Admicom Oyj (ADMCM) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Admicom's Q3 2026 Earnings Webcast. My name is Simoes. I'm the CEO of Admicom, and I'm joined by Satu Helamo, our CFO. Today's agenda is to go through our Q3 key highlights. I will run you through some of the key milestones, key events from the Q3, and then I will also share with you some of the updates regarding our AI road map and how we have been developing in this field. I'm sure that will be something many of you are interested in. Then Satu will take you through our Q3 financials well details at on financial performance and then we will have a quick look on our financial outlook for 2026 end of the year, and then we will have some time for Q&A. I do remind you that there's the activity feed. You have the opportunity to ask questions in the webcast, and we will then pick those up in the Q&A session, so we will not have live questions in speeds, but we have it in the right thing. So pleased to use the opportunity to ask questions, and we will then go through those in the end. Let's go to the Q3 '26 highlights. The Finnish construction market is definitely showing clear signs of recovery Yesterday, the Finnish confederation of construction industries released their own forecast for the next couple of years. And they estimated that this year will be, in total, an approximately 2 percentage growth compared to previous year and the next year will be around 4% growth. But I think the key highlight and the message was that the recovery that we are now seeing is not a return to the old normal. So we should not expect all the different construction sectors to recover to the same situation as they were before the construction recession, but we will see new layers of construction markets forming in Finland, very much driven by, for example, the data center build-outs and also infrastructure-related markets driving the growth. And of course, like for Admicom and for our customers, residential side is an important market. And there, we see a very polarized picture. We have areas which are in growth, but we see areas that are still continuing to be in a recession. So we're living very interesting times, definitely clear signs of recovery, but how this recovery will be converted into success to our customers. is still somewhat unclear. And what we see in our customer base is that there is a very polarized picture. Some are in growth and some are in decline, and Satu will give you a few highlights on this in her section. We continue to have a fairly strong commercial momentum in the market. Our sales bookings that are the order intake for us that we are now taking into delivery grew 17% year-over-year. And this was the second consecutive quarter where we see this sort of a growth figure in our order intake and in our sales bookings. And I have been also very happy with our sales and marketing team performance due to their consistency over the past months delivering solid results every month. Our annual recurring revenue grew 5.3 percentage points year-over-year, which I feel is in a way a fairly state result. But of course, we have to remember that we have some timing synchronization compared to last year, which Satu will go through as well, so that we have our price increases effect coming in a little bit earlier than we had the last year. And of course, our growth momentum is very much dependent on -- for the rest of the year, depending on our customer implementations from the sales bookings that we received in the third quarter. And of course, with our ability to mitigate churn in terms of the voluntary return and how are we going to see the insolvency in bankruptcies to evolve also during the end of the year. So there are still things that are affecting our year-end performance. and Satu will give you a few updates on that, how we see that evolving. Our churn, so our customers removing or customers leaving us was still somewhat elevated. And there were still bankruptcies and insolvencies affecting our total number of customers leaving. And we saw that in business services or the services part of our business had a particularly challenging quarter with some consolidations in the market with some insolvency-related larger customers leaving the services part, especially. And also, we had some voluntary churn affecting the overall performance in the business services. We did have a very strong profitability in Q3. We announced the restructuring in Q2, and we had reductions in our total number of employees in the second quarter. And now we have been in the ramp-up mode in getting the new competencies in getting the new roles in -- and we have not been maybe at the pace which we anticipated originally. And we are still in the phase of recruitments during the rest of the year. In Q3, we did see then certain benefits coming in from this seasonality of personal leaving and then the new hires coming in to our payroll. Satu will give you a few highlights on this one in more details around how our headcount-related costs have been evolving and how we're seeing that moving forward. So our profitability reached 42% adjusted EBITDA, which was an improvement of 2.4 percentage points year-over-year. So a very strong third quarter in our profitability from value delivery and into customer retention. In our restructuring, we mentioned that we will be shifting our resource allocation more to customer value and to holding and ensuring that our customers get the value from our products and services as we move forward. This, we feel, is also one of the moats against the AI disruption. It's not about who can develop a but it's more about who can help the customers to deliver the value for their business with help of those technologies. So we have renewed our business services packaging, which allows us to deliver our customers more of the value-add services. And also, we have ramped up a new team into our customer success management where we have both external new recruitments and internal moves to make sure that we have the best talent for