LeadDesk Oyj (LEADD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
February 23, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveGood morning Europe and welcome to LeadDesk's earnings call for 2022. I'm glad to have you all on the call with me. It's 11:00 o'clock here in Finland and 10:00 o'clock elsewhere in Europe. On the agenda today, we'll first look at LeadDesk in general. Then we'll be moving on to the highlights of last year, looking at the key figures as well of course, everybody is super interested in them. We'll look at the outlook for next year, what's the goals and ambition for the coming year. And at the end, then we'll have a fireside chat together with Henri Palomaki and there will be also ample time for Q&A then. I'm super happy to have you all on the call with me here and I'm super excited to be able to present our last year's results. On the call with me presenting some of the financial figures, you have our CFO, Paul Stenback who will do a deep dive more into the figures part. And I'll focus then on the more strategic and operative content. One of the questions that typically comes up is that what does LeadDesk actually do? What do we do? What's the core of LeadDesk? What is the software? And what do our customers especially do with our software? And it's a wide question as our software is so widely used, but I just wanted to highlight some of the key use cases that we have at LeadDesk and which we are happy to support our customers with. So as you see, LeadDesk is a widely used system in a wide variety of different use cases of large variety of different industries and verticals. And what takes all of these, makes them the same, is that all of these verticals and industries have a large number of customer communication points. They have a lot of customer communication happening, whether it's B2C or B2B business. There's a lot of customer communication happening. And we're not talking about marketing e-mails here or any automation like mass automation. We're talking one-to-one connections with people. So we facilitate these conversations that our customers have with their end customers. That's our key and that's where we are the center bringing all the data together for our customers to be efficient at their own operations. That's the goal of LeadDesk and that's why we're so enthusiastic about our offering. Then looking at the company side, we are a leading SaaS provider in our vertical, meaning, providing software for customer support and sales. And our focus is on the European markets. That's where we excel. So our market, the European SaaS market for contact center software, customer service, sales, that's the key. Our ambition for the future is that we want to reach EUR 100 million in revenues. And why EUR 100 million? We want to set ourselves apart clearly from all the legacy providers, from all the competition, we want to be the clear #1 in the European market. That's our ambition and that's the road we are on. Now I'm happy to say that we are well on our way there reaching our targets. When it comes down then to what we base all these on is our software and its ability to take all these different customer service channels together, put them into one formalized way so that they can be analyzed, they can be routed to the right person, they can be analyzed and that all everything's in control. So our customers can be in control of the conversations they are having with their end customers. We have a lot of different channels. Most traditional, of course is telephony, which accounts for majority of customer service and sales communication at our customers and in companies in general still. On top of that, then we have also other channels such as SMS, e-mail, and social media channels, web chat, of course and all these modern channels that then put our software in the forefront of omni-channel customer service and sales. So that's the foundation. First, we take all these different channels, the traditional and the more modern. We have a harmonized way of controlling that. And then we are able to route them to the correct endpoint, meaning, one of the agents, so our conversational AI. In our setting we have a few different interfaces we provide our customers in order to then interact with these conversations. We provide online for online customer service, meaning customer service across channels. We have outbound for sales use cases. We have Talk and Talk is then when you are doing your work primarily in a CRM system or ticketing system, for example. Then we can bring in natively Talk into, for example, Salesforce or Zendesk. On top of that, as we saw previous, we do also have the field case, meaning when the employees are on the field and for that use case we have our mobile solution. It's not of course, enough nowadays to only provide human interaction and that's why we are super enthusiastic about our Jenny bot, so a chatbot that can do some of these conversations on behalf of the agents. All countries assist agents in doing their work in order for the personal touch to be more prevalent than in the contact centers. These are all one system. And these are just different user interfaces to make it efficient for the use case. No software can be without interfaces, nowadays you need to have other systems of course supporting customer service and sales, for example, invoicing system, so customer relationship management and such. And for those we have created APIs, we have created integrations for these