Operator
Welcome to Carasent Q1 report for 2026. 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 first quarter of 2026. We will start with me giving a company update, and then I will hand over to Svein-Martin for more of a financial update.
First, a quick overview of who we are. Our business is to help our customers, who are private hospitals and clinics, to help as many patients as possible.
We do this through our EHR systems and related products. We're growing rapidly, this quarter with 16% ARR growth, and with highly recurring revenues, in this quarter is actually above 95%, and we have a net revenue retention of 111%.
Looking a little bit more of the highlights of the first quarter. As I mentioned, we had good ARR growth of 16%, and we continue to scale our business in a good way.
In this quarter, we had almost 80% of the growth translating into profitability. This is the way we've been working the last couple of years, and this is how we aim to continue working.
In the quarter, we have quite low consulting revenues, and consulting's revenues they vary between quarters, very much depending on exactly what happens, which type of projects we have in each quarter. What I think is also, and we ought to have mentioned many times before, consulting revenues are not our focus, that's not what we want to build our business on, and we working to move consulting revenues into ARR instead.
It also makes it easier to convince customers changing EHR system by not having a lot of up-front costs. This is something we're working towards.
Sometimes the projects are of types where you can have consulting revenues, and sometimes the customer is of such type that they expect costs there and can accept costs there, and it's difficult to move them into ARR. We have a major milestone.
As we speak, we're moving our first paying customers into our German system, WebCare, which was formerly named WebDoc. WebCare was the name that was preferred in the German market.
This is a major milestone. We're very much looking forward to it and to start scaling the sales of our new system in Germany.
Also, we have some promising traction for Medsoma. We have signed up more than 100 new users this month, or last month, and I will come back to this.
As I mentioned, signed not implemented ARR is now at 4 million. What I think is worth mentioning around that is that all those 4 million are new, all those are sales from this quarter.
The 5 million we had last quarter has already been implemented. In total, with the 16% organic ARR growth and the lower consulting revenues, we have 7% reported organic growth in the quarter and an EBITAC margin of 10%, up from 6% a year ago.
Talking about what I think most people are talking about at the moment, AI. This quarter, I plan to talk a little bit about how we act, what we do with AI.
There are three areas which I would like to mention. The first one is that we accelerate development.
We believe strongly that as it gets faster and faster to develop software, customer demands will increase. Our plan for that is to use all efficiency gains into producing more functionality for our customers and a better user experience for our customers, instead of saving money.
The aim is to really increase the pace, get more and more functionality out to our customers. What that means is that we're widening the gap between our product and the legacy systems who do not really develop.
If you haven't really developed, AI will not help you very much starting to develop. You don't have the culture, you don't have the structures, you don't have the staff.
I think that will really help us. I think it also will be an expectation for customers, and it will also mean that we keeping the gap to potential new threats and competitors the same, keep a big gap between us and them by continue to always develop and increasing the speed as we go.
We see quite big gains from AI in development and in many other functions also, too. At the same time, it's very important that we continue to live up to all regulations, that we make sure that the product is always stable, and that it's secure.
It's a bit of a balance act, but I think we're taking big steps forward and getting better every week and increasing the pace. We also do a lot with AI in the product, and there's a lot of potential to do a lot with AI in the product.
That comes from healthcare has a lot of administrative demands, and it takes a lot of time from our users. AI is really good at administrative parts.
Medsoma, which is our ambient scribe, that means that we listen in on the discussion between the doctor and the patient and automatically proposes a journal note already pre-filled into the system where the doctor can then make some small changes if he or she feels the need to do that. What's been very important there is to match the quality of the leading ambient scribes that started a bit before us.
We now feel that we are at that point, and I know that many of our customers feel so. Most of the customers we gained, we gained from other ambient scribes, cuz they already know the structures, they know they like to work with those type of tools, and they just feel it's much better that it's completely included within the EHR system instead of a separate system.
The potential gains from this are really big. The studies out there say that you save between 15% and 33% of the documentation time, which is a lot of time for our users.
I will get back to next steps what we'll do on the next slide, what we plan to really do. What I think is what we're focusing on now is to really rebuild the UI of mostly WebDoc, our large system, to make sure that the AI experience fits the UI experience, and it creates in total a really good experience for the user, and really efficient experience.
We are this year rebuilding quite big parts of the front-end of WebDoc to make sure that AI is a natural part of it. What we want to do with the AI tools are this, and parts of it we already do.
When you have the discussion with your doctor, we listen in on the entire discussion. From that discussion today, we just propose clinical notes.
The next step is to really catch everything that you agree with the patient to do. Prescriptions, referrals, follow-up bookings, sick leaves, and so on.
All of these are tasks that the doctor, physiotherapist, or so, needs to do either whilst talking with the patient and quite often do after talking with the patient, and it's a lot of their time, and there are stuff that they don't really like. We catch it all so you don't have to remember it, you can just see it popping up in the system as you speak the tasks that you have to do.
