Agillic A/S

CSE:AGILC

Earnings Call Transcript

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Welcome to everybody listening in and joining us for this Agillic Q3 '23 results call. As always, we are helped by CEO, Emre Gürsoy; and CFO, Claus Boysen, to help us take us through today's presentation. Today's presentation, as I said, the Q3 '22 results the headlines, I think you gave it yourself, good EBITDA improvement and also looking that you are underway to reaching your targets for the year. So a good quarter. [Operator Instructions]

But for now, I think I'll hand the call over to you, Emre.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Thank you very much. My name is Emre. I'm the CEO of Agillic. And thank you very much for joining us this morning. I'm together with Claus and what we usually do a very short introduction to our company and our products, and afterwards, we'll jump into the results for the quarter, and we would love to spare as much time as possible for the questions that you might have.

So if I may take a very quick introduction to our company. We're operating in the marketing technology space. We are an omnichannel marketing automation platform. And our platform is empowers brands to work with their existing first-party data as well as their content to create and send personalized messages to their customers.

Now this is quite an important exercise because in the world that we live in, the brands are highly dependent on their customers' loyalty because loyalty brings higher conversion for their sales. It brings customer satisfaction and thereby higher retention for a longer lifetime value.

So all that is a very important part of our platforms results, which is quite applicable for quite a large portion of industries. And that's why on the right side of this slide, you can see the number of industries that our clients are coming from. But when we look at it mainly those who are very rich on data are very strong transaction of a high level of traffic that's on retail side, that's on finance side.

And that's on any kind of business regardless of which industry that is working with subscription-driven businesses, that's where we are highly, highly penetrated in the 10 markets in Europe that we are working with 120 clients.

It is important to mention, we are a 100% SaaS company. We do only build our technology. We do not do professional services on the site. For that, we work together with our partners. So I'll talk more later on.

Around 50 employees end of Q3, and we have been on the -- in the stock market since 2018. If you look at a quick introduction to Q3 highlights, now I will give up some of the highlights that I really like to mention. It's start with revenue. Our total revenue end of Q3 year-to-date is DKK 49.3 million. That's a 6% increase versus the same period last year.

I'm very happy to see this because we are about to hit the DKK 50 million benchmark for the Q3 level. This is the highest we have reached so far. And another highest score that we have also reached our EBITDA for year-to-date. That's DKK 3.5 million, end of Q3. Again, this is quite a huge improvement for the last year same time, has an increase of DKK 3.8 million.

If you look at our total ARR, that's DKK 68.9 million, and that is a 1% decrease on that one because our transaction part of our business have been declining in the Q1, Q2, that decrease is picking up now, but that has an effect of minus 1. We'll come more into that. On the other side are real license business, which is what we call the subscription ARR, it is on growth of 13% and is on the highest level of DKK 56.8 million so far.

What I would like to do is I'll just pass on the word to Claus to take you through the details.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. Thank you very much. And as you can see here, the revenue for Q3 is DKK 49.3 million. It is a fairly and slightly increasing revenue per quarter in our subscription. And the transaction part is less than last year, which also impacts our total ARR. However, in Q3, and as we announced with the half year result, our ARR from transaction is slightly increasing again quarter-over-quarter.

Our committed future revenue ended at DKK 25.1 million at the end of Q3 compared to last year, DKK 27.3 million. The small decrease from last year is due to the clients being the same number as last quarter. So we would have liked to increase our client numbers a bit more to increase this number, but that was also in alignment with our previous guidance updates on the 23rd of August.

If we go to the EBITDA level, we have in this quarter, made DKK 2.5 million EBITDA, which results in a DKK 3.5 million EBITDA compared to last year where we were at minus DKK 0.3 million. So we are in the range of our current guidance and having a strong Q3 quarter. Yes. If we look more into the details of our total ARR, as you can see on the dark blue diagram. Our subscription ARR is steadily increasing and then now is at DKK 56.8 million.