use cases and we support a large variety of integration capabilities. If you consider this to be the factory flow, then you also need the tools in order to make the factory run as efficiently as possible. And for that we then of course provide a large variety of critical tools for our customers in order for them to do their work efficiently. This can be considered like the flight control of customer communication at our customers. So our workforce engagement tools enable both motivational aspects, motivating the agents, it enables meeting your [ SLAs ] with fine-grained tools in order for you to then meet the SLAs and have the right people answer the right questions at the right time and a whole host of other things especially now, quality management being a key topic that a lot of our customers are talking about. All these, we can then also enable with AI. We've invested in AI for a couple of years already and we have many tools available. For example, Jenny is one of the prime ones, an AI -- conversational AI tool that our customers use both in customer service setting and in sales. But with the latest developments we see great opportunities in bringing more functionality now and more quality functionality to our customers. Our primary market, [indiscernible] solution is the European market. We spread across the Western Europe and the Nordics. We've owned presence in some 8 countries now. All the way from the Arctic down to Mediterranean we can service these countries very well. And this also brings a great barrier then to entry for any other providers looking at these markets. European markets are very particular in that they have very strict guidelines on how you control data, how customer service and sales should be operated and so on and so forth. And meeting these criterias is a huge hassle for anybody wanting to enter the market. We talked about compliance as a service. And it's built into our system. And our customers take it for granted as they should. We must be compliant in all the countries where we operate, but it is a good barrier for entry to any of our international competitors. On the other hand then, our infrastructure where we've invested a lot throughout the years is rock solid. We've invested in having a global infrastructure, our own CPaaS network with high-quality interconnects to local operators in order for our customers to be able to rely not just the business critical operations, but mission-critical operations as well on our infrastructure and our software. [indiscernible] throughout the years, we've also invested in security, not just as passwords, but actually to prove it we have the best security certificates available. And that's a great thing to have, especially on the enterprise customer side where they require rock solid security. Then looking at highlights of 2022, we can be super proud of last year. So looking at the goals we set up for ourselves. Firstly, strong organic growth, we said that we will have a strong growth for 2022. We will extend our offering. We will focus on getting non-organic growth. And lastly then we'll enter the ecosystems, the large global ecosystems and also build on our partner network on top of that. So how did we do here? So the outcomes for last year, we were well within our guidance. We managed to also do a lot of R&D. And as an example, we launched our new UI for the sales use case for outreach as well as then we provide it for native integrations into quite a lot of systems then with our Talk product and other products. On the M&A side, due to the fact that the valuation differences between public and private markets, it was quite hard to work on it. In the second half still we see private valuations coming to a more -- level more in line with the public markets. And that pipeline is very active at the moment, but unfortunately we didn't close any cases last year mainly due to the fact that the valuation differences were still too large. On top of this, we also launched our Talk user interface to our system inside a big change for Salesforce and Zendesk Marketplace. As said, we also do have a variety of other ecosystems we do natively integrate, but these are well-presented now also in the ecosystems on Marketplaces. So I'm super proud of last year. And now it's a great time then to hand over to Paul, who will then talk more about the figures.
Paul Stenback
executiveThank you, Olli, and good day also on my behalf. 2022 in numbers at a glance, we regenerated EUR 28.1 million in revenue across 1,900 customers throughout Europe and across a number of verticals. Our international revenue was roughly 16% and we employ 170 people across 8 offices in -- excuse me, 8 countries in Europe. Which is actually -- the numbers actually slightly less than a year ago, which implies we're actually done more with less people. Our EBITDA margin was 12%. How does this then compare to the previous year? Revenue growth more than 14% of which roughly 10% was organic. In the second half of the year, organic growth was 12% driven primarily by Finland and Norway in the enterprise sector and Spain and Finland in the SME segment. ARR grew at 9% and EBITDA margin was steady at 12% of revenue in 2022. However, EBITDA has been on an upward trend during the year, second half EBITDA margin was 14% with the improvement being driven by scalability of revenue and prudent management of personnel costs. We'll dig deeper into the financials also in the fireside chat. Now I'll hand over back to Olli.
