Smartcraft ASA

OSE:SMCRT

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q2

[Gustav Line, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to SmartCraft's Q2 presentation. My name is Gustav Line, and I'm the CEO of SmartCraft. We have an agenda today, which is in 2 parts. In the first part, we'll talk about the typical Q2 reporting. We'll talk about the operational development in Q2 and and we'll also talk about the financial highlights.

In the second half, we'll talk about our go-to-market model and how we do marketing and sales in order to win new customers. And then we'll talk about the development strategy and some of the initiatives we are going to launch quite soon. You are welcome to input questions in the web tool and then we'll have a Q&A at the end of this session.

So for people that do not -- I'm not that familiar with SmartCraft, I'd like to give you a little fly-in. SmartCraft is a software company delivering SME construction software. And we deliver this to the construction industry. This is in order to give our customers overview and control. And we concentrate on what we think is the the mission-critical areas. And that will be anything related to people, material and documentation.

People out in the field, we need to know if we have the right people in the field with the right skills and that they are doing the right jobs, and they are invoicing and doing the time -- registering the time that they are using on different tasks. We also need to be in control of the materials that we buy, that we buy the right quality material at the right price and that it arrives at the right time. This is very important in order to get the right margin on the different projects.

And then thirdly, it's very important that we have solutions to do the documentation related to a project. And this is in 2 areas, it's about quality assurance and it's about health and safety. And the need for this type of documentation has increased a lot over the last years. So we basically tie this information from people, material and documentation together in one solution in order to give the company overview and control.

So this is a need to have -- we have need to have solutions that improve both revenue and margin. We have a leading position in the Nordics, and our company has a long history of delivering both revenue and margin growth. If you look at our margin, you can see that it hasn't improved that much, but you have to remember that we have done 9 acquisitions. And every company we buy, we buy at a lower margin. So actually, the underlying margin scale-up is quite substantial.

We've also expanded our customer base and gained market share in the recent years. So today, we have about 200 employees in Sweden, Norway and Finland. And we think this is a great position for further growth, both in the Nordics and in other geographies.

So to the Q2 highlights. In Q2, we continued to deliver on our strategy and this is actually the ninth quarter in a row that we are delivering on the guidance that we gave to the market 2 years ago. We delivered a 21% growth in annual recurring revenue, which is sort of one of our main KPIs and the ARR has now lifted to NOK 358 million. We also delivered a record high EBITDA margin of 44%. And our solid business model creates strong cash conversion, which has increased 150% compared to last year. And in these sort of turbulent times, it's good to see that we have a stable and low churn of 7%.

So people ask us what is unique? How do you manage to deliver good results every quarter? And I would like to talk a little bit about what's unique about SmartCraft and our business model. First of all, we target SME construction companies. And these companies are not working really with new build projects. They are mainly concerned about existing buildings and they are most existing buildings, and they work with maintenance service and upgrades.

And also most of our customers are either electricians or plumbers. And today, there's some strong energy initiatives going on in Europe, which basically drives a lot of demand for these customers. And thirdly, we see great demand coming from all the need for documentation, and we have some really strong solutions in this area. So this is really our strategic focus.

Then how do we operate? Basically, to me, this is all about the team. We have great people on board, and we make sure that we stay focused at what we are really good at. And a focus team for us, it's all about listening to the customer, understanding the industry and making great solutions that our customers need. And annual recurring revenue, like I mentioned earlier on, is one of our main important areas. And we really work hard to make sure that all our revenue is recurring.

And why is that important? So basically, we think that great software does not need a lot of consulting, installation, setup fees, training and so on. So we want to reduce all the sort of nonrecurring revenue and make sure that our customers have really transparent pricing and understanding of the solutions. So our solutions should be easy-to-buy and easy-to-use and we should also be very easy to do business with. And I think recurring revenue model is a very important part of that.

And by having a recurring revenue drive, we also have a very high recurring revenue percentage. So 96% of our revenue is actually recurring, which is also a great thing to have in your business model because it keeps our business really solid. So great people, great solutions. We also need a good go-to-market model and we have in order to create visibility and also to convert customer opportunities into sales. And Katja is going to talk more about that later in her session.