Then, while you're done, you just go through the tasks that the AI has proposed for you. It's as much as possible, there are some legal hurdles on some of these tasks, but most of them we can have completely pre-filled proposals both from the talk, but also from previous medical notes and other information we have in the EHR system to really make sure that we give such as good proposals as possible.
This we aim to have in place by the end of the year. While the reason why it takes to the end of the year is that we really doing the entire UI, we are interviewing, we're sitting with a lot of users testing different ways of building this, testing how they really want it to work.
Cuz as I mentioned before, the most important is that we build technology that really fits how our users want to work and fits their everyday. We are in no stress.
We have the strong position we have. This will not, in Sweden and the Nordics and Germany, this will not grow exponentially, this will be a steady step that users want to start using this type of tools.
We're doing it really properly, we're doing it fully built-in as a natural part of the system rather than just hurrying it out. We want to be a fast follower in general.
It will be a very interesting autumn, I think, releasing all this functionality. Looking a bit more at the journey ahead, we aim to continue as we do.
With strong organic growth, especially focus on ARR, we aim to continue to have a good grasp of the costs, not to reduce costs, we believe that we need to release ever more functionality to our users, there is so much we can do for them. We have a tight cost control, and we aim not to increase our costs, and that the absolute majority of all growth should translate into profit.
Then this year, we also launching WebCare, formerly WebDoc X, in Germany, which is a major milestone for us. With those words, I will hand over to Svein-Martin.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Thank you, Daniel. Starting off by looking at the financial highlights of the quarter.
The headline growth figure, as Daniel mentioned, looks a bit lower than we're used to, and I will get back to that in more detail on the next slide. The underlying metrics that we follow, that we believe drive value in the long term, the ARR growth, the scalability, and the cash flow generation, continue to develop in the right direction and improved a lot compared to last year.
We ended the quarter with 360 million ARR, contracted ARR. It grew 16% year-over-year, and we had a strong net retention of 111%.
Profitability also improved a lot, and EBITDA margin was 20%, and EBITAC margin was 10%. Starting with the P&L, you see that the revenues came in at 90.4 million, compared to 85.2 million last year.
This, as you see illustrated here, is a growth of 6%, 7% adjusted for currency. You see that there was a drop in the consulting revenues from 8 to 4 million, a 50% decline, and that is the reason why the growth is lower than the ARR growth.
This is a few different reasons, but the consulting revenues typically vary more from quarter to quarter and is more lumpy in nature. We also had in Metodika, we had to focus a lot on post-implementation work for Volvat that didn't generate revenues.
In general, we prioritize away consulting in new sales processes compared to recurring revenues. Looking at the cost base, which I think is one of the key highlights of this quarter, the cost base is essentially flat year-over-year.
You see personnel expense increased a million, other OPEX decreased around a million, and capitalized development increased half a million. Around a half a million increase in total.
This is even though we add quite a lot of cost for AI-related features, such as Medsoma, where we have a big hosting cost before we get a lot of revenues, and also in our own development, we add tools, we have been able to absorb these costs and become more efficient in other areas, basically. This results in EBITAC of 8.6 compared to 4.8 million last year.
You see that the revenues grew approximately 5 million, and EBITAC grew close to 4 million. We were able to convert close to 80% of the revenues into profits, even though we have very low consulting, which typically has a 100% drop-through rate.
This is a very important metric for us. Also worth noting that there is no adjustments in the figure, and there was no adjustments last year either.
Looking at the ARR bridge, it clearly shows what the growth is coming from. You see on the left side, we had 320 million contracted ARR last year.
Then the net upsell this year was very strong, 45 million or 15%. This is also stronger than historical figures, and this is because some of the large new units we have added is included here, such as Medtanken and Volvat, adding 10 million alone.
This is included in net upsell because we had some units from these customers before we signed the big contracts, it's an existing customer. Upsell, in general, also was very strong in the quarter.
You see churn here, 10 million, 3%. A third of this is coming from the German legacy product.
In the Nordics, we can see now that the churn has normalized again, as we had communicated in H2 that we saw that churn was down to lower levels. If you remember, March last year, a lot of the churn in WebDoc took effect in March.
Now this is not included in the figures anymore. On the new customer side, we had 15 million in ARR added, 5% growth, and it improved quite a lot compared to last year as well, when it was 11 million.
In total, ARR grew 16%, and worth noting is that the Nordics is now growing at very strong levels. Excluding Germany, ARR growth was 19% in the quarter, which is higher than we have seen actually for the last few years.
This is a very good sign that the momentum in the business is continuing. This slide we have shown many times now, and it's a good illustration of how we think about developing the business.
To explain it to those who haven't seen it, the orange line there is the revenues, and then the bars is the cost base that we have. The dark blue part of the bar is the OPEX, CAPEX, and personnel expense for the organic business, if we exclude the acquisition we made.