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveThank you, Paul. And then looking at our strategy for 2023, so what are we going to achieve this year? Our focus is still on growing organically and managing great organic growth. At the same time due to the macroeconomic situation, a prudent company, a diligent company must also look at the profitability side more than in another kind of market. So we will look at maintaining and improving our efficiency throughout the year. And of course then -- and profitability for us is always an equation. And now we're going to be looking a little bit more now on profitability, but still maintaining strong growth. One of the key things for the product side is a tighter integration with the AI offering -- our AI offering and making sure that the arms race that is now ongoing will also benefit our customers even in the short term. And we are super excited about the opportunities that we now have with the new tools that are coming to the market and new studies and research studies happening across the world and especially being driven by the likes of Google and Microsoft. As said, also the private valuations are now on a more sustainable level. And we look forward to seeing also nonorganic growth this year. When it comes to the outlook, the outlook for 2023 is that we are expecting from 6% to 14% of annual revenue growth for this year. And first time, we've also given more on the profitability side. So we are giving a tighter guidance there, so between 11% and 16% of profitability measured by EBITDA. And as previously as well this outlook does not take into account any significant M&A that might happen throughout the year. Our investment story holds very strong. We are in a prime position with our product and we are really a leading product in the market. And that is the foundation of our growth and of our success also in the future. We have a great go-to-market model. We've demonstrated it country after a country that our go-to-market model works greatly and that is one of the fundamentals which we should also build our future on then in the coming years. Our revenue mix is stable and our revenue mix is varied. So we are not -- not own only a few customers, but we do have a large variety of customers, a large variety of industries and our revenue mix is on a healthy level. Lastly, we are super ambitious. We want to take over the market. We want to dominate the European market in CCaaS and that's the ambition that we are driven towards. This concludes this part of the presentation and events. We'll move next to the fireside chat where you also have an opportunity for Q&A. And from my part, I would like to thank you now all the shareholders and our employees for last year, it was a great year. And I'm super happy about all our employees and all our great shareholders. And now we'll have a minute or 2 pause while we move on to the fireside chat. Thank you.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeWelcome to LeadDesk's fireside chat. My name is Henri Palomaki and I come from Sijoittaja.fi, which is an information service for private investors. I'm here to ask some questions from Olli and Paul regarding to the earnings report. [Operator Instructions] So thank you for the great presentations. Olli, you said that you are proud of the performance of 2022 and that you met a lot of goals that you set in the beginning of the year. Which were the key milestones that you achieved in 2022?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveSo looking at the key milestones for 2022. I think firstly, of course, macroeconomic market was tough last year, but we maintained strong organic growth, which I'm super proud of. And we managed to develop our team and we also managed to, at the same time, then scale our teams and enterprise deliveries, for example. And that's something I'm super proud of. We had a lot of deals that we closed the first part of the year and we managed to complete all those deliveries by the end of the year, which I think was a great achievement. We're talking about health care providers here. We're talking about global fortune companies and all that. So completing mission-critical software deployments in 12 months is a great achievement. Lastly then our product developed, looking back, I'm astonished how much we achieved in the year. And I'm super happy that we could both invest in the ecosystems and then invest in our primary use cases in the contact centers at the same time. And I'm super happy about that.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeOkay. Let's talk a bit about the numbers then. So the market environment was a bit tricky this year -- last year, especially in the beginning of the year. However, you were able to gain 14% growth. How satisfied are you with that growth you generated in the second half?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executivePersonally, I'm very satisfied and very glad that we achieved a 14% growth. And in this market situation, I think that was a great achievement. In the summer, there were some hiccups as we communicated, but we were able to move over those and even taking those into account, then we managed great growth. And I'm super happy that to bring these results now to the table. And then looking at the profitability side and the efficiency side, so we've been managing to get synergies from the organization quite a bit and also then work on our profitability for the future as well. So -- and the things that we did in efficiency are not just one-offs for last year, but they are things that also then bring fruit to the later years as well.
Paul Stenback
executiveCould maybe I add on to what Olli said about, well, the difficulties in the second quarter of last year, I think like what the rest of the year showed was that, also the resilience of our business model, even though one sector was in difficulties in our -- in this case, the energy sector. Despite that, it didn't disturb the big picture that much because our system is mission-critical and we have a very diversified customer base with many different verticals. So if we're not kind of dependent on one single customer vertical.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeYes. And you also mentioned already about the profitability, how it improved. But about last year, in the second half, you had a EBITDA margin of 9.5%, and now you improved it to 13.6%. So which were the main causes for the improved profitability?
Paul Stenback
executiveYes. That's a good question. I think there were a couple of things in particular. So we do have a scalable revenue model and the fact when we had to take some enterprise costs upfront when we started our projects, but then when we have revenue ramped up that improved our profitability, so the scalable SaaS model. And then the second thing, we were very prudent with our investments, making sure that we kind of released the last synergies from our own M&A cases. And we're very efficient across the organization and only investing in the places where we get the most bang for the buck, so the right investments.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeYes. Good. And then about the guidance, you guided for this year, the revenue growth of 6% to 14% and EBITDA margin 11% to 16%. Are you focusing more on profitability this year than growth, do you think?