Another important thing that I think is unique to SmartCraft is that everything we do, we do with ROI mindset, return on investment mindset. We want everything, everywhere where we spend energy to create some good results. And when you create that discipline in the organization and combine it with good growth and also good cost control, we get good margins and profitable growth.

Lastly, we also think it's very important to do acquisitions, but it's also important to do successful acquisitions. And we've done 9 acquisitions so far, and they have all been successful. And I'll get back to that a little bit later.

So basically, it's a combination of all these factors that make SmartCraft unique today. I want to switch gear and look into the segment situation in each country. We have faced some slowdown in Finland as some large customers that work with new projects, new build projects have seen slowdown in the business. That's why we have increased focus in 2023 on renovation. And so far, we can see that new ARR revenue is trending upwards the last 3 quarters.

We can also see another positive thing that our potential revenue pipeline has increased by more than 150% compared to last year. So some of our large customers are facing challenges in the new build area of the business. However, they do downgrade some of their revenue, which means that we get a little bit less ARR, but they do not churn. And this is very important. So in Finland, we only have 3% churn, and that's stable for going back also to last year, which puts us in a really strong position when the new build market picks up because again, these customers are there and when activity builds up, we will get the revenue back.

Moving to Sweden, we had a very strong and good quarter in Q2. We had an organic revenue growth of 5% versus previous quarter. We did some organizational changes in 2022, that is now paying off, especially for Bygglet, which is the biggest revenue driver in Sweden. And we can see that the number of booked meetings in Q2 increased by 64% compared to last year. And that's a very important number for us because we know that 60% of our meetings that are historically turning into revenue. So having a 64% increase is a very positive signal going into second half.

Moving to Norway. We had another strong quarter in Norway with 18% annual recurring growth. And again, like in Sweden, we increased sales focus. We have a more holistic view on how we work in the Norwegian market, making sure that we use our resources more -- in a more smart way. And this actually paid off, again, looking at the largest solution, Cordel. We can see that the booked meetings increased by more than 100% year-over-year and also that the potential revenue pipeline is at an all-time high, growing 36% versus last quarter. So with that, I gave you a little bit of input from the segments, but I think the time is right to give the word to Kjartan to have more financial details

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Thank you, Gustav, and good morning, everyone. So SmartCraft has ended another strong quarter. We see high growth, increasing profitability and strong cash flow. Macro picture is in many ways as before, we still see high inflation and uncertainty in the market. But at the same time, we get a sense of rising optimism. And like Gustav just showed, it is visible in the pipelines as well.

If we take a closer look at the segments. We maintained a strong growth in Q2 with rising margin even if the increased pipelines has not translated into increased growth just yet. Norway continues to perform well. We have a higher growth and a step-up in profitability. The 2 latest acquisitions are improving well and all investments in Norway show a nice return when it comes to both growth, cost base and profitability.

In Sweden and Finland, we still see the same macro picture as before, but again, with a more sense of optimism. With the 2 new sales managers in Sweden, we see a good effect on the pipeline as we expected. And we are very positive for the second half of 2023. And although the Finnish enterprise market currently experienced the most challenges, we do see the stable churn. And there are still -- there are a few new build projects initiated. And this affects our growth. But the focus -- we turn the focus to the renovation subsegment and it has had a significant improvement on the pipeline. As the market eventually bounce back, we expect a positive effect from existing customers starting up dormant new build projects.

In total, we grew revenue more than 23% and we maintained a high recurring revenue share. Total revenue is now more than NOK 100 million per quarter. Those of you who know us, know how our business model, gives us the possibility to maintain a high profitability. The margin is now almost 44%, which includes some adjustments of the EBITDA related to M&A activity.

The margin expansion is also backed by the increased level of capitalization, but also the adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx margin has a strong increase of 3 percentage points. As we presented last quarter, we have increased our R&D capacity by working smarter allowing more of the development teams to focus on future value creation, new features and potential growth increase.

In Q2, we have capitalized a higher level than initially indicated, which is due to the capacity not being reduced by vacations in June. Following this, we are now expecting a higher level of capitalization for the whole year. We continue to have a solid financial position. Our scalable business model enables us -- enables increasing profit to flow through to increased cash flow.

As previously stated, Q1 is the seasonally strong quarter, but we see a significant increase in operating cash flow in Q2 as well. Note, of course, that SmartCraft is cash positive every quarter and is self-funded. We have an unchanged profile of the capital structure with only seasonal effects such as deferred revenue, in addition to the increase of treasury shares through our buyback program.

