Operator
Welcome to Carasent Q4 report for 2025. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode.
During the questions-and-answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. Now, I will hand the conference over to CEO Daniel Öhman and CFO Svein Martin Bjørnstad.
Please go ahead.
Daniel Öhman
Good morning and welcome to our presentation of the fourth quarter 2025. I will start with a business update, and today a little bit extra about AI again, and then Svein Martin will give a financial update.
As most of we're providing EHR systems for healthcare providers. We're growing quite rapidly at 15%.
We have more than 90% recurring revenues and a net revenue retention of 110%. Looking a bit at the quarter.
We have a strong quarter with high activity, especially given that we have taken almost all of Volvat, so that's Capio Norway, online. That's something we're really proud of.
It's more than 5 million medical records have been transferred from multiple old systems into our system. I think it's gone more or less on time and and in a really good way.
Really happy with that. It gives us an extra strong quarter with some extra high consultancy revenue, even if that's not our focus and we price it lowly.
It's the result of the Volvat implementation mostly. In general, we have a really good improvement in profitability with EBITDAC margin of 16% in the quarter.
That's up from 5% last year, and there are no adjustments this quarter at all. We also have a very promising sales pipeline.
We've been doing quite a lot to strengthen the sales team and marketing team in Sweden, adding new roles and start working in more in different ways. Really promising start this year and at the end of last year on on the sales.
We're happy with that. Looking a bit into 2026, I think it's important to know that the Nordics, we're happy about, we believe that will grow strongly.
We're happy about Germany, too. It's according to plan.
The old products in Germany are not growing very much, and the new product will start roll out this year, but from a very small base, obviously. That means that the German growth this year will be quite low.
The Nordic should be good, and then over time, Germany will increase, giving us the 3-year targets. If we're looking at growth in the quarter, signed not implemented ARR amounts now to 5 million.
That's because we implemented Volvat, most of it, and also Frelsens Armé in Norway. We have a strong sales pipeline, we're not worried about that.
In total, we have 15% organic ARR growth and 16% reported organic growth. If we look at the entire of last year, we're really proud and happy what we have accomplished with strong improvements from last year.
We have the quite strong growth, and you see the EBITDAC, so that's our main target that we look at internally, EBITDA minus CapEx, going from -30 million to +44 million. This is something we aim continue with, having a very large percentage of our growth falling down to higher margins and and especially EBITDAC margin, which we think is the most valid number to look at when it comes to us.
What's almost everyone is talking about at the moment, AI, and we will be looking at three different perspectives this morning. What does it mean for our development?
How do we use it in product, and how do we think about it? What about our position in the market?
If we look at development or productivity, our strategy has been the last couple of years since since I joined to have a high development pace and to develop our products faster than the competitors. By always having a higher pace than our competitors, and our competitors are old legacy softwares, the distance between them and us increase every year and thus increasing the need to change system and make it easy for us convince customers to change to a better, newer system from us.
With the help of AI, we can develop faster, obviously. That means that compared to the legacy softwares, we will improve more rapidly, and the change will become bigger, faster.
We continue on that in that path. I think it's important also to use the productivity gains to improve the products faster than before because what will happen when productivity in development increases is obviously that development will go faster.
By keeping a high pace ourselves, we stay clear of new entrants, and we gain on incumbents and old softwares. We're going to continue with that.
Having said that, it's important to, at the same time, make sure that we always fulfill all legal requirements. There are high demands on how we are allowed to develop and in what way and what processes we need to have from most of all Läkemedelsverket in Sweden.
There are similar rules in other countries. We cannot and never have disruptions to our services.
If we have, our customers cannot work. The most important for our customers is that the software is always up and running.
That's 24/7. We have to maintain that at the same time.
Having said that, I think that the new tools are great. We're using them more and more and really getting productivity gains from them.
When we look then at how we use it in the product, our plan is to continuously add AI functionality in the product. I think that most of you knew know that a year a year ago, we decided to increase our spending on AI in the product as we saw that it can really help our customers become more productive.
We aim to add more and more functionality in the product step-by-step and giving it more of an AI agent feel all overall. The first and product is MedSam, which is an ambient scribe.
That means that we listen in on the call and the discussion between the patient and the doctor or the physiotherapist, and then we automatically propose a medical note from that. That's the functionality that's gotten the most use within healthcare so far.
Even if this is the most used type of healthcare product function in healthcare from AI, it's still way below 10% of our customers that use any of this type of tools. It's not moving very rapidly.
Still, it has potential to really save time for our users, and that's something we're working on. Given that our customers are afraid of change and especially our strong position, we don't need to be first.
We think it's good that others are first and that we can see what works and doesn't work and in what way our users like functionality. If we believe that we can do it well and if it makes sense to have it in our systems, then we can develop it.