You see that it's been extremely flat over the last 10 quarters, and this means that we have also been able to take out costs given that we have wages increase and inflation, etc. This is, of course, very powerful.
If you look at how the margin has developed because of this, we had the EBITAC of -30% three years ago, is now +10%, and we still have capacity to continue to scale, and that's the plan going forward to add very little cost. We will add some roles this year in Germany to roll out WebCare commercially, but in the Nordics, we will continue to be very disciplined.
Finally, on the cash flow, you see that in the quarter we had a very strong free cash flow, 47% operating cash flow and 36% margin on the free cash flow. This is, of course, because of a very strong working capital effects during the quarter, and it's driven by three main effect.
Firstly, as I talked about in Q4, we had a big customer that had a delayed payment in Q4. This came in in January, and it was 10 million added.
This would normally have been in Q4. Then we had very high consulting revenues in Q4.
This was paid in Q1 as well. This, of course, boosted the working capital compared to normalized levels.
Then in Q1 is typically also quite strong because we have annual invoicing of certain customers. It's worth noting also that our working capital profile is very supportive to our cash flow in the long term because we charge up-front, and we generally pay our invoices after the period, and salaries.
All in all, final point here, share buyback, we did of 40 million in the quarter, and it took around 40 million in cash. All in all, a quarter that in the underlying metrics, the ARR growth, the conversion of revenues into profits, was a step in the right direction, and we continued to deliver on the plan on this important metrics.
With that, I 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 Elvin Rolder from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Elvin Rolder
Yes, thank you. Good morning, Daniel and Svein-Martin.
I hope you can hear me and I hope you are all well. I have a couple of questions from my end covering a bit of a ranging topics.
Maybe we can begin on the consulting part, given that it was kind of a contributor to the lower revenue here in Q1. You mentioned in the report that especially the Volvat effects are expected to subside here in Q2 already.
Can you kind of help us in what kind of base shall we use going into Q2 here now? Or do you think Q2 2025 is still very unrepresentative?
You mentioned the comp here in Q1 was difficult. Can you help us kind of bridge that a bit to understand that?
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Yes, sure. I would say that the Q1 is a bit on the weaker side on consulting than a normal level, because we didn't have Metodika doing a lot of consulting work.
In general, it's not the key priority for us, as we mentioned. It's not that simple to be very specific on guiding for the next quarter and the year.
I would say in Q1 it's a bit lower than what we have as a run-rate level when Metodika is fully free to do consulting work. I don't know if you have anything
Daniel Öhman
to add. No, what happens is that Metodika with the big implementation of Volvat, we had some work to continue to do in the first quarter, which we did not charge them for at all.
We feel that it's very important to have a happy customer, and we can also see it, we get a lot of questions from potential customers in the Norwegian market from successful Volvat projects. I think that's worth the investment.
They will move on now to more of a normal business in the second quarter. We should really see consulting revenue picking up.
Can also mention that, even if our focus is ARR, we want to of course have as good results as possible. We're also looking over a bit how we work.
It used to be that when we sold to a new customer, we had not high fees, but we charged them for education, setting it up for them, and so on. Now we very often to a very large degree, give it away to customer as part of the negotiation and not to negotiate a lower ARR or the subscription base.
We don't want to lower that. Maybe we're giving it away a bit too easily.
That's something we're discussing internally. I don't have an answer for that yet.
That's something that we're looking at, because ARR is our priority, but, of course, if it's possible to also, without hurting the subscription revenue, to have some other revenues, that's fine, and that's something we want, of course. We're looking over that a bit if we're giving it away a bit too easily.
In general, the coming quarter will be better than this quarter, but not as good as the best quarters last year when it comes to consulting revenues.
Elvin Rolder
Thank you. Very clear.
Continuing maybe on Germany, you attributed 1/3 of the overall churn in the group to kind of the legacy products in Germany, and we saw a decline in revenue overall for the German operations here in Q1. Should we expect revenues from Germany to kind of decrease for the full-year 2026, or do you think that you will be able to compensate the loss from Data AL in what you gain on WebCare, or is that perhaps too early?
Daniel Öhman
I think that's a bit too early. This year it will probably continue more or less in that trend, I would say.
The the major thing to look at this year is to really get WebCare up and running, happy customers, the first ones who can be references for future customers, that we get sales and marketing really going, and so on. For then during next year and the year the year after that to really see growth coming, and and that we're growing much faster than we're losing customers.
It it it will take a bit of time.
Elvin Rolder
Yeah. Thank you.
Very clear. Then, moving on to Medsoma here.
I believe a couple of quarters ago, you mentioned that you have an ASP of I think it was 750 crowns per user per month. Please correct me if that's wrong.
Is that still a kind of a valid level to assume, and has that had an effect on sales yet? You mentioned 100 100 users live since, or signed since last month already.
A bit tied to those users, is there anything exceptional about kind of these users that we should be aware of? Have this been involved in kind of the pilot programs, and have been involved since the start in this?