We are net cash positive and we have an increasingly negative net working capital. As always, our main focus in daily operations is ARR, which is about 88% of our total revenue. ARR grew 21% in Q2, 15% organically. And organic growth is driven by new logos, which is about 50%, and upselling and the tailwind of CPI adjustments being the remaining 50%. Total growth includes acquisitions and currency effects.

With the improved and strong pipeline for the second half of the year, future ARR development look increasingly positive. And with that, I'll let Gustav tell you about something that will give us an additional step-up in ARR in Q3.

[Gustav Line, executive]

Thank you, Kjartan. So acquisitions are essential part of our strategy. And so far or at least the last years, we think there have been some really high price expectations, and we are very pleased to acquire Coredination in July this year. And the thing with Coredination is, it's a great Swedish company with a great team. And again, remember what I said, it's all about the people, and we really do like the people. And they also got a great solution that complements market really well.

Another thing is we think they have really great SaaS metrics. They have good ARR growth. They have a high level of recurring revenue and they have low churn. So the solution complements what we already do. And I think going forward, we'll be able to both lift revenue and also take out the cross-sell opportunity in the future. At least when you look back and look at our acquisitions in the past, we have done 9 acquisitions, and every acquisition has been successful, growing both revenue and margin.

So you could ask, what's the secret sauce? And I think I just want to give you some of my thoughts about this. I think first of all, it's about understanding the people, get to know the company and understanding the motivation of these people before we buy the company. Because, again, if you have the right people in place, things are a lot easier. Secondly, what we do is we spend time on understanding how we can increase recurring revenue in the company that we buy.

So what should we stop doing, what is not core to what we do and how can we convert nonrecurring revenue to recurring revenue. Then we also look at how we can reduce complexity and complexity by that, I mean, how is the message perceived out? How is the marketing? Is it easy to buy the solution? How are the sales processes? What about the pricing? Is it easy to understand the price model and so on. Basically trying to remove all the bottlenecks that might stop growth. And then finally, we work to see how we can work better together basically reducing administration and then release time for customers and sales.

So to sum up the first session of today, we have great solutions that our need to have for our customers, and we will work to make them even better. And we will also work to improve our processes and the organization because this is the way we grow revenue and scale the business. We've had a great first half and we have a solid pipeline of potential revenue going second half. So we have a positive outlook on the future, and we reiterate our medium to term guiding of 15% to 20% organic growth with increasing margin as we scale the business.

So now I would like to move to the second part of the session. First, Katja will talk about sales and marketing before Christian will go through the development strategy. So please, Katja, the word is yours.

[Katja Widlund, executive]

Thanks, Gustav. Indeed, we have a very positive outlook, and we truly see we are in a very good position to continue our organic growth. And I also agree with Gustav that in the end of the day, it's all about people, and our fantastic figures, this Q2 is based on lots of hard work to realize our sales and marketing strategies that I now want to share with you.

As a SaaS company, there are quite a few levers to use and my session will mainly concentrate on how we are changing our ways of working, especially when it comes to optimizing upsell and cross-sell. But there are some more magic levers to use. We are continuously looking into deepening and expanding our presence by growing through new verticals. And a good example of this is, of course, our new acquisition of coordination, where we are broadening our value offering through transport management and machine rentals.

But the most important pillar for growth is a strong market. We're working deeply under penetrated market with lots of opportunities up to NOK 10 billion only in the Nordics. So in order to find out more about our market and to share our findings, we have started the yearly SmartCraft Digimeter survey. It is conducted by a third-party supplier. It's neutral and addressed both customers and noncustomers. And it's -- we have around 680 respondents from mainly small to midsized companies with different fields.

The report of 2023 will be released in September, and it covers the aspects on how digital tools are used in the business, both in the office and also in the field. And it's also investigating different benefits and potential pain points that construction companies experience.

So first, to get an understanding about the demand in the market, we asked the respondents about their intended investments in digital tools for the coming years. We have found out that 8 out of 10 respondents, 8 out of 10 will increase or maintain their investments. We do, however, see some movements from last year to more maintained investment strategy, but it is obvious that the respondents have no plans whatsoever to decrease their focus on improving their business in order to stay competitive.

