Gofore Oyj (GOFORE) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone. My name is Mikael Nylund. I'm the CEO of Gofore Group, and I want to warmly welcome you all to Gofore's Capital Markets Day, which is actually our second Capital Markets Day ever. Two years ago, we had our first one. We've been a listed company, a public company now for 5 years, and maybe it's becoming somewhat of a tradition to have this Capital Markets Days every 2 years. It's very nice to see some of our audience here present today, not the usual setting for today's investor presentation. But also, of course, we have a lot of people online listening to us today. So welcome to both groups. Today, we are going to talk about where we Gofore as a company are today, what we have achieved during especially the last 2 years, and we also want to tell you where we are going, what we see -- how we see the future and what we want to do in the future. And to do that today with me, I have some great people. First of all, we have a couple of guests to make this a little bit more different Capital Markets Day. We have Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from our customer, Elisa, who we will talk with about what customers expect from a company like Gofore; and we have Juhana Huotarinen, who is the founder and -- one of the founders and CEO of one of our group companies, Rebase Consulting, and with Juhana we are going to talk about what the talent market looks today and what role companies like Rebase Consulting play in that talent market. We're going to dig a little bit deeper into what Rebase Consulting is later on. But of course, we have our own team or part of our own team here today, the excellent people that together with me have been working on the Gofore story. We have Riikka, Sanna, Ville and Teppo here today, and it's really great to have especially Riikka, Sanna and Ville who are not always present in our investor presentations to be able to present themselves and give all of our investors an idea of what kind of team we have working on Gofore. Today's agenda looks like this. The important thing at this point is that we are going to have 3 separate occasions where we're going to have a discussion with you guys, these Q&A sessions. First one is before the break at 10:40 scheduled. And please, let's make this a discussion. Let's hear your questions, let's hear your thoughts and what you are especially interested in. We want to try to answer, of course, all of your questions in the Q&A sessions. You're going to have the chance to ask questions on the streaming platform, especially, of course, those that are not present here. We are going to take questions from the streaming platform. And those that are present here today, we also are going to have a microphone for you guys at the Q&A session. So you can choose. Either you want to use the platform or you want to use the microphone to ask the questions here. Hopefully, you can be active and we can have a discussion today. Otherwise, the agenda is that I'm going to give you the big picture here in the beginning, then Sanna will continue with people-related issues, of course, something that's really important for Gofore. Riikka will take over after that with customer-related and our strategic industry-focused teams. And then Ville and Teppo in the last part of the day will talk about M&A and financials and delivering shareholder value. And after all of these sessions, then we'll have the Q&A. So with those words, I think let's get going. In this first part of today's session, I will guide you through what Gofore has become, what we are today and what we have achieved over the past couple of years, and then we'll have a brief and like a high level look into what our strategy, which was released in December, what it's about and the big themes. But first, I want to talk about our slogan, Pioneering An Ethical Digital World. So Gofore is a digital transformation consultancy, which means that we work with digital technology. We work with things related to digital technology and the very transformative power that, that technology has. It is a technology that can and will change the world. And for us at Gofore, it's our mission to make the world a better place. And in this context of digital technology for us, that means that we are here to make sure that this technology is used for the good of everybody. And that was -- that's why we have adopted a slogan like Pioneering An Ethical Digital World. We want to be the explorers, the pioneers of what this digital world will mean for us all because it will be a different world than what we are used to, and we want to make it different in a positive way. If we look back 2 years and at the last Capital Markets Day that we had, we are in many ways, of course, the same company, a similar company, and we have -- we are still working on the same things that we were talking about 2 years ago. But we are, on the other hand also in many ways, a very different company. And that's probably most obvious by looking at the numbers. Compared to 2 years ago, the numbers are pretty much double from what they were. If you look at number of employees, if you look at revenue, if you look at other things, we are pretty much double what we were since the last Capital Markets Day. That's a big change for us as a company. And that's why we feel it's good that we are here today to discuss these things. A lot of the same things that we have discussed 2 years ago, but with a new twist that comes from size. And especially something that I want to highlight here when we have the map picture here is that, of course, the German area or actually the DACH area with Austria also being now in the mix. We've taken big steps in October, we announced the acquisition of a great company in Germany, Austria, called eMundo, and those are now part of the Gofore Group and, of course, strengthens very much our local presence in the DACH area, and allows us to build on that for the coming 2 years. So based on this, the messages that we want to convey to you today is, first of all, that we want to remind you of our strong foundation and very good track record of things with steady and profitable growth for a long time now. We want to talk about our updated strategy that builds on the strengths that we have, very much builds on the strength that we have and adds a few things to that. And of course, the upgraded financial targets, which many of you are especially interested in and give some color of why we have decided to make some changes and raise our ambition level with the long-term financial targets. We also always talk about Gofore as a growing and profitable digital transformation consultancy, and I think this picture highlights that very well. We have been doing a good job making growth happen, being profitable, and that's very much true for also last year, a very strong year for us, a lot of growth. The numbers for organic growth and also adjusted EBITDA are for Q1 to Q3. So not the full year numbers yet. But we have something to look forward with the full year report still that we're going to update those numbers, but a strong year, EUR 156 million in net sales pro forma for the whole year. So something -- a good momentum going into this year and going forward. And this is, of course, something that we -- our ambition is to keep up. The big things during the year were the acquisitions of eMundo, which I already mentioned, and also in January feels like a long time ago, a year ago now, Devecto, which is a company that has very nicely and kind of easily integrated into the Gofore platform here in Finland, and given us a good base to build on our new customer segment of industrial customers that we have decided to focus on now with our new strategy. Other targets that we have looked at, and if we look at the strategy update that we did 2 years ago, we were looking at 3 growth levers there: growth in Finland, international growth and disciplined M&A. I think we have shown now that this have become true. We're looking at the long-term targets that we set then with 20% total annual growth. And looking at last year, which was released on Wednesday when we put out our December numbers, we have 43%. So of course, very much outperformed what we set out to do. The organic growth part, we look to have at least half of our growth in annual growth, so around 10% or at least 10%. With the latest quarter in Q3, that number was 32%. So we are in a very good place there, very good momentum there. We wanted to grow the portfolio of big customers and have a special focus on private sector customers. As you know, 2 years ago, Gofore was pretty much known as the public sector supplier of digital solutions. Hopefully, we are that still today. But we have done what we set out to do and built a very good portfolio also private sector customers, mostly in Industrials, which is why we are now focusing especially on those customers, with 64% last year growth in private sector customers. A number that we are, of course, extremely happy with. We also set out to increase our presence outside of Finland and work on building the international business from outside of Finland. And if we look at the numbers from last year now and include eMundo for last year, and look at the pro forma numbers, we are now at 14% of net sales coming from outside of Finland. And we're in a good place also there in terms of momentum. 76% of our organic growth from outside of Finland last year. So the momentum is there. That's now something that we see happening, the internationalization also in terms of customers and business from outside of Finland. Six things that I want to talk about what Gofore is today, beginning with the market. We are positioned in a market that is, of course, extremely favorable. The world is changing at an accelerating pace that transformation is driven by the development of technology, and that development is not going anywhere. It's just accelerating. And that technological change is, of course, what drives companies to invest into what we nowadays call the digital transformation. So these are drivers that in the long term are mega trend kind of drivers, and this is not something that will go away. We have a strong market depending on who you ask and what market you look at. Different researchers talk about 10% annual growth, 15% annual growth or like in this one from IDC, Gartner sources. 16.3% CAGR for market growth, very strong market to work in. And the important point here related to the market is the second one. We have built an offering that is strong and it's 100% relevant for the digital transformation market. It's also comparing to our most -- our closest peers. It's a differentiating factor. We have an offering that is broad, end-to-end is what we talk about where we can address the customers' digital transformation issues on a very broad spectrum. And this is something that I think shows in the success that we have and also something that we want to build on going into the future. Digital transformation is driven by technology, but looking from organization that is working on its own digital transformation. It's not just technology. It's a lot of things that are like not necessarily technological issues like change issues, and those are the things that we want to help our customers with. Third point we want to highlight is that Gofore has always been and will always be a very people-first company. And this is long-time basis for success for us and something that we see. Of course, it being also in the future. We started working in like a people-first way and talking about company culture, building a new kind of company culture already before the fight for talent was as evident that it is today. But of course nowadays, everybody sees that the fight in the market is not only about customers, it's also about the talent. And in many cases, it's more about the talent fight. So that's where we want to be, need to be strong. And we have a culture that is something that supports this, a culture of growth, I would say. And I don't talk about just business growth. I talk about individual growth learning, going somewhere together as a team, as a company. This is -- I cannot stress how hugely important this is in today's market. You need to be attractive, you need to have a strong brand, you need to engage all employees in being successful in the talent market. The other side of that coin is, of course, the customers and the market there. And what we have basically done to simplify it very much is that we have worked towards longer, more strategic, more impactful and bigger customer relationships. And these are numbers that are shown on this slide, not only the strong NPS on the left-hand side, but the numbers on the right-hand side that show that our customer portfolio has developed as we have aimed it to develop. We have a stronger portfolio of big customers. We have strong returning -- strong revenue from returning customers every year. And of course, the special point still about Gofore is that 60% of the net sales comes from public sector