And as Emre mentioned, an increase of 13% compared year-over-year. The ARR from transaction increased to DKK 12.1 million from last quarter. It's less than last year and which actually turns into the total change in ARR since last year is minus 1.4%. We also have introduced this slide on our previous presentations to give more details into the ARR transaction development because that impacts our total ARR.

And as you can see, our pattern in the previous year is that we have a regular increase quarter-over-quarter within the year, but we saw a decline in -- from Q1 to Q2 that impacted our total ARR and are expecting to end the year at an ARR transaction between DKK 14 million to DKK 17 million. And with the slight increase here in Q3, we maintain that trust that we will end there -- end the Q4.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

I think it will be also important to mention that this the change in the pattern. And this is not driven by any of our clients, losing an important client that is heavy on the transaction side or anything. It's actually a comparable pattern. And what we have seen in the year of 2023 is the quite an unforeseeable level of engagement from multiple different business segments and their way of looking into the market.

So yes, we have had -- we can identify certain areas such as the SMS prices Claus mentioned, but there are also other unforeseeable things that have been happening in the market, which is valid for all businesses. Everybody is highly interested on how to look into the future. So there's a bit of a hold back. I think that will be revealed as we go through into the next quarters.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

So you are a little bit afraid that the statistics that you're normally seeing will not show up, but I guess, looking from the consumer side, we are not lying in the corner and grind, but we are, of course, not that optimistic. And in general, I guess there is a lot of campaigns, right? You have the Black Fridays and you have the Christmas holidays.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Absolutely.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

So I guess it's -- I understand that statistically, you can't see it, but there shouldn't be anything from your viewpoint, that should change that normally Q4 might...

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Absolutely none. On the contrary, actually, when we are speaking to our clients in regards to the Q4 because just as you mentioned, on certain segments, it is the high season, I mean, especially for example, retail or many of the subscription businesses, it's the high season with all the black week and with all the other technology-driven opportunities that the companies are actually leveraging up their sales and Christmas later on. So it's a high season.

On the other hand, we also talk to, for example, another very important area of our business is the travel and hospitality. And when we speak to them, what we also see is that there's an unforeseeable way of sales. But if you look at the average of their, I think they see a positive development. As we get to the 2024 conversation, I'll go more into details of that. But I think, just to mention that things are not normal and that's not driven because of we are looking into the business in a different way. It's the market conditions that are giving an impact on our performance. That's what I meant.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

So a little bit more into the details on the SaaS highlights. Q3, we ended the number of clients with 120, the same as by Q2, a mix of new clients insurance, and that also impacted the committed revenue, as I spoke of earlier. Our average ARR per client remains at DKK 0.6 million per client.

And if we go to the international client wins, we still have a good part, a solid part of our clients that comes from international markets. It's 36% of the new clients that are coming from international markets and the ARR value that they bring into the -- or brought into the company, sorry, it was 36%, 39% in 2022. So in 2023, the client that we won from international market increased to 56%, which is a good signal.

However, they have brought a little bit less ARR value into the business than we saw last year. So that means that the clients that we have won have lower ARR value on the international clients, at least in this period of time. But normally, we also see that when we are winning clients that they grow year-over-year.

On the net revenue retention on the lower graph, we have by Q3 now at Index 100, if we adjust for exchange rates. Last quarter, we were at 98. So we have increased our NRR by 2% in Q3 stand-alone. And if we look at our customer acquisition cost, we are still at a fairly low level at DKK 0.3 million, which gives a month to recover CAC of 8 months.

Those are still very good numbers, very low numbers, and it's an aim for us to have a low CAC cost but it, of course, is a part of our investment in how we market our product together with our partners rather than sending out a lot of marketing material debt.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

There's a question actually here regarding your client -- is a grow in our high subscription in Q3 versus Q2, primarily driven by price increases? Your client base is around the same number, and you grew your subscription. So what is the primarily driver of that as -- and I also know it's a big rounding, but the average ARR is also around the same.