So only 2% will lower their ambitions. The level of insecure respondents, they remain at the same level as last year, but it's also then indicating that there is a possibility that even more businesses are willing to spend more money on the digital solutions.

So the next question, I believe might be of our interest, is what parts of the business did the respondency might be improved by digital tools -- it is striking here that the respondency of great potential in all parts of the business. The top 3 areas are all related to managing people, materials and documentation and quality assurance and safety. And with such wide opportunities overall to improve the business, we believe that the competition within the construction industry will force companies to invest in digital solutions in order to make their business more efficient and also profitable. So our conclusion is that there is a need of digital solutions in both good and bad times. This is not a need to have -- sorry, nice to have. It is a need to have.

So how about respondents that are already up and running with digital tools. We asked them about the impact they see in their company on a scale 1 to 4 within quite a few different areas. It is interesting to see the strong overall impact on different business areas when it comes to productivity, documentation and as well as also business overview and administration work.

A personal reflection I have is that all the ratings are in the top 3 and 4. And it's also interesting that it's not only efficiency focus that are improved, but also the overall turnover and revenue, and that is money in the pocket by the end of the day. Last time, we showed you some customer cases from a couple of our solutions, and we believe that construction companies using digital solutions will be like proof of the pudding, which eventually will also start some sort of a snowball effect because these kinds of companies within the construction industry, they tend to have a very wide network either the use subcontractors or our subcontractors themselves.

So they will eventually, we believe, push the need to other companies to start using the same kind of tools in order to stay competitive. This is my last slide for the market. Another effect that many probably not talk so much about because it's more about the soft values is the great impact digital tools have on creating a better working climate and also the customer communication. This is simply because of the higher degree of transparency between all parties. Both between the companies and also towards their customers. And the fact of this is fewer mistakes, less misunderstandings and this in turn results in quicker projects since you don't need to redo your work in the same level as previously. And companies will be recommended by the customers and the employee turnover rate will diminish. So all of these are factors that will create more profitability. So in the end of the day, the best companies win since they are nicer to work at and also liked by their customers.

Okay. So we know that we operate on one of the most interesting markets and how do we then maximize our efforts. As we have touched upon previously, we changed our organization from having been solution specific to country-based organization instead headed up by country managers. As we grow, the benefits of such organization are obvious instead of the solutions to work in silence in multiple countries, we can now leverage our efforts in a much smarter way. With local sales and marketing managers, best practices used for all the brands and scalable -- the scalability is also increasing.

So with the new structure, we build continuity. We're making ourselves less vulnerable and less dependent on certain people since there are more backup possibilities in larger teams. Through this way, we're also getting more efficient and coordinated. When it comes to the SmartCraft brand, the next step will be starting pushing it more aggressively with part of SmartCraft as the first step. And from a sales perspective, this change will also enable more upselling and cross-selling where it makes sense.

So the great Q2 figures that Gustav and Kjartan has presented to you is due to these longer-term business efforts from the beginning of the year. Now I will give you an example on how we are working with this practice across markets. I personally strongly believe in a very systematic approach, and we are using a generic model by Google, which is called see, think, do and care. And this model is simply a sales funnel, which you also can see here where you're building the brand, you're convincing the leads, purchase with both through push and pull and then you take care of your customers.

But the model is just a model if you don't put it into practice. So I believe strongly in building a very systematic approach where no stone is left unturned and where we also build a massive multichannel impact on the market. So this model is highly integrated with both sales and our customer success teams. For sales, it aims to increase our customer acquisition rate by expanding the overall awareness and also all visibility in all channels to generate leads and then finally, also working with market automation in order to support our sales staff in many ways.

And this systematic approach is also used together with our customer success people when it comes to increasing the customer lifetime value through upsell, cross-sell and also to create stickiness through increased usage. So all these teams with marketing, sales and customer success, we truly work very tied together in all parts of the process. And we are also very keen on metrics to see if we're successful or not.

So we open here from both customers and competitors that they really see us everywhere. I will just show you some figures that I think are very interesting. And also give us an indication that we have created a very strong marketing and sales strategy moving forward. The first 6 months of 2023, we generated a substantial number of media views and visitors to our website, all our websites.