customers, which during the uncertain times that we have gone through the different levels of crisis are important things. They have helped us go over the crisis situations easier than only having private sector customers. The fifth point here is that we have shown from 2017 and going forward that we have a strong understanding of what it takes to grow inorganically, growing via company acquisitions. We have a good ability to do M&A, and I think we have developed very, very well there during the last years. And these are things that, of course, help us in renewing, in reaching the targets that we have set for us, for example, expanding our position into the DACH area into Central Europe strengthening our capabilities in various things related to the digital transformation, broadening our offering in other words. So a very important part of the track record and history of Gofore. Finally, what I want to highlight, of course, the result of the 5 aforementioned is that the track record we have of growth and profitability is not only steady and like good in that way, it also compares rather well, I think, to the closest competition. We place nicely when looking at long-term growth and profitability compared to peers, and in a way, of course, in this picture, we are placed in a group where we have a very international global successful companies that compared to us, and that's something that we are very proud of. So basically, that's where we are now as Gofore, what we have worked on during the last 2 years and next time I'm going to look at the strategy update and some highlights for that. We released our strategy update in December which was around 2 years after the last strategy update, and this has become like our strategy process cycle. We work on a continuous strategy process with a 2-year cycle. So if nothing special happens, then we'll be here again in 2 years and talk about the next update to the strategy. This is something that works well for us. We have strong foundation. We have strong -- we have strengths that we can build on. And we don't need to change our strategy basically in a radical way. We need to add to it. We need to develop with our own growth and of course, look at what happens in the operational environment and react to that continuously evolve and change so that we are relevant also in the future. But it's not a question of making a huge change making -- changing direction completely. If we start with the long-term financial targets, as said, we have raised our own ambition level a little bit here. If we start with the profitability target, that remains the same. I've many times said that when we build Gofore and when we make decisions about what kind of company we are building, we always think about the 15% profitability target. Our structures are built so that 15% is something that is achievable in a good year. And the company has built it and structured in the way that it is achievable. Profitability in consultancy business is not something that is very complicated. It's about basically 3 things. It's about the gross margins, it's about customer prices versus the costs for providing the services, mainly salaries, that's simple. It's about being efficient. So in consultancy business, it's always about the utilization rate, the billing rate. That's what sets good consultancy companies apart from the maybe not so successful ones. And thirdly, it's about the least important of this, I think, is to see that the operational expenses are on a scalable platform. Teppo will talk to you a little bit more about these components in his speech. Then there's the growth target. We have, as said, raised ambition level a little bit. So that goes to show that we are quite confident in what we have done. We have a momentum that, of course, even exceeds this target. So we can be confident in that way. We are also confident that our strategy is working. We have the customer base there that will allow us to grow 25%. We are going into a year of uncertainty for sure and nobody knows for sure what's going to happen, but we are rather confident about that. And especially in the midterm, the long term, the drivers are there. That's clear for us. We want to grow with the market as fast as the market. So the drivers for growth in the market are there. We have not changed our dividend policy. It remains the same, and Teppo will talk a little bit more about also capital allocation in his speech. The big picture for what we do in terms of strategy is that we always in our strategy process look 5 years or so into the future and start building from there. Our ambition is high there where we are going. We want to be the most significant digital transformation consultants in Europe. So that means that we are, of course, broadening the reach from not only Finland, but also the rest of Europe. And from that, we have looked at what are the themes that are especially interesting for us in terms of looking at 2027. And we have found 4 themes there. Those are the future work, industry approach, sustainability and international. So a little bit different themes that we have then built our strategy based on these things. And we have today, Sanna of course talking about the people side of things, so she'll address the future of work part of the strategic themes. And we have Riikka talking about the industry approach, so that's what she'll address. And I'll quickly look now at sustainability and internationally in my part of this. So what we did is basically look at 2020 set some -- set the objectives for us there. In a nutshell, I guess, you could say that we strive for European awareness, recognition, both on the employer side. We are very appealing and well-known brand in Finland. We have work to do in other markets. We want to be known by customers as specialists in the strategic customer segments that we focus on, on digital society and intelligent industry. And we want to position our brand also from the sustainability point of view as I said in the beginning about the slogan that we have adopted, Pioneering An Ethical Digital World. And basically, what we've done then is map this to what we need to do now, what will get us there and what we need to build, what kind of enablers. I'm not going to look at this in detail. You can find the material afterwards also, and we can discuss this in the Q&A part. But what I want to do is talk a little bit of how we at Gofore, think about sustainability issues. This is something that for a company like ours is really important. The people that work for Gofore, on average, are extremely interested in where the world is going and how we can build a sustainable world. That is why we have for a number of years now, or you could say always been very, very aware of our corporate responsibility and our footprint in the world. That is not something that we can do hugely to change the world to the better, the footprint part. We are aware of our environmental responsibility, we are aware of our social responsibility; and especially on the social side, I think we also have done things that especially in the Finnish market have changed how work life is done. We have our own collective agreement. I have been one of the pioneers to build a new kind of agreement thinking between employees and employers and have been pretty open and vocal about that. So what we want to do is change how Finnish work life functions and, of course, make that also something that affects not only Finland but a larger market. But where we see the big things happening is on the handprint side of things. We work with customers who have their own sustainability challenges. We work with organizations that build a digital society. How is that society going to be equal and accessible for everyone? We work with customers that build machines, basically. How are we going to help those customers build machines that are environmentally friendly and carbon neutral? That is the area where we have a lot of things to do and need to be better in the future. And we also want to be active ourselves and promote action, and we have in our strategy release also talked about our plans of setting up Gofore Impact Foundation that will work on promoting digitalization -- promoting the positive side of digitalization. On the handprint side, our idea is that in 5 years' time, probably 50% of what we do together with our customers in some way will have to do with those customers' sustainability-related targets. They can be very different depending on what kind of customers those are, but here are some examples of that. We have a big momentum going on in the green and digital shifting, and that's relevant, especially for our intelligent industry customer segment. They invest heavily into green and digital solutions technologies, and that's where we want to be part of the solution. For example, in heavy machinery where electrifying machines is a big trend. That basically always goes hand-in-hand with also digitalizing those machines, adding a lot of -- a lot more software, adding connectivity, adding digital user interfaces and so forth. So a huge change going on there. What we have done for years now is build a digital society and the digital services that all of us use. And we want to make sure that we can help our customers in making those accessible for everyone, inclusive and so forth. So that also the digital society is for everybody, not only for those that are somehow able to use the services, but for everybody. We -- our offering includes ethical design methods, and those promote inclusion, accessibility and social innovation. And something that all of our customers also bring up, green, ICT ethical data and AI issues that we'll see in the coming years that will have a bigger impact on all of our customers. A few words about the foundation that I mentioned, the Gofore Impact Foundation. This is a plan that we have worked with the Board to make happen this year. And the idea is to have a foundation as a platform for projects that impact the market in the long term. We want to promote the positive sides of digitalization. We are aware, and we want to show that we are aware of the tensions that relate to digitalizing society and our everyday life, social tensions and environmental issues and so forth. And we want to find solutions to those tensions. And this is the idea with the foundation that we have. We are going to have this proposed to the Annual General Meeting later this year to get this going and have our first projects with a long-term impact, we hope, in the market during this year. Very important thing that I myself, I'm extremely inspired by. The international part I also promised to talk about. We are not going to change a lot of things here with this strategy update. Basically, the geographies that we look at are pretty much the same. We want to have a focused internationalization strategy, and that means that apart from our home market in Finland, we put a lot of focus into the German market, into the DACH area market, as mentioned, and we have done things to get us further along the road there. If we look at the DACH area market, if we look at it from different viewpoints, from a business and customer side of things, we do see that as a market where there is huge opportunity for things that we have done in the intelligent industry area with our customers. Riikka will talk more about that. We also see that, that is a growing market for public sector projects, public sector customers. Germany is investing into digitalization, coming a few years behind the Nordic countries as we have discussed with many investors over the years, and we see things happening there. From a people point of view, the German market is where we want -- need to build recognition and awareness for the Gofore brand as an employer, promoting the Nordic work culture idea, that we have something that is differentiating to some extent in that market, and that's where we -- what we are working based on that differentiation. And on the M&A side, we have an active pipeline now that we have built during the last couple of years, both, of course, in Finland, that's a longer-term thing, but also in Germany and the DACH area, working with company acquisitions there. So in a way, you could sum the strategy up in our 3 avenues to growth, which are that we want to build on the success that we have had over the years in the digital society area, leverage the leading position we have in the Finnish market there. We want to challenge in the market of intelligent industry customers, we have a good customer portfolio there. We have a good chance of increasing our share of wallet and building bigger customer relationship in the intelligent industry area, both in Finland and also in the DACH area. And we want to support all of this by M&A activities like we have done before. Basically, that is how you could sum up the strategy update that we have done. Next, we'll have Sanna talking about the people issues and make like a deep dive into those things, something that, of course, is very much at the core of what Gofore is as said.

