Exsitec Holding AB

STO:EXS

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

Welcome to this quarterly update for the third quarter of 2023 for Exsitec. Presenting will be the CEO, Johan Kallblad. And without further ado, I'll leave the word to Johan.

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Thank you, Hampus, and thank you for joining. Talking now is me, Johan Kallblad. I have served as CEO of Exsitec since 2010. We are sending from two different locations today actually. So I have my CFO, Anna, with me on link here, if there are any questions where she is required. I expect this presentation to be around 50 minutes, so we should have plenty of time for questions, and it's possible to ask questions via the chat or the Hand Raise function in Zoom.

So I'll jump into it. As usual, I will start off by making a short recap about our business as a reminder of what it is that we do. After that, we'll cover some Q3 specifics on the financials and the short market update, talk a little bit about our priorities, going forward.

So we exist to help medium-sized businesses in the Nordics, use digital tools to improve their operations. And we're a one-stop shop, so the customer can focus on their core business and leave the IT and the digital tools to us.

Digital tools can address areas like reducing financial administration through automation or use data for better decision-making. And it can also be creating the integrations and information flow between business applications used in an organization.

Like I said, I've been running this operation since 2010, and it took us a few years to set up this current business model and to reach scale. This year, 2023 will be our 10th consecutive year of profitable growth. We actually reduced head count a little bit the last 2 quarters, specifically in e-commerce, where the financial performance still is lacking a bit.

And we have been getting back into a growth mindset this quarter, especially when it comes to the areas of financial automation and integration. So we are currently around 550 employees in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

Target market is medium-sized companies with at least SEK 50 million in revenue, typically. There is really no size limit upwards on where our model works, but we don't actively target the enterprise segment in our sales and marketing. We have around 4,000 active customers spread through many different industries. And typically, in a year, no one single customer is more than 1% of revenue.

So what we do is we combine software components that we work with in a modular way, and we've created some bundles of software to fit different industries, and these bundles are often made up of the same foundational components with some industry-specific add-ons. That's why we have a good fit towards many different industries.

So all in all, we sell and implement around 20 software packages that we can combine in this modular way together with in-house developed integrations. And the logos you see here 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.

A dream customer of ours can use up to 5, 6 different components from us, but the average customer is today only, it's just over 2. So there's a lot of work remaining in growing our footprint on existing customers.

The business model is built on 3 revenue streams. Sales and marketing is focused on selling software from the selection I just mentioned, together with integrations that we develop in-house. This is sold on a subscription model, where you pay as you use, and this revenue stream is around 20% of net revenue.

Just under 2/3 of our revenue is from professional services, where we implement the software and make the customer successful in using the software over time. We also do custom development and custom integrations, where needed.

The third part of our business model is that we offer our customers a single point-of-contact support on a recurring fixed price model. And in this type of engagement, we can also take care of infrastructure and Internet access and IT security. And we try to give the customers a predictable cost structure, with much of the running costs on a subscription model.

So moving into the specifics for the third quarter here. On a high level, this is what defined the quarter for us. As always, for us, Q3 is seasonally weak, given the vacation period for us and our customers. But that is nothing new for 2023. We always have a challenge in Q3.

We have learned over time to use the slower business side to develop ourselves, and we do a lot of internal activities like training for staff and especially onboarding new staff in the quarter, and we've done that for many years.

So the highlight of the quarter must be the performance in Norway for me, where the local management have turned around the business from a negative margin of more than 10% to a positive margin of just over 5%. So again, we've seen a quarter with longer lead times than the historical average for closing deals, but we are actually very pleased with the overall sales numbers, and we've closed new deals on a volume that's around 50% higher than Q3 of 2022.

And lastly, the big picture here shows the trainees that we took on board in August, 74 people all in all. We hired over 80 people, not all trainees then, in Q3. It's a big undertaking. But over time, this is the most important investment we do in our business.

As for financials, overall growth, 10%, with organic growth of 8%. No significant acquisitions affecting top line, and the divestment of the point-of-sale business in Denmark last year is almost the same size as the small acquisitions we have done.

So diving into the numbers here, it's a bit of a varied story. The e-commerce business is actually shrinking by around 20% compared to last year, while the finance automation and business intelligence business is growing at 20%.