We don't need to be first, but we should really follow very closely after. Take MedSam then, ambient listening, where there are a couple of products like that out in the market already.
Still, use is very very low among our customers, but we believe it will grow over time, then we release it need to get there. Given our product then, MedSam, we have been a bit too slow, I think, even given that we don't want to be first.
We should be a little bit closer to being first. The reason why we've not been in the forefront is that we have tried to stay clear of US-owned clouds, even if they are in Europe, we don't want to be in them.
It's a promise we make to our customers because most of our customers do not like to be in the US-owned clouds, and many of them know that it's quite likely that it would be illegal to be in US-owned clouds with personal data in EU again. It has been twice before.
Our customers are really [PR?] because they the type of data they are handling, and that's why they are well very well informed about this type of risks.
What we have noticed is that the type of AI LLM models we can run outside of US-owned clouds are they are too weak, they're too small. It's been Llama we've been running, and it's not good enough.
Now we have moved to OpenAI and ChatGPT instead for our customers, and we'll be rolling out that. Those who really don't want to be in the US clouds, even if they are in Europe, they can still use Llama, but I don't think that our customers will use that.
We can always switch them back to, for example, Llama if we want to and they want to. Now we're really getting the pace up.
Last of all, the market position. EHR systems, by nature, I mean they are truly mission-critical.
Our users, the healthcare providers, they are standing still when our systems are not up and running. They don't know how to who which patient to meet.
They don't know anything about the patient. They cannot make sure that they are called.
They cannot charge payments. They cannot do basically anything.
On top of that, we have countless integrations with different levels of Swedish society and different types of of entities. There are very many different workflows that we need to accommodate in our systems, very many different people that collaborate within a hospital or healthcare clinic.
There are tough legal requirements, and it's really painful to swap systems, or that's what our customers think. We're trying to change that as much as we can.
Our sector, they don't like change. Doctors, nurses, and so on, they are trained never to make mistakes.
They don't like taking risks, and changing systems is a risk as they see it, they avoid it. Also, EHR systems cost only 1% to 2% of their turnover, it's never worth taking any type of risk for them for that cost.
That's always our challenge. What we are competing with mostly are systems that are 20 to 30 years old, and they look like they're 20 to 30 years old.
We have a lot of new, good functionality, and still it's hard to make them change. In total, I think that there are very few software or knowledge companies that are have a stronger position than us in this environment.
I think we really can gain advantages for this. We can add more functionality to our customers.
We can help them help more patients. We can also improve our products faster than before.
Since we are the ones investing most in our markets or most of our markets in our products, we are likely to gain the most, I think. Having said that, I think it's always important to stay curious, stay on our toes, always think about our position, how can we strengthen it.
That's what we do every day, and that's what we've been doing for a long time. I think we This is a discussion that's likely to continue.
For now, I will continue to the next slide and look a little bit at the journey ahead. We aim to continue with the high growth we have.
We have added sales resources in Sweden, also divided workflows a bit differently to make sure we have a strong focus both on existing customers and new customers, and also working more with outreach in sales. We will now strengthen the sales and marketing staff and and organization in Germany in order to roll out the new system.
It's a really exciting time, and we have many projects that are now facing the day of light and are ready for commercial rollout or are in commercial rollout. We have Webdoc in Germany.
We have our new system, Ad Opus Web, in in Norway. We have surgery functionality that more and more customers are adopting in Sweden.
We have MedSam for ambient listening and so on. We're really happy about where we are and find it this will be a very interesting and fun year.
As I mentioned before, we aim to continue to invest a lot in our products, but we do not plan to invest more than we do. We aim to every day get more efficient, being able to get more functionality to our users with the same resources and to help more users and to sell to more users with roughly the same resources.
Every day getting a little bit better, and over time that adds up to a lot. We maintain good cost control.
What will be really fun and interesting this year is of course the launch of Webdoc X, where both our team in Germany, the early pilots, and when we show it to on fairs and so on, we have really strong and good reception. It would be a very interesting year to follow that and see the first customers, how do they feel about it and then start getting sales going.
With those words, I will hand over to Svein Martin.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Thank you, Daniel. Looking at the highlights of the quarter, Q4 was a very strong financial quarter, where the profitability improved a lot, and we also had good growth.
ARR ended at 331 million SEK, including the signed contracts. We grew our ARR 15% organically with 110% net retention.
Margins on EBITA was 25% and EBITDAC 16%. Starting by breaking down the growth.
One point here on the high level is that it's the first time we include the German acquisition in the organic growth, given that it's been part of the group for over a year now. That is still all the legacy products, it's not growing basically.
It basically means that the Nordics grew very well to be able to maintain the 15% for the group in Q4. Looking at the net upsell, important contributor here is Volvat.
It's included in net upsell because we had a very small part of Volvat before the new contract. That contributed with 6 million.