Good morning on my behalf too. My name is Sanna Hilden, and I'm the Director of People Operations at Gofore. And I'm really happy to continue the story started by Mikael, as he said that it's our people-centric culture that has been driving our talent attraction and retention which clearly are very crucial to achieving our growth targets in the future, too. It might be a good idea to start from the results, so how we are doing right now, and I would like to point your attention to the figure of 377 million, which we are relatively proud of last year, recruitment. We had an all-time record in 2021 with the 214 new joiners through recruiting, but still the last year was 76% higher. So that was a good result. And that is supported well by our strong brand and reputation. As you can see, there are a couple of awards and recognitions that we've received. Just to mention the first one of the listed companies and our best reputation as an employer of the listed companies in Helsinki. And if we like to understand how this strong brand and reputation is built, it's good to realize that in Gofore, it has always been about concrete work life actions, and a lot about what the Goforeans tell about us and how they tell about our story. And therefore, we will go back a bit later to what makes Goforeans so proud, why they tell the story, how do we get this very strong basis for building the reputation. But before we go into that, we could look at the challenges already mentioned by Mikael about the future of work, how things are changing. And probably the first question is the same that it has been, and it's the most crucial one: how to attract and retain the right talent. But there are new questions, and these are probably not even the only ones, but still the first there refers to the fact that now that we are doing work a bit differently. We are talking about hybrid work and full remote work, and different forms of work in many ways. We really don't know what will be the implications to us as human beings, like the impact of working fully remote. We know that we are discussing how people perhaps should be more at the office to really feel well, and what it does to the organizations as social systems when people are working differently than they have used to. So this is a question we don't know what's going to happen. The second question there refers to the fact that we probably know that the diversity of needs and preferences of our experts, they will get more diverse. And we want to be able to speak to all of this valuable talent, how to do that with smartly targeted investments. There is a risk that if we want to be attractive to everyone that is not going to be too efficient, but how to do it smartly. The fourth question relates to the fact that the so-called fight for talent and even lack of talent is not going anywhere. And therefore, as an employer and us as employers, we need to be very responsible and take good care of the talent pool that we are sharing. And that means that we need to take the juniors on board to work life as quickly as possible. And we need to upskill and reskill people along their careers. And we need to take care of the well-being of people so that they can maintain long and profitable years of work in this industry. And just as well, we need to ensure that the senior experts can find flexible ways of working. And in that sense, having longer careers. So as an employer, we can also have an impact to the talent pool that we all are sharing. Some of the questions related to how the work is changing. Now looking at our response, what are we going to do as a people strategy? Here, we have 3 themes in a way, but also a title that could refer to 2 seemingly opposing targets. We are going to be one, and at the same time, we are going to be many. And the 3 ideas here, they are building that in 3 different ways. So the first one refers to the diversity. How we can transform our growth and our broad set of capabilities. Based on our offering, how we can transform that, becoming international gaining deeper customer understanding, building even bigger strategic partnerships with the customers? All of that deepening, broadening world, we are going to transform it into the most desirable expert community. And that's the basis of us being the one and the most inspiring for expert. On the right-hand side, we are talking about the diversity in a way that people want to be seen as individuals. They want to get very personalized service, if possible. And that's what we are going to go for. It's an ambitious goal if you think about our size that we are making a promise to offer even more personalized opportunities in professional development but in many other ways also during the employment. But we'll come back to that a bit later. The third theme is something that reflects in a way our other value. We've had 2 values from the beginning for 20 years, and thriving on customer success has always been there. But during the past couple of years, we've sort of come even more aware how important it is to understand how much pride and how much inspiration there is for our experts in really being able to help our customers. And Therefore, we sort of want to remind us that even though sometimes in people operations, we might tend to focus a bit inside that actually for employee experience, there is a lot of power inside this, focusing on a customer. Not to mention the healthy business that will enable us to make good investments to people and bringing joy also in that sense. But these are the 3 things that we will get back to. But let's go back again to our numbers, how we've done. And here, we have some examples of how we are doing in EX. We have been investing in employee experience, of course, for probably from the beginning. But during the couple of years now back, we've sort of understood that the most valuable thing is to be able to find what makes people really proud to be Goforeans. And we have really put a lot of effort in those things. It means the meaningful projects for the experts, but it's also the caring and supporting community. You can see that we have good numbers in how people feel that they get help and support for their own success from their colleagues and also from their people leaders. And focusing in a way on this question of being proud. We've also got good results in our eNPS, which has climbed from 30 to 43 during about 12 months. We are going for 50 surely, but this is a good track. Attrition rate was challenging in 2021, we all know that. But we've been able to drop that to 12. And actually, 9 would be even more accurate. We are changing a little bit about this metric since for it to be valid metric for understanding our retention and our capability to keep people, it's better to exclude the cases where there is, for example, a retirement or a fixed-term contract ending or a dismissal, which is not a sign of failure in our retention. So 9% is the unexpected rate of levers. But good progress here. I mentioned already that this question of being proud is important. And one of the things that our people are really proud of -- and what also brings us attention from outside is our promise of building ethical digital world. And actually, this ethical capability that we have been building for our organization, it also means structures and skills for people to have these ethical considerations for the support of our customers, but also in the way how we operate internally. This is something that creates the sort of frame how we think about social sustainability, how we think about our goals in diversity and equality and inclusion. Because the strive for being ethical means that you will automatically take care that all of the different perspectives and life situations and voices are included when planning almost anything. And that's the sort of core idea of well-working community with fair opportunities. And once again, this sort of guiding thought is bringing good results. As you can see, we have the relation between women and men on a very good level compared to the industry averages. We have 33% women. And as you can see, the salary developments last year brought the average salary of women very close to men's. We are in 99%. So almost full equality. And those figures there that 91% can be their authentic selves and 85 feel that we have fair opportunities. Those are also very nice grounding feelings for us to have a fair good community. Now if we go a bit back to our strategic themes, there was this goal of embracing diversity. And our concrete results in this already, how we have been experimenting and building this. For example, these companies that we are having on our platform, we will get back to talking with Juhana about Rebase. Sleek is the same kind of a company. And these are the sort of new kind of opportunities, responding to diverse needs of experts. And we can see that they grow a little bit faster than our sort of core operations. Even though the core is doing really well, we get an extra boost for our growth with this a little bit different twist in our models. The same goes for this questions of office locations. Along the hybrid and remote work, we've noted that we probably should be open-minded in opening new locations since actually, we see, again, the higher growth relatively in those areas. So it looks good, and we might want to expand this a bit. The same opportunities probably can be even used in our international offices now, to consider whether the same sort of medicines could work also in growing into challenging markets like DACH. But using the diversity for supporting growth, this is an example. One clear example is using partners and offering the possibility for experts to become the Gofore family through not employment, but being a partner. This is an area where we have huge potential. Since the amount of our partners in our network, that's growing, but we really haven't put a serious effort what it means in our terms to really understanding how we could actually serve the partners, providing better partner experience, understanding the different kind of partners and their needs. Here is a lot that we can do. So a lot of potential in this form of diversity, not being employed, but being strongly enjoying the Gofore company and our customers. Still on the strategic themes, there was this mentioning that fueling the joy of succeeding together with the customer. And this, in concrete terms, means, for example, our compensation models where we have been quite, let's say, successful and innovative. Our local salary settlement has been proven in a way to be a very good tool because it seems to provide nice salary development for our experts, at the same time, since it's dependent on our financial success. It's also a safe way and a managed way to allow our salaries to develop. General races are, of course, only the half of the truth and there are personal races involved. And we can see that also the personal races, they are providing people good compensation progress, while we have been able to keep our average salary development nicely in line with the customer price development. So this is a well-managed entity. For the experts, it's very important that we have the competitive base salary, topped with nice benefits and health services, but also different kind of salary extensions in a way, the flex parts that are dependent on our company's success or even the personal success as it is in Rebase and Sleek and also inside the group, otherwise. The third perspective here is very important, and it's the possibility for experts to own the company, and Crew Share is our tool for that. And we are really happy that about half of Goforeans are owners through this program. And Gofore is supporting the ownership by providing extra, but all in all, these all models are basically having the same guiding idea that we are sharing the common success. And we have an incentive to be really interested in how we are doing and understanding how it's bringing these fruits in this way, in concrete way for our experts, but also providing the safe and financially stable platform to continue. Now I also mentioned that we are having this ambitious target of personalized services and development paths. And we have digital, state-of-the-art tools, providing opportunities for our experts to sort of flag what they are interested in to what direction they would like to develop their skills and matching them with what the customers need. We also have a tool that is sensing what customer needs there might be, and a person can build an own map of his or her skill profile and map that to the customer needs, and many different kind of ways to use this digital capability to provide this more self-organized way of finding the right paths. Our way of measuring employee experience is changing towards more coaching type of service where the tool itself gives hints and points to find the right solution. So there again, we are supporting the self-directiveness while still having a very close link to our people leaders and the community support. Just to remind that even though we are building a lot of our capability on our digital strengths in a way, we have been putting a lot of effort lately and, let's say, in 2 years' time to strengthening our leadership service. And the single most important goal of our leadership service to people is to ensure the personal success of the person. And now this is the sort of grounding of providing the personalized service, where the diversity and all of the possibilities that our broad and deep organization can provide. Now just to recap what we've said here, I'm going to say the same thing as Mikael already said, that we have a very strong basis and probably, we can just add this couple of new opportunities. They are ambitious, they are not easy, but we have a very good starting point to start pioneering this very sort of inspiring experts community while having a personalized service. And what it will lead to is that we're going to be the most desirable community for experts to work in and for the customers also to work with. We are going to do it also with nice operational efficiency as we have been doing, but just remembering that it's always the people that will provide the next excellent results. Thank you.