I guess the essence of the question is, should we expect the next 100 customers to come as fast, basically?
Daniel Öhman
That's a good question. A bit hard to answer actually, but I'll try to give as much information as I can.
No, those were not pilot customers. We had roughly around 50 customers through their pilot phases the last maybe six months, a little bit on and off, but roughly 50 customers.
They are still there,
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
users,
Daniel Öhman
and they're converting to paying customers. Then since we then relaunched, we have gained another 100.
Every Monday we go through sales, and if we look at upsales to customers, Medsoma is now quite a large part of all discussions and all the meetings with customers, and also inside. I think that's going really well.
I think it's a bit hard to predict. These are the ones who win usually now move from other such solutions.
Those are early adopters, they have used this type of solutions before, they like it. The rest who has not started using this type of tools, how quickly will they start using it is kind of the question.
In general, this business is slow. Healthcare workers are trained not to take risks, and they are a bit conservative.
Our group of users are a bit more offensive, they're on the private side. Still, they have the legacy of being educated, working in the public system for the entire education and far beyond.
In general, they are slow. This technology on the other hand has really potential to save a lot of time for them, and it does not force them, at least not to a large extent, to work in new ways, which is typically the barrier.
I have hopes that this type of technology will go faster than other technologies, and it will also be more enduring, that it stays. I think many of us were in the time where video meetings started, and it was the craze, and it kind of didn't really grow very much, and now it's declining.
This I think is different. I think this really saves time, I think it's easy to start using.
For many of our users, it fits really well. You should also keep in mind there are other good solutions for it.
We have in our systems phrase libraries, so many of our users have very similar patients all the time, but they have already pre-filled what text should be there, and then they maybe change from right to left eye or something like this. It's not for everyone, but I believe it to be for many of our users and the majority over time.
As we add more functionality during the year, I think we'll see more and more users that see, "Okay, now it really saves a lot of time for me, too." It's a bit hard to predict how quickly will users pick it up.
Can also mention that on the video is that one challenge we have, but we also overcome in these numbers as you can see, is that the digital care providers, they are actually declining a bit in Sweden, and most of them use our systems. It's a bit hard to predict where technology is going.
In general, I think this one will pick up quite rapidly compared to other technologies for healthcare. That was a long answer.
Sorry for that.
Elvin Rolder
It's great. Thank you, Daniel.
A couple of more from my end. Sorry about that, but perhaps can you give a bit of an update on the surgery module?
What have you seen here? When should we expect this to kind of move the needle in terms of contributing to the ARR, or how much has that impacted ARR already?
Can you give just some kind of general update here?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. We are in a lot of those sales processes, so that's the positive side.
All of these customers, they are 100-plus users in each place. We don't charge them per user, we charge them per visit, but it's still a good indication on the size.
And 100 for us is big. Our average customer, I assume, is 8 to 10 users in WebDoc.
Those are really quite big, and then you're small hospital. It's also then extremely slow.
I was sitting in such a meeting with a potential customer not long ago, and, "Yeah, yeah, we will move into WebDoc. We believe that this will happen maybe in two years' time somewhere."
It's very frustrating to sit there and have those discussions, but it does take time. They want to go through, they want to make sure they have all the staff aligned, that they plan time for it, they want to make sure they do the risk evaluation that's their legal requirement of them to do.
They want to go through every single part of the system, make sure that they have all the process all in order, and that it will support all the processes they have. They want to make sure that they then change if there's something that they need to change in the process.
We want them to change also process, so that they really are efficient, cuz quite often they work with systems that don't really support the process today, and they have had to build processes that are not optimal, but the system has forced them to do it. It really takes time.
I know it's not what you want to hear, it's not what I want to hear, but I really believe that it will support strong growth for many years. It's not coming as quickly as I thought and hoped, and but the discussions are really positive.
We have an increasing number of users in the OR modules, I would say, also all the time. To move the needle, it seems like it will not happen as I expected.
Elvin Rolder
Very clear. Thank you.
Let's see here. Maybe perhaps on ARR, continuing on that end.
You have a very strong ARR growth in the Nordics here, I think it was 19%, and you have quite a good kind of new customer inflow. Could you expand perhaps a bit on what is driving this?
You've mentioned over the past year, and a year or two now, that you've been trying to kind of been more active within your sales processes, hiring sales people, and been more kind of outbound in your activities here. Are we kind of seen the fruits of that labor now, or is there any other kind of factors driving that figures we're seeing?
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Sure. I think we are seeing the effects of a more effective sales force in the Swedish market.
On the sales side last year was actually quite a strong year. Then we had the churn levels that took down the growth a bit.
It was netted out a bit. Compared to what we sold in terms of ARR, not the reported revenue, but the sales was up quite a lot.
