Earnings call transcript: Exsitec Q4 2024 revenue hits record, stock dips

Exsitec Holding AB reported its highest quarterly revenue to date in Q4 2024, reaching SEK 227 million, slightly below the forecast of SEK 230 million. Despite this achievement, the stock price fell by 5.8% in pre-market trading, reflecting investor concerns over missed revenue expectations and other operational challenges. According to InvestingPro data, two analysts have recently revised their earnings expectations downward for the upcoming period, potentially contributing to market sentiment.

Key Takeaways

• Exsitec achieved record quarterly revenue of SEK 227 million.
• The stock price dropped by 5.8% following the earnings announcement.
• Organic growth was negative for both Q4 and the full year.
• Strong order intake in Q4, 50% higher than the previous year.
• Personnel reductions and program scaling back raised concerns.

Company Performance

Exsitec’s overall performance in 2024 was marked by an 8% growth in total revenue, reaching SEK 811 million. However, organic growth was negative, with a decline of 5% in Q4 and 1% for the full year. The company continued to focus on integrating recent acquisitions and expanding its software offerings, which contributed to a 32% growth in net recurring software revenue.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: SEK 227 million in Q4 2024, a record high, but slightly below forecast.
• Total (EPA:TTEF) 2024 Revenue: SEK 811 million, an 8% increase from the previous year.
• Adjusted EBITDA: SEK 30 million in Q4, down from SEK 45 million in Q4 2023.
• Full Year EBITDA Margin: 15%.
• Proposed Dividend: SEK 1.75 per share, totaling approximately SEK 24 million.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Exsitec’s Q4 2024 revenue of SEK 227 million missed the forecast of SEK 230 million by approximately 1.3%. Despite achieving record quarterly revenue, the miss was significant enough to impact investor sentiment negatively.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Exsitec’s stock price fell by 5.8% in pre-market trading. The stock’s decline positions it closer to its 52-week low of SEK 122.5, indicating a cautious market response to the earnings miss and other operational challenges. InvestingPro analysis suggests the stock is currently undervalued, with a P/E ratio of 25.18 and a favorable PEG ratio of 0.65, indicating potential value relative to growth. Subscribers to InvestingPro can access detailed valuation metrics and 6 additional ProTips for deeper insight into Exsitec’s investment potential.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Exsitec aims to return to organic growth in 2025, focusing on sales execution and operational excellence. The company remains cautiously optimistic about market recovery and sees potential for selective M&A opportunities as the market improves.

Executive Commentary

Outgoing CEO Johan Karlblad noted, "We’ve been resource constrained probably 12 of the 15 years," emphasizing the challenges faced by the company. He also highlighted the opportunity for growth, stating, "The best time to grow is when the market turns around and the competitors aren’t really ready for it."

Risks and Challenges

• Negative organic growth trends could persist if market conditions do not improve.
• Personnel reductions and program scaling back might affect employee morale and future talent acquisition.
• Macroeconomic pressures and cautious market environments could continue to impact smaller operational investments by customers.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the lead time for order intake, which ranges from 3-9 months. They also addressed concerns about the billing ratio in Sweden, which decreased by 4% year-over-year, and the strong sales performance in ERP Norway and data analysis sectors.

Full transcript - Exsitec Holding AB (EXS) Q4 2024:

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: Welcome to this year end report for 2024 for Excitec. Presenting will be CEO, Johan Karlblad. And without further ado, I will leave the word to Johan. Thank you, Hampus.

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: So we are going to go through financial results of 2024 for Exitech. I expect this presentation to last around 15 minutes. It’s possible to ask questions via the hand raise function or the chat function in Zoom (NASDAQ:ZM). So I’m on my 15th year as CEO of Xitek. And one big piece of news on a personal level for me is that I will be transitioning into a role on the Board of Xitek and handing over the CEO duties to Niklas Ijek in the start of March ’twenty five.