our customers available to help them to get the value from the products that they're using, if they have any challenges in terms of knowing how to use them or in adopting the best practices and ensuring that the value will be delivered. We have also continued very active customer work around the AI adoption. And also, we see that the customer interest is accelerating to our capabilities and in understanding what value AI can bring to the customers in August. And from that survey, we saw that there are customers who have been very successful during the recession times, and we were investigating what are the reasons why some of the customers are performing well. So 40% of the respondents were approach disciplined project and customer selection, digital capabilities that they have been able to utilize and better use of timely information for their real-time data-driven can be supported with AI capabilities. And also in the survey, we saw that 30% of all the respondents had not used AI at all. And the reason for that -- the main reason was that they're lacking the skills and competencies in doing that. So as Admicom, we want to help our customers to build better. And we thought that one of the things that we can do is to provide education for our customers. So we launched 3 module training, free training for construction companies, and we have received more than 1,000 registered participants for those trainings. We have had already now 1 module and the feedback was excellent. So we are truly believing that we can help our customers and construction industry to adopt AI capabilities as we embed those capabilities into our products, and we enable our products to be working together seamlessly with AI agents moving forward. So very nice to see that construction industry and construction companies are keen to adopt these capabilities as we move forward. We have been also mentioning about our international growth and our M&A pipeline build. And we have been progressing well with this work. So we have no active sales ongoing in Estonia with our new sales leader there, and we are now bringing news through the Bauhub acquisition. And we have been active in researching the M&A market research in different markets where we could open the door or for the larger addressable markets, as we stated in our strategy last year that we want to triple our total addressable market. And this work led by Henna Kotilainen our Chief Strategy Officer, has been progressing well, and we're quite confident that there are good opportunities for us also to enter new markets also supporting that with inorganic growth activities. So all in all, I would say that we had a fairly strong third quarter, and we're seeing that the market is starting to recover. And of course, still we have room for improvement with our -- especially with our growth momentum and in the churn mitigation. Then a few words about our AI road map and how we have been developing. As I mentioned, there's a lot of interest in our customer space for the AI capabilities. And it's starting from very basics educating our customers how to do prompt engineering and how to use AI capabilities in language models, but it's also about how we bring those capabilities to our customers in an easy way of buying them and utilizing them in their day-to-day operations. And like I said, I feel truly that bringing these AI capabilities and helping our customers utilize those is part of our mission to build better together with our customers, with our employees and with the broader construction ecosystem. And also, AI plays a role in our vision. So how do we start connecting this broader construction software ecosystem to work together? And I will highlight how we are enabling that also through the AI capabilities. So just repeating our AI vision. We want to make sure that the customers can get business benefits from easy-to-use AI capabilities in the fullest extent possible in the construction domain. We want to bring them as part of our every product and has integrated into our products and also as embedded capabilities in those. And we want to make the use of secure and controlled for our customers so that it's as reliable as our existing products today. In our road map, we have been developing assistant capability, which is purpose-built AI assistant using multiple different technologies to create this secure and reliable interface by using natural language to our systems. And we want to connect those capabilities to all of our products, but also to third-party capabilities. We want to create automation to end-to-end processes and workflows, and we want to embed those capabilities into our products for seamless use and for ease of use and to reliably take benefits of the AI capabilities. And ultimately, we want to create agent platform that allows the customers to deploy the best practices from the AI agents to their workflows to get the business benefits from using of those capabilities. So what we have actually done, these are a few concrete examples of how this is brought to life. So we have specialized AI capabilities that truly help our customers to automate tasks and support different workflows end-to-end. So in the Connect part, we have created a platform, which allows the MCP interface and we have this connectivity architecture now more or less up and running. So we can connect our existing products through the MCP gateways, but we can also start to extend that to external connections. So we want to be open in our strategy in terms of how we can enable different capabilities, different third-party AI platforms to also utilize the data and the capabilities of our products in the future. And we want to automate things. We want to create more capabilities to our products through this MCP connectivity and through the different AI-based use cases. And as an example, we are now gateway, so that we can have more and more assistant, natural language-based inquiries, for example, to project data how those can be created way without having to know or browsing through