It's a different effect that we have talked about a lot last year, but we restructured the entire sales organization, which is showing good effects also, where the sellers can focus more on chasing new customers, and we have customer success representatives working on the existing. This has had effect.
We have also had very good traction in Norway, where we have taken a lot of market share from competitors, basically, through yeah, having invested over time more than them in the product, and also in terms of marketing and working proactively towards new customers in new segments. It's a mix of factors, but I would say that's the main reasons.
Daniel Öhman
I think we've found quite a good balance between kind of understanding the customer and being part of the healthcare system, but still having a sales approach and being a bit pushy. That's a balance act.
I think, in general, that's where we're quite good, I would say.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Like Daniel mentioned as well, on the backlog, it looks like it's quite a bit down, right, from 12 to 4 million. On the other hand, that 12 million, it was big customers that we sold that was in the backlog for years, that took time to implement.
This backlog, this quarter, basically all that we had going into the year is spent. Then we have added 4 additional million, which is actually quite a strong quarter for us in terms of sales.
Elvin Rolder
Yeah. I think that's also very clear.
I will ask one last question, and then you can some other people ask questions, perhaps. Perhaps on the CEO letter, Daniel, I think you're once again kind of enthusiastic about 2026.
You're looking forward to it with kind of an upbeat tone, I would say. How should we kind of bridge that enthusiasm in terms of kind of the ARR development, expectations for Germany, expectations perhaps in Västra Götaland, continuing what has happened there, perhaps for Medsoma?
It sounds like with all of these effects that ARR should kind of accelerate from this kind of high level. Is that completely unreasonable, or and how should we kind of bridge that thinking?
A bit of a long-tail question, I understand that, but. No, but
Daniel Öhman
I can try to put some color onto that. I would put it this way.
I'm very upbeat actually about what we're doing. I see that we every day get much better at shipping out functionality to our customers, both through AI, but also through just getting better as an organization.
I also see that the AI tools within our systems, for our customers, will add a lot of value to them. I'm very optimistic about those possibilities, and also with the rebuilding of the entire UI, UE, it really fits, and we create a seamless good experience.
I believe very strongly in that. I also believe in WebCare.
Many of the things that I believe strongly in and that we're working hard on at the moment will not translate to financial performance this year. The most of the things I'm mostly upbeat about is maybe more long term, because this complete new UI with the built-in AI, that's by the end of the year.
Our customers are slow at adopting new things. I believe it will take time.
On the other hand, I also see that, as I mentioned earlier, that the customer representative especially, they're really good at talking about Medsoma with their customers. They're signing up new customers.
We have a webinar tomorrow, I think they're 175 roughly people who's going to listen in to that webinar who has signed up for it, and it's only about Medsoma. I think how to bridge that, if you need to bridge that, is that I think this year we'll see the Nordics growing well.
Germany, as I've mentioned before, will not really grow that much this year. Then Germany, during this three-year period that we have targets, will accelerate through that.
At an end of that period, we really see WebCare being a big growth factor for the group. It's Nordics that will carry this year.
I think that some of the upbeat and the potential I see is a bit more long term than 2026. I think that's maybe if you see a difference there, if you see a gap that needs to be bridged.
Did that kind of answer it, Elvin?
Elvin Rolder
Yep. Of course, that's very clear.
Thank you so much for answering all of my questions. I will get back in the line here.
Thank you so much.
Daniel Öhman
Thanks.
Operator
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Fredrik Nilsson from Redeye.
Please go ahead.
Fredrik Nilsson
Thank you very much. Good morning, Daniel and Svein-Martin.
I want to start with OPEX. While OPEX, as you mentioned, is rather stable year-over-year, it increased by over 5 million relative to last quarter.
You mentioned AI hosting costs, but could you elaborate a bit on the increase further?
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Sure. Q1 is a bit higher than Q4 because we have a holiday effects in December.
That's a part of it. Then we also said in Q4, right, that we have this SkatteFUNN grant that had the 2 million effect, a positive effect on the cash cost in Q4, that we talked about in the quarterly call.
That was part of it. Then it was AI costs that we added, it was around a million, I would say.
That's the total. As you also saw that it's quite flat year-over-year.
Fredrik Nilsson
Great. Thanks.
Regarding Medsoma and its typical users, you mentioned, I think it was a few quarters ago perhaps, that a lot of customers are testing different solutions. Do you see that they are more settling down now for Medsoma hopefully, or what do you see currently among the customers using Medsoma or competitive solutions?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. I believe most of them will settle down for our solution, as it's completely built into the system and has access to more information than the external ones.
I think it's just a better user experience, and that's why you will settle down for them. The key being at least on the same quality as the competitors when it comes to what we actually propose.
That's the challenge. We need to make sure to always improve there.
I believe that we are there, and as long as we are there, they should choose the built-in solution for most cases. Then there are use cases which we do not aim to meet ourselves, where we happily work with partners.