So it’s only a month out. Niklaus has been a colleague of mine for about 10 years, reporting directly to me in the role as the Business Unit Director of our largest business unit, ERP Sweden, for the last 4 years. Also new in his role is Karl Anderson, who’s joined us as the CFO earlier this year with a background from several entrepreneurial growth focused organizations. And both Karl and Niklas are here with me in the call, and we’ll be able to answer questions relating to them. So as usual, I’ll start off by making a short recap about our business to remind everybody of what it is that we do.

And after that, we’ll cover Q4 financials and a short market update. And then Niklas will talk a little bit about our priorities for 2025. So starting off with Excitec, we exist to help medium sized businesses in the Nordics use digital tools to improve their operations. And we strive to be a one stop shop for the customers so they can focus on their core business and leave the business side of IT to us. Digital tools, things that can address areas like reducing financial administration through automation or using data for better decision making and sometimes creating integrations and information flow between the business applications used in an organization.

Like I mentioned, I’ve had the pleasure of overseeing this operation since 2010, which has been a very consistent growth story. And we did manage to produce some growth also in the challenging year of 2024. I’ll get back to that later. Geographical expansion has also been a priority over the years, growing up from one office in Linkoping in Sweden to around 20 offices covering Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. So looking at our target market, that is medium to large sized companies in the Nordics.

Our customer base today is around 5,000 organizations. No one customer typically is more than around 1% of our revenue. So it’s quite a low risk in the individual accounts. We combine the software packages that we work with to fit different industries, and we have customers in most every industry sector, at least the ones where there is a large amount of medium sized to large sized enterprises that need digital tools. So we are resellers of a selection of software components, and the selection has grown to just over 20 software components at this time.

We combine these resold software components with integrations that we develop in house, and these are the primary software providers at this time. We have a revenue share partnership with these software providers where we market and sell their software to new accounts, and we make customers successful in using the software over time. Dream customer of ours could use up to 5 to 6 different components from us. Our average customer today is a bit over 2. So there’s a lot of work remaining in growing our footprint on existing customers.

Lastly, about us is a picture showing our business model. It’s built on 3 revenue streams. Sales and marketing is focused on selling software to our target markets together with these integrations that we develop in house. This is sold on a subscription model where you pay as you use, and this revenue stream has grown to around 23% of our net revenue for 2024. Still around or just under twothree of our revenue is from professional services where we implement the software and we make the customer successful in using the software over time.

We also do custom development and custom integrations where needed. And the 3rd revenue stream in our business model is that we offer the customers a single point of contact support on a recurring fixed price model. And in this engagement, we can also take care of infrastructure, hosting Internet access, IT security and such things that’s needed for the ongoing use of the software products. So time to get into the year that’s passed from a financial perspective and also a little bit about the market conditions in general. So on the business sentiment in general, we’ve seen a cautious market all year in actually in all our markets with customers pushing out investments.

It seems it’s like it’s especially the small tasks that are being pushed out, probably the things that are perceived as operational rather than strategic. This actually, all in all, adds up to quite a large volume for us. And due to this, we have a lower resource utilization in our professional services than what we planned for in the quarter and actually for most of the year. It does, however, seem like the big initiatives are picking up, and we see record strong sales numbers in terms of our order intake for Q4, especially around our new cloud commercial offerings, but also around data analysis and e commerce. Actually, that’s been a weak spot for us throughout the year.

So we have an order intake that’s more than 50% higher than that of Q4 of 2023, and it’s 30% higher than the previous record, which was actually in Q2 of ’twenty 3. So it’s what should I say, it’s difficult and cautious out there, but there are deals to be made. So we would feel really good about having a couple of more quarters of strong sales numbers, then we’ll start to feel really good about things. Going to the numbers. We did create some growth through our M and A activity.

So overall growth of 77% in the quarter, reaching SEK227 1,000,000 revenue. It’s the highest revenue in a quarter to date for Excitec. The organic growth, however, was minus 5% in the quarter, challenging environments. We should note that the revenue numbers and in particular EBITDA in Q4 of 2023 was a bit higher than normal due to some effects from some software partnerships where we have had an unusually high margin in the quarter. And we mentioned that to some extent in the Q4 report from last year.