Paul Stenback
executiveWe're focusing both on profitability and growth, but the mix has been -- so our previous guidance for last year was that we are profitable. And that has been our -- historically, our guidance on profitability. And now we set up scale, which is clearly above 0, right?
Henri Palomaki
attendeeYes.
Paul Stenback
executiveSo naturally, we are focusing more now on profitability. And we see that this market environment companies have to be prudent and they have to be diligent and that requires that you build up a buffer for the short or long-term recession that we are going to be facing in the general market. So that's basically the reason why we are now putting a little bit more focus in the profitability side for us. It's always been an equation. So most of the start-up world sees the equation as having quite a bit of less focus on profitability than we've ever had. But our focus previously was that we are profitable and growing. Now it's more that we are -- we have a healthy profit margin and are growing. So the equation changes a little bit.
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveStill for us, the change is smaller than or many other growth companies. We haven't had to do any drastic moves like what you hear from the U.S. or some other also here in Europe. For us, it's more about smaller adjustments that we can do without disrupting our growth, without disrupting our normal operations.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeOkay. Good. Then we have the first question from the audience, Jaakko Tyrvainen from SEB. [Operator Instructions]
Jaakko Tyrväinen
analystIt's Jaakko from SEB. I know that you are not publishing churn rates or retention rates. However, could you talk a bit how the second half was in terms of churn given that the organic growth slowed down a bit towards the year-end?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes. So looking at churn, we have no changes in our churn. So if there are any changes, such as, for example, the energy sector, we have brought those always up. Now we see churn as being on a level that historically it's pretty normal for us, net retention rate while the -- so net retention rates are the historical norm and there's no changes there. Then Q2 being, of course, for last year, difference there with the energy segment back then. But since those times the net retention rates have been the historical norm.
Jaakko Tyrväinen
analystOkay. Good. Then my second one, on Spain, where you highlight the strong performance. Could you bit give a color what is the size of the operation in Spain now? And what was the key driver behind the solid performance in '22?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes. So looking at Spain, we see that it's one -- percentage-wise is the fastest-growing country for us and been that way for quite some time. And also like size-wise, it's reaching the level -- reaching the level that it will -- although the countries outside of Finland and Sweden, I think it's the largest one now or pretty soon.
Paul Stenback
executiveAfter Norway also.
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes, after Norway, sorry. Yes. So after the largest countries in the Nordics, it's the largest single market for us. And that, I think then also adds flavor and it's the growth levels, they are very nice and we continue to operate well there.
Jaakko Tyrväinen
analystOkay. Great. That's very helpful. Then regarding the Salesforce and Zendesk [ Corporation ], what should we expect looking towards '23 here? Will those kind of contribute materially to the sales in '23?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveThe later part of the year -- but for the -- these are, of course, some things we have just launched and we do have a nice-sized pilot, for example, going in the Salesforce ecosystem, providing our Talk for large multinational. And we have, of course, smaller cases. But then I think it's mostly the revenue is going to be mostly driven by the large deployments and the small deployments that are then business as usual, they don't have a significant impact now or in the future, but rather the large ones, then that we can go see. And I'm super excited about the pilot we're running at the moment.
Jaakko Tyrväinen
analystOkay. Good. Then my final one, a bit technical regarding the FX impact, you kind of first time referred to that in your guidance. What was the FX impact in the second half '22 or Q4 2022?
Paul Stenback
executiveIt was not very significant last year. It's more about how it impacts this year, so 2023. So if I remember correctly, the rates started going up and/or the Swedish krona and Norwegian krone started depreciating in the last quarter of last year. And now compared to the average rate of last year, they are a bit weaker. And that might -- if they remain on that level, they will have an impact on like like-for-like numbers, so to speak. I think we had the number in the report, but Sweden and Norway accounted for roughly 38% of our revenue, which is a decent share.
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveAnd just to be clear here it's -- we have, of course, like the local entities, we charge customers locally in their currency. We paid the salaries in the local currency and so on. So it's more on the top line than the other like the FX than the cost base.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeIf we then talk a bit about the market, enterprise segment is one of the key strategic areas of LeadDesk and the revenue from enterprise segment was about 43% last year. How did it develop in the second half?