For example, there are some users who want to walk around and kind of record as they go, maybe they're a physiotherapist working a lot in the gym with the patient. We do not at the moment, at least, aim to build an app for Medsoma and try to be really good in that experience, too.
There, we're happy that you choose something else then. We'll see, it's still early days, and since most of our users joined last month, it's difficult to answer if they will settle down.
I believe that we have a good edge because of our position and the information we have, and since it's the system that's already being used. It's up to us to make sure that they do stay there, I would say.
Fredrik Nilsson
I see. Just to follow up on that, you mentioned that a lot of your Medsoma customers are coming from other solutions, but I assume then you don't see any significant movement in the other direction, Medsoma customers moving to the competitors?
Daniel Öhman
No, not yet. We did see it early on.
When we did lack the quality before we started selling, cuz when we tested ourselves, if you just do a simple meetings, and so on, also in those test cases we had with early pilots, it looked to us that we could match the quality even when we used smaller LLMs. We thought so.
Then when it entered the real world and people starting talking about golf through the meetings, and there was a bit scrappy sound, and things happened, our quality was a bit behind. That's enough for them to choose another solution, because then you have to do some extra work with the keyboard, and they really don't want to do that.
You should also keep in mind that what they do in general, or what they want to do, is kind of not to take notes during the meeting anymore at all. You have to make sure that you catch everything that they want to have in their notes, cuz otherwise they anyway have to take notes themselves so to remember what they want to write afterwards.
It's really sensitive on the quality. Then we paused the sales, and then we had some customers leaving and choosing other solutions.
Since the restart of the sales when we're using larger LLM, we have not seen that. It's early days.
Fredrik Nilsson
I see. Thanks.
Lastly, some years ago you used to say that your customers have a very long list of new feature they want, but you have to focus on the most value-creating ones. Has that changed given the advancements in AI?
Could you make those easier now? I suppose you can, but at the same time, there is also a lot of new features related to AI and the UX that you want to invest in.
Is that something that you will focus on more, or is there other things that's more interesting?
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. We still have a very long list of what we want to do for our customers.
Extremely a lot we want to do, and that can really add value for them. We keep having those projects competing with each other.
Then you have, as you just mentioned, the new AI functionality, they're also in there competing. At the same time, we're increasing pace.
What we say internally, which I think is a good point to do also here, is that even if we get 500% more efficient as a total, in some things we will be much more than that, but in total, that's not a prediction, but that's just as an if, we still have things to do, cuz the systems we are supporting, they're huge, our systems. We're supporting a small hospital and a clinic, in some cases even quite large hospitals, with everything they do, all parts of it.
EHR systems compared to other types of products that you use are not as polished, they are not as good in all respects, and I think that AI will start demanding that of products like ours, too. That there is really a lot we can do and need to do, and which will add a lot of value for our customers, I really looking forward to that.
I believe that even if we get 500% more efficient, we will have jobs for those that work for us, as many jobs. It's only conditioned on that you are prepared to change, that you're prepared to really embrace the new technology, embrace that your role will change quite a lot, and then you have a place.
That's what we say internally, and I think that's the truth is that expectations will go much higher. If you take the old list of everything we felt that we want to do for our customers that will add value, we have a lot of new demands, too.
I think that's where we're heading, but it's also difficult to know. Things are moving quite rapidly.
They might not come to the level I expect them to, or they might go beyond it. Who knows?
We're trying to really make sure that we are the winner in all those scenarios. That's our aim.
Fredrik Nilsson
That's interesting. Thank you very much.
Daniel Öhman
Thank you, Fredrik.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Thank you.
Operator
There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Okay. We have gotten quite a few questions here in the chat as well.
First one, "How much has the hiring of new salespeople affected the revenue?"
Daniel Öhman
I think it's a bit early days. Most processes are quite long.
When we go through the list of potential customers that they are working on, I feel that we have good progress, good discussions, but they're not many that we are invoicing yet. Some of those signed that we leave the quarter with comes from new sales people.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Next one, "With profitability and positive operating cash flow now established over several quarters, how are you approaching capital allocation priorities, in particular, how do you assess the attractiveness of reinstating a share buyback program at current levels?"
Daniel Öhman
That's really a board decision and AGM decision. We believe in buybacks in general as a way instead of dividends, as returning cash to our shareholders.
That's what we want to do. As also mentioned, we are looking at a few acquisitions, not in general.
We're never in any structural processes. We have a few acquisitions that we think are interesting, that really strengthens our position in Sweden.
Key acquisitions. They are always difficult to know when they will happen, as it's us knocking on the door saying that we're interested, not the other way around.
In general, we see share buybacks as a good way, and we see that we'll have an increasing cash flow from operations, and it will continue to improve. We will use that for share buybacks and those targeted acquisitions.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
You see now that in the quarter we had a cash balance of 130 million. We don't plan to have that large of a cash balance in the long term.
We will deploy it either through buybacks or this strategic acquisitions that we have mentioned. Next one, "What are the opportunities in the pipeline to continue growing over the mid-term?