Great. Thanks, Sanna. Very good presentation of what we do in terms of people thinks at Gofore, and what we are good at and what we want to be even better at. And welcome, Juhana, to discuss with us. Before we go and let Juhana tell a little bit tell us more about himself and Rebase Consulting, I want to now remind you that this is the situation where you should be asking questions. And we will take them from the streaming platform, and we'll take also questions here locally from people that are present, but you that are following us on the streaming platform, shoot away, we'll have the questions here on the iPad here. But okay, Juhana, you are founder and CEO of Rebase Consulting. So could you start by telling us in your words, what is Rebase? What does it add like today digital consultancy market as a company? And how is Rebase different from, let's say, traditional consultancies?

Yes. Hello, I'm Juhana Huotarinen, and I'm CEO of Rebase Consulting. And Rebase combines elements from typical consultants company and bring some freelancer site to there and combines those 2 together. And from the consultants' company side, Rebase offers, simplicity and safety. So we are working the same project with other Goforeans and help people have opportunity to work with those projects. And at the same time, they are -- they have employee rights. So a holiday bonus and premium health care and so on. This is the one side. And the other side is that we are bringing some freelancer elements to the package as well. So maybe the best example is that the salary is not fixed. The salary depends on how much -- what is the hurry rate and how much the people work. So that is maybe something that is coming from the freelancer side. And then putting those together is something unique and things that we can offer. And that's the thing.

Yes, so basically combining the positive sides of being employed and on the other hand side of being a freelancer. Sanna, you already talked in your presentation also or mentioned Rebase and Sleek, it should be mentioned that we have 2 of these companies in the group. But why do you see Gofore involvement in Rebase as a good thing? We are the majority owner of the company after all. So what's like the positive sides there?

I think we have discussed that we like growth. So in that sense, Rebase has been an excellent, and Sleek too, showing the extra growth for us. But there are clearly 2 sides to the Rebase being a strength for us, and that's the customer perspective that we have the possibility to attract different kind of talent profile for the Rebase kind of work, so we've seen that. And also more specialized perhaps skill profiles, which is good for the customer that we can offer a little bit different kind of skill profile. And for the experts, as Juhana described, that they like to have the opportunity to be in this between mode, between the freelance and employee. So this fits very well to our diversity strategy.