So due to our extensive marketing, we experienced a high number of inbound leads, and we also have a fantastic conversion rate from meetings to sales, which is 60%. And this figure, I think, gives us 2 strong messages. Firstly, that we have truly attractive solutions that meet the market well. And secondly, we also have the right sales people who truly understand the challenges of construction companies and who are by many customers also regarded as their trusted adviser.

Another figure on this slide that I want to bring to your attention is our impressive customer lifetime value divided by acquisition cost, and that is a ratio of 18%. And we find all these figures to give us an indication that we have solutions that are crucial to our customers and meet their needs.

Here is another example and way of measuring that we are on the right track. This report is called share of search and is by many considered 1 of the best metrics to understand the brand impact on the market. Share of search is building a universal -- sort of a universe based on your competitors and where the sum is also always 100.

So if more people are searching for contract started than previously, the percentage for Elvis and Bygglet would decrease. The reason we are presenting the Swedish brands is that we have worked a very long time to establish Bygglet and Elvis in Sweden, and we are very proud of the strong impact we have made. This is a new way for us to measure our impact.

So unfortunately, we do not yet have good comparative figures from the past, but it will be truly interesting to follow in the future. Some last figures that build or build as confidence in some online statistics. And for our -- for the Swedish market exposure, it has more than doubled from last year, and we also see an effect on more efficient media spend due to the focused audience targeting. Another figure that is really interesting is that our direct online sales has more than doubled from last year.

Finally, I want to show you an example of how we visualize for our customers, how quickly they can gain organizational benefits by using digital tools. This example is available online. We are -- here, they can use sliders to explore. For example, how many projects they have and how many employees they are and also how many supplier invoices that they are using.

And then this is an example of a very common customer for Bygglet where they have around 20 employees, and 25 projects and around 100 supplier invoices. And what we have done in this calculation is that we see that the same around 2 hours project and also quite a lot of time not handling paper invoices. So if you're adding that up for a full year, they are saving whooping EUR 23,000.

And the point we want to make to our customers is that even do, we just do a calculation for a very small fraction of the benefits, the winnings are great. And we also believe that these figures are quite moderate. But let's say the benefit is half of this, it's still great. And remember, there are so many parts of the business that our customers can improve with the digital tools, which we have not even started to calculate.

So Finally, I want to stress that this kind of digital tools is an example on stuff that our marketing teams are testing out in order to gain more customers and leads. So this concluded my session, and I will now hand over to our CTO, Christian, please go ahead.

[Christian Saleki, executive]

Thank you, Katja, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure for me to be able to share a bit about what is going on in our R&D and product departments. But let's start with a quick recap. At SmartCraft, we decide on what to develop by evaluating value for our customers. And as we have mentioned before, we see some of the greatest opportunity in the electrician domain, where we also think that we will find some of the greatest rewards, especially because we have a very strong lineup of solutions for electricians today with a strong footprint in the market.

Our solutions, El-Verdi, Cordel, and ELlin all cover a significant part of the electrician ecosystem. But if we put them together, they will create a unique and highly valuable solution for electricians. Now with this in mind, we have now started to consolidate 3 of our products within the electrician domain. However, this is not just a fusion of tools. It's an integration onto our most advanced technical platform, SmartCraft Core. We are also strengthening the SmartCraft Core team as the Kvalitetskontroll team comprising of 10 people will be joining forces with the core team, significantly increasing the capacity of the development team.

By consolidating these teams, we will strengthen collaboration and accelerate the development of the SmartCraft Core platform. But let's have a look at some of the benefits in this strategy. First of all, we are looking to create a unified experience. We will start with connecting our existing user interfaces to SmartCraft Core,. but long term, the ambition is to provide electricians with a cohesive solution, thus reducing the learning curve and ensuring a more intuitive user experience.

We will also get a more efficient solution for our users, where electricians can seamlessly transition between tasks. SmartCraft Core is our most advanced platform. The consolidation will ensure that our solutions for electricians will remain at the cutting edge and always ready to integrate new features and innovation.

And finally, a consolidated platform results in cost-effective maintenance and updates become much more streamlined. The integration of our electrician solution on the core platform is a clear signal of our direction for the future and a testament to our vision of providing professionals with next-generation tools that evolve with their needs.