Signed not implemented ARR currently stands at 4 million, which is low compared to previous periods." I think we addressed the backlog there a bit earlier, that over the last few years, we had a big backlog, but it was also customers that was in the backlog for quite some time because it took time to implement.
This is basically new backlog, which is a very strong quarter for us, I would say, signing 4 million near ARR. In the mid-term, we see great potential to continue to grow.
We still have a low market share in the Nordics, much market left to grow in, and to take market share, and also in Germany as we get more traction there. You see that the momentum in the ARR this quarter already with the 19% growth in Nordics, which is very strong, I would say, for us.
Next one, "How will you attract new customers in Germany, through salespeople on the ground or companies partners?"
Daniel Öhman
That's why the acquisition was important to have something to build on. We have a sales force in Germany.
It's small, it will have to grow, working, and we're also selling through partners already, the existing products in Germany. I think we'll continue with both.
What we really want to develop in our German organization is much more creating leads through marketing. We still work very conservatively in Germany with a lot of cold visits, and that's quite an expensive and inefficient way of selling.
We have to be mindful that Germany is not like Sweden. We actually tried to do cold visits in Sweden, that really doesn't work.
No one wants to meet you at a cold visit. It is a bit different between the markets, and we have to appreciate that.
We are strengthening the German organization with local experts on how to sell and market in a modern way in Germany. That's something we're in the progress of strengthening the organization.
I think we have a good base building with good sales people that we can then help become even more efficient.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Great. Next one, "Could you please update us on your progress in Stockholm, also with regards to further hiring of further sales reps?"
Daniel Öhman
Stockholm is moving to Cambio from TakeCare in 2029, 2030. We see that as a great opportunity.
I think you can all read in the papers how those regions that moved to Cambio feel, especially those, there are a few that actually moved from TakeCare. As a user, you feel that TakeCare is a much more modern system than Cambio.
It's also much more suitable for small private clinics than Cambio is. When that change happened, it will really help us grow a lot, is our expectation.
It is still so far in the future that it doesn't help us very much in Stockholm, cuz we can say you're going to change systems anyway, but that's typically these processes get delayed also. It's five, six years in the future, so that doesn't really count that you anyway have to do it in five, six years' time.
It doesn't really help us from that perspective yet. Still, Stockholm is the biggest market we can win customers from TakeCare.
We can continue work. Over time, that change, we believe, will really strongly help us.
It's not yet. Still, we're growing in Stockholm.
Most new customers are in Stockholm. We will not hire new sales reps at this point of time.
I feel that the ones we have hired are still catching up and coming up to speed. It's the same with the customer representatives, customer success.
They are still kind of learning their roles, but doing it at a really good pace.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Next one, "Could you comment on how the UI should look like in your perspective in an AI world? How will that incorporate workflows in conjunction with AI?"
Daniel Öhman
Yeah. That's something we're really testing out and trying out.
We have a lot of POCs that we are testing with real customers, not with real data yet, cuz there are limits to what we can do then. We do a lot of videos and then test the system and some while we're interviewing them.
I don't think it in the first version this year will look extremely different than from before. We're rebuilding the UI, and at the same time we're addressing old things we know that we anyway want to improve.
Then everywhere we're building in AI support, so that if we have the knowledge from the meeting, from the recording, or from anywhere else in the system, we pre-propose things. There are limits to what we can pre-propose.
We are currently not allowed to propose things that help them make a decision. It's more of the administrative side.
I think that's quite okay because that's where our users have a lot of work to do. It's not the actual decisions they make.
They're typically quite easy in the private healthcare setting, and not what takes the time. Also the administrative part, they really don't like.
There are a lot of legal hurdles there. When it comes to prescriptions, there are a lot of requirements on, and we have to follow the exact same look as Läkemedelsverket has already approved in our system.
That there are certain limitations within this sector, but in general, we think it will not look that different, not at least yet. You will feel and you will see the AI support you in all different views in the system, and it will also take you to the right views and right places when you need it to.
We don't have it all in place yet. We have a template how we think it will look by the end of this year.
Still being worked on with the details. Then it will continue to evolve, I'm sure.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Next one, "Could you help us understand how difficult it is to switch a system currently, and which part makes it hard or easy?" Yeah.
Daniel Öhman
I think that the hardest part is that healthcare, if you run a clinic, you have all these fixed costs, and I know I talk about this often, but you have all these fixed costs, and then you have your variable income. The mentality among our customers is that every day we need to fill it.
We have to make sure that we don't have a single empty slot, cuz then we're not making any profits. That mentality means that you're really working the same way.
You don't really take a step back and think about, "How should we work with our processes? How can we improve?"
I think that's the major shortfall of European healthcare in most European markets, at least, where you don't really think through your process and think, "Okay, if we do this work now, then we'll every day get a bit more efficient." The same thing with changing systems.
