Vitec Software Group Q1 2025, Summary

Vitech, serves nearly 26,000 customers through 46 business units across 12 countries, with sales in over 50 countries. Proforma Sales for Q1 2025 reached 3.7 billion Swedish kronor, with 88% coming from recurring revenues.

The company's strategy focuses on simplicity, efficiency, trust, and transparency, with a vision to shape a wiser and more sustainable future. Growth is driven by a business model of high recurring revenue, decentralized development, product investments, and strategic acquisitions.

In 2024, Vitech made seven acquisitions, including its first in Belgium. In 2025, the Dutch company Integrip was acquired, providing mission-critical software for society.

Q1 2025 Financials

  • Net sales up 23% to 880 million kronor

  • Recurring revenue up 28%

  • EBITA margin at 25%, down from 31%

  • Operating profit at 153 million kronor, margin at 17% (down from 22%)

  • Organic pro forma growth expected to decrease due to lower inflation

  • Cash flow from operating activities in line with expectations

The lower margins were attributed to a mix shift, with fewer services and license sales. While new projects were postponed due to economic turmoil, Vitech did not lose any customers or businesses.

The company's flat organization allows for knowledge sharing and efficient decision-making across business units, facilitated by a small group office at headquarters.


This summary was written by our AI Analyst Tim! If you find something that does not seem right let us know and we will correct him