the data sets in the Bauhub file deposit ores or in the plans of the project. And this we are building for every product in the Admicom portfolio to be able to have this connectivity and to have more connected project data repository so that all the data related to the construction project is easily available. And in the embedded features, Ultima is the most commonly used product in our portfolio, and it's maybe containing most of the business-critical data. So we are building different kinds of AI-assisted transactions. So that automation can be even further increased in the time pert.And now as the next feature, we will bring the AI assisted invoice processing capability, which will significantly improve the level of automation into all of the accounts payable handling and invoice handling. We already have now 40 customers in the pilot, and we are clearly seeing the benefits of these capabilities and this is also important for our customers to deliver in a reliable manner. So we have created also a capability where the logic of the AI and why it's doing the different decisions on the account allocations, it's all transparent and it's all manageable by humans, but it can be automated by AI capabilities. And also, we are creating more of the AI-based embedded features into Ultima, for example, voice-based user interface for helping in interacting with the tool in the repeated tasks like reporting related tasks and time management. And also, we are offering other embedded AI capabilities for better user training and also user advice. So we do see that a lot of the AI features will become available for our users, maybe not even users themselves knowing that it's AI-based assisted transaction or a feature, but it needs to be, of course, delivering business value for the customers. So the road map is getting more and more concrete. And we are very excited with the end of the year launches that we can make and the further development we can accelerate through this process. And also related to our own internal software development, some of the new capabilities that we're now building in the AI space are also developed by AI native software development methodologies. So we are also gearing up our own software development to be more AI native in the way we deliver the software capabilities to our customers. So this is the road map that we are building all the time. So we want to support the customers in all of the main construction projects, workflow areas and domains, and we want to bring the AI capabilities to the center, providing the agent capabilities in running the workflows, embed those capabilities into our products, and we are evolving our portfolio also during this year to be even more easy to buy and also to be more connected with the different products to create more the packages and the bundles, what customers can then leverage. So continuously evolving our technology and software capabilities to help our customers to build better. All right. With this, let's go into the third quarter financials, and I will hand over this to Satu. Over to you.

Thank you, Simo. Yes. So in my opinion, fairly decent quarter financially from us. And while we, of course, we continue to focus on the things that we can affect in our daily operations, we are also very carefully always monitoring the development of the construction industry and the market. And while during the summer, we have witnessed double-digit revenue growth figures being reported from the Finnish construction sector. At the same time, we are seeing still a lot of polarization in our own customer base. If we look at the average revenue growth of our Ultimate ERP customers, is still very modest and there's a very high variance. We are seeing some customers grow really fast. So they are clearly gaining momentum from the data center and infrastructure in investments, but we are still seeing a large group of customers struggling in this very challenging market environment. The volumes in the residential construction they are very low, and that is impacting our customer base negatively. Based on the latest forecast by the confederation of the Finnish Construction Industries, which was published yesterday, the residential construction volumes are expected to remain low throughout 2027, and that will inevitably impact the small- and medium-sized companies in the construction sector. For that reason, we do not believe that the bankruptcies would return to normal levels too soon. We would need to see, for example, improvements in the housing prices and transaction volumes as well as improving consumer confidence for the residential construction to pick up. If we consider the impacts of the market for Admicom, improving market environment would give us tailwind in several different ways. For example, our 1,500 Ultima customers and about 700 business services customers, growing revenues would generate more MRR for us through our revenue-based billing model. And of course, in the growing market, we would have more projects, more employees, more users for our software. So all of these would feed into Admicom's growth through our monetization models. Of course, in a growing economy, it's also easier to sell, bankruptcies would be less. So for our investors, it's very logical to expect Admicom to benefit from the market in multiple different ways. This quarter, our ARR grew by 5.3% and revenue by 4.1% and -- when we reported the previous quarter of Q2, we communicated about multiple bankruptcies that happened in June, and they were all above average in size. And now they have realized as churn in the third quarter, and that is one reason why our last 12 months rolling customer churn is increasing. We were able to boost growth this quarter with price increases, which we have now introduced the majority of the customers that is earlier than before. So when reviewing our growth figures, it's good to understand that in Q3 26 numbers, we already have impact from the price increases but in the comparative figure of Q3 '25. The comparative year growth