So we feel a little more competition in the market. We have not really increased overall prices for new sales. We started increasing prices already early last year or maybe even 2 years ago for new sales, but it's been more static this year.

We have had a good increase in the average deal size. And we're doing -- for existing engagements, we are doing early price indexing based on labor cost index that's around 4% to 5% this year. Software and especially those priced in U.S. dollars, a very small percentage for us, but that has had a larger price increase. So all in all, I estimate that around half of the organic growth is due to prices, including currency effects, and half is volume.

Talking about volume, a quick reminder that the quarter has 1 less working day compared to last year, which affects the professional services a little bit.

Adjusted EBITDA, up from SEK 5 million to SEK 12 million, which means we have a margin improvement of around 4% to just under 8% margin in the quarter.

In addition to managing the holiday period in this operation, where 60% of the revenue is from professional services, we've added costs in taking on a lot of new staff in our trainee program. And we have 10 years of track record here, and we expect to recoup this investment by early Q2 of 2024. It's almost entirely in Sweden this year. So the Swedish operation is the one that's been carrying the most cost for new employees.

Year-to-date earnings are up [ 39% ]. Last year, we had a one-off positive effect in the quarter of just over SEK 20 million from divesting the point-of-sale operation in Denmark, but we adjusted for that in the comparison numbers.

So going through the segments in a little more detail, Sweden again, actually a strong quarter, which they had last year also, solid growth and earnings. We're okay with the margins here. A weak performance in the e-commerce business led to us having to do a reduction in force last quarter, and we're not exactly where we want to be yet, but it's also in Sweden where we added around 90% of our trainees.

Norway, from a profitability standpoint, is the highlight of the quarter. I've been very transparent with restoring profitability being the top objective in Norway and building for long-term growth. This has been a huge undertaking, and it feels great to be able to show an improvement in margin on this level.

So lastly, Denmark. This is the last quarter where we don't have the point-of-sale business in the comparable numbers, so we think we'll see a more predictable performance, going forward. I actually feel really good about the shape of the operations, overall. The recurring revenue stream from software, a nice consequence of our business model. This helps us have more stable results and cash flow than if we were only a professional services company.

Like I said earlier, several of our suppliers made price increases on the start of this calendar year, which helps us. But we -- on the negative side, we do feel that the easy growth when customers increase seats, users and volumes due to their own growth, that's [ lower ] with customers, for instance, reviewing license usage and removing unneeded usage to adapt to a slower economy. But all in all, solid and growing revenue stream, total growth of 24% year-over-year.

So I want to finish up with a short update on the market conditions and our priorities going forward. So I was surprised already in Q2, actually, to see the strong sales numbers for new engagements. And now in Q3 -- after Q3, I'm not as surprised, but I'm equally happy to report an order intake on the same relative level as in Q2.

I track 4 KPIs to monitor sales, and that's how many leads we generate, how long time we have between a qualified lead and a sale, how many sales we do in total and what the average order size is. And the negative KPI that's been going on for some time is that we have seen lead times increase. This quarter, the lead time from -- that is from qualified lead to closed sale, that was 50% higher than historical average. But it's actually only 20% higher than the same time last year.

So our data tells us that the market was slowing a little bit already this time last year. Throughout the year, we have been generating a lot of new leads. However, we feel we have a very strong offering, and we have around 30% more leads than we had in the same period of last year. And we also see a 20% increase in average deal size compared with Q3 of last year.

So the total order intake in the quarter is up more than 50% from the same period in 2022. We will keep track of this and get back with more inflow in the coming quarters, but we have 2 quarters in a row with really solid order intake, and that feels pretty good, actually.

Business priorities. Overall, we think we're in really good shape. We've taken actions to improve margins, and we intend to keep on doing this. So operational efficiency is still a higher priority than maximizing total growth. This is a people business, and we will keep on investing in finding the right people, training them in our offering and in sales and marketing and develop the people that we have.

Conditions for M&A has obviously changed due to the higher cost of financing. We are spending a lot of time on building a good pipeline, even if we are and we have been cautious in doing things that add significant risk. An acquisition that's always good is doing something that strengthens market share in an area where we are already present because it's easier to project the financials and it's a lower risk on the personnel side. So we keep on working with that in mind.