Thank you and very welcome to this Q1 2025 presentation for VTech. I am Ole Backman, the CEO and you will have to do with me because Patrick is not available at the moment. But as always I would like to start with a general presentation of the group and starting with the big pictures here. Customer perspective, we always start with that. We have nearly 26,000 customers that we serve all business to business. We do that out of today, 46 different business units. Business unit, basically a company. We have our feet on the ground in 12 countries, but we actually have sales in over 50 countries today. All in all, but should also remember that most of our business units are a very domestic business or regional at best. So Proforma Sales, which is a bit of a guidance since we do lots of acquisitions, is up to 3.7 billion Swedish after Q1, 88% of that was pro forma recurring revenues. And to my assistance I have nearly 1660 colleagues. And you can see the sales distribution there by market. It's quite evenly distributed between the origin of ETEC from the Nordic countries and then spreading further, further out into Europe. With our footprint in the Benelux area. Our strategy chain, which we work with throughout the group, it's always based on our values, that is the products. @ the foundation, it's very important to remember that we are a product based company. We like to keep things simple and that's more to do with efficiency and how can we improve, how can we make this in a more efficient way? So it's a mindset and then of course trust and transparency that works towards our customers, towards the society as a whole and always of course internally because it's a great value for us to be able to share knowledge between the different business units. Then we work further into the brand promise which is to rely on today and tomorrow. Especially important in these times, perhaps that we are a very stable company that has been here for a long time and we really care about our long term customer relations. And then working through the business concept and objective and then hopefully then also reaching towards our vision which is to. To shape a wiser and more sustainable future. And talking about that future and, and, and the growth that goes with it. We have a way of trying to describe how we grow, of course, the business model. As I mentioned, all our business units are market leaders. They have a high percentage of recurring revenue, so they work with that business model. We develop these business units from a decentralized perspective. So we are a very flat organization. We make a lot of efforts into the Product investments, which is very important for us in order to be that trusted company in the future. And all of these fuels the organic growth of the business units. And then we top that up with acquisitions. And basically we look for nice vertical market software companies, established and profitable. They have a proprietary software which means that they own their own product roadmap and of course they already have a decent amount of recurring revenue. So basically the characteristics of VTEC itself is what we look for for in new acquisitions. Talking about acquisitions, this was the seven that we did last year and I'm not going to run through all of them, but the, the point here is that they come in all shapes and sizes and they also in a very spread out geography. Really interesting here for us internally, of course, we opened up a new home market with our first acquisition in Belgium last year. So far this year we acquired the Dutch company Integrip in January. Really nice addition. Also a great proof of a company that does not only have a mission critical software for its customers, but also Asus software that is critical to society as a whole. That was a really nice addition. If you look at it by vertical, we perhaps could cluster them together. So we have our big footprint here in the energy field, in property management, healthcare, auto finance and so forth. So sometimes we buy companies that sort of jack into one of these existing verticals or we could buy a company in a totally new vertical. And this is another way which we, which we show our business units. You can see here the sizes and the proportion of recurring revenue and also the year of acquisition. So and this is pretty much like a blueprint of the M and A market as we see it in our existing geographies. The average size is roughly 4 or 5 million euro company, some bigger, perhaps 1 out of 10 or so. That's pretty much what it looks like when we look into our pipeline as well. Organization, like I mentioned, it's a very flat organization. So in these blue boxes that's where the business units are. That's where all the business decisions are taken locally. That's where it all happens. And to their A, they have the VPOs, which is Vice president of operations. So they are part of the, of the group management team. But they work exclusively with these business units. So they don't have anything else on their plate. They just work to coach them, to guide them, to make them a bit better year by year. And then we have a small group office at the headquarters supporting the business units. One of the things that we do drive centrally is this sharing of knowledge which Is a very important part because when you have 46 companies that are basically doing the same thing, which is vertical market software, although directed at different industries, it's a very important thing that we can share our common culture but we can also share concepts, best practices, worst practices for that matter as well. So we share both successes and failures. And this is just get keeps on getting better with size. So it's a very powerful thing within the VTEC group that really helps us to become better. Moving over to the numbers for the quarter then net sales was up 23% up to 880 million. The recurring revenue part increased by 28%. EBITA margin at 220 margin wise percentage unchanged or unchanged in absolute terms the margin decreased to 25 dropped from 31. Operating profit which was 153 million. Same there unchanged but the operating margin at 17% compared to 221 last year. Reason for this is basically a bit of a mix in the revenue. So we had less services and less license sales although they are quite small part of our total business. But they are 100% margin business because we have all the resources already at our payroll. We thought we saw some increase