in January. I think most of you will be tuning in for the CMD as well. Thank you everyone for listening in. Thank you, Satu, and we follow up on the next session, most likely in December in our CMD. Thank you all and have a great day.
Satu Helamo, CFO, Admicom: Thank you.
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