But -- so some explanation why the subscription is growing, but client base is not?

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. So the NRR last quarter was 98 compared to 100. So that is, of course, impacting the growth on our ARR from subscription in Q3 mainly. And as the average ARR per client is still the same amount that doesn't have such a huge impact on the growth in ARR subscription.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

So have you made price increases or something else that can explain that bump attribute.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Price increases or the usage, the utilization of our platform, increase of customers or use of the channels that we are selling.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Okay. Perfect. So that's why this is a...

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Yes, it's important to mention that when we talk about the total ARR, it's a combination of multiple activities increasing uplifts, price increases and all coming together as a new client coming in. That's an all combination of all that. So it's not just one thing, but many things.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect. Perfect.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Cash flow, we started 2023 with DKK 7.4 million, and our cash flow from operations for Q3 is minus DKK 5.9 million. Our Q4 is normally a very strong quarter for our cash flow from operations. So we are still aiming to achieve our strategic goal, which is cash flow from operations positive by year-end. On the cash flow from investment, it's primarily the investment, the R&D we make into our platform, and it's stable quarter-on-quarter and minus DKK 9.6 million and on level with our projections.

The cash flow from finances is plus DKK 19.7 million, which is a part of the capital increase that we did in the spring of DKK 21.2 million. So at the end of Q3 2023, we have DKK 11.5 million in cash.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And Claus, can you remind me -- remind us why you have these differences, and it's pretty well known, you are strong. Is that because customers are -- have their paying cycle? The payment cycle, is it in Q4 -- would you -- is that why you are pretty confident in that target still?

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. So historically, we have won most clients in Q4, and that means that they are renewing in Q4 and paying for the next year's license in Q4, which increased our cash flow from operations.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Is the seasonality on that? Yes.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. So the next is on the guidance that we announced at the 23rd of August that we maintained with a revenue of 67 -- of DKK 76 million (sic) [ DKK 67 million ] to DKK 70 million, an EBITDA range of DKK 1 million to DKK 4 million and a total ARR of DKK 70 million to DKK 75 million (sic) [ DKK 77 million ]. We also maintain our strategic financial goals towards 2024, where we, in the spring, added the positive cash adjusted EBITDA strategic goal.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And there's a question here regarding the EBITDA. What are expectations of the cost side for Q4 regarding your current '23 EBITDA guidance range? I guess you are close to the top of that and if I look in seasonality, you also normally have a pretty strong Q4 on the earnings side, if we look at the last couple of years, so what are the expectations on the cost side? Are you ramping up some investments into Q4 or something else that explains this that you haven't bumped up your interval?

[Claus Boysen, executive]

It is highly related to that we are focusing on a sustainable growth which means that we want to earn the cash before we spend it. We earned the EBITDA before we spend it and make the investments in a good manner, you can see. So we are cautious on the positive side with our investments once we have the EBITDA. So we constantly invest into our future growth, but on a level where we can also produce a positive EBITDA, which is why we remain with the EBITDA guidance of DKK 124 million, even though we have an EBITDA of DKK 3.5 million in -- at the end of Q3.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

I could also see that the salary, the employee cost had a dip compared to the last couple of quarters, but you had the same amount of employees. Is that just some split between the quarters that we are looking at or is there something different in this result?

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. Q3 has the summer holiday adjustments where a lot of people are on vacation and therefore, we have holiday pay, for instance, that are adjusted and has a consequence of reducing the employee cost. So that's the only parameter that is impacting why it has declined since Q2.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

All right. I think you should also mention that. Since it's the...

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. So once we go and look at our revenue per employee, so we ended up the number of employees with 50 by Q3. But if we look year-over-year, our revenue that we have generated per employee is now at Q4 or Q3 2023 at an index of 147. So we have increased our revenue per employee by 47% and over the last 3 years.