And today, I have some news related to SmartCraft Core and the launch of our latest product, SmartCraft Calculation, which is a personalized calculation tool crafted specifically for plumbers and electricians. This is also a great example of how we have leveraged our existing resources towards higher value creation and innovation, just like Kjartan mentioned earlier today.

So why is calculation tools so important and valuable for plumbers and electricians? By the way, we have -- we are AI enthusiasts. So we have harnessed some of its magic to create captivating images for these slides, just as a side note. But back to the topic of why calculation tool is important, let's imagine you're a plumber or an electrician. Every day, you're faced with a vast sea of products, each with its own specification and uses.

Choosing the right one can be like finding a needle in a haystack. And once you have made your choice, how do you accurately assess the time and material needed for the job. Now this is where our calculation tool comes in. Think of our tool as your personal assistant. Instead of sifting through thousands of products manually, our solution helps you to narrow down the best option for your specific needs.

Also, for example, a sink or a bath tub isn't just a single piece. It's a complex assembly of various components like washers, bolts, pipes, extensions and more. In our calculation tool, we've organized these components into predefined packages. These ensure that the plumber has a streamlined process and don't overlook any essential parts. This is, of course, true for electricians as well.

It is also quite a complex and time -- it's a time-consuming work to assess material and the time it takes to install it, which often leads to unexpected costs. Our tool provides accurate estimates ensuring you're prepared and can avoid those unexpected surprises.

Sometimes, a job requires revisiting calculations or making adjustments based on client feedback, for example. Instead of juggling multiple papers or excel versions or getting lost in edits, our software will let you manage and compare different versions seamlessly. We understand that every calculation you make affects the quality of your work and your bottom line. Our tool ensures that each calculation is precise, helping you to maintain high-quality service while also ensuring profitability.

And finally, with our tool, you can send out bids quickly, increasing your chances of securing your next job. And remember, the early bird gets the work. SmartCraft Calculation is designed to make your life simpler, more efficient and more profitable. It's not just the software. It's your partner in success.

SmartCraft has a long history of delivering calculation software for both electricians and plumbers. And boy, have we used our collective knowledge on the subject to reimagine and build a fantastic new solution based on the latest technology. The solution will initially focus on new customer groups and segments to generate new revenue for SmartCraft.

We are currently running pilots with 300 users and launch is expected to start in a few months. SmartCraft calculation will be first available for plumbers. And going forward, we will expand the tool to accommodate electricians as well. The development of that is already in the advanced stages.

Now let's have a look at a short demo of SmartCraft calculation in action. All right. Now imagine you're a plumber and you want to bid on a big job, for example, renovating 20 bathrooms. The builder has handed over the details you need, and instead of getting overwhelmed, you just pop those details straight into the calculation tools through our import function.

Here, we see the user importing the base detail for the tender calculation. And once the main items and packages are in, you can now may easily make changes. For example, adding some extra that makes the job more profitable for you, but still meets the builders' requirements. Here, we see the user adding 2 new predefined packages and adjusting the content before entering it to the main calculation. You can play around with different setups and simulate versions to see which 1 gives you the best profit.

Now here, we see the user making another version of the main calculation, keeping the original intact and checking the profits and other properties on the different versions. For every calculation you do, there is a handy dashboard. It shows you all the important stuff like material costs, work cost, customer amount, profits and status on where you are in the tender process.

There is also a detailed window of the tools for a final check. And when you are all set and happy with your numbers, send the way that works best for your customers. Here, we see the users sending the final calculation to the customer through e-mail, which is just one of the options available.

Now what you have witnessed here was that we managed to create a complex tender calculation with a lot of materials and work our estimates within a few minutes. We also managed to do so without compromising quality or profits. Now if that's not magic, then I don't know what it is. And on that note, let's take a look at what we are doing in the area of AI.

AI is a hot topic in tech, and we want to take part of its possible benefits at SmartCraft, of course. So during the first half of 2023, we began experimenting with cutting-edge tools like GitHub CoPilot and ChatGPT, both of which are AI-powered solutions designed to assist developers in their tasks. Our goal was to determine if these tools could actually improve our engineering department's productivity, and the results were very positive.

We were able to do more in less time, and our developers were able to streamline their work, reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and enhance the overall quality of our software. Equipped with our positive findings from the internal use of AI, we are now looking to extend this experience to our users. So in the latter part of 2023, we will start exploring opportunities towards integrating AI tools and libraries directly into our products with the objective to provide our users with some of the benefits of AI that we experienced internally.