Worth mentioning as well is that new clinics for existing customers groups, such as Capio Legevisitt, is included in this figure. Net upsell has been on the sales side very strong in '25.
The churn we have spoken about many times over the last year, it's elevated figures, mainly due to non-voluntary churn, such as bankruptcies, that we saw last year. On the churn, we generally are notified by our customers canceling the contracts at least 3 to 6 months before it takes effect in the figures.
What is good is that we had, in terms of canceled contracts before it's reflected, we had high levels in second half of '24 and also in first half of '25. For the second half of 2025, we saw that the churn levels dropped again down to normalized levels, which is positive and will be reflected in the figures basically this year.
New customers, it's looks like a small percentage of the revenue growth, is 5%. What is positive is that if we compare it to what the same figure was last year, it was 9 million, it actually grew 56% year-over-year.
It shows that we are succeeding well with our sales. This is, of course, also a very important driver of net retention after the customers are onboarded as they grow with us.
Moving on, looking at the P&L, our revenues ended at 93.6 million compared to 78.7 last year, it grew 19% in total. The growth was boosted by a very high consulting and other revenues.
If we look at the gross margin, it was impacted that we have this one big one-time revenue in Germany that had direct costs linked to it. This increased the COGS.
If we hadn't had that revenue, the gross margin would basically be stable year-over-year. Also looking at the cost base, it's developing according to plan.
We did have a positive effect by a grant in Norway related to one of our development projects, where it basically reduced the cost in the quarter by around 2 million. This was according to plan, and we had expected it, but it's nothing that's going to come every quarter basically.
This resulted in a big improvement in profitability. You see here that the EBITA increased from 12 to 24 million on adjusted basis last year.
No adjustment this year. EBITDAC landed at 14.5 compared to -16.8.
On adjusted level, we increased from 5% margin to 16%, which is a big improvement. Naturally, it's worth mentioning as well that this quarter is a bit special in terms of profitability, given that we have the high consulting revenues and combined with the lower cost that I mentioned.
If we hadn't had this, the margin would naturally be a couple of percentage points lower like our underlying run rate. Still, very good improvements year-over-year.
This slide is a good illustration of how we think about running the business. Basically, it shows our revenue development compared to our costs.
The orange line here is the revenue LTM going from 245 to 344, growing about 100 million. Then we have the gray part of the bars is the COGS, which increases a bit.
We have the light blue, which is the acquisition in Germany that was done in Q4 '24. Then the dark blue part is the cash cost base of the organic business basically.
OPEX, CapEx, personnel expense. You see that it has been very much stable over the last couple of years, which means that the business is scaling nicely.
For 2025 in total, we were able to convert around 80% of the revenues into profits, which is basically in line with our target. We still invest a lot in our products, we aim to be able to scale the business for a long time when we grow our revenues.
The key is to grow the revenues and keep the costs under control. Finally, on the cash flow, cash flow is naturally supported by the big improvements in profitability.
However, we see that the working capital development in '25 has been very weak, and there is a few reasons for this. It's mainly these three reasons that I list here.
Firstly, as I've talked about many times during last year is that the re-listing costs were taken in December '24, and then it was paid in Q1. You see the effect there in Q4, it had a big positive effect on the working capital in Q4 2024 and then a big negative in Q1 this year '25.
It's around 15 million effect. Secondly, we had a large customer that, due to a mistake on their end, didn't pay their invoice in time in December.
This is a big public healthcare provider, it's a very solid counterpart. Either way, it was paid in January this year instead of in Q4.
Thirdly, these big consulting revenues that we have talked about, they mainly occurred in December with payment date in January '26 as well, it didn't come in in Q4. As you basically understand, some of these effects will have a positive impact on Q1 '26.
Then we have done the share buyback program, which also impacts the cash position. We have in total acquired almost 6% of the outstanding shares in Carasent.
In summary, another strong quarter financially, very much in line with the plan that we have. With that, we can open up for Q&A.
Operator
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad.
The next question comes from Fredrik Nilsson from Redeye. Please go ahead.
Fredrik Nilsson
Thank you. Good morning, Daniel and Svein Martin.
I want to start with the situation in Västra Götaland regionen. They have more or less decided to go for a modular solution.
Have you seen any impact on your ability to approach primary caregivers in the region so far?
Daniel Öhman
Good morning, Fredrik. Yes, we're targeting primary caregivers in Västra Götalandsregionen all the time at the moment.
They are never fast, but I think we have good and productive discussions with potential customers, and we have gained a few. I think that if you talk about the situation more in large, we also hoping that potentially the public primary care could come into question as they are planning to go for modular approach.
That will take time. The last two attempts to implement softwares, Millennium, they never succeeded with, but also the one before, it took 8 years.
We assume that the situation will be more or less like this for 7 to 8 years from now. I think the caregivers think the same.