And as we -- you also asked about the EBITDA level, we are 100% focused on a sustainable capital-efficient growth, which means that we are spending money when we have earned them here and investing into our future growth as we are still having a strategic goal of making a double-digit growth on our ARR from subscription.

In general, it has also through our operational excellences that we have spent time on in the last couple of years made us -- have given us a platform where we have a solid platform to drive EBITDA margin from growth in the future.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Yes.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And when you look at such numbers, you always think what are the limits of driving out something? Was it an easy starting point? The easy apples has been picked or do you actually think you can drive that further on in the future? And the reason why is that your partner strategy that will help you and maybe increase this further on in the future?

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

If I may answer some part of this. It is actually -- in the next slide, there will be more of that conversation because it's [indiscernible]. But let me just put it this way. This is not about how do we get -- squeeze our people. This is more about how do we improve our way of working, smarter processes, smarter technology, smarter thinking of our go-to-market model, all combined into this. So I had this conversation the other day with another CEO and he asked me the question, so what is your target number?

My target number actually is not about a certain number. It's about how do we continuously dynamically change the way we work by bringing more people to increase our technology ability. In the same time, our sales and competencies in the customer success areas. So we always change all the parameters. But as long as we are increasing our competencies by intention and by not need. This is the way we are trying to show that if we would increase our ARR 30% tomorrow, would we be dependent on people or not? And the answer is no.

So that is the very important part of our business model that as we go through and increase our ARR and grow our company, our scalability of our bottom line has a great potential. So this is what we are -- this is why we are measuring this a lot and looking into this.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

All right. One last slide from our side. So we got more time for questions. So what have we been busy with in Q3. And this is not absolutely -- we started ended in Q3, but it is -- these are the main highlights that we have completed within Q3.

Number one, I'm very happy to say that we have recently announced as of the beginning of the month, we have welcomed Martin Lindboe as our new CTO, Chief Technology Officer. And I'm very happy about this because I've been working in the part of the search process with a group of team members from our side to actually find the very right person for our company as well as the person themselves.

So we're lucky enough to have Martin. He's already fully onboarded and he's very much engaged and looking to bring him to -- up to one of the conversations in the future as we go through.

Now why is this very important for us because we are a very technological company. We're so interested into development and innovation. So if I jump to the right side of the page, we are also coming up with one of the largest achievements from the product perspective over the last couple of years.

We have been working on this product development initiative for a while. And end of this month -- the quarter, we will be fully ready to roll it out. What it is, it is basically what we call the content designers. It's the way that our clients are working with our platform, there's a tremendous improvement, both on the [ UX ] side also on the speed and efficiency, which is also making their lives easier.

We have been presenting this to our clients and partners, and the feedback that we have received so far extremely positive. This is what we call fast time to value. Why we're talking about this is the customer value management. For us, what is so important is if they can actually work faster with the system and if they can take care of their customers faster through our platform. This will be the most successful achievement for us. We have done some side-by-side comparisons.

So the current system versus what we are launching now, it's 3x faster to work on the system. That's a very, very heavy improvement if you're a user. We also tested how fast a person can learn to use the new system versus the existing one that's 50% faster. So which means that our partners, our clients can gain new members in their team and they can go fully onboarded, up and running in the 50% faster performance.

Now these are all very important parts, and we are launching this whole thing. In Q4, everybody is very busy with the high season. But as we complete the quarter, it will be rolled out to all clients as we speak.

Then in the middle, these are 2 very recent announcements that we have also done, which I'm very, very proud of. We have increased our partner portfolio with 2 new companies. Number one, Merkle. Merkle is one of the world's leading networks within the data and customer experience space. They are owned by Dentsu Holding worldwide. And we have established a partnership with Northern European Merkle structure.