But in either case, not a good quarter from the organic growth perspective. It’s entirely the professional services that has been weak. Software (ETR:SOWGn) revenues have recorded strong growth all year. For the full year, we report a total growth of 8% to SEK811 million net revenue with slightly negative organic growth, organic growth around negative 1%. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter SEK30 million, it’s lower than the SEK45 million we had a year before.

Not a great performance, actually still our 2nd best Q4 to date. Like I mentioned, the SEK45 1,000,000 from last year was affected by some positive one off effects from some of our product vendors and the very favorable product mix that we also mentioned in the year end report from 2023. But no matter how you put it, the SEK30 million from Q4 of 2024 was clearly a worse performance than the year before even taking this into account. So the main reason for the negative development in EBITDA was lack of volume in the professional services in a passive market. The increased trainee program and our sales talent program that we announced in August also affected EBITDA relative to 2023 with around SEK4 1,000,000 in the quarter.

This is an investment that’s intended to yield results in the second half of twenty twenty five and onwards, assuming that the market is gradually heating up. So this additional cost is not actually the main reason for the weaker results, but it certainly doesn’t help. So for the full year, we end up with an adjusted EBITDA of SEK121 million for a margin of 15%. Moving into the segments. Sweden, a bit underwhelming compared to historical performance, 17% margins.

And it was in Sweden that we had the majority of the costs for new employees. There were some one off effects related to M and A activities. We think the normalized numbers are a little bit better than the actuals. So to elaborate on that, some efficiencies when you try to bring on 150 new customers and 30, 40 new employees doesn’t have doesn’t yield all business focus in the operations. So we should be doing a little bit better, I think, normally in this business unit.

But Norway saw some improvements actually with a strong demand for the new business next offering, still lower efficiency levels than in Sweden. It looks like we are on the right track again. Denmark and Finland starting to look better after the acquisition of the Wisma Business customer base we announced in the quarter. That’s gotten off to a good start and should provide a growth opportunity for the coming year. So for the entire year and a few years back, the net recurring revenue from software has been a highlight for us.

For the entire year, we see a growth of 32% in this revenue stream, and it made up 23% of revenue for 2024. The growth is driven both through M and A and through new sales and cross sales and to a slowing degree of price increases that was a bigger driver a year or 2 ago. This is an important contributor to our earnings. It’s also good measurement to see that we have a strong offering and customers using and deploying software that we and keep on using software that we delivered to them. Last thing on the quarter, we completed 2 M and A deals in the quarter.

We used a debt arrangement that we informed about earlier this year, so minimal dilution for shareholders. We acquired a business unit from ECIT consisting of over 100 customers using the Wisma Business ERP platform in Denmark. When merging this with our existing business, we become the clear market leader in this niche segment on the local market. We also acquired Brightcom Solutions in Sweden. They are specialized in ERP based on Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Business Central, especially for e commerce and retail operations.

Some onboarding costs and inefficiencies in the quarter, bringing on a total of 2 50 customers and more than 40 new colleagues, but we feel really good about this addition to our business. And then to round up the financial, the Board of Directors proposes a dividend of SEK1.75 per share for 2024, which amounts to a total dividend of approximately SEK24 1,000,000. This is around 40% of our earnings after tax, which is in line with our ambition to distribute up to 40%, and it’s the same dividend as last year. And this concludes my presentation, and I will hand over to Niklas, who will mention some about our priorities for 2025. Welcome, Niklas.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: Thank you, Johan, and hello, everyone. This is Niklas Ijekt talking. I am the new CEO from the beginning of March. So these are business priorities for 2025 where the first one is sales execution. We increased our sales force in 2024 to be ready for 2025.

And as Johan mentioned, we are coming from a strong quarter with record order intake and our offering is better than ever going into 2025. So a clear priority for us is to increase our sales to be able to get back to organic growth. The second one is about operational excellence. Our employee turnover has decreased significantly during the year, and our total turnover rate is now lower than historical average. At the same time, we have been running a record large trainee and sales program.