Now they're open for discussion, and we have good, productive discussions, I think.
Fredrik Nilsson
Okay. Great.
Also, I want to continue a bit on your discussion about AI. You mentioned that you have changed Llama to OpenAI.
When did you do that? Is there any impact on gross margins, pricing, and what's the feedback so far?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. It took quite some time to change actually model cuz we need to have guaranteed to have the clouds in Europe, and we also need to have zero retention.
We only have data in the Azure cloud for basically yeah, almost no time at all, and then it's completely gone. OpenAI, I think they have some growth pains maybe.
It took a really long time to get an agreement in place. It would have been much faster with Google or Claude, but when we did the blind tests, we saw that OpenAI was usually the one doing the best ones.
We got live last week. We have a number of pilots running in MedSam, and they're many of them also running competing products.
The early feedback is that we are on par now cuz we've done a lot of other changes, too, to that product. We feel we're in a good position, and we will want to see 1 week more of feedback.
Then I think that we will just push sales on MedSam now. We have been pausing sales in MedSam for a while until we felt we had the same quality.
We don't want to take customers online and then they move back cuz then it's really hard to move them back to our product. We have taken it a bit easy, but now we'll start pushing sales again on MedSam.
Fredrik Nilsson
Great. That's helpful.
You talk about strengthening your sales organizations in Sweden and Germany. What magnitude of increases are we talking about approximately?
Daniel Öhman
As I think most of we don't have a very big sales organization, but basically for our main product Webdoc, we have gone from five, or we had also people on sick leave and so last year. Last year, we had roughly four people in place, and now we are at seven.
What we've done is that we introduced customer success managers that are responsible for most of upsell. Then the sales team, their role is to work on leads and also reach out to new potential customers.
We also added some people which we believe will really help us sell. It seems to be working well.
I must say, it's been working better than I thought so far. To really convince someone to change systems, that's quite hard.
Most of our customers, they feel that they have a poor solution today, the potential customers, and therefore they are open to discussions. I think the sales teams are doing a great job, and I think this change have really worked.
Step-by-step, we're getting better and better. The way we've gone from roughly four people to seven people in the Swedish organization.
Fredrik Nilsson
Okay. I see.
Last question from me. Regarding the surgery module, are you seeing any meaningful contributions to ARR near term, or what's the status of that product?
Daniel Öhman
Nothing is ever completely done, right? We will wind down the development of that product in a couple of months.
Then we feel that it's really finished. We've felt it's been good enough to sell for half a year or a little bit more maybe even, but there's still been functionality that's been important for our customers that they've been wanting.
A couple of customers, they've been wanting certain things, and we have had them live, but then we start paying then. The main importance for the surgery module is to win new customers and large new customers.
On average, the customers that need that module have maybe 150 employees somewhere around there. We are a number of those type of discussions.
That would really help our new sales cuz most new sales today are startups. That's why even if they add a lot of customers today in Svein Martin's picture earlier in the presentation, it's still quite a small part of it.
That's because they are new opens, and then we grow with them. That's great.
If we can add some big customers into that mix, it really helps our growth, such as Volvat, for example. We hope and aim to win a number of large clinics this year with the help of surgery module.
I think that it will help us over time to win more and more of that type of customers.
Fredrik Nilsson
Great. Thank you very much.
That's all for me.
Daniel Öhman
Thank you, Fredrik.
Operator
The next question comes from Albin Roller from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Albin Sandberg
Good morning, Daniel and Svein Martin. I hope you are well.
I have a couple of questions here from my end as well. Perhaps beginning a bit more high level, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts about how one should view kind of AI-related risks within your vertical given the debate we've seen across the Atlantic now in recent weeks that has also affected kind of software assets here in the Nordics as well.
It would be interesting to hear about your thoughts about kind of entrenchment and barriers to entry risks and so on.
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. It's It's a bit difficult.
It's It's a bit like when I was CEO of GHP and and we had a government that wanted to outlaw private healthcare or or insurance payments, and and it's so many different scenarios that everyone get in their head before it's really concrete. That's why it's difficult to to meet everyone's view on this in in one answer.
In general, I would say that, as I mentioned in the presentation also, that our position is extremely strong. What we are competing with and our challenge every day is to get people to change from systems that are 30 to 20 years old, and they look like they are 20 30 to 20 years old.
We're trying to get them to start using functionality such as self-check-in for payments for patients so that they can save time. We're trying to get them to start having automatic what's the word?
Calling for patients. We can automatically send appointments to patients, and then the patient can can change the point of themselves.
We can save a lot of administration time for the for our customers. They are they are really afraid of change, and there are a lot of legal requirements on how we're allowed to do it.