Yes, and I guess you could simplify it a little bit, but the more like seasoned and senior the expert becomes, it seems that at least in this situation in the market, the more interesting these kinds of opportunities become for the experts. So for us, a channel to find the senior level expertise. But Juhana, about the talent market, we have seen that changing over the years. How do you see the talent market today? What do you highlight as the biggest changes in the last few years? And what are people now, when you look at it, looking for in terms of a good employer, interesting working place?

Yes, so as you mentioned, yes, the talent market, it has changed indeed. There are people who are looking at this kind of like a typical workplaces and ordinary places to work and like, for them, this kind of like a fixed salary and benefits are good option. But then there's a group of people, and they just want to focus the project work and get a good compensation for that. And for these kind of people, I think Rebase is a good option and we have seen that, as you mentioned, those growth rate and so on. So Rebase is a good option for those people.

Kind of, I think, certain kind of maturity to the talent market also. It's not that many years ago that things like pool tables and stuff like that were seen as the important thing. But I think the market has matured, and people are looking for more, I should say, like more important things than just the policing on top. We often get the question when we discuss these concepts of Rebase and Sleek that aren't they competing with Gofore in the talent market. And in principle, they are. But Juhana, what's your experience on that on the competition between Gofore and Rebase in the talent market? And on the other hand, Sanna, you are in the end responsible for the recruitment numbers, which were good, by the way. But have you seen a problem here? Do you see Rebase taking away from Gofore recruitment? Maybe if Juhana starts.

Yes. So I believe that it's like a as I mentioned before, so there's a different kind of people, and they are looking at different kind of options. And like I could see that like Rebase can offer this kind of like a simplicity and like it's a project work. And for those people, I would say, it's like a good place to work for. I don't -- and that's -- they are a different kind of people that are looking at something else. So I think that's kind of like as Gofore as a group, everybody will win because we can have a different kind of options for different kind of people that they are looking for.

I think it's fair to say that at the beginning, we might have been a bit jealous even about your strong growth pace, but we've surely learned to understand that we can do cooperation, and we can use this as an advantage for both of us. And now we are sharing information and probably building even better cooperation. And our new strategy definitely will create needs for perhaps more specialized talent. And again, this variety, what we can offer at the phase where a candidate is approaching us. There are different kind of paths and also that which is important to underline that the paths go to different directions. So it's basically okay, to start from the core Gofore, then go to Rebase, and if you like, then come back. So it's depending on the life situation and the preferences of people. So not a threat anymore.

Yes, now it's probably a good time to have some questions. Anybody has a question. Everybody has a question. Good. Joni.

Joni Grönqvist. I have 3 questions on the international business. Firstly, you mentioned impressive 76% organic growth in international business. So could you elaborate or explain a bit, is this driven by the private sector, local expertise in international business, or is this also driven by your Finnish know-how in the public sector and the international deals that you announced last year? Second question is on the international public deals if and when you are doing them from Finland as well. How is the pricing compared to the Finnish level? So is it profitability enhancing? How should we look at this? And thirdly, on the international strategy, can you explain what Spain's role now in your international strategy? And how has that developed in recent years?

Yes. I'll try to remember all the 3 parts of the question and starting with what is driving international growth. And as you said, 76% was the organic part of the growth last year. And as you suspected, that is driven by private sector demand. Not only that, though, we have had some success also in finding public sector customers and working for those. And on the other hand, for the delivery model, there are both the German market customers, which are a growing part of this, but also customers that we serve on a primarily remote basis, customers from, let's say, Sweden or the U.S. so on and so forth that are looking for remote teams to work together with them in their challenges. So it's a little bit of everything. But you could say that at the core of it is the German market customers and how we can combine local presence and then a bigger delivery team from Finland or whatever location delivery center that we have that is suiting to that customers' needs. So that's also what we are going for and what like the sweet spot for us is, that we can combine these elements, that we can be there for the customer locally but use delivery capability from other sites. That might be then in terms of price or cost a little bit lower cost point than the local German expertise in a similar situation would be. Your other question was about profitability and margins. So of course, when we look at the European market or the market outside of Finland as a whole, the price range is much broader than we are used to in the Finnish market. We have everything from offshoring pricing to, of course, very premium pricing. So it's different. We are learning to find the niches, the pockets of the market where our cost structure is relevant. And those are not on the low end of the price range, but more in the, let's say, higher half of the price range. The work that we do for German clients is typically on a little bit higher customer price levels than we are used to in the Finnish market. Your third question was about the Spanish operation in Madrid, and during this year also in Malaga, has from the beginning been primarily about delivery and finding talent there, and that's what we have been building there. And that's what we offer for, of course, Spanish people but also other people that might want to spend some of the, for example, long finished winter in the sunnier parts of Europe in Malaga. So that's what it's about, a delivery center, basically.

Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. So I have a couple of questions. So can you first discuss the rapid increase of your company size and the employee count? So how can you remain nimble and manage this, I guess, admin cost burden of heavier, more international organization in the future, maybe reflecting on the fact that you will be growing more rapidly in the future according to your growth ambitions.

This is maybe a question where, Sanna, you also can chip in a little bit. A very important question, I would say. As I said in the intro speech, this is kind of a driving principle for us that when we develop the organization, it needs to be balanced so that we are able to do the 15% EBITDA margin that we are targeting. And that is -- a lot of that is about how we like structure the company and it's about the ratio between people that do actual customer work and people that are admin, which is, of course, at the heart of your question. So this is something that we are constantly very aware of what we are doing. About the ways that we make that lean, make that work that equation, I think one of the parts is that something that Sanna little bit touched on, the digital platform. So things that traditionally might be the role of management -- of middle management and so forth, we try to digitalize those. We try to automate the matching between customer needs and expert skills and, of course, also what Sanna mentioned, what experts want to learn and what they are interested in, what their own career part is about to automate that matching. And that is, of course, at the very heart of what we do. And to have the digital platform working in that area is something that gives us scalability. Growth as such is also like a contributing factor to this. When we grow well, which we have done during the last 2 years, it's kind of easier to manage this challenge of balancing noncustomer work with customer work. When the business grows faster than the administration, that's where we are like in a good place. So good customer demand, good growth is also a contributing factor there. Anything that you would like to add, maybe.

You said a lot already, but I agree that when in a way leading the people operations there, the profitability and the growth they are very hand-in-hand and they are considered in our lean organization all the time, so -- on a daily basis. So we take a very good care of that. So both are very much in our backbone. And just as a note that if we look at the amount of experts in our enabling operations, meaning the admin people. The relative number hasn't grown at all. So we are in good shape with regards to that.

This is very difficult, I guess, from the outside to compare companies in this sense that what their structure and how heavy on the noncustomers and the admin side companies are. But for us, when we talk about utilization rate or billing rate, the main metric and the important KPI for the whole company is the utilization rate for the whole company. We don't just talk about utilization rate for individuals or utilization rates or those that are supposed to do customer work. We talk about the utilization rate for the whole company. And that gives a strong signal of what we are doing. We need to keep that number structurally so that we can achieve a good utilization rate on the company level.

All right. I guess my second question is about the compensation and incentive models of Rebase and Sleek. So the growth is evidently higher, but are there any differences to go for general margins and potential scalability?

Do you, Juhana, want to comment on like margin and profitability side of thing?