So this combined has strengthened our delivery capacity and will ensure our overall capacity when the markets rebounds. However, at the beginning of 2025, we reviewed areas where we had excess capacity and did not have great sales numbers and made certain adjustments to improve efficiency. We will continue to work with operational excellence and higher efficiency in 2025 to increase our earnings. In the last quarter, as mentioned, we acquired Brightcom in Sweden and a business unit from ECIT in Denmark. So an important task for us in 2025 is to integrate these into Excitech as smoothly and quickly as possible to keep focus on the customers.

Even though we completed these two acquisitions in the Q4, we will continue to work with M and A and keep looking for selective acquisitions when we have the opportunity. So this concludes the presentation. Are there any questions for us?

Raymond (NSE:RYMD), Analyst: Let’s see. If you

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: have any questions, you are able to use the raise hand function. And we’ve got some questions here. We will let, let’s see here. We will see if we can hear Tom.

Tom, Analyst: Perfect. Can you hear me?

Raymond, Analyst: Yes.

Tom, Analyst: Great. I was just wondering about the order intake and sort of the lead times on these new orders. It’s quite significant growth both in volumes and amount of orders. When do you expect to start delivering on these? Because you commented a bit on it in Q3 as well, but we haven’t really seen a drop through in Q4 sales.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: Yes. I can answer that one. So the short answer is that it depends, but it depends in different offerings. So there’s always a lag from when we close a deal until we can start to deliver and we can see the actual results. But if we need to have a number, I think it’s somewhere between 3 to 9 months.

We should see some results from that good sales.

Raymond, Analyst: Perfect.

Tom, Analyst: And another question on the billing ratio, especially in Sweden. Can you give us any sort of direction on how much it’s fallen?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. It’s around 4% lower than for Q4, it’s around 4% lower than a year ago.

Tom, Analyst: And you expect to balance this with personnel reductions here in the beginning of ’twenty five and increased demand?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. Like Niklas said, we reviewed in Q1, we reviewed around year end when we realized we weren’t at the level where we wanted to be. We looked at the areas where we had weaker resource utilization because it’s not the same all over. So we looked at the areas where we had weaker resource utilization and did not have great improvements in sales because if we have a weaker resource utilization but really strong sales, it should even out over time. But we reviewed the areas where sales were not great and the resource utilization were too low.

And we did a we’ve already executed actually on a reduction in headcount there that affected around 20 colleagues.

Tom, Analyst: All right. Perfect. And just a final one on the split between organic and acquired software growth here. Have you seen any of the recent acquisitions standing out on the up or down side?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Not really, no. We saw actually a good result throughout the year from Intergrafoom’s partner. Now that was a year ago, so it’s not recent. But we’ve seen a good performance on integrations and also an integrated it’s not an integrated business unit yet, and it will be some time, like Niklas mentioned before, before we can see that fully in our numbers.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: Thank you, Tom. Okay. Next (LON:NXT) one to talk is Raymond.

Raymond, Analyst: Hi. Can you hear me?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes.

Raymond, Analyst: Perfect. A couple of questions for me. Could you share sort of how you view the performance of segments internally, like what segments are underperforming in your view, where you’ve made headcount reductions and which segments are performing well in your view?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. So in general, there are, well, it’s a different story all over. What’s, if you look at the segment that hasn’t been great but has really strong sales numbers, that would be ERP in Norway. So the ERP business has really more than, it seems like they have doubled the sales numbers. And it’s this offering that we actually been struggling with for a year, not so much with market demand but with more of the capacity and ability to deliver on customer promises around the BusinessNEXT.

We see really strong sales numbers. We don’t see enough resource utilization, but then the sales numbers give us some confidence that it should get better. For Sweden, another area that’s very similar, it’s in the e commerce space where we have done a reduction in force throughout in the year, but we do see stronger sales numbers now, but that’s from a very weak starting point. So there is too low utilization. On the flip side, with good resource utilization and solid sales numbers, It’s around data analysis and business intelligence sector there.

We have had strong resource utilization. And the same thing with integrations and our integration offering. We’re also pretty good resource utilization and good sales numbers. So it varies a little bit. You really need to dig in on the individual delivery and product area to see the specifics.