There are so many Each time we develop a function such as that, for example, we have to make sure take the self-check-in that, yeah, if it's an insurance patient, then we have to inform the insurance company, and then the the patient should pay a little bit themselves. If it's a patient from maybe Västra Götaland, they should should pay another amount themselves.
Then we have to check with Västra Götaland or with another region depending on which region the patient is from, if how much if they are entitled to not having to pay anything at all and so on and so on. It's there are so many interactions in the software and so many different workflows.
We also have very small part of the customer cost, but we're an extremely important part of them running their clinic. We're talking about organizations that are afraid of IT.
They don't really have Most of our customers are in the size of maybe 30, 40 employees. They hardly have an IT person, and with us, they don't have to have one.
We I have really hard time seeing that they should do something themselves or would do something themselves. I think that as long as we press on with development, we can get become more and more efficient, deliver more and more functionality to our users.
I think the software companies that are really at risks are the ones that have been milking positions. If I think that many around us And and I think that, a lot of investors have been telling us for quite some time that you have a really big cost for R&D compared to competitors and other software companies.
The reason is that we want to develop. With within our industry and similar industries, it's been possible to not develop your products and have really really good cash flow.
As we've said before many times during the last couple of years, we don't believe in that in that strategy. We're believing in improving our products so we gain more customers because the milking position, and especially with AI, becomes weaker much more rapidly now.
Those And those are the type of companies that we compete with to a large extent. That means that we will now gain on that.
The advantage we have will become faster, much faster. Also, for them to start kind of develop their products and start using these tools is quite difficult.
If you don't have a tradition of doing new development, you are mostly just adding more interactions. You're adding new legal requirements, but you're not really moving your product forward.
Because you've been able to feel safe in this industry by just the number of different workflows and and all the different integrations you have done. You and you've been keep adding integrations, so over time you have so many integrations.
It's That's why it's difficult for us also to replace others because we've been adding in integrations also for a long time. Now I think it's important to also improve your product.
That's what we've been doing, and that's what we continue to do. We can do it at a higher pace.
I think, and as I mentioned also, I think that I have a hard time seeing any software company or knowledge company that have a stronger position than us. I think also it's important to to stay curious, to think all the time, how can we strengthen the position, how do we use this functionality to the best extent, how do we get it into the product.
Already today, healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, and so on, they go from using their iPhone or using modern software solutions in the private setting, and they come to their workplace, and they they see something from the '90s, and it looks like it's from the '90s. I think it's important that with AI agents likely on the rise that also our systems feel similar to what if they what they use in in their private life.
To incorporate that type of functionality in our products, I think is also important. It's us who have the data.
We're not allowed to give the data to anyone else. They cannot use an agent on it.
It's yeah. I think I think we have a strong position, and then there are many different scenarios to discuss.
Did that answer answer your question, Elvin?
Albin Sandberg
Yes, it was a very extensive answer as well. Thank you, Daniel.
Continuing a bit on AI, I guess. MedSam, which you've kind of gone with a soft launch with now, has that helped anything on the revenue side, or has it still been kind of pretty few pilots still before a full-on commercial launch here hopefully in the coming weeks?
Furthermore, on the cost side, You mentioned a couple of quarters ago the increase in costs from AI development. Has that been kind of the similar cost pattern now, and do you expect it kind of the same going forward, or will that an increase, or will we perhaps see a net decrease given that you can become more effective and so on?
Daniel Öhman
If we talk in development in general, I don't think it's the time to invest less in development. We might have it in different patterns and in different ways than traditionally.
I think that these productivity gains, just as we had when we had factories coming for the building of cars and things like this, we had better cars, more cars, more functionality in the cars. I think it's the same for software.
We have to move faster. It will change a bit how we work, and it's changing our work.
I don't think we should decrease costs. We could do the same pipeline that we had planned or roadmap and have less cost, but I think that we should put in more in our roadmap.
When it comes to MedSam and costs, we will add a bit more what's the word? Staff to it, we can say.
It's within our targets. It will not change anything drastically.
We will add a bit more and focus a bit more on it than we have. We already have quite a team working on it.
It's very easy with the AI to get it 90% of the way, but we need to be 100% of the way. Then it gets always the last 10% are tricky and difficult.
That's why we will continue to invest in the AI in our products, for our users. I think, if anything, we'll increase it, but then we will also think about costs in other places in our structure and move more focus on this part.
As always, we have so much we can do for our customers to help them help more patients. We always prioritize what we think can help them the most and where we can gain the most value, either through that we can win more new customers more rapidly or we can increase upsell.
AI agents in the products is definitely an area which can help our customers save a lot of time. The main burden for our customers is administrative.
They have a lot of administrative tasks, and this is where AI is good. It also has to be near perfect because they are liable to what's written, for example, in the medical records.
It has to be fully correct. The customer is looking at it, and it can be that the patient is dependent on a certain medication, it has to be correct.