Yes. So actually, last year, we haven't of course, published our numbers yet, but like our profit has been around 15% to 16%, for example. So it's a bit a good level. So as I mentioned that this kind of fee-based model is something that they focus only the project work, and there's not so much extras. And that's why we can keep our costs low as well. For example, we don't have office buildings. We have only a little small office building as over.

And that's not really from a group standpoint, that's not the only like viewpoint, but it's, of course, difficult to open up on the whole, but that's the most important thing that Juhana said, that the companies are responsible for their own results, and they build their operations in a way that they are profitable. We, of course, then have the group subcontracting margins that are added on top and so forth. So yes, it has scaled well and the guys have done a very good job in that sense also. Juhana is very active on social media. You should follow him. He tells you also about how the company is progressing in terms of numbers.

You can find us.

Yes, all right. Excellent. My final question is what's your current latest take on Finnish IT service market size in terms of the public sector and private sector? And what is the Gofore's current market share on the public side?

Well, we talk about our IT services market of around EUR 5 billion, but the public sector side of that is rather like more easily defined, and it's been over EUR 1 billion now since 2019. We don't have exact numbers of what the growth has been, but there has been growth and the structural reforms in the public sector market in Finland for example, and especially the social and health care reform we've had, that's also added to the market growth somewhat. So I'd say somewhere between EUR 1 billion and EUR 1.5 billion in the public sector and the rest in the private sector. For public sector, our market share might be like an interesting metric already, around 5% or maybe even a little bit more. But we should understand that there are no players that have like over 10% market share in the market. So it's a very diverse market with a lot of players there. On the private sector side, well, let's say, then 1% it's not really relevant for us. We have a market where there's so much room to grow. That's not like a relevant metric for us, how we look at the market. We have room to grow both in terms of market growth and taking market share from competition.

Jaakko Tyrvainen from SEB. I could continue on the talent side. And have you analyzed because you've been so successful now this year or last year on the recruitment side, have you analyzed where you are winning this talent from? Is it coming from the small peers very close peers, larger peers, from customers or universities? What is the split of the incoming talent?

Sanna, you want to...

Actually, I don't have any clear figures to -- I think that there is a lot of movement now in the talent sector. And we know that we are getting people from our direct competitors, but also from probably elsewhere. The fact that we are -- it's not a big portion from -- directly from universities in Finland, even though that's a way of recruiting which seems to be functioning rather well in the DACH area, for example. But I don't have the exact figures. Would you happen to remember?

No, not really, but it's a mix of all of those that you say. We are on the winning side if we talk about people that move in the consultancy industry, obviously, because of the growth. So we are on the winning side there. But it's a good thing. People are moving. People are moving from customers to consultancy side, people are moving from us to the customer side. Of course, in the big picture, I think all of this is also very like positive. We can transfer knowledge, we can understand our customers better. We build a network of people that know Gofore and how we work also on the customer side. So these are positive. When looking at how people move from competitor to another, we of course want to be on the winning side of that. Not in every individual case, we are not. But on the whole, we are on the winning side. And Sanna touched on that, that we should -- and that's the IT industry in general. We should be much better in Finland, solving a little bit self-made problem of having too little expertise. We should be better at bringing in the university students, bringing in people from other industries and reskilling, upskilling those people. We do, as an industry, and also as Gofore too little for that. And that's something that for the coming years for Finland to be successful, we need to address. And we do our share. We could do more, and we will want to do more. But that's for sure. For Finland as a whole is an important question.

Perhaps a follow-up on the traffic between the consultancies and the customers. A few years back, there was a kind of a discussion or risk that -- or the consultants would like to go to the customer side. Has there been any changes in this trend over the past year?

Yes, there was, and probably still is somewhere, a discussion about that we don't feel that, that is a threat to Gofore, to put it bluntly. That is not a threat. We can find a lot of positives if people move from Gofore to the customer side. That can be very beneficial. And I'd say we also see the benefits in people moving from the customer side to us, the customers probably not always see the benefits there. But anyways, I think it can be beneficial. And this is something that we have like strategic discussions with our customers more and more, I think, about the value that we can provide to our customers being the most attractive workplace and having like a strategic relationship there, using also the customers' brand to attract people because that is a problem that we share. For the customer, it's important that they get the expertise that they need. If they are not able to recruit it in-house, which often is a problem, then we can cooperate on finding that talent for Gofore and then working for the customer problems. So I think we have like at least with many of our customers, we have like found each other in this sense. And there are strategic discussions that are based on a win-win situation there.

Good. Then perhaps on the high organic growth target, does the high target tell more about your view on the future market growth? Or is it more Gofore-driven thing?

Both are reasons why we are confident in our -- a little bit higher ambition level there. I think it's obvious that we have shown that our operations are capable of making this kind of growth happen both on the -- and especially on the people side, but also on the customer side of the equation. About the market and where that's heading, mid-, long term, we are extremely confident that there should be no reason why the market wouldn't grow fast. Short term sure, there are uncertainties. And that's why we call the targets long-term targets. Of course, that we look at the long-term development of the market. This year, it's especially uncertain in many ways. We don't see the uncertainty in order intake, we don't see the uncertainty in customer discussions at this point in time, but we are following it closely.

Final follow-up on the short-term view. It's a year of parliamentary elections here in Finland. And last time we had the parliamentary elections, your growth was a bit perhaps slower that year. How have you prepared for this year and the elections? What are your expectations?

We could return -- and we should return to this question when Riikka is also here -- up here after the next session. But shortly answered, I think for us -- for Gofore, the important thing is that we learn from things that happened in the past. We have learned from the last parliamentary elections and we look at the market on a longer time scale. And we've seen -- and we realized how important the tenders that are out there already a year before the parliamentary elections are because those are the defining ones that will take us over the parliamentary elections. And I think we have done quite a good job there. The parliamentary elections are interesting, important in 2 ways. First of all, the election as such means that we have like a period of going from 1 governmental program to another, and that will mean that there is a slower period in the market. The other is, of course, what kind of program the new government will then pursue, and that's interesting to see. We don't feel that there's much risk there. We see that the things that are driving investments into digital are seen from all political sides and there shouldn't be any big political risk in that sense. But we'll see. We'll have a break at this point in time, and we can -- but you'll have a chance to ask your question in the next Q&A. Is that okay? Because we need to take a break now so that we don't fall behind schedule. Thank you for the good questions. We'll come back shortly and continue with Riikka's part of the program. [Break]

Welcome back. We'll continue with the program. And the agenda looks like we have 2 parts for the afternoon sessions. First, Riikka will have a look into our strategic industry focus, so the customer side of things, and then we'll have Ville and Teppo talking about M&A strategy and delivering shareholder value on the financial side of things. So very interesting presentations coming up. And the important part here is to remind you that you'll have 2 chances to ask questions from here on. First, we'll have the Q&A together with Riikka and Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from Elisa, our customer after Riikka's session. And then we'll have a final session after Ville's and Teppo's session where we can then take the questions regarding future M&A and more of the financial side. So please, let's continue with the good track from the first Q&A and make this a good discussion. But without further ado, Riikka is starting to come up onstage.