Paul Stenback
executiveThe enterprise sector actor actually developed really well in the second half of the year. As Olli mentioned earlier, we had a bunch of bigger deals that were signed in the beginning of '22. But this always take time to ramp up and then the revenue starts flowing in. So that is why the enterprise side looked really good in terms of our numbers. What we have seen then later on in late '22 and early '23 is that in the market enterprise customers are currently a little bit hesitant because of the economic situation for enterprise customers taking into use a system like LeadDesk. This a big investment, which is why they really need to be sure that that is worthwhile in an environment like ours, which -- and I think this is something that not only relates to call center software, but it's basically all kind of software and all kinds of investments right now.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeOkay. And what about the energy sector? It was a big topic in the last half year report in August. So how did it develop in the second half?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveBasically, we saw the headwinds in -- during the summer. So Q3 and a little bit in Q3, but mostly focused on Q2. And then in the later part of the year, we didn't see any significant impact either way. And now of course, it's interesting how the energy segment will start developing after things stabilize across Europe in that segment. But I think energy companies are still a little bit hesitant to move steps, of course. So many unknowns in the market still and they concentrate on the must-haves -- only the must-have in their investments.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeYes. And next, we have a question again, Antti Luiro from Inderes. [Operator Instructions]
Antti Luiro
analystA couple of questions. I think first on the competitive landscape and how it's been evolving. We recently got the bankruptcy filing from Avaya, for example. Do you see that there's any change in how the competitive landscape has been evolving? Or is this just part of the bigger trend that the market is moving towards the more modern players?
Paul Stenback
executiveSo looking at Avaya, particularly, I don't know how many Chapter 11 it has gone through already. It's not the first time for that particular company. So I wouldn't take that as a market trend, but what is clear is that Avaya and legacy players are having a hard time competing on the contact center as a service market. And they try to bring their existing solutions and cloudify them, but it's really not the same thing. As you saw from my presentation, we have global CPaaS network. We handle all the channels ourselves. We've got a super solid experience, and we were born in the cloud. So we are fully self-provisioning, meaning that our customers can do all the things themselves. So we are true God creates ideas from where then legacy players are with the offering where they just offer the same old software just running in somebody else's cloud.
Antti Luiro
analystAnother one on cloud infrastructure costs. I think last year, the U.S. dollar getting stronger was one cost driver on that front. But now recently, we heard -- I heard of the cloud infrastructure players doing maybe even quite aggressive price hikes. Have you seen this in your negotiations?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes, we have. And we've had actually that's one of the areas where we are putting time in. So we are looking into ways where we can limit that exposure so basically bring out -- bring down our cloud pricing. And there's a lot of things that we can do technically and then there's, of course, things that we can negotiate about. And for us, we still see that we can manage our cloud spend. And even with the rising trend, we can, at the same time, bring down our infrastructure spend in the mid-term. At the same time then also having more scalable solutions and having a more scalable infrastructure. And we are confident that we can actually make that happen. And from my point of view, maybe it was a positive thing that the market pricing has been going up, so we can now justify these investments even better.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeWhat about partnerships? That's also one of your key strategic areas and you published this new Salesforce at application in January. What has been the feedback on that? And how do you see that in this year?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes, especially the enterprise players, that's very positive. As previously for the European market, the offering has not been really on a great level. We can provide mission-critical quality for bringing telephony and other channels into -- natively into Salesforce or Zendesk and so on, where then the offering has been basically lacking previously. And this is much to do with our scalable infrastructure and our super reliant infrastructure that our customers can rely on. And I see this, especially on the enterprise segment, that's a great thing and the best sales cases on that end on the enterprise segment as of course, they have also the more investment capabilities into their own processes and so on. And when it comes to then other partnerships, for example, the case we did with CrossPoint. And that end, I think that is something that will develop further and we might have a good and other partners also coming up. And of course, then investing in this partnership is critical for us as it is helping us with other cases as well.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeAnd product development. You said that your product also, service went to a huge steps last year. Can you open up that a bit? And what will be the focus for this year also in product development?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveSo looking at product, we had -- want to focus in the partners and ecosystem side for the whole year. And as I said, we've now published Salesforce and Zendesk integrations in their respective marketplaces. And we do also have other integrations ready and available. This has been a big investment. And also we totally transformed the outreach side of our software. So the sales user interface, we totally renewed that and renewed the technology and can now bring a lot of new features to our customers through that change. On the other hand, then our customer service offering developed a lot as well, especially now with so many businesses using our software, we have a great dialogue with them in order to be even more cost present. That then allows us for this year to also focus more on the AI. So last year, we used a lot of time in integrating Jenny, our conversational AI as tightly as possible. And now we can then -- now it's bolt-on. So now we have the capabilities of bringing even more AI services to our customers, for example, having intelligent agents assist. So not only -- so we have a conversational AI, but also that that AI can assist agents while they work and do their work. And that's something that I'm super, super excited about and then also being able to most probably then also train it better now with the tools available coming to the market from the arms race between Google and Microsoft. Contact center as a use case is very particular in that you want -- and the customers, they need to control how it operates because if you send a message that is the [ media ] of the company and then if the customer takes that as a fact, then it is a fact. So you need to be very particular on how you utilize AI in a contact center setting. And we are really in a prime position there now to take the modern tools in to use also on that end.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeAnd then we have a next question from Frans-Mikael Rostedt.