So but we’re not sure really what the trend. Well, certainly, it should be a trend that e commerce is picking up because that’s been very weak. And we saw probably 3x the number of deals in Q4 than what we saw a year earlier. So or maybe it’s also that we adapted our offering a little bit to be less consumer oriented and more business to business oriented in the e commerce space. But we’ve been trying to do that for some time without sales success.

Was that detailed enough? Raymond, do you need more details on that?

Raymond, Analyst: No, that’s great detail. And a second question of mine regarding sort of the challenging market that you’re experiencing right now. Could you elaborate a bit about how you view your recruitment needs here in autumn? For example, how many trainees you’re looking to add? And maybe how many you added here in H1 in spring?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. So we did have an ambition to have a large trainee program. I’m talking about 6, 9 months ago, we thought that we would have a large trainee program starting now in January. Something that happened to us that we weren’t really prepared for is that from around May, June going forward, our regular employee turnover has reduced quite a lot. I believe that’s actually the uncertainties in the job markets that make people less prone to switch jobs.

So we have seen this doesn’t have anything to do with the trainee programs, but we have seen a much reduced employee turnover. And that means that replacement recruiting isn’t as needed if we have lower personnel turnover. Now who knows if that will last or not? Because I must say, and I mentioned this sometimes, that during my 15 years as CEO here, we’ve been resource constrained probably 12 of the 15 years. So but we weren’t resource constrained in the 1st year of COVID, and we weren’t resource constrained from the early portions of 2024 and some other times.

But most of it, probably 12, 13 out of 15 years, we’ve been resource constrained. So I can’t, for me, we don’t really change strategy. We think that building competence is a long term thing. Sometimes the market is better, sometimes it’s worse. But it’s a long term thing to be an attractive employer and to add people and to continue building that way.

It’s not something that we turn on or off 100%, given that we don’t like or don’t like the quarter. So but still going back to your question. So having seen reduced employee turnover from May June and then keeping on throughout the fall, we actually reassessed our need for a trainee program this fall. So we’re actually just we have some new onboards this fall, but it’s for specific needs and specific people. It’s not a large scale trainee program this fall.

It’s very limited. And also for the fall of ’twenty five, we are expecting to have it about half the size. It should fit what we need, about half the size of 2024. But we are also ready if we see these strong sales numbers for another quarter and maybe going into Q2, we will reassess that. And we so we are ready to scale that up if sales numbers continue to be strong because I the worst thing that could happen is if actually the job market becomes hot again and employee turnover turns back to regular levels and we haven’t done a trainee program, then we’ll be back to being resource constrained in our growth.

So it’s

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: a bit of a tricky balance trusting the sales here. Yes. Just to be clear, we this January, we were constraining the Trinity program. And this fall, we’re expecting it to be maybe half the size of what we had left. Correct.

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: So very long winded and detailed answer. I hope that’s is that okay?

Raymond, Analyst: That is more than okay. Thank you very much for answering my questions. I’ll get back in line.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: Thank you. And then we have questions from Jacob.

Jacob, Analyst: Yes. Hello. Good day. Can you hear me?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes, very good.

Jacob, Analyst: Okay. So I’m just following up on Tom’s question regarding the like 50% higher order value year over year. So firstly, this might be a stupid question, but can you just define like new sales for us? Like is it just sales to new customers or sale of new softwares and consultancy services also to existing customers?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. New sales, the way we do it, it’s new software deployments. So a new software deployment can be a new customer deploying software or it can be an existing customer deploying a software they didn’t previously use. So that’s new sales. If it’s an existing customer doing more with the software they already use, we call that additional sales, and it’s another sales number that we also track.

Jacob, Analyst: And then we have actually

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: a third stream that is not tracked, and it’s the one that we love the most probably. We call it rin in Swedish. The flow of things that comes in through support that never passes the CRM system. That’s actually the best revenue, which the customer just calls someone and just gets help because there’s absolutely 0 sales effort involved in that. But that’s for that reason, that’s not tracked in the CRM system.

So that’s actually so actually, we always sell less than what we deliver to some extent because it’s a lot of work just flowing in without requiring a sales effort.