Now this includes multiple markets in the Northern Europe, including Benelux and the Northern Markets. And a very interesting part that I love the way that they have come up with the headline, and I -- with a very pleased and I thought that I would say, we will use exactly the same thing, which is basically, I don't know if it's readable over there. But I want to read again is Merkle and Agillic team up to supercharge time to value for inpatient CMOs.

So this whole thing about fast time to value using technology to create results and improving return on investment, that is the main focus on that one. So it's basically our new partnership now that we are building a go-to-market model, how we're going to go to the market together for new clients and for the existing portfolio, how we can actually offer them an improved service.

The second one, Nexum. Nexum is from Germany. Now this is another extremely interesting one for us because Nexum happens to be one of the largest partner -- solution partners, as we call them, structures in Germany. They have 5 offices alone in Germany, 2 in Switzerland, 1 in Spain. Our partnership with them covers all these offices altogether. And what is extremely important is that they are already operating within this space that we're talking about very heavily.

They have a number of products within marketing automation in their portfolio, but they choose to have Agillic in that portfolio for 2 main reasons. Number one is that what we do, it's very different than what the other ones are doing, and this is a good value. Again, fast time-to-value perspective. And the second one is that our product and service structure are compliance within Europe are incomparable to the what's available out in the market.

These 2 main reasons bringing in. So we are now in the process of building our collective go-to-market model as we speak. So these are very important long-term relationships that we are building with major players in the markets that we are operating. So I'm very pleased to announce that. And as we get to the next quarter, hopefully, we will see the fruits of this conversation.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Yeah, there is a question. what opportunities does this new partnership with Nexum bring you? You have answered a little bit upon it, but is a lot of -- if you should put it down, is it more sales muscle on the German market or if you should just give 1 or 2 headlines.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

I mean the main purpose of our -- I mean, and the way our strategy is built upon is that we expand our penetration into new markets. In this case, Nordics and Germany is via partnerships. What that means is that they are the trusted partners in the market space by their existing clients or in the market space for the prospects.

So together, we create this value proposition out to their network and we reach out to them. So it is very much built on a very strong partnership, true partnership, both strategically and also from an implementation perspective. And it is important to mention these are not resellers. These are true implementation partners. We will be sitting side-by-side in any conversation which we are having with the prospects. So it is a value-driven and partnership driven engagement.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

That's all from us. Any questions? More than welcome.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Yes. There's a question. Will you be profitable for the full 20 years and going forward from here?

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

For the...

[Claus Boysen, executive]

For the full 20 years?

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

20 years or...

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Will you be profitable for the full 2023 for this year and going forward from here?

[Claus Boysen, executive]

So the EBITDA guidance is made at DKK 124 million, and it's an increase from last year, both the actual numbers as well as our guidance has increased year-over-year in EBITDA level. And that has been a main strategic goal for us to be positive EBITDA. We are still a growth company, so we will reinvest in our future growth as well.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

And I think it will be also important to mention that for those who have not been able to look into it or didn't have the time for it, we have been delivering positive EBITDA since 2020 every year. So this will be the fourth year in a row that we'll be delivering a positive EBITDA because this is a strategic decision that we have taken back then that we will be running a sustainable -- sustainably growing company, but also delivering a positive EBITDA.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And then let's go to the bottom line because, as always, there's also a question, when do you expect a net positive result? Meaning down on the bottom line. Do we have any guidance on that? I know you have the cash adjusted EBITDA and how far will that bring you to be bottom line positive also?

[Claus Boysen, executive]

It will bring us further. So when we have the cash adjusted EBITDA, we are reversing the capitalized development cost which is close to be the same amount as we have in depreciation. So -- and bringing that to a positive level is just, yes, financial expenses and taxes that are in adjustments. So yes, with that strategic goal, that is -- there will be a consequence of that.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Yes. Then they say -- question, have you seen M&A in the marketing automation market any M&A activities? Is there a consolidation out there? What are your feeling of this market right now looking from your [ amenity ] point?