figures, they still carry some inorganic impact from Bauhub acquisition, which took place in last quarter of '24. Simo already talked about our rather high profitability this quarter. Of course, improving profitability is 1 of our key strategic goals, but I would maybe say that Q3 adjusted EBITDA is a little bit higher than we targeted. Profitability was naturally driven by the revenue growth, but also the change in negotiations we carried out in the second quarter. We have plans to recruit new people, new competencies to Admicom. During Q3, we have not yet finalized many of the recruitments. And of course, also the use of external services was quite low during and right after the summer holidays. We will have a closer look at the personnel expenses development later in my presentation. And if we compare Q3 against Q2, we are seeing flat revenue development. And that is basically explained by the annual adjustment fee. So this year, we still have approximately half of all the ERP customers who are being built, the annual adjustment fee. And the revenue from those is generated in second quarter and in third quarter. and the highest amount was invoiced and recognized as revenue in the second quarter. So in euros, the decline of the annual adjustment fees from Q2 to Q3 was approximately EUR 250,000. Our Q3 EBIT was 31%, which is 4 percentage points higher than last year. And if you look at the difference between EBIT and EBITDA, the majority of that comes from the amortization of goodwill generated in the business acquisitions. We report under the Finnish accounting standard that and therefore, recognize amortization for goodwill, which obviously IFRS companies do not do. Now let's go a little bit deeper into the personnel expenses. So this graph shows the rolling 12 months personnel expenses recognized in our profit and loss statement. And as you can see here, throughout 2025, we were seeing in our investment period and the head count and personnel expenses grew. In the second quarter this year, we carried out the change negotiations, and we lighten our workforce in some areas where we saw opportunities for efficiency gains. And one key reason for the change in negotiations was that we wanted to make room for some new skills and competencies that are critical for us to meet the strategic goals. So in total, we let go of 38 employees, and we have a very carefully considered plan about where and when to make recruitments to new roles. As said during the third quarter, partially because of the summer holidays, we have completed only a few recruitments, and the people who joined Admicom in Q3 mostly joined towards end of the quarter. So that explains the rather low personnel expenses in Q3. We will be closing some more recruitment this year. And there is an expectation to increase a little bit the spend on external services in the fourth quarter in those areas where we believe that it is critical to advance our strategic projects. When we look at the ARR development, as Simo said, it was satisfactory. Of course, the bankruptcies and churn in general was a declining factor for our ARR. But the price increases were carried out successfully. And if you look at this graph, you can see a similar uplift in ARR in Q4 '25. So that's probably the main point from this graph this quarter. But if we look a little bit closer at the ARR development elements, you can see for example, the churn is already above previous year's total. Year-to-date, approximately 30% of churn has been due to insolvencies. And we have also seen unusually high churn related to corporate restructurings in our customer base. But of course, we have also identified areas where we can improve internally to manage churn better. And one example of that is now the new customer success management team that has been now up and running for a couple of weeks and their key responsibilities to ensure that the customers get enough value from our solutions so that they remain as happy customers and continue to extend the use of our software. The price increases are mostly visible in the positive development of net upsell and with new sales, we are currently close to or pretty much at the same level as last year. Our financial guidance remains unchanged. So we expect ARR to grow 3% to 10% total revenue to grow 2% to 6% and adjusted EBITDA to be between 31% and 36%. A couple of words about the key themes affecting our growth and profitability this year and how this themes that we have published earlier how they are developing. So definitely, we are seeing the actions to improve sales formats, delivering success. But with churn mitigation, we believe that we could do better. So we have done a lot already this year to mitigate churn better. But now we are putting a little bit more emphasis on that with the customer success management team. Market has not improved as expected. And for the future, we have to carefully consider how we incorporate the market expectations in our financial guidance. The profitability turn has gone really well. And of course, it was accelerated by the change negotiations. We have some targeted investment needs. And on top of the key competencies that we have to have to still ramp up. There is some rather big renewals of our systems architecture that we aim to do. With the systems work, we're going to start already in Q4, but we are not expecting very high investments in this area this year. And maybe now that we have been sort of identifying and selecting the systems that Admicom will be deploying, and we have been planning how to face the deployment of those investments. They will likely start in the Q1 of '27, but the current estimation of the cost is not huge. So we are likely talking about few hundred thousand euros in the first year when the implementation takes place. And then of course, after the implementation project has been carried out, then the costs will normalize to lower levels. But that concludes my section of the presentation, and now we can head to the Q&A. I think we have questions in the chat.