in the activity in the market in the end of last year. We were hoping that to come through in Q1. Unfortunately it hasn't done so. So all the turmoil around us has sort of postponed some of the rollouts of new projects, rollouts of new features and things like that. So that's still the picture that we see. We don't experience that we have actually lost anything either customers nor businesses. It's just a lot of postponements of new initiatives. And although at a quite small scale because we have this really stable business model with the recurring revenue, it's still sort of the sherry on top there that also falls through with the market. But if you look at the operational result, I will get back to that shortly. It's still okay quarter, not our best, but okay. And if you look at it by quarter or the yearly. So the graph here is just an expression of that. You have read that through the numbers I think on compounded growth over the past 10 years is 21%. If you look at the EBITDA margin, same here. We are increasing in absolute terms so year by year. But if you see the margin on the last few quarters it has dropped a bit down to the 25 for this quarter. And talking about the what I mentioned here, which is sort of the cash generating profit, this is one way that we measure internally because we don't do the activations and the amortizations and things like that on a business unit level. So when we coach and guide our business units and set their targets, we use an internal KPI which is basically a cash ebit. So this is just a bridge for you to understand the 153 million which we reported. If you deduct the capitalization and you add back the amortization and the acquisition related amortizations, you get to the cash ebit which actually then increased with 12% and the margin is 20 compared to 22. And this is also stems very well with the actual cash generating. So the cash flow was up, I think 9% this quarter. Look at the distribution here. You can see the, the very importantly that the subscription based revenues is growing healthy underneath. And then we have the transaction based revenues on top, which is a great value add for our customers. But as I mentioned before, they have a very different gross margin profile. So it's a lot less profit in that dark blue part of the staple. But all in all a very good offering for our customers and very appreciated, which makes us take a greater share of the wallet growth. Then as I mentioned, one acquisition so far this year and then if you look at the organic pro forma, which is what we have been guiding for now for a couple of years, so that's one quarter in this year and of course three quarters in the last year. So we are expecting that to go down a bit because we have still some tailwind from the higher inflation year of last year. So the price increases there are expected to go down a bit in this year. If you look at it in a more traditional way, we measured this on a full year basis. So this was last year's numbers. So then we had an organic growth of 9%. In comparison, the diversification of sales, as I mentioned through the geographies, it's quite an even spread, but also a very nice diversification when it comes to breaking down the recurring revenue, of course, and also on the customer side. So we have a very low customer dependency. And then that is just to sum it up a bit like I said, nice growth. One acquisition so far this year and the cash flow from the operating activities was pretty much in line with what we expected. And with that I think that we will hand over for any questions. If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Predrag Savinovic from Carnegie, please go ahead. Good morning Ole and thanks for taking my questions. I think first off, how much should we read into the comment around the mix shift? Is this an isolated event for the quarter or this is something that we will see more of during 2025 the mix there. We are both hoping and expecting that some of these projects will start rolling out. Like I mentioned, we haven't experience experience that we actually missed anything. But of course with all the turmoil that goes around us, VTech itself, we are not that affected, but our end customers might be. So we're still hoping that we can pick up on the project and the rollouts. So that is to be expected. Okay. And if you could elaborate on this kind of transition around services and on the margin, I think if you can help us. Where is this happening on their respective revenue lines and where is the margin impact hitting you in a year over year perspective? Yeah, it's basically two things. One is of course like I said it's a bit less portion of our revenues. But we have services and we have licenses. Services is by far bigger. Licenses is roughly 1% today. So. But the, the service department here is that we have all the resources available because we are doing all this with our own stuff of course. So by that it sort of flows down directly through the, the P and L. So it has a basically 100% gross margin impact if we get that up to speed. And the same goes with the, the activation. So the R D efforts that we do, it's a bit less on that part as well. We will see if that is something that could be maintained over. So it's an increased efficiency. It's still a bit early days to say whether or not that is here to stay. We are very focused on having the correct sort of level of R D spend because that's is our investments for, for future profits. So these things, these two things combined. And then of course we have the, the transaction based part of our recurring revenue which has a lower gross margin. So if, if that has some sort of larger part of a single quarter, of course that, that would affect the, the margin. But we saw a lot of that during last year. We still have this quarter where for instance we have companies like you know, one bit theater. Bit theater was not part in Q1 last year. So. So that will still sort of be visible here. They came in, in late in Q2 last year. So I think all in all we are expecting the, or I would say hoping and expecting that the project part will pick up at some point and the rest of the revenue should be fairly stable going forward. And then we also have an. On the OPEX side, Q1 is by far the highest sort of proportion of the opex. We know that we have a bit lower due to the holiday seasonalities in Q2 Q3 because staff is our by far our biggest cost. So also from an opex perspective, Q1 