It can be that they are allergic to a certain medication, that has to be fully correct. It can never be wrong, and the doctor is themself liable if it's wrong.
That's why they are slow at adopting this type of things, and that's why we have to really make sure it works really well and at the same time it fulfills all the legal requirements and so on. We will invest more in that, but I think it will be on the expense of maybe having other things in development.
It also will come from us being able to put more in the roadmap in total with the same cost.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
It's also worth mentioning in the short term for MedSam, when we change from our own hosting to OpenAI, it also means that we had to sign up for some minimum volumes. The cost for hosting will increase.
When we have fewer users, it will increase by around 1.5 million compared to where we are on annual basis. Then when we have many users, the gross margin will be better because we get a lot of tokens for that minimum volumes.
Albin Sandberg
Okay. Great.
Thank you. That's very clear.
When we kind of summarize, I guess, the increase of sales and marketing in Germany here in 2026, and also these kind of, how do I say, more projects with putting into the product, how should we think of kind of overall on the OPEX side here in 2026? Will we see a kind of similar organic OPEX increase as we saw in 2025, or is there a reason to believe that you're kind of accelerating this now?
How should we think about that?
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
The cost where we will add a bit of cost in '26 is in the German sales and marketing team. There we plan to add a few roles.
In the Nordics, we plan to maintain a similar staff level. We added a few people on sales in Webdoc, and that's pretty much it.
Daniel Öhman
You will not see any drastic changes, and we always adapting the organization. Even if you didn't see too many changes during last year, for example, in the total cost, we did a lot of changes in the organization structure with people that had to leave and new people coming on board.
We always try to have the optimum, to speak, organization. We continue to make changes.
The overall guidelines is where we aim to continue. A large part of our growth should fall down to the bottom line, and we continue that way.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Yeah. I think a fair way to look at it is basically a similar cost base.
Then we of course have like wage increases and inflation and a handful of roles mainly in the German business.
Albin Sandberg
Okay. That's also very clear.
Thank you so much. I think that was all from my end right now.
Thank you so much for taking my questions, and I'll get back in the end of the queue here.
Daniel Öhman
Thanks, Albin.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Thank you.
Operator
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. There are no more phone questions at this time, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
We have gotten quite a lot of questions in the chat as well. We might have addressed some of them, but we can start going through it.
First one from Rikard. I can take this one.
Was full recurring revenue from Volvat live during Q4 all of Q4? No, not during all of Q4, but in the ARR it's basically implemented.
It took effect from the mid of November in Q4. That was when the big system was migrated.
Next one from Risto. How do you envision the profitability of those AI functionality tools from a gross margin perspective?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. The gross margin is a bit lower on those type of tools as we have the cost for yeah, either OpenAI or Google or Claude.
It will not be dramatic as we in our targets still don't believe that we will have dramatic revenues from those type of functionality in the near term. That could be that it's will grow faster than we thought, but our industry is slow at adopting new technology.
Ambient listening, when we automatically propose medical notes, is something that really can save time for each visit. It's been very widely discussed now for 2 years in this sector.
There has been good solutions for it in at least 1.5, 2 years. Still, the adoption is really low.
What we see in the US, when it comes to ambient listening, US has much less regulation and a much more commercial healthcare, a bigger pressure to become efficient, and the US healthcare works very differently from the European ones. There you have much more ambient listening.
For just standalone ambient listening products, there have been a price war. If you're just like a ChatGPT wrapper, then, of course, it's difficult to maintain high margins.
I think, for us, it's part of the system as a whole, and we have a lot of information that we can use. We're not really in the same type of competition, I would say, not over time at least.
It depends. If we get a much higher and quicker uptake than we think, then we'll grow faster than we think, but then our cost will also Our margins on that addition growth will be a little bit lower than we're used to.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Next one. Given your current stock price, does this increase your appetite to increase the capacity of the share purchase program?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. No, we're trying to maintain a steady pace.
I think it's basically up to the board. It's not for me and Svein Martin to answer.
I would say that, as CEO, you should never really have a view of what's the right share price for your own company. It's up to everyone else to judge how we're doing.
The board will decide on that pace. We have no new information to give on that.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Yeah. As we generate more and more healthy cash flow, we have found that this combined with M&As is a good way to distribute capital basically.
It's a long-term effort and in addition to the one we have this year. Next one from Niklas.
Your strong balance sheet and accelerating profitability means that you have a lot of room for acquisitions. Have you seen any changes in the M&A market during the current turbulence?
Daniel Öhman
We are looking at a couple of acquisitions, as I think most of you know. It's mostly acquisitions that strengthen our position in the Nordics that we're looking at, where we have really, yeah, clear synergies in getting a stronger position for our present products, mainly Webdoc.