And for about 9 months, I've been telling you that the priority for 2023 is to improve margins more than maximizing growth. And we have delivered on this with improved margins every quarter this year. We do feel that what's maybe a weaker overall market could be a good time to start up growth initiatives for a company in a good shape.

And as competition, generally, is a little bit lower, whether it's for M&A activities or for hiring people. And we have initiated a strategy process where we are looking towards growth and long-term growth again. I hope I can elaborate a little bit more on ambitions in the year-end report.

We're not doing anything crazy here, so do expect strong margins rather than high growth also in the coming few quarters. All in all, this concludes the presentation, 14 minutes. If there are any questions, please feel free to ask. Hampus, do you have any questions at this time?

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

Yes, we have a question from Tom.

[Tom Guinchard, analyst]

Perfect. I was just wondering about the easy growth that you spoke about that customers are reducing their licenses per account. Can you give us something on the size of that effect on growth?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes. And this is not an exact science because it's not like every customer is doing the same thing at the same time. But we typically see about a 4% to 6% growth in an existing account just from increasing volume every year. So for instance, some -- a lot of the softwares we sell are priced based on a number of legal entities or number of users or a maximum number of transactions you run through the software. So we do see an underlying growth in something that you sold several years ago, just a customer calls in and say, "Hey, I need 10 new users, and I started in a new country." So -- and then you get an automated order intake that's not really the result of a sales activity.

We see that as typically somewhere around 4% to 6%. It's not an exact science but somewhere in that range. And we see that flattish this year. So I would say it's -- and then license sales is also only a part of our business. But I would say you could use that as a proxy also for services -- rendered as services used because [ they ] typically also need some services and so on. So I would say a general slowing economy, perhaps a 3%, 4% reduction in overall growth due to that.

[Tom Guinchard, analyst]

All right. Perfect. And then just a bit on the geographies. Can you walk us through the markets in Sweden, [indiscernible] and Norway?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes. From a sales perspective, actually strongest in Sweden, even if we see the best financial improvement in Norway. But the financial improvement in Norway has a lot to do with internal activities, and it's things that we've done ourselves in the business and that the local leadership have done in improving efficiency and so on. So it's a lot of internal things there.

Actually, contrary to what you may be -- read in the papers, we see the strongest sales market actually in Sweden and the strongest demand. Sweden slowed up the earliest. But we do see the Swedish market as having actually more activity than Norway right now. So -- but if we are a little bit more local and talk about our specific offering, the strong offering in Norway right now is the cloud version of Visma business called [ Business Next ].

It's a new software that was released last year in Norway. That's where we have an offering to where we modernize and move all of their implementations to the cloud. We're only gone through maybe 5% or 6% of our customer base, but that offering is definitely the strong one in Norway right now. That hasn't yet been released in Sweden.

So we are -- we've seen the overall market. Sweden looks surprisingly strong, but the local Exsitec world, maybe the product offering in Norway is very interesting right now because we have a really strong cloud conversion offering in conjunction with Visma.

[Tom Guinchard, analyst]

Can you give us some insight into the -- how the order book is split here for '24, '25 onwards?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Come again, could you repeat? I didn't quite...

[Tom Guinchard, analyst]

There smart cloud transition here in Norway, you have quite a large order book here. With regards to timing, is most of it concentrated into 2024? Or can we expect it in [ 2025 ] [indiscernible]?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

It's going to be for a few years. Actually, we're planning for this -- and this is not in a huge detail, we're planning for this transition to go on until around 2028, actually. So it's a long transition.

And it's because of few different reasons: First, not all customers are early adopters. Not all the customers want to move to something that is less proven than what they had. That's one of the natural things in a product life cycle. So -- but it's also because some of the functionality in the newer version, there are some of the functionality that some customers use is not yet released.

So while it works 100% for some operations, there are some operations that still have to await some additional functionality. So it's actually not fit for 100% of everybody to convert to yet. So we do expect this to be a large undertaking for a longer time frame than 2025. It's going to be 2026, 2027 also, probably.

And that has not started in Sweden now, although it's a -- you can't just project either this improvement that we see in Norway. It's not something that we can only project to Sweden. We're going to release this product probably sometime in 2024 in Sweden. But in Sweden, we have -- we don't have as big of a legacy customer base.