Jacob, Analyst: So Okay. I see. And this RIN, is it something that you can give us some flavor on how that has developed during the quarter?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. That’s not that’s actually a weak point. We cannot really do that because as I said, we per definition, we don’t track it. But you would over time track it as the difference between ordered volume between sales volume and delivered volume. But you can’t really track that in we don’t really track that.

But it’s you can see some of it because you can see some of the volume that starts with a support call that ends up in billable work. And that has actually been a weak point, unfortunately, and not just for the quarter, but for the entire year, we feel actually a weak a bit of a weak point. And it seems that a lot of customers have spending have very low spending mandates on the operational side, and they try to reduce. So when they call the support and it turns out something requires a billable work, they say that probably this can wait. Whether if it’s in a strategic effort where they want to implement a new software or something, that’s something that’s approved by maybe the Board or by the CEO of the customer side.

Those work engagements are still good. So yes. I want to just elaborate one thing. Niklas mentioned on how long time it takes from an order intake to become revenue. And that depends.

So the last portion to become revenue is support. And it starts off with professional services. So it depends on the revenue mix when you sell. The first thing you do is you start delivering professional services for implementation. And then you gradually start off to expanding the license, so the software engagement.

And then you need a few seats during the project, and you need more seats of the software once deployed. And then lastly, you probably have support. So it depends a little bit on what we sell. Unfortunately, professional services, I would say, is the weakest sales point. So if someone I mean, obviously, the fastest time to revenue is a customer, if we do a sale where they just sell, we just need a couple of 100 hours of consulting services.

That turns off in 2 weeks, that turns on in 2 weeks. That starts, that delivery, if we have the resources available, can start almost directly. That’s probably the weakest point in our sales, the regular professional services. So most of the sales definitely now are of the character where we sell software and and professional services for implementing it. And it’s a little bit longer lead time for that revenue.

Jacob, Analyst: Yes, I understand. And speaking of that or still on the topic of this 50% higher or total order value. Like can you give us some more flavor on how big of an impact this will have? Like for example, will this be enough to make sure that like your large chunk of trainees has a decent occupancy rate for 2025? Or like how should we view this?

Because fifty percent is a very high number. One quarter

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: of this should be enough for a decent occupancy rate. If these sales levels continue, it should be enough. But Niklas, maybe you want to elaborate on that. I’ll give you promises from here.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: No, that’s right. Well, 1 quarter will not be enough for all the trainees and to have the growth that we would like to have. So we need to keep strong numbers in the sales in

Jacob, Analyst: the coming quarters as well. Okay. But not like 50% each quarter, I suppose?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: We would love to have 50% sales growth in each and every quarter. Now, but I don’t know exactly how much do we need. We need an improvement from the year before at least. Yes. Okay.

I see that.

Jacob, Analyst: And we should have,

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: I mean, just for size wise, we need probably 10%, 15%, 20% just to cover the staff level, and then we also want to improve. So I think we should need probably 30%.

Jacob, Analyst: Okay. I see. And like finally on this topic, you talked about order value, but you have previously also talked about like the number of sales and number of qualified leads. Do you have a figure of how that has developed in Q4? Yes.

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: The biggest difference for us now is actually in order value. There we see the biggest improvement. Number of sales picked up a little bit, but not a lot. The biggest difference is in the order value, which also goes, this theory of ours that the larger, it’s actually easier to get approval for the larger orders because they are always approved by a board or so on, whereas the small orders are probably just operationally done. And with people with a saving mandate don’t allow that as much.

So the big difference is the order intake. The number of deals was also a little bit growing. Number of leads is really good too, but we are not sure yet of the quality of the leads because a lot of them are an unusually large amount is due to outbound activities from us where we have we’ve invested a lot in our sales force during the fall and those that sales force is working a lot on outbound activities. And we can’t be certain until something has turned into a deal that it, so it’s not all, it’s not the customers calling us, begging to buy. It’s us calling them, begging begging to buy probably.

But the leads numbers look really good, but they’ve also required a lot of effort. So we’ll have to it will have to be a couple of quarters before we feel totally confident in that.