is usually a bit higher than the others. Okay. So we should expect the OPEX to decrease in the second quarter. And could you give some more color on margins for Q2, Q3, etc. Because given there's a large change year end sequentially. I know you don't want to do guidance but understand the moving parts a bit more on how this can trickle down for the rest of the year. Like I said, like you said, we don't do guidance on specific quarters because also we really like to think of VTech as a very long term and long term oriented company. Things are moving quite slowly as usual in our part and we don't see any dramatic changes in this regard. Yes, we have a hard. A bit more on the transaction based part, but that came through most of it in Q2 or sorry, Q3 and Q4 of last year. In Q4 we had a lot of projects that came through and these projects, exactly like I mentioned, they had a lot of services. There were some licenses which fell through. So we had a fantastic strong Q4 of last year. So I say if you look at the. The sort of rolling 12 months basis, it's always what we'd rather like to think our best guidance for the future. Okay, that's, that's clear. Thank you very much. Thanks Berg. The next question comes from Eric Sandstedt from Kepler Shuvreu. Please go ahead. Hi there. Thanks. I've got a few detailed questions perhaps on amortizations. Trying to get a better understanding of the difference here between the P and L and the cash flow, although you kind of briefly commented on it already. But if we look at amortization of intangible fixed assets, it amounted to 67 million in the quarter. Right. And I think this line has tended to be around 30 to 50 million per quarter historically, although it was pretty high also in Q4. How should we think about this cost line going forward? Is Q1 the sort of the new normal here? Yeah, so I think I can flip back. If you look at the. You have them here, the 67, you can see quite a good increase from 38 to 67 and then 66, which is actually Decreased. Yeah, the latest quarter is always kind of a good proxy. And then of course, because what we did as the larger acquisitions that we did, and especially the ones in Q4 last year, they had intangibles on their own balance sheet. So what happens then is that if you don't have any activations on your own balance sheet, the amortization will end up in the acquisition related. But if you have it already, then they already part of the PPA. So it's a distribution between these two lines. So yeah, I would say that Q1 is a good proxy going forward because of course these are all amortizations according to plan, so they will stick with us for many years. But it's really distribution between these two lines when we do the PPA allocation. Yeah, because that actually brings me to the second question because if you look at the acquisition related amortizations, those were 63 million in the quarter. Right. And I think that's only sort of on par with the same period last year and clearly below the Q4 level of 78 million. So is that related to your previous comment or are there any sort of acquisitions where this. Yeah, like I said, it's really a distribution between these two lines. That's one thing. And the other is of course that as our companies sort of fall over the 10 year frame, they will be fully amortized from that row. And that also happened last year. We had some of our acquisitions that were made 10 years ago which were a bit bigger by then actually fell out. So yeah, that will happen. Yeah. But has anyone fallen out in this quarter that explains that pretty low number, 63 million. Or is it more the mix between the two? It's more of a mix, but yeah, they fell out already January 1st. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, good. And then finally on organic sales growth because that's continues to hold up pretty well, growing double digit in local currency terms in I guess what's still a pretty tough market. So what's. Could you maybe share some more lights here and also maybe comment on pricing specifically but more also generally what is driving double digit organic sales growth in a pretty tough market? Yeah, like I mentioned, that's on the pro forma basis, which we think still it's a good guidance of the pace and the size that we have today. But we have done 3/4 in last year and 1/4 this year. So gradually the organic part is expected to to go down a bit because we don't have the the same tailwind from price increases. Price increases last year were perhaps in the 4 and a half, 5, 5 and a half range this year. Probably like 2 percentage lower at least. More on the 3, 3 and a half part which we see so far this year. So that is expected to go down a bit. And the rest has been upsell to existing customers like mentioned before. So we still see decent activity in the existing customers which we can sort of sell things to. And one of the things that we do sell then that is actually the transaction based products that we have because like I said, they are always sold to a customer that already has the subscription part. So we can't just do the, the transaction based part. There's always a subscription at the basis. Yes, but I mean how does this then relate to the cost of goods and services? That is up quite a lot. I think you mentioned it already. But coming back a little bit to the question how one should look upon that going forward. Because this relates I guess to the transactional part of the business. But cost of goods and services are up a lot year on year. Yeah, they are predominantly related to the transaction based. They are the transaction based and then there is the external hosting. That's basically what's in there. So if we have a higher degree or higher sort of gross number on the transaction based revenues, we will have an increase in the cost of goods sold. So that pretty much follows it. So same here. Giving the distribution within the quarter the sort of gross margin level that we have now, it could go up a bit like I mentioned, if we get more service sales. If we pick up on that line, of course gross margins will pick up a percentage or 2. So they are very closely related. Okay, perfect. Thanks a lot. The next question comes from Patrick Schwartz from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead. Thank you. Hi Ola. I have a question on the product mix. So transaction revenues were up on volume. Is this specific to Bid Theater and Inova or is this broader among your subsidiaries? They