Hello, everyone, on my behalf also. My name is Riikka Vilminko-Heikkinen, and I'm the Director of Sales and customer value at Gofore. I will first talk to you about our customer strategy and industry focus, and I will be very excited to also invite one of our customers, Elisa, a bit later on, on stage with us. But first, before we move on to the industry focus, I would like to talk to you a little bit about the evolution of our account portfolio. So we've been building our portfolio around large strategic customers for the last 2 years about. And we've been succeeding in this quite well. If we're looking at the numbers that you can see in the presentation on the right, you can see that the number of accounts with more than EUR 1 million in revenue have grown in numbers from 14 that it was in 2020 to 31 that it was last year. So the size of our customers has definitely grown. Earlier, we were also following the number of how many accounts that we have over EUR 500,000, but nowadays, we feel that account category of EUR 1 million accounts is more suitable for really kind of describing the evolution that we are having in our customer portfolio. So we are now helping our customers in large significant digital transformation projects that also have a very strong impact. And we are really succeeding also in building deeper partnerships in ways that we are also expanding the end-to-end offering in the accounts, and we have wider collaboration in terms of our offering with the customers. And I would also say that we are really building the trust and kind of the mutual targets for reaching the full potential of digitalization. But the large growth really comes from the returning customers. And again, as you can see on the right in the presentation, when we are looking at the share of the net sales last year, 82% came from the returning customers and then again, only 18% from the new customers. And this is actually something that we estimate that the number for the returning customers will be even bigger this year. So we still feel that we have the share of the wallet quite small, and there's a lot of room for the growth in our account portfolio. We are also on the right path when we are looking at the customer satisfaction that we have. So the NPS is 43 at the moment in our recent customer satisfaction survey that we conducted last fall, and the overall satisfaction number is on a very good level also in 4.1. And it has been on a very good level for many years already. And that's something that we are very happy with, of course. Some of the kind of recurring topics that our customers raise in the satisfaction survey results are that we seem to be exceeding their expectations. We offer a very diverse expertise for them. The collaboration seems to be very smooth with us, and we are trustworthy. And these are all things that we are very proud of and definitely want to maintain and also see that they are kind of the preconditions for the growth that we are still looking for. Also, our brand survey states that we are in a very good path. So we are the preferred company out of the 15 peer companies that were included in the brand survey last year. So this is also a very good sign. We feel to take the customer portfolio forward. Then we will maybe look a little bit deeper into the customer portfolio in terms of the public sector and private sector. And as you can see, we have a very diverse and very strong portfolio in many ways. And also the international aspect is interesting. So definitely, the share of international accounts is also growing. If we're looking at the public sector side, the growth has been very stable and were something that we are very happy with, of course. And also, there are some new names in addition to those very long-term very beloved customers that we have for many years already. But 1 example of a new account is Deutsche Bahn, which is something that actually the acquisition of eMundo brought to the account portfolio. And that's a very interesting opportunity for us in the DACH area, of course. If we are looking at the private sector side, we are also building a very good portfolio at the moment. It's a very interesting mix of different companies that we feel offer a great deal of opportunities. We also have very solid relationships in the private sector side. And of course, the growth has been very strong, and the private sector has been growing even faster than the public sector. A few more words about the public and private sector. So the public sector has been a very steady base for us for many years. And it has definitely been a very kind of resilient and good pace for us during the uncertain times. For example, COVID, of course, but also other uncertainties that have followed after that. And we believe that it will be also such for the future years as well. We have a very strong contract base, and we are always making sure that we always have a very strong contract base. And the question about, for example, the election this year, we feel that we've been growing the contract base in terms to kind of make sure that we will be always able to make sure that there won't be in trouble when we know that, for example, the election will definitely affect the public sector to some extent, at least. Like I said, the international account portfolio is expanding on the public sector side also. So many very interesting opportunities internationally in Europe and also in Germany in the DACH area. And I will be talking a little bit more about those later on as well. Now when it comes to the private sector, like said, we have a very good mix of the customers, for example, the global industry companies. And this is something that we feel that is very good to build on. And we've become the established player. We called those sales as challenges for a long time when it comes to the -- sorry, private sector, but now we feel that we have already established very good customer relationships also on that side. And the organic growth and the acquisitions that we made have really enabled the birth of intelligent industry. And this is also the industry approach that will take us forward. And I will move on to that topic. So we are talking about the industry approach, in other words, the digital society and intelligent industry. We are really thinking that the deeper partnership and customer understanding requires industry expertise, and that is the reason why we're really investing in building this forward. Before going in detail on the digital society and the intelligent industries as this growth avenues, I would surely like to tell you about what we want to achieve with this. So we definitely see a lot of growth potential on both of the industries, and we want to grow both of them equally. We also want our plan to be very strongly associated with both of the industries. And we want kind of the Gofore name to be a guarantee of quality when it comes to these two. And when it comes to numbers, here are some ambitions that we have when it comes to the industry approach. We are really looking forward to those bigger accounts still. And our estimation is that we could have 12 more accounts that are over EUR 1 million in revenue this year as well. And we are looking for those really big accounts. So our ambition is to have accounts worth over EUR 25 million in 5 years. So that's the direction we are really striving for those big accounts. And we are looking for a bigger growth in DACH area in percentages. And we really want that for customers working with Gofore to equal to succeed in very big, very complicated digital transformations. So a few words about our strategic industries, digital society and intelligent industry. So we no longer talk about public and private sectors. We are talking about digital society and intelligent industry. And digital society is really built around services. It's about those organizations and companies that offer those everyday services for the citizens such as booking your doctor's appointment or get a compensation from your insurance. So it's not about the public sector organizations only. It's about all of those that are offering the services. Then about the intelligent industry. It's about those industrial companies that are really striving for the effective operations and harnessing the technology to become more efficient, sustainable and productive and human-centric. And also the sustainability is a very important angle on both of these. Here are some examples also from the customers from the public -- sorry, from the digital society and also from the Intelligent Industry side. As you can see, very familiar names and also both are kind of in the core of the industry approach in our opinion. So about the steps on our growth journey, so how are we going to do this? We really need to scale our business. Half the bigger customers, like I mentioned, become the trusted partner. We want to build the trust, especially because we feel that's kind of the precondition to really build the partnership forward. We want to have more responsibility for our customers' success. And these are all of the things that we want to do in -- with the international accounts as well. Then in terms of sales, we have to have new models to monetize. We have to have larger solutions to offer to our customers, do solution selling, take advantage more of the service approach. And we want to be the thought leader in both the focus industries. We don't want to kind of see the leaders where they're going. We want to be one of those leaders. And that's a very important aspect for us. And in terms of offering, this is something that Mikael also showed in the beginning of the presentation about our digital transformation offering that is based on the generic digital transformation capabilities. Now we are building upon this. So we already kind of have the building blocks that we have and the industry-specific offering really builds on these generic capabilities, but answers to industry-specific customer needs. And I will a bit later on show you an example of the digital society and intelligent industry. But before that, let's look a little bit about the growth opportunities that we have on both of the industries. So for digital society, we absolutely feel that we still have a very strong customer portfolio that creates a lot of growth potential, definitely. But there are also a lot of opportunities in Finnish market otherwise. So for example, the social services and health reform that Mikael also mentioned a bit earlier, is a very big growth opportunity for us still. We feel that the digital transformation is just beginning in that field. And also the private companies that are operating in the proximity of digital society, those still have a very small share of wallet. And we feel that there's a lot of room to grow. But then maybe even the interesting angle is the international markets. And Germany and DACH is something that we are really looking into. And Germany is really striving for this very comprehensive digital transformation in a very short period of time. And they rank below the EU averages at the moment when it comes to the for example, the DS index where Finland is actually #1 last year. So we have really kind of this really great solid foundation to really export our expertise also in Germany. Also, Digital Compass, which is the European Union's digitalization accelerator, is something that definitely accelerates the digitalization in Europe. And we are already involved in some of the EU initiatives such as real-time economy. And these are something that we feel that have really a lot of growth potential to also have interesting aspects in Europe. And then there's also the recovery funding post-COVID at the moment that has a very strong effect on budgeting, on digital transformation. And we see that, that is also something that really grows the potential. So here is a very quick example of the digital society offering. I won't go into the details with this, but this will be shared in the material later on, so you will have an opportunity to see it a bit more closely. But the idea is really to build on the customer need. So we are using the offering that we already have but building on that. Then some growth potential also for the intelligent industry. We feel that the intelligent industry has a lot of growth potential in home market in Finland. So like I said, the share of wallet is still very small on our customer portfolio, a lot of growth potential there. As I said a bit earlier, we have a very interesting mix of customers. And here's an example that we have actually 50 biggest companies in Finland, we have 27 of those in our current customer portfolio. So that may be shed some light on the potential that the current accounts have, actually. And a few things favor us. For example, when we are looking at the key trends in Finland, for example, cloud, data and AI and cybersecurity. This is something that our offering responds very well too. And the digitalization is at the top of strategic agenda, and there's a lack of talent. So that is something that also favors us. When it comes to the German and DACH area, again, the key trends in there, such as AI cloud, Big Data, IoT and machine learning, are offering response very well to those. And Industry 4.0 is definitely one of those driving forces in the DACH area. We have a lot of upselling opportunities in eMundo customer portfolio also. And very shortly, I will also show you the intelligent industry offering. So very similar in a way of visuals when it comes to digital society, but when looking closely, very different. And this is the strength and here, we can really see the industry approach and the differences between the digital society and intelligent industry. But again, I don't go into details right now, but it will be shared in the material. But this was all from me. And next, we will continue with Jussi-Pekka Erkkola from Elisa to discuss these topics a bit further. And Elisa has been a customer ever since 2014, so it will be very nice to have a long-time customer here with us. But we will be back shortly.