Jacob, Analyst: Okay. Thank you, Parekh, for that. And moving on to some questions about your headcount. We’ve touched upon it here before. But like from the outside, it seems like you have made a like a little bet to run a slightly larger than normal trainee program.

And like from your previous communication, you have stated that this is to enable you to be ready to have the capacity to increase your market share once the market returns. And like so far, obviously, the market hasn’t really turned and it’s only been 1 quarter. So it’s, of course, too early to like determine if your decision was right. But what I’m wondering is like how did you come up with the decision to run such a large trainee program in a like current weak market? Like what data did you base your decision making on?

How was the process for evaluating the pros and cons with expanding the trainee program in the middle of a weak market?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: That was a very long question. But in general, I mean, it goes back to some of the experience where I still, even though the market is weak now in our, the IT services and the digital, in this digital solution space, we’ve been resource constrained most every year. During my tenure as CEO here, we’ve been resource constrained most of the time. So that’s the basic thing that long term, we expect us to be resource constrained again. So that belief is a part of it.

Also, in my experience, what I’ve seen here and also from prior experience, a really, really great time to grow is if you are a tiny bit, it’s risky and scary, I understand that, but still 15% margins for the entire year. I think we’re among the best in our industry even with this. So we feel that we have the strength in our financials to be able to take this bet because the best time to grow is when the market turns around and the competitors aren’t really ready for it. So we’ve been pushing. I realize again that this is aggressive, of course.

We’ve been pushing sales really hard during 2024 and growing our sales force, and we are trusting that we should see good sales numbers coming out of this and then trusting that, that will yield the efficiency levels. What we weren’t really prepared for and we didn’t have and that’s the thing that we didn’t make contingency plans for. It was actually the reduction of employee turnover that reduced by almost half. And it started pretty late actually. It was around May that we saw a significant reduction in employee turnover numbers.

And that actually, we probably expected 15 or 20 more colleagues to leave their positions than what they did. So if we would have known that at the time when we committed to the trainee program, maybe we wouldn’t have felt the need was this big.

Jacob, Analyst: Okay, great. I think it’s always important to like evaluate the process and not the result. So hence my question.

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. And it’s also, Joakim, it’s very early to, I realize we all want increasing profits every quarter. It’s very early to see any value. Actually, it’s fine to me if you think that we’ve been too excessive here, but then just remember that 1.5 years from now when we have a lot better growth than our competitors, remember that we told you that this is actually a long term investment. So as long as you can remember that, I’ll take all the critique I surely deserve right now for this decision.

Jacob, Analyst: No, no. You shouldn’t see this as a critique. I’m just curious, wondering like, yes, what’s your point of view?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. Your logic is perfectly, I mean, your logic is perfectly fine. It’s a bit of a difference for me. I wouldn’t expect the pure professional services players to be as aggressive in recruiting as we have been because I would expect them to see a much shorter time from demand to actual revenue. But our thing is around deploying software to and selling software packages and then doing the professional service and maintenance work as a result of that.

There’s longer lead times for me, and it’s also longer lead times for training people. So because it’s a higher degree of specialization in our business. So I mean, certainly, I we’ve been doing the same questioning internally as you are here for sure.

Jacob, Analyst: Yes. And of course, like it’s impossible to time a market upswing perfectly. So of course, it’s going to be some quarters where it doesn’t fully match. But speaking of that

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: like Maybe, I mean, a good sales numbers start with a good sales quarter, and we just had a good sales quarter. So who knows? I don’t know. I’m not a macroeconomist, to be quite sure. So I wouldn’t claim to have the expertise here, but we’ll see.

Jacob, Analyst: Me neither. But I am an equity analyst, however. And I’m also like wondering how will you be reasoning if the turnaround in the market does not materialize during 2025?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Yes. We’ll have to do the same thing we did now. So we look at utilization numbers and looking at sales numbers. If we have too low utilization if we have a high utilization, not a problem. If we have too low utilization, the next step is to look at the sales numbers.