We work on that. When you have a very narrow target focus and the ones you're talking to are probably not for sale, you're approaching companies that you think are interesting and would strengthen position, we have maybe five companies on our list, then it always takes a lot of time because they are not structured processes.
The owners might not be willing to sell. They have not planned to sell at least, you have to convince them.
That's when you do the really good acquisitions because you can target the ones that you really believe in and that you really believe can add value to what you do. When it comes to valuations, I think that the private market is always much slower than the public market to changes.
Typically, I think that even when the public market has gone up or down, the private market is quick on the up, but really slow on the down because if you're on the private market and you don't have to sell, you just wait in a period like this.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Great. Next one from Richard.
Are you following the original time plan in Germany as far as pilots, commercial launch, and sales expectations?
Daniel Öhman
Not fully, I would say. I would have liked to been a bit further with the product at this point in time.
I think this is quite often the case that when you start developing, and even when you have a really clear understanding of what to develop, once you get into the details, how is this supposed to be reported to a certain authority in Germany, for example, a certain type of information, and when you dig really into the details, it typically gets a little bit more complicated than you thought from the beginning. That's the same for each one of all those type of things.
I would have like to been a little bit further, but I still think that we are in a good place. We have a really high pace in development, and the product looks great, but we are a little bit behind during the time plan.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Next one from Niklas. While your platform is mission-critical and difficult to replace, there is a lot of third-party integrations to your platform that are sometimes easier to replace.
Are you looking to increasingly develop your own solutions to replace third-party products now when it's easier to code with the AI?
Daniel Öhman
Not from that sense, but I think that with the help of AI, our products can target a little bit wider group of potential customers. What's difficult with software if you want to have it without an end date?
That's what we've been talking about all the time internally. We don't want to have an end date of our products.
That's why we develop a lot. We put a lot of effort into our products.
That means that you always need to make sure that all parts of your products are more or less up-to-date. The first code you wrote has to be up-to-date also 10 years later.
You need to replace the code all the time, the maintenance gets quite high. At the same time, you want to build functionality for new customers.
That means that you, over time, have a lot to develop each year. That's why for our products we have said that this is the types of customers that this product is aimed for.
With the help of AI, we can be quick in development. We can get better at maintenance.
Possibly, we could have a bit wider scope for our products when it comes to different types of customers and different types of customer scenarios. That's how I mostly think about it.
It could be a little bit that the integrations, but many of the integrations we do are to like insurance companies, public entities, quality registries, and so on. The other types we do are typically very specific functionality.
There, possibly, we could move a bit in that direction, too.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Okay. Next one from Mark.
Could you please elaborate on agentic AI workflows with regards to your product pipeline and R&D? I'd also be interested in your pricing model and your thoughts around the idea that seat-based pricing might negatively be impacted going forward, if relevant.
Thanks for the good results delivery.
Daniel Öhman
Starting with this last part, in general, we charge our customers for the value we create. We're trying to have the same models that our customer get paid for.
In primary care, they get paid for each listed patient they have, we charge them for the number of listed patients they have. In specialist care, they typically get paid for each patient they see, each visit, we charge them per visit.
That's how we have been doing it, and that's how we plan to continue to do it. There are other scenarios, too, but that's how we usually work.
When talking about agentic AI workflows, yeah, we are planning to add more and more functionality, as I spoke about earlier, in it. I think it's important that when you meet our softwares at your workplace, at the clinic or at the hospital, it should be similar to the type of softwares that you use in private.
Today it's not for our competitors. Typically, if you're a healthcare worker, you come into work and you meet a software that looks like it's from 30 years old, and in the private you're using an iPhone.
As AI agents get more and more popular, we have to have similar experience in our systems. I think we can move close to that.
There are a lot of legal requirements. It can never be wrong, as I mentioned before.
It always have to be correct, which is a bit of the challenge. We also have to make sure that we never expose any personal information in the wrong way.
There are a lot of challenges in it, but we're working on it. I think that we can add really good functionality step-by-step, helping our customers save a lot of time.
It is an increasing focus for us, and it's been for quite some time.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Next one from Rasmus. Could you clarify on the OpenAI LLM?
Is it run on their servers instead of yours as Llama is?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. You cannot run Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini 3 on your own servers.
There are LLM models that you can run on your own servers, such as Llama or there are some Chinese ones and so on. What we've noticed is that they are not good enough.
Now their LLM work is done in the Azure cloud in Germany. The data is there very momentarily.
That means that instead of having a high fixed cost, which we had for our own servers, because the servers are really expensive when you have a lot of Nvidia chips, we are using the cloud for just that functionality. As Svein Martin mentioned also is that to have zero retention and have promise of to have it in Europe, we have to have a minimum use of tokens.
The fixed cost is actually a bit higher at the moment. Over time, it will not be a fixed cost.
It's a bit different. Then it can be that for certain functionality, we can use our own servers and we can use smaller models and so on.
