Hello everyone online, and welcome to the Heeros Business Review for the first quarter of 2024. We did a bit of technical changes, so if the voice is somehow off, please let us know in the chat. Otherwise, we'll kick off as it's exactly 11:00 A.M. As usual, the safe harbor statement from us, and nothing new there. What is new is a bit of updated pictures for both me and Juho, but the guys are the same from the last four quarters. In general, same type of content as usual. Quick commentary on Q1, and then some comments on the outlook for 2024. But at this point, I'll pass the mic to you. Thank you, Niklas. On my behalf, welcome to this result briefing for Q1 of Heeros. Nice to see you joining on this special event here. As stated in the business review of Q1, we had a strong growth in profitability during the challenging environment. Revenue and recurring revenue were both affected by the decline in transactional volumes. The volumes decreased by 9% and revenue, transactional revenue by 17% in the first quarter. Transaction revenue is about 17% of our total revenues. Its share has decreased year-over-year. Contract revenue grew by 3%, and we have a growing contract base and good long-lasting customer relationships. By looking at the profitability and the Adjusted EBITDA, it was improved by 35% during the first quarter. The improvement comes from cost savings made during the second quarter of last year, and as we have also made cost savings during the first quarter of this year, we expect this positive trend to, in profitability, to continue throughout this year as well. Although we don't give a financial guidance on the Rule of 40, which is the combined revenue growth percentage and the EBITDA percentage, we will report it in the key figures. Adjusted EBIT Rule of 40 was 19%, compared to 18% a year ago, Q1. With the low transactional revenue resulting decline in total revenue, we can see somewhat muted Rule of 40 in the first quarter. Looking at the revenue and profitability development trends, in all the graphs, the logic is the same, and we have the year-on-year comparison and change percentage, along with the comparison change percentage in the first quarter in each of these graphs. Revenue declined by 2%, and contract revenue growth was 3% year-on-year in the first quarter. Focus on the profitability, which also was stated, it started already in 2023, and during the second half of last year, we saw the effects of the cost-saving coming through and during the first quarter. As said earlier, the cost base is already lower than a year ago or at the end of last year. This doesn't mean that we will stop investing in sales and marketing and product development. This is still continuing. In the SaaS metrics, we have the net revenue retention, ARPA per end customer, and order intake, ARR. Net revenue retention, 105%, which was a year ago, 107%, especially strong within the direct customers, both in Financial Cloud and ERP Cloud. We have sticky customers, and market situation doesn't affect this. The average revenue per account, good progress there, +8%. Number of so-called paper customers decreased due to this packetizing changes and all the measures we do for digitizing our large customer base. In the order intake, ARR, Q1 was lower than a year ago at EUR 102,000. The transactional volume and the trend can be seen in this graph with the macroeconomic uncertainty, all available in the graph. The transaction revenue, as said, about 70% of our revenues was impacted negatively in the first quarter of the year. When we released the Q4 figures in February this year, we stated that there was a little tick up in the volume part, about -8% at that point, but now it dropped back to -9% in the first quarter of this year. We can see from our transactional volume data that the volumes are decreasing across all the sectors, so nothing sector specific in that. We also see that the Finnish strike waves did influence the economic activity within the first quarter. The turnaround in the economy can be seen in the transactional volumes in the fall of 2022, when the year-on-year change shifted from positive to negative. Yeah, at this point, Niklas's turn to continue on the key messages. Thanks, Juho. So, still continued quite steady performance during the first quarter of 2024. As noted by Juho as well, excellent development in both profitability and cash flow continued. The company is clearly cash generative now and is scheduled to repay a large part of net debt during the year. The Adjusted EBITDA grew by 35% compared to Q1 2023, and in a very positive note, one of our most important internal metrics, the so-called EBITDA cash, increased by more than 450%, reaching around EUR 240,000. Obviously, the comparable figure is quite, well, at least somewhat misleading, but it's a very nice trend that we hope to continue. Usually, Q1 is quite bad for us, profitability-wise, and we did lose 17% or almost EUR 100,000 from transactional year revenue from a year ago. So I do think that profitability in this perspective will also bounce back during later in the year. We also made some rather large internal changes during the quarter. The most important one of these was the change in negotiations during February. There were really three aims to the negotiations. First, to