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Should I give the go on that one? So if you look at enterprise -- the answer -- the short answer to that question is that the M&A activities have been continuing. I cannot tell you exact number of whether it's speeded up or not, but I can always tell you that the interest within from the global world to our company because they are -- the number of conversations and interest that I'm receiving has increased in the end of Q2, Q3 portion of the year versus the previous part of the year.

So number one is that there is an interest for investment is increasing. That's what we see from the engagement. If you look at the space, the market space, on the enterprise level, there used to be a much greater M&A activity. Now that has been slowed down heavily within our space. The middle part, there are new players who are trying to bring some consolidations but they are all -- they're not coming directly from marketing space. So they're not like MarTech companies, but they're bringing some of the marketing MarTech elements into it. I don't know how that will work.

So we see a bit of movement. But in short, what I would say, the strategy that we have chosen that best-of-breed playing with the other best-of-breed. So best-of best-of-breeds constellation within our ecosystem has been actually quite an interesting model because the interest to debt is increasing. And at the end of the [ suits ] and the increasing part of the best-of-breeds is the word that we are hearing out in the market.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

There's a question here, the lack of growth in ARR approximately 2 million years [ a days ] Does it cover only lack of closed contracts or are the clients that are pushing you on the existing contract or leaving us clients? So I'm not quite sure where we get the 2 million from, but maybe that's...

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

I don't know the numbers...

[Michael Friis, analyst]

So a little bit about the...

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

I think I got the question. Let me just do my version and then you can just jump in. I don't know the exact number from that point. But what I would say is that with a space of [indiscernible] average million ARR. The answer to that question, all of them. There is nothing stable in the market. I mean all our clients most of them. They are also in the market to actually deliver an improved result on their side.

So they're also looking into their contracts. They are looking into are we staying with them? Are we -- do we have that stickiness? Do we have that? Yes, we do. And higher the engagement that we have with our clients in regards to our technology being utilized, higher the retention of a [ problem ] in period, of course. We are not an easy one to get in. We are not an easy one to get out. I mean, this is something very important to mention.

So we are almost like an enterprise-like technology in a much compact, small and cheaper version of it. So from that perspective, I would say, all of the above and we are -- that's why one of the reasons that we are so busy is that we want to make sure all of our clients happy and all of them in the bucket.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

So the thing that I could add to it is that we have ARR value, which is we think excluding churn, and that's close to 100. So it is possible to sort of calculate how the growth has ended up with the DKK 2 million. On top of that, we established a center of excellence department in the beginning of 2023 to make sure that we could go out and make, for instance, health check on our clients and show them the win case and show them actually what they do additional and invest in to improve their profitability.

And that is also a positive effect that we start seeing that they are implementing this and give a stickiness and make customers more happy and want to stay with us.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And clients leaving you, is that still -- is that still what you told in the past that if they get bought up or they change system that you might actually be -- you are in a new competition with maybe 2 companies. So is that still the main effect?

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

It's a very much, so is the game. It's -- the consolidation game on the client side is much faster happening in the MarTech space. I can assure you that.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Yes. Yes. Yes.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

And it's also an increase in space within in the European markets. So yes, very much so.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And then there's a question. In short, how is your normal sales process? How do you get a new customer? That's -- how do you start up a sales process? Is that true the partners bringing some in and you sit down together or do you do self inbound yourself. So in short how do we start up a cost to new customers?

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

I mean get a cup of coffee. I'm ready to go. All right. So I mean, I wish that it would be so simple as that I could put in a very short strategy. But let me just give you the -- let me just start from a strategic perspective down to the operational perspective of it.

So first and foremost, our sales is -- it is an enterprise like sales. So it is a consultancy-driven sales. This is not just you have a credit card and an e-mail address that you buy our SaaS solution. This is an engagement that requires conversations in regards to the company, their stage, their maturity, their data availability, their [ conduct ] availability and their maturity of how do they actually look into the customer centricity altogether in their organization.