We have been in running our business using other cloud softwares for quite a few years. So the situation with such a large part of the customer base being on legacy software, it's specific for Norway, even though we do have a large amount of legacy software users. But maybe in Norway, it was 80% of the operation and in Sweden, maybe 20%, 30%. So the offer, it's not as massive a change for Sweden as it was in Norway.

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

We have a question from Johnny.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. I have a couple of questions. First, regarding the SEK 10 million impact from the [indiscernible] program, mainly affecting Sweden there. Can you say something about how much -- how large was the impact last year, so to speak?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes, that's a great question. I can actually tell you that exactly, if I open my little -- it's -- I'll do that fast, I wasn't prepared to open my reporting. It's around SEK 1.5 million more this year than last year for Sweden.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. So SEK 1.5 million...

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

So we had an impact last year also that was high. So it's around SEK 8.5 million for Sweden this year, and it was around SEK 7 million last year. So -- but then it's less of an impact in Norway. So all in all, it's a little bit higher on the total result, but it's -- the difference is more that some of the costs moved from Norway to Sweden, if that makes sense.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. This is very clear. And also regarding the market conditions there and the longer sales cycle, could you say something about how the development was during the quarter? Was there some difference at the end compared to the beginning?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes. So this is a good question, and I wish I could elaborate more on this. It's -- actually, what happens for us is since we see July being -- and even the first half of August being very, very slow due to the summer, they were slow last year and the year before.

So it's actually -- it's too little data to have a good -- it's actually too little data to have a good analysis based on the first half of the quarter. So most of the data is from the second half of the quarter. And I'm not -- I can't really make any long-going conclusions.

I think a conclusion like that would be based on too little data for the earlier part of the quarter. So we'll have to get back to that to Q4. But it's a very interesting question, obviously.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. Yes, I understand. And because finally, you continue to win new business, but you also say that you're affected by [ reduction ] of some newer licenses among customers. Is it possible to like quantify how large that is and how one should think about the margin impact on that and also the margin, going forward?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes. I can try. Like Tom asked the question before around the impact of slowing usage from existing customers, we usually see an underlying growth of the installed base of maybe 4% to 6% per year, things that we are not responsible for. Like the customer says, "I have 10 new employees I need to license or I have another country or I have increased -- I have licensed 10,000 transactions and we use 12,000."

So we usually see on average a 4% to 6% growth in the license base, and that has been fairly flat in volume this year, albeit though we have seen some price increases, so maybe the overall numbers don't look that different. But if we were to have normal usage growth, I think we would have seen a total growth that were some 2%, 3%, 4% higher, probably, on the organic side.

So that's one way of answering your question, I think. Let's see -- what was the other part of the question? You had something else. Sorry, could you repeat?

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. It was just how one should think about the margin.

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes. For margin, that doesn't really affect much. So it's actually the same margin profile if we have -- so unless something massive happens, where we would like have to renegotiate with our partners and so on due to us selling -- not selling enough, but it actually doesn't change margin profile on the license part.

What changes margin is utilization of the consulting force, and utilization is mostly about planning and having the right number of engagement as compared to how well staffed you are. So it's -- that's more of a business execution. It doesn't actually change margins much. It more changes growth. You get some free growth, that's fantastic. But it doesn't change margin as much.

What does change margins other than that execution is actually that it's easier to -- this automatic growth that comes from the customers increasing themselves, it doesn't require sales activities. And sales activities, of course, are expensive. So with lead times for sales being 50% higher than historical average, we can also expect that sales cost per million [ SEK ] sold is probably also higher, right?

So margin's a little bit negatively affected by higher sales cost as compared to total growth. But the main thing is actually execute -- here in margin profile for me right now and for the coming quarters is mostly about execution and making sure that we have the right size in our professional services organization compared to the total order backlog.

So -- and we do feel pretty good about that. So I'm not -- I mean, I would have loved for it to be automatic growth in the market. It's not -- and I adapt to that. So that's fine. I mean I live with that. It's going to be another year. Over time, you have years where the economy slows, and you have years when the economy grows. And it's not something I lose any sleep over, really.

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

And we also have a question from [ Eric ].

[Unknown Analyst]

This is [ Eric Larson ] from SEB here. I hope you're all good. I just have one question. Very interesting granularity on the longer sales cycles and the higher order value. I guess those things balance out. But I just thought on the larger order values, does that enable you to be more efficient in some way, given it's larger projects, not utilization and so forth? Is that more...