And then if both of them don’t check out, then we’ll have to hopefully, we’ll have some areas where we have good demand, and then we’ll move people around. Or otherwise, we’ll have to look through the entire workforce, of course. It’s the same unit economics as for everybody else there.

Jacob, Analyst: Yes. Crystal clear. And my final question, but also more of like a long term question, is that it seems like Exitec has taken a very large market share on Wisma in both Sweden and also Norway and now also, as you stated, the acquisition, yes, in Denmark. So I’m curious about like how are you reasoning around Exitec’s Exitec’s long term growth runway in current geographies? Is there like sufficient growth runway to grow, let’s say, high single digits organically for many years to come?

And if so, what will drive this growth?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: I’ll see what Niklas has to say about that. Well, I think that

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: we can have a growth with Wisma in the coming years. First of all, we have this migration going from the on premise system to cloud solution, and there’s some growth in that. And we do have a large market share in especially in Norway with VISMA systems. In Sweden, there are other systems than VISMA. But so in Sweden, we can do a lot of new sales for customers coming from other systems.

And we can still do that in Norway, but in Norway, it’s another reality where the market share of Visma systems in total is bigger. So I think that we can continue working with Visma in many years to have growth. I don’t have any doubt about that.

Jacob, Analyst: Okay. Okay. And But you also have this component with like cross selling softwares. Can you give us like some nuggets on cross selling? Like how many of your customers are using 2 or more softwares from you now compared to maybe like 2, 3 years ago or just something like that?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: That’s probably more a question for me than Johan again. So we started this initiative maybe 5, 6 years ago. We had 1.4 software components per customer on average, and I think we’re around 2.1 now. The customers that use the most are 5, 6. You’re not supposed to run every software because sometimes it can be that we have different financial accounting softwares for different industries, and you typically don’t use more than 1 in an operation.

So probably, but most everybody, if you have a warehouse, you could use warehouse automation, procurement, invoice automation, financials and so on. You probably could use 5 or 6. We’re around 2.1 softwares per customer now. Actually, Hampus, who’s working a lot with me on M and A, who has been working, and he said he actually ruins that number with the M and A because typically when we acquire something, that company will have had only one offering. So all the time, when we onboard a new customer, one of the ways that we want to get value from M and A is to, over time, show the customer that you use this software now, but we actually have integrations to 10 other softwares that can help you in other areas of the business.

But all the time, when you merge in a new customer base, we merge in 250 new customers in this last quarter through M and A, and it’s very likely that they will only have one of those 250 customers. So but that movement is so we should get worried again. If we start reaching 3 or 4 softwares per customer, then we probably don’t have enough growth opportunities in the customer base.

Jacob, Analyst: Yes, that’s true. So that was all the questions. So thanks for taking them, and I wish you the best of luck going forward in all of your new roles, both Johan, Niklas and Karl.

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Thank you so much.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: And we have a question from Tom again. Yes.

Tom, Analyst: Sorry, just a final one for me. In terms of the layoffs here in Q1, could you take any of the one off costs already in Q4? Or should we expect that for Q1 as well?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: We don’t. The way we see it having it’s not a big massive layoff. It’s just looking at individual performance and the abilities and the possibilities to have to reach a good resource utilization in a certain area. It’s a lot of individual decisions with people that are actually really great, but they just have the wrong skill set right now for our market demand. So it’s not like a big layoff.

And we won’t we’ll do that. It’s as a professional services driven company as well or large part, that’s business as usual. We always even if it was unusually difficult market conditions right now, this is not something that we seem as extraordinary. So we’ll just take that over the results. It’s we want to a big or at least that’s not the plan.

We want to a big write down or anything like that or a big something extraordinary. It’s just business as usual.

Tom, Analyst: So no major impact in Q1?

Johan Karlblad, Outgoing CEO, Excitec: Correct. I mean if this people would have been utilized at good hourly rates, that would have had a great positive impact. But we will this is something that happens from time to time in a professional services firm that you have to reevaluate the headcount compared to demand. Do we have any other questions, Sampus? That, there’s no further question, and that concludes our presentation.

Jacob, Analyst: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Hampus, Moderator/Host, Excitec: Thank you.

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