Okay, so next possibility for you to ask questions and really use this opportunity since we have Riikka here now and especially have Ju-Pe here from Elisa. So you can ask the viewpoint of the customer to Gofore's business, not something that is maybe the usual setting in a Capital Markets Day like this. Hopefully, that will be valuable for everybody listening. Thanks, Riikka, good presentation, and especially thanks, Ju-Pe, for being with us here today. It's very important for us to have that like a customer perspective for this kind of event. So you are Vice President at Elisa of e-commerce and digital services. And in Finland, we know Elisa, of course, household name in mobile networks, but it's much more recent. So could you like tell us shortly about what Elisa is?

Sure. Thanks, Mikael, thanks, Riikka, for inviting me here. It's really nice to be here and also present our approach to the partnership for Gofore and of course, our approach, how we see our partner strategy in a way, of course, quickly tells something about Elisa. Of course, today is about Gofore, but happy to bring the customer approach here. So first of all, quite many of you at least here on the side knows Elisa, but of course, people online might not have that quite good knowledge. First of all, Elisa is the Finnish market leader in telecommunication services and digital services. We are over a 140-year-old company, but it doesn't make us slow. We have always been interested in technology, how to use it, new ways of using it, creating value for our customers. And of course, we are known, especially for our quality, customer experience, and our continuous learning. That's part of our culture in a way. We have over 5,300 employees in over 20 countries, so we have been growing also outside of our home countries. We are serving over 2.8 million customers in Finland, Estonia and of course, internationally. Yes, as I said, consumer customers, it's about telecom services, devices, subscriptions, fiber, 5G, super important for us and our customers. And then for B2B customers, it's about IT, automation, security services, consultancy. Of course, telco services, of course, for big clients and smaller clients also. And then in our international digital services, we are operating in industrial software like the Industry 4.0 related to that one. Of course, telecommunications software, we have a lot of clients and partners. We are providing them software to manage their networks and optimize that. And then last but not least, we're also in the virtual collaboration business globally. So we have quite good focus when it comes to digitalization per se, and of course, some similar topics that I have been hearing today from you.

So we share a lot of I think thinking together with Elisa. You are a much older company, but agile and interest for technology and renewing yourself and doing new things.

Definitely a lot of like familiar phases and words and terms from Riikka's presentation that we're also looking, especially how we operate, for example.

Okay. Riikka, you mentioned that we have worked with Elisa since 2014. If we look at what kind of services and what we do together, what are those? And on the other hand, then maybe you could comment on this. Are these the things that you use partners for? Or what's like your strategy then to use partners and what kind of things do you need the partners for?

Well, maybe I can begin that we are definitely doing a lot of collaboration in terms of quality assurance, for example, test automation and DevOps. And probably one of those very peak is the Elisa's online store, which is, of course, quite important for you as well. So maybe that's one of those key collaboration topics.

Exactly. So when it comes to test automation, we are partnered with Gofore. They are providing us professionals. And for example, it's not only important for me because I'm representing the e-commerce here for the consumer customer, but also for our customers. Our e-commerce is growing really, really nicely also the whole digital services side, self-service, whatnot we are providing there is super important.

So in a sense, you could say that you mentioned 2.8 million end user customers. Those all of them are benefiting from what Gofore does with Elisa and benefiting from a quality service in the digital part of the service.

Yes. As mentioned, quality is key for us. And of course, quality is key when it comes to digital services, e-commerce. Of course, everything needs to work and function as per se. No problems on Black Friday, for example on our e-commerce side. So happy about it.

Yes. What do you expect from like a strategic partner? What do you think like makes an excellent partner for Elisa?

So first of all, when it comes to like strategic partnerships, so we expect that our partner understands our strategy and knows our business. So those are the key as you're supposed to be. But of course, when it comes to partnerships, so we want to augment the skills and knowledge that we have or that we might not have. So of course, working with the partners and vendors who can bring us skills, knowledge good professionals in a way. So that's like the basics. But understanding the strategy and business is super important for us because that's a good way to build healthy and long-term relations. For example, we are using multiple different partners. We have like short-term project kind of getting the resources in place and professionals in place but for example, with you from 2014 already, long-term partnerships and also growing that partnership and understanding where Gofore can help Elisa to drive in our business and especially on digitalization side. So that's 1 thing. Skills, professionals, super important for us because it's not only like bringing resources, but it's also learning from partners. Like that's one key element for me when we are talking about strategic partnerships. But what are the skills that the consultants can bring to us? And that's also something that we have been working with you. For example, consulting side when it comes to agile, DevOps, all these kind of things. SaFe, scaled agile on that side. Strategic partners want to also build this kind of win-win situation. It's easy to say, sometimes hard to do, but of course, that interests us that everybody benefits from that. And of course, then our customers get the value. So that's super important. Flexibility, of course, all the contractual terms need to be there, that's taken. But if there is a need to go extra mile, let's say something happens, good partners can react really superfast. There is no like contractual, okay, this doesn't fall under the SLAs or stuff like that. But I understand that, hey, how we want to build this, so speed, flexibility, super important. You mentioned about the smooth operations also. So that's about it, not only like lean and agile in software development side, but lean and agile also on governance side and the partnership. So that's key there. And of course, the ecosystem that partners can bring. Like you said, you have been growing nicely. You are taking this industry approach. So what kind of skills, knowledge, professionals, ideas you can also bring that we have said, okay, we have a need for this kind of things. This might be something new that we might not know too much about yet. So usually, partners that have a larger ecosystem also helps us and brings the speed and flexibility to our operations. So that's a key kind of thing. And not last, but at least, cultural fit. So that we share the similar values ways of working, so I can't emphasize cultural fit enough. For example, Riikka mentioned about the sustainability. Sustainability is a key for us. Our mission is sustainable future through digitalization. So how we can work together on these important topics.