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

We haven't quantified -- I have -- actually, that perspective, I haven't really thought of, that's a good -- that's an interesting perspective. The other -- I had another perspective that I thought about, which is maybe, to some extent, us selling larger engagements is a reason for why it takes longer time. Maybe it's not the market that takes longer time, maybe it's us trying to sell a more complex engagement. Maybe that's why it takes longer time. So that's a perspective that's worthwhile looking into.

Actually, I think you are probably right, but that it should be easier planning with larger engagements. I think though, on average, we would have to get a lot larger engagements. I would be sure if you look at some of my colleagues in the business that are more into the enterprise segment, their average order size is probably 10x or -- it's not 20% higher than [ 9 ]. It's probably 10x. I probably do 10x more deals than they probably have 10x larger deals.

So -- and they have a different planning situation because then you plan like 1, 2 or 3 consultants, 4, 5 consultants for a long time, whereas me, I'm like it's 1 day here, 1 day there. It's a much more complex planning engagement for -- or planning undertaking for us, but -- or actually -- it's more complex, but it's also -- on the other hand, it's less dependent on individuals and so on and so.

So I mean like this, if average order sizes keep on getting larger and keep on getting significantly larger, yes, it will be an easier planning situation for us. I'm not sure whether 20% changes that in any quantifiable manner. But I guess -- I mean, I suppose it does a little bit over time. So yes.

And also, you could probably see with us making a little bit larger engagement, maybe a little bit pressure on price, maybe a little bit longer lead times, maybe a little bit easier planning. So maybe all those things probably connect together, but it's not something that we have quantified in any way yet.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. Yes. No, very interesting though. So thank you for your thoughts. That's all for me.

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Thanks. I hope I'm not taking everybody's time. These are really interesting questions. This is a change in our operation that has happened, obviously, that we -- we're happy to see it. We're happy to see the good order intake, but we can't -- we're happy to execute on it. We can't really say that we know exactly why and what's happening in the underlying market.

But we've always had this way of keeping track of our sales KPIs to give us a good expectation on what to expect in terms of utilization, going forward, so that we can [ start ] in the right way. And that's why you also see high sales number in Sweden, that's why we have most of the new recruits in Sweden. So it's just us trying to prepare for good execution.

Any more questions, Hampus?

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

Yes. We also got some questions via the chat function. And the first one is, how come you have a larger seasonality affecting margins with a soft Q3 relative to the typically general IT consulting company?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Yes. This is actually an excellent question and some -- really honestly, an excellent question and something that I've been -- but I've also been very frustrated over. And I think that this is exactly correct. The person asking the question is exactly correct.

We have a much higher seasonality than the average. And you wouldn't think that we would because we have more than the average on fixed price engagements. But for us, we work -- one thing that's important to note is that we work on project engagements where we are the people running the project, and we work with the business side on the customers -- on the customer side, whereas a typical IT consultant, he sells people engagement.

So you say you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 consultants that work on a typical engagement. And when they are back from vacation, you just put them out on the customer side again, and then you start [ building ] right away, whether when you run projects in-house like we do, we have to wait for the customer to come back to -- we can do some activities, obviously without the customers being back.

But it's almost like our business doesn't really start on full effect until everybody is back. It's enough that 1 or 2 key people from the customer is not yet back from vacation, and that can prevent us from starting.

So that's why we have changed our model. We have accepted this. We've been very frustrated with it, but we've accepted this. And we also said, so we -- let's use this time of underutilization to train ourselves to do kick off, to do training, to do learning, to get new staff and so on. And we've gotten into that. So you wouldn't see probably -- you probably don't see everybody doing so much of their hiring in 1 quarter as we do.

So it's a little bit different because we sell to the business side rather than to the IT side of the business that we do more work in-house. But it's a true and correct observation that we have more seasonality than what you would expect. Actually, more change in margins.

And the other way of saying it is because I run the business on a very low utilization in Q3, partly because our market and partly because of our own choice to focus a lot on internal things in Q3.

And again, to be also with the community here, I've been running this now for 13 years. I've been trying to figure this out for about 8 years or 10 years. And then the last few years, I've overcome to accept it that rather than trying to change this, we may be accept it that we do things to prepare for really good quarters in the other quarters and because we -- but I definitely understand the question where the question comes from.