I think it is good that we are working with both and try to find the right way of handling each type of data at each point in time.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Great. Next question from Yannick.
Could you comment on the next steps you'll take in Germany? Is the product ready to be pushed already?
How will you approach sales, and will you need to invest further for that?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. We'll add some sales people and marketing people in Germany.
We'll also modernize a bit how we work in Germany. We are selling the product.
We have contracts for new customers, but we have no paying customer using it yet. That's what the state is.
I think we should have paying customers in roughly half, 3/4 year, somewhere around there. It will not be a substantial impact on the revenues of Carasent this year.
It will not be meaningful from that perspective, but it will be very important to start getting new customers. Sales of a new system, in my mind, is exponentially.
You start with a few customers, you get a good reputation, you fix the first kind of things that they think are not really like it should be, and then you start adding more and more customers. It's really important to get new customers into product, and also to get paying customers.
Because pilots is one thing. They are not paying, they are typically not as critical to you as a paying customer.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Next one. Daniel, could you give a bit of more comfort that your pipeline is on top of the latest Claude product offering from a few weeks ago?
Your thought on this would be much appreciated.
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. It's a bit difficult to answer it completely.
We see, as I mentioned before, very low risk that any of our customers would do anything with that product. It's not really how the systems are used.
It's really complex flows with many different use case, different integrations, and so on. We have a hard time explaining to them what the cloud solution is and the advantages of it.
They're very far from it. Also, how you store data, in what way, and you have to make sure that each state is only accessible to the right person, and we have to store exactly which person to access which data at which point in time.
The legal requirements on our customers that they should take random looks at which one looks at which data. There are so many different requirements.
Even if coding was completely free, there's still so many requirements and complex things and legal requirements on it that it's very hard, extremely hard for someone to build a competing product. I think, as I said before, I think it's important for us to maintain a high velocity of improvements and always moving forward using technology as soon as we can without breaking laws and without risking that the system goes down at any point in time.
As I said, I think there are very few with a better position than us. Then I think each one has to think what does the future look like.
I think there are very few with a strong position than us.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Next one from Rasmus. Could you talk about where you will switch the focus of development when the surgery module is done?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. There are some integrations that we want to do, and when I say integration, it's not just transferring data somewhere.
We have to also create some new views and so on that I can talk about later on when it's done. That's what we want to prioritize because it would really help some of our customers.
We can talk about that probably in the Q2 report, we will talk about it, when it's done and it's out. We don't want to talk about it before it's done.
It's something that we really look forward to. We will also be pushing resources to AI and so on.
The surgery team is just one of our development teams, and it's quite a small team. It's four people, it's not a really huge one.
In our roadmap, we have stuff to develop with a higher pace for many years to go, where we can really help our customers become more efficient.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Next one. You mentioned that the cost for the customer is 1% to 2% of the revenue of our customers for Webdoc.
Could you speculate where you see this number moving in 4, 5, 6 years if you get these agents that you foresee?
Daniel Öhman
I think that we have an aim to increase that internal aims, I should say, over time to increase it to 2% by helping our customers more and more, creating more time for them, having them help more patients. Then a small part of the savings they make should fall down to us.
We can really have a substantial impact for our customers in helping them help more patients. AI agents is a part of it.
Far, very little used. There is really good potential for it, especially when it comes to medical notes, certificate doctors write for someone who's ill and cannot work.
Now don't remember the English name at the moment. On.
Decision support, I don't think is very important for us, as I mentioned at previous calls, because most of our users have very simple medical decisions to make in the private healthcare, and it's also the part that they like and it doesn't really eat any time for them. We will focus on administrative parts, and that's where we really can help them.
It can save them a lot of time, and the things they really don't like to do. It's very valuable for them to get rid of that and to instead have more patience.
I think that's the most part. Then I think it's also important that we deliver an experience that's similar or are AI agentic, to speak.
That's something we're working on. We have good proof of concepts on it, and we'll see exactly in what pace we develop and release what.
We'll focus, as always, on what saves the most time and creates the most value for our customers.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Great. Final question.
Could you comment on the high consulting revenue surge in Germany? Where are they coming from?
This is related to a upgrade on the connections for the public system, and it is delivered by a partner, and then we charge our revenues, and then we have a cost to the partner basically. It's something that has occurred historically in Diga data basically every other year approximately.
It's not really a strategic revenue for us. It has a low gross margin of around 25%.
It's something that we had planned for in our targets, it was important to reach those. It's not something that will reoccur every year or every quarter basically.
That was the final question.
Daniel Öhman
Okay. Thank you all for your questions this morning and for your attention.
Just reach out if you have any more questions. We're available on email or phone.
Have a good rest of the day, and thank you for today.
Svein Martin Bjørnstad
Thank you.
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