So therefore, these conversations usually start with an engagement and interest that is driven from either marketing or partner-driven or direct sales approach. So these three within each area, there's a very detailed program running. So in marketing, you will have from digital activities from search optimization to any kind of social media activities to any kind of use cases, client stories, anything that we can publish to create interest reports.

On the other side, you have lot of joint events that we do together with our clients. Now all that altogether brings the interest. That moves into a conversation. That conversation will be taken care of from a consultancy perspective, either directly from our salesperson or if it's coming from a partner related, this will be with partner, it will be starting. At one point, they will be bringing us in. That partnership that we have with our partners.

And it is very important to mention, we have a very, very extensive experience of different segments in our space because we have been working with so many of our clients in those industries. So we can speak about a specific industry in greater detail for what are the do's and don'ts. What are the ideas that you should apply in which speed in what time of the maturity level. So all that is a very detailed conversation that has been taken with altogether or without with the partners.

Now the next stage is the flow of the conversation, how fast the conversations are being closed to sales cycle. The sales cycles highly depend on where are the clients in their process of search of the new technology. Is this a new technology search replacement? One marketing automation system out, One marketing system in. Or is it an ecosystem approach? I mean, are they looking for a new digital ecosystem structure architecture that they will need a partner to help them to build this.

So it all depends on where the conversation starts and how the client would like to do that. Now there's one dominating -- a common dominator in this. And that is how fast? How cheap we can deliver our services to the client? And that's why we keep talking about fast time to value because at the end of the day, regardless of where this conversation is in their maturity, everybody loves to hear that we can do it very fast and then we can do it very cheap. And that's where the whole sales conversation comes into an end.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

Perfect. And the question wasn't short, no I am joking.

ARR from transaction seems to be a very big fluctuation in Q-o-Q and year-on-year. So what is the reason that transaction revenue are seen as recurring? Is there a contract behind that customer that there is some lease amount of transactions they need? Or is it completely transactional? In that case, isn't that just a one-off revenue and just not -- and not a recurring revenue?

So a little bit -- I know it's a little bit theoretically, but why is this -- you say the transactions also seen as ARR.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Yes. So it is a theoretical discussion to some extent. But the most important part is that when the customers are buying our platform, it's to communicate. And that means they will send e-mails. They will send SMS, most of them. So -- and that is a recurring process. So if they're not doing that, they are not sort of using and utilizing a marketing platform.

So it is a recurring thing. And if we look at our clients on a broader picture, they are very recurring. So this -- as we saw on the slide with the transaction, it increases towards the end because you have at Q4 a Black Friday or Black Week or Black months, whatever. We call it now. We have Christmas and everything else. And that usually comes year-after-year and creates the same value and attention to the transactions as we had last year.

So we see the same pattern among our clients. The decline we saw in the beginning of the year was because of all the inflation rates and energy prices and the increases -- increased prices in SMS from our sub suppliers that actually addressed our clients to be more focused on being cost optimized on how much they send out and where they get the best value out of it.

So in general, I think the slide with the transactions, ARR and transaction shows very well that it is a recurring thing for us, and it is -- has a constant pattern year-over-year in normal cases.

[Michael Friis, analyst]

And to enter the theoretical discussion, it's split out in your accounting, so you can adjust the value to that. You can say what ARR subscription has a higher value when you want to do the revelation. But I understand your question that there is not a minimum contract. But if your customer buys your system, pay 600,000 average price and don't use it, then it doesn't really make sense.

So I guess this will always be a theoretical discussion. I understand that at least you've shown us both the numbers, so you can use it as -- to do the valuation on behalf of that.

Perfect I understand the question. I think we have went through all the questions. Thank you to everybody listening in and for the enjoyment of a lot of questions, and thank you to you, Emre and Claus, for bringing us through your results and answering the questions.

[Claus Boysen, executive]

Thank you very much.

[Emre Gürsoy, executive]

Thank you very much. Have a good day.