clarify the sales organization and address issues in the new ARR intake that we've seen over the past year. The second one was to reallocate R&D and product development resources after the completion of certain key R&D projects. And thirdly, to continue the journey towards a more tightly focused apps. Even though these processes are always super difficult, I do believe we succeeded in all these three targets. That being said, the change negotiations certainly affected the performance of the sales team during the quarter, especially in February. And I do think that we will see a much better sales performance during already Q2, but also during the rest of the year. We see this in clearly improved ARR intake in April already, with April being the best sales month of the year, and we are sort of only halfway in. Finally, I'm very happy with the performance of our product development teams in a quarter of multiple changes. We'll highlight some of the progresses in AP and AR in the next page, but also wanted to note a bit on the fact that a very large software development project in the PSA business, which we acquired two years ago, nears completion now, where the development of the reporting module progressed rapidly during the early months of the year. The new PSA reporting feature, which enables more dynamic handling of reports, saving personal reports, and sharing them with other users, has now been put into the piloting stage with customers with excellent feedback already. On another note, regarding product development, the positive momentum in the development of our new purchase and sales invoice offerings continued. These two products will benefit both of our two key customer segments, accountancies and direct mid-segment customers, for whom we solve challenges related to the digitalization of financial management processes. The development velocity for both AP and AR increased significantly compared to last year's, and especially the Heeros sales invoice solution achieved significant milestones during the quarter. I'm personally super happy with the offering that we have been able to put together for both accountancies and direct customers, and they've already gotten the new version of software with positive feedback. Then going a bit to the outlook for 2024. Not that much new to note, as the year has only started, just started. As highlighted in the Q4 2023 report, Q1 is typically almost always our worst quarter, so very happy to see we've had a good result here, and we do expect profitability to increase gradually during the rest of the year. Also, reiterating something from the last quarter, which you have also noted, is that even after the cost cuts made both last year and now in February, we are still investing strongly in forward-looking R&D, with around EUR 2 million of investment projected in 2024, with the key focus areas in the accounts payable and accounts receivable automation. Finally, for a bit of a strategic outlook. We had our AGM a few weeks ago, with the board being mostly reelected from last, last year. Our outlook and our strategy for 2024 really emphasizes continuity, profitability, and our existing customers are at the core of our strategy. We've made multiple changes in the past 12 months. In one week, it will be 12 months for me as CEO, and ours really is a slow, slow, gradually moving business. Now, for 2024, it is time to wait, trust that the changes made have been for the better, and continue to increase profitability. For the financial outlook for 2024, we do expect that both revenue and EBITDA for our 2024 financial period will improve from the 2023 financial period. Certainly, EBITDA in Q1 increased quite substantially. Revenue dipped somewhat, mostly due to transactional revenue, but I think we can right the ship during the latter part of the year. That is it from our side, and I welcome any questions from the crowd. Good. So, if you have any questions, I think we already have one question here. So that and any other are also welcome. So the first question is about the international business. How do we see that one? So, in general, I think the strategy for international business remains very much the same as it has been. We focus on businesses which have their headquarters in Finland and have subsidiaries across Europe. Aim to target them, especially with our sales invoice solution, but also our purchase invoice solution, and grow within this context internationally. We are also, let's call it more opportunistically, looking at cases where when they pop up to us, both our PSA solution as well as our other solutions are adaptable internationally as well. But our focus in the growth market, really, at least during the first half of the year, will not be international business. We are also following quite closely what happens in different e-invoicing mandates across Europe and are thinking of a strategy to address those, especially in the latter part of the year. Good. And if you have any other questions, those can be sent still. All right. Seems like this was it for questions for today. Thank you, everybody, for joining, and have a great continued spring. Hopefully, it will be a bit warmer in a few weeks. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.
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