Yes, indeed. Thank you, Satu, for running through the financials and giving us a bit of an insight into those. So we do have plenty of questions. And I have a little bit categorized them. So let's first start with the bookings growth. So there are questions around the calculation for the bookings growth. So what's actually been calculated in? And is there also some effect from the price increases in the bookings growth? And when do we expect that to land into our ARR? So would you like to, Satu, start a little bit allude to this bookings growth and the dynamics behind that?

So basically, MRR, and price increases impact maybe to some extent, that is included, of course, when we have done the price increases for the current customers, we are also doing them for new customers. However, that was fairly late in the quarter. So it doesn't have a big impact in the 17% growth. When we sign a deal with the customer, there's typically a delay until it converts into revenue with Ultima and Business Services, the delay is on average 3 months. But for example, companies that are signing a deal for ERP in the second half of this year, it's quite difficult that they only want to go live in January or early next year. And I saw a question in the chat about why are we maintaining our ARR guidance range so wide. So that is one of the key reasons. So we are not yet certain enough about how fast can we deploy the new figures. And when our forecast is still within the guidance range, we see no need to specify the guidance with information that is not completely out. So if we choose to do that, we will do that only when we have a better visibility into the last month of this year.

Yes. And just to highlight this question around is the new sales and the bookings growth affected by the price increases. So this sales booking only contains the new orders we get in. So it's not kind of like it's not being inflated by rice increases we do for existing customers. So we do not report that. So it's still order intake that reporting in MRR euros. And related to booking, there was also the question of how the cross-sell initiatives are progressing I would say that the majority of our new deals are somewhat multiproduct deals. So we are continuously improving our ability to sell and create value propositions for multiple products to be sold at once. And also in the enterprise customers where we have the larger groups of companies or other customers. We're also moving towards this more of an enterprise model where we enable the customer to utilize the full portfolio of Admicom. So these kinds of initiatives we're running to get the full value delivered to the customer from our broader portfolio. Okay. From bookings, let's go to ARR growth. And as there was already a question which Satu alluded to this ARR growth for the rest of the year, having a quite wide range, what we have also commented before is that as we are actively looking for M&A opportunities, this ARR guidance for the year is also containing a possibility for some kind of an M&A transaction, which is then, of course, if we are able to complete one during the end of the year, it will be visible in our ARR numbers as well. So it does also, in a way, have certain kind of an assumption that this sort of an activity is still possible during this year. And there was a specific question around Bauhub growth. How has the Bauhub performed? So Satu, can you give us some kind of color to the Bauhub performance?

Yes. So Bauhub has been growing really well. Of course, the Estonian market is not much better than the Finnish market. So that probably slows down the growth in Estonia as well. But Bauhub has a great pricing power, for example. So we have been able to introduce higher price increases in Estonia than in Finland, for example. So we expect Bauhub to grow by, let's say, faster than our organic growth targets.

Absolutely. And it's been very well performing, like Satu mentioned. And we are now also working, as I mentioned, the example from the AI connectivity with Bauhub we get Pala even better connected to our other portfolio elements so that we get the full benefit from Bauhub also with the Finnish customers. All right. Then there is, of course, the question of how much did we see the impact from price increases in the third quarter? And I think Satu, you already covered this in your presentation. So definitely, there was a significant contribution from the price increases. And we had the timing a little bit different than the previous year. So the elevated growth that you saw in the last year, fourth quarter was somewhat now visible in the third quarter. So the price increase effect was more in the third quarter.

Yes. And maybe to add on that a little bit. So we still have some price increases to be introduced in the fourth quarter. for some of our customers. For example, we have a 3-month, 6-month billing periods. And for that reason, we still -- some of those to come. So we will likely comment more about the effective impact of the price increases in relation to our Q4 results when we have the full exact.

Very good. Then a few questions about churn. How much did we see churn now in the third quarter churn figures? And if you can maybe start to comment this first, and then I will comment the voluntary turn a little bit.