They see the short-term pain that comes from that you need to re-educate your staff, you need to do this assessments of risk of changing systems that you have to do, it's a legal obligation they have, and we support them with it. Then you also have to work through, "Okay, how do we work now?"
In general, we try to support all workflows they have today, but quite often they come from them adapting to not great system, and they should really rethink a bit how they work. It's difficult for them to take the time to do it, cuz they have such a short-term focus when it comes to planning and everything.
I think that's quite a big hurdle. Then makes it a bit more extra difficult, I would say, is that when the regions change systems, and you read everything about it in the newspapers, it makes everyone more afraid of changing systems, even though when the regions do it, they do it in a completely different way than us.
It is not that difficult, but I think many have the view and think that it is very difficult when it is not that difficult when we help them. We ask all customers a month after they change to WebDoc, "How happy are you with the change?"
It's a scale from 1 to 5, and every month we are above 4.5. Already a month after, they're very happy with the change.
We try to market that, we try to tell that story, but it's a sector that's afraid of change.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
I think we got a follow-up here on the AI discussion. It says, "Does this mean agents could be deployed?
Are you planning to connect MCPs, and how does this work with regards to restrictions on sensitive patient data?"
Daniel Öhman
Those are tricky questions. In general, we are not allowed to train on sensitive data, but we can give them access to sensitive data through MCP, for example.
That's fine. A bit depending on what you do, it cannot be decision support, or then we need new certifications, which we might do.
We haven't decided yet. One reason why our AI costs gets quite high is that we also have to make sure that it's always processed within Europe.
That's, from some of the large LLM models, that doesn't cost extra. When we do quality checks and we do blind tests with different LLMs, we can change in a day.
OpenAI is the one that scores highest in blind tests from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. OpenAI charge quite a lot for guaranteeing that it's within Europe and also guaranteeing that it's zero retention.
Zero retention is not a legal requirement, but it's something that's really appreciated with our customers that the data is never stored in an American-owned cloud, even if it's within Europe.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
It's worth noting that they charge a lot. It's a minimum fee.
It's not like the gross margin will be very weak. It's more that we need the big volumes
Daniel Öhman
to defend the. The cost because the token is better and is lowest with OpenAI of all of them, actually.
OpenAI uses less tokens than the other models for the same query when it comes to these questions. Over time, that will make us more cost-efficient.
Within in general development, it's mostly Claude we use, but in the customer-facing products, it's OpenAI at the moment. That's easy to change.
Let's see. Did I answer the full question?
The sensitivity, yeah, it is difficult, but as long as they stay within Europe, we do not train on data, they're fine. We do use the feedback, when users change something in the medical notes we have proposed, our structure learns from those changes, but we do not train the LLM model.
We set up the structure so for all changes, it learns from it and it gets more and more personalized, cuz each users wants their replies and their medical notes in a bit different way. It learns from that, but we're not training on the sensitive data.
We are training on other data.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Next one, "How does Medsoma differentiate itself from competitors like Tandem Health?"
Daniel Öhman
We're not really trying to differentiate ourselves. We're trying to be on the same quality level.
The differentiation factor we have is that it's completely built into the system and have access to all the data in the system. It's UX, user experience.
I think that's the difference we want to make. Then I think Tandem is good for certain cases that we do not aim to meet, because they cost too much for us at the moment, at least, to develop compared to the amount of our users that need it.
They're going a bit of different direction, I would say, than what we're doing. I think that's fine, and that's good.
We have a good collaboration with them. For the typical WebDoc and user of any of our systems, I think that Medsoma will solve their needs in a good way.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Next one, "Is Medsoma a transaction-based revenue or subscription from a segment reporting standpoint?" It's a subscription revenue that we charge per user.
Daniel Öhman
That have been said, we want to move from charging per user over time. That's just because everyone we're competing with are charging per user.
We want to charge for usage in the future, like we do with WebDoc charging per visit. I think that makes more sense, and as they use it more and more, we'll have more revenues, like we do with WebDoc.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Then the final one, I think you addressed it, Daniel, but "Can you comment on recent sales development in Stockholm and VGR?"
Daniel Öhman
Sorry?
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
"Can you comment on recent sales development in Stockholm and VGR?"
Daniel Öhman
Most of our new sales are in Stockholm. That's where we do most of our progress.
I think it's also extremely important from a long-term perspective that we get more and more known in Stockholm, when they change systems, we are well known and everyone thinks about WebDoc. We have to make sure that that's the case.
Also here now is the biggest market. That's where everyone is, and that's where we focus our sales efforts.
In VGR, we are continue sales also, but it's a smaller market and we have a stronger position already, where we do have a lot of discussions on within primary care. We're getting a larger and larger part of the private primary care market in VGR.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
That was the final one.
Daniel Öhman
Excellent. Thank you all for listening in, and if you have any questions, just let us know.
Thank you.
Svein-Martin Bjørnstad
Thank you.
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