are by far the biggest one in that category. But still there are lots of other business business units that also has transaction based volumes, but they are by far the two biggest ones. Okay, thank you. And then on seasonality, normally Q1 is lower on transaction revenues from OBS. Was this true this quarter also or did we see an increase lower on the transaction from anova? I should say ANOVA is still expected to have larger volumes in Q2 and Q3 due to the seasonality. The other companies that have transaction based, they are much more even throughout the year. So it's basically Inova that has a big seasonality effect. Yeah. Okay, thank you. And then on cost per employee, you now had about 3/4 where cost per employee has been up about 6% year over year. Is this starting to become a larger trend or how should we think about that? If you look last year, 6% up, that was pretty much in line with just the salary increases within the IT industry. We are looking for very talented and highly sought after people. And last year salary increases were in the 5, 6 range. Expected to be a bit lower this year. But yeah, we will basically follow the, the IT industry in that sense. Okay, thank you, Ola. I'll get back in time. The next question comes from Christian Binder from Red Eye. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking my question. I just have one quick follow up. You know, looking at the M and A front you already elaborated on, you know, general economic uncertainty doesn't affect your recurring revenues that much. But when it comes to M and A, have you seen anything in terms of, of sellers maybe turning a little bit more cautious or if the market's still unaffected, so to speak? Yeah, we, we still experience a good pipeline. There are lots of companies to look at. So, so we have a really good funnel in that sense, but it is dragging out a bit in time. There are longer discussions. There are more uncertainty, of course, from both buyer and seller. But in this case, as we have done in, in many, many years, we have a really focused approach, we have set criteria, and we're back to the fact that VTEC is to be relied upon. We have the funding available. So, so we are what we think, a very stable partner in that sense. But yeah, from a seller's perspective, of course, a bit more uncertainty, I should say. And we have experience that discussions are taking a bit longer perhaps, but it doesn't change anything in our strategy or the way we think about what we're looking for or how we should price things. All right, perfect. Thank you so much. The next question comes from Eric Larson from seb. Please go ahead. Good morning, Ulle. Hope you're good. I just have one question and I know you don't usually comment or I guess never comment on single business units, but given the tangible deviation to expectations there, I'm just curious if you saw any earnings decline in any of your particularly larger subsidiaries. And of course, I'm always interested Inova, since that's a bit more difficult to assess. Yeah, exactly. Like you said, Eric, we don't comment on the profitability on the individual business units. What we can say, first of all, this is not the margins here. When we look at it operationally, Like I mentioned, because that's how we measure our business units. Profit was at a 20% margin level compared to 22 and it is 12% up. So really no drama, nothing that sort of makes us think in, in any different way. Of course, we're always cautious on costs, we're always looking ahead and then seeing, okay, what's the activity like out there. But no, there were no really surprises for us in this quarter. So pretty much business as usual. All right, that was my only question. Thank you. Thanks. The next question comes from Daniel Thorson from abg, Sundal Collier. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you very much. Ole, many questions already asked here, of course, but I looked at the earnouts paid out here in Q1. They were 175 million sess. Do you have any kind of outlook or guidance for the rest of 2025 in planned paid out earnouts? Yeah, if you look at the short term part there, I think it's roughly a bit over 100 million or so left, if I remember correct. So if you take the short term, so that's to be expected to be paid out and the companies that relate to that, they are performing really well. So we are expecting that to sort of be materialized. Yeah, I agree. Okay, that's fine, that's fine. And then also out of the 1600 employees, roughly how many work with fully service related projects and revenues, if that's possible to measure? Unfortunately, that's not possible to measure because the smaller business units they are, one individual has sort of many roles. So they can be a developer, they can be a tester, they can work in customer success. So it's really hard to measure. Yeah, I see. And then a final one. We already got some questions on Enova and Bit Theater, but are there any of these two companies that have particularly tough comps in any quarter in 2025 here versus 2024 that you would like to highlight? No, not apart from, like I said, Innova has an expected seasonality. But yet again I don't know what the weather will be like in the Netherlands in, in May and June. So fair enough. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks. The next question comes from Victor Lindstrom from Nordia. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, Ola. Just a follow up on the OPEX question. So you mentioned that you expect OPEX to decrease here going forward. But. But does that still include that annual salary increases, are those completed or should we expect those to kicking from Q2 and onwards? Both salary increases and also price increases when we reach the end of Q2? So during the first half year, both price increases and salary increases will be done. Up until this point, Roughly I think 40% has fallen through. So it all depends on the different sort of patterns in each country. Okay, thanks. That's all for me. Thanks. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speaker for any closing comments. Okay, so thanks all for listening in, and we're looking forward to the agm, which we held next week. So you're most welcome up to UMEO if you have the opportunity. Thanks for listening.

Contact us!

Send us a message and we will get back to you as soon as possible!


InvestorCaller AB, Bulevardi 32 B 25, 00120 HELSINKI
© 2026 InvestorCaller AB, All rights reserved