Some areas that spark extra interest for us includes speeding up onboarding, customer success modules, tailored training and contextual search. However, we are in the earlier stages of our experiments and eventually, we will choose 1 of these topics to move forward with. This concludes my part of the presentation, and I'd like to hand over to Gustav and Kjartan for our Q&A session.

[Gustav Line, executive]

Thank you very much, Christian. I'm -- I really did like the AI pictures that you created, I thought they were fantastic. So anyway, now we have concluded or gone through the 2 parts of the presentation. And as you can see, we've had a great first quarter -- sorry, second quarter, and we also have a really good outlook going into the second half. So now we open up for questions. And please take the first question. .

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, Gustav. We have the first question from Gustav Froberg at Berenberg. He's asking about the margins in this quarter, which were very strong. how should we think of seasonality in terms of margins for the remainder of the year? And are you now at a sustainable higher level than what we've seen before?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Yes, of course, as you can see from my slide, we have had an increase from quarter-to-quarter and increase Q2 versus Q2 is significant. We do not guide on the short term. So the next quarter or 2 quarters, it depends on do we want to do investments or not. But in the medium term, we reiterate our guiding and expect margin increase due to the scalability of the business model.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you. We have a question from [ Ariston Lodge ] at ABG. Can you give an update on the outlook for M&A? Have price expectations among private companies come down to more reasonable levels now? And should we expect more M&A going forward?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. We do have a good pipeline. We've said this several times. We are in contact with a lot of companies in the Nordics but also outside the Nordics. And I do think that price expectations have come down some. But still, we'll see, they have come down, maybe not to the levels we would like to see them, but they are definitely more a reality check for some of these companies. So that's a good thing.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, Gustav. Two questions from [ Fredrik Nilsson ] at Red Eye. What are the drivers for the improved pipelines in all regions?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. I think I'll sort of pass it on to Katja here in a second. But I think, first of all, it is basically what we talked about really having a stronger focus on sales and how we can drive sales and how we could do it in a holistic view within each country, so we can maximize the sales resources we have. But then Katja, you've also done some great stuff in marketing. So maybe you could just quickly sum that up as well.

[Katja Widlund, executive]

Yes. I think the systematic approach. We have that is very significant. You have many companies that are more focusing only on campaigns, but we are focusing on branding, we're focusing on campaigns. We are focusing on our customers with recommendations, which is very, very successful. So that we are improving this across the different countries will secure the pipeline. And as you can see also for the Q2, the changes that we have made since the beginning of the year, they are starting to give us an effect that is very pleasing to see.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, Katja. Yes. Next question is, is Elvis not included in SmartCraft Core Electro at this point? And if so, why?

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes. we are -- we have started with the solution that we have in Norway. So you have to start somewhere, and we will look into how we can include Elvis later, but they are definitely part of the long-term plan.

[Unknown Executive]

Thanks. [ Hover Nielsen at Sun ] has a couple of questions regarding your calculations on LTV over CAC. So first of all, how -- can you elaborate on the calculation of that KPI? And related to that, can you comment on the development over time? And if it is really as high as 18x, aren't you spending way too little on customer acquisition?

[Kjartan Bo, executive]

Yes, I can at least answer for the calculation. So when we calculate the lifetime value, we -- it's a product of average revenue per customer gross margin and churn. So that's the lifetime value. The customer acquisition cost is, of course, sales and marketing. When it comes to the development...

[Gustav Line, executive]

Yes, I can say a few words about that. I think it's -- the way we like to run our business is that we try things, if they work with you more of it. If they don't work, we stop doing them. And that's how we work with marketing and sales as well. That's one part of it. The other part of it is that we try to automate more and more of our marketing and sales processes. So actually, we expect to have a very high LTV to CAC going forward. I mean if we could automize everything, we would have a fantastic LTV to CAC. So I think you would expect it to be high. It has been higher, actually above 20%. Now it's down to 18%, and then we expect it to at least be at a high level.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, Gustav. There are no further questions on -- from the webcast at the moment.

[Gustav Line, executive]

Okay. So thank you very much for listening in, and I hope that you see that we are on a really good track and we are really well positioned to take more growth on over the next quarters. Thank you very much.