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

The next question we have is, is the improvement you see in e-commerce mainly related to your business? Or do you see an improved market as well?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Great question. It's a combination. Actually, we did some deals, especially late Q2, that are giving me a little bit better utilization, and that would be an indication that the market is a little bit better.

But the other thing is that we've adapted and changed our cost -- our cost [ tune ] to the level of demand that we see, which is lower. So it's not a great market, but it's not getting worse either. So what it was gradually -- I think the worst quarter was probably Q1 of '23, so stabilizing, probably.

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

The next question we have is, many of our competitors are reporting a substantial slowdown in new sales and activity within IT. How come that you are able to take so much market share?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

That seems like a question that we would have placed out there ourselves. We -- well, first, a couple of different things in that. Now first, we don't -- I think it's one change that we sell into the business side and a lot of our -- the other IT consultants, a lot of the pure IT consultants, they sell into IT.

And it's like when -- we are like the initiators of new projects, and they can sell on the -- in the other end of everything, where you buy a consulting engagement, you get a consultant in-house because you have too much to do.

And it's typically not why our customers buy -- our customers buy software and implementation through us because they want to change something in their operation. And if you're a generic IT consultant, you sell to someone who has too much to do and need help to balance workload. So we -- it's a little bit of a different logic. I think that's one difference, if that makes sense.

The other difference, I would think, is we have a really large sales and marketing operation. A lot of the companies really don't. They have a small sales organization, and they are very good at finding a need at the customer side that the customers themselves have identified, and they have a small and efficient sales operation to cater to that need.

But when the customer doesn't have explicit needs, they have a harder time selling, whereas we have an ongoing sales and marketing automation that talks about using digital tools to improve. And then we sell it as a one-stop shop.

So I just think what happens to me right now is I'm getting some results back from this long-term sales and marketing operation that we have all the time.

And maybe in a super-hot market, having a large sales and marketing operation is almost unnecessary because you could just deliver your consultant into a customer that knows themselves, that they have this need. But I think our model works a little bit better in a slower economy. That would be my take.

I realize I'm giving very detailed answers here, but I think these are some excellent questions. So do you have anything else, Hampus?

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

Yes. We have another question from Johnny.

[Unknown Analyst]

This is Johnny from [ SEB ] again. I just have a quick follow-up regarding the customer sales. So can you say something specific if you see some specific segments or industries among your customers that stands out on a positive or negative side?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Not really, actually. It's a little bit all over. But one thing that has surprised me is that building and construction -- the building and construction installation space, that has not died. You would maybe expect with house, building and so on are slowing up a lot, then you would maybe expect that IT usage in those industries would also slow up.

And we have seen some engagements where we haven't -- where we had a verbal agreement with the customer, and they choose to move it to the future. That's one of those things that happen when lead times get longer, but we have seen some of that in the building and construction space.

But I would say, compared to what you read in the newspapers, surprisingly strong demand for digital tools from building and construction. That would be my only take. Other than that, it's all -- nothing really specific in terms of industries.

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

We also have a question, which is within your increased order intake, are there longer projects you're selling now? Or is it the same?

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Well, the -- with the order size being a little bit larger, that means that the project is a little bit longer. But then the main thing -- so a little bit longer projects, but not significant, not a huge difference.

The main thing for us is actually not the size of the initial project engagement. The most important thing for us is to make the customer successful in using a certain software that we sell. And sometimes, if it's more complex, it takes a little bit longer to get the customers to be successful. But when they are successful, they keep on using it, then it's actually the changes on the customer side that gives us a lot of easy automatic sales, right?

So a customer engagement for a new financial software, for instance, can be that they use it for 15 years. But the first implementation engagement may be 4 months. So it's a little bit longer, but the most significant part for me that gives the foundation for long-term growth is actually selling to a lot more logos, selling to more customers. That's what the foundation for long-term growth.

So not a massive change, a little bit longer engagement but not massive. Anything else, Hampus?

[Hampus Strandqvist, executive]

No, these were all the questions we had.

[Johan Kallblad, executive]

Okay. So I want to thank you very much for all these questions. It's fun to get a lot of questions and feedback. And feel free to get back to us at [e-mail] if you need more information, and I wish everybody a good day.