Frans-Mikael Rostedt
analystYou comment that the Finland, Norway and Spain developed especially well last year. How about the other more mature markets, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark, how did they develop last year?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes. We had growth in all our countries. So those that were listed there were basically the star players. So they were the places where revenue grew fastest. But we're continuously adding clients and revenue on our markets and we see no reason for why that wouldn't continue going forward.
Frans-Mikael Rostedt
analystAnd you don't see a lot of differences in the current outlook of your different markets?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveWell, a little bit, yes, there is always local conditions like for example, the energy part that we talked about hit a little bit more in Netherlands, for example, than other countries in Europe. But all in all, kind of cloud trend is or transition to cloud in our segment is prevalent in all countries and [indiscernible] driver for us everywhere.
Frans-Mikael Rostedt
analystOkay. Yes. And then one more question about the cash flows. Could you comment about the drivers behind the working capital development last year?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveYes. The main thing about the working capital and particularly around the year and this is that in one of our major countries, we invoice our customers primarily 1 year in advance and that happens right before year-end, which is why our working capital was pretty poor at the end of last year. However, it improved directly in January. So the cash position at the end of December is actually shows a little bit more negative picture than normal, so to speak. So that is the main explanation for the working capital development. All in all, there is no like issues with regards to working capital, our collection rates and credit losses and stuff like this is at the normal level that where they have always been.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeLet's talk about mergers and acquisitions next. So you mentioned that you signed new CFO, Kaisa Ronkko, but you're focusing more on corporate development and mergers and acquisitions in the future. So can we expect something to happen there in 2023?
Paul Stenback
executiveI definitely hope so. And that is what Olli is expecting from me. But that's -- Olli touched upon the subject already with the -- one of the issues we had last year that we've been talking along the way is that the public and private company valuations were a little bit out of sync. Now they are more in line with each other. So that's one thing that makes it easier. The second thing is that in the last 3 to 4 months, maybe in particular, we have seen quite a bit of small to midsized tech companies throughout Europe notice that the financial environment is changing. They might not -- they realize that they might not make it anymore on their own or they will have challenges. So there's more -- or quite a bit of interesting technology available in the market. What we just need to make sure is that the underlying business is good and that is something that we need and the tech is good and then the price is reasonable. But in general, I think going into '23 compared to last year is -- looks better for the segments that we are looking at.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeYes. So you're positive, yes.
Paul Stenback
executiveYes, I'm slightly positive. Let's put it that way, without bumping up the expectations to that. Yes.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeOkay. What about in the long term then this year 2023? What are the main strategic themes for LeadDesk to make this year as a success?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveSo for this year, for us, it's super important now to make the equation, the new equation of growth and profitability work well for us and get that balance right as we are adjusting it a bit. And that is the focus that we are working highly on. Secondly, then, looking at the product side. So of course, we need to enhance our product with many ways, but one of the key things is to bring data and AI more into the forefront. At the moment, we have tools for both, but it needs to be even more productized and even more integral part of anything you do in LeadDesk and that's I think, something that is super important for this year. And then, of course, I'm looking at all here that there are a lot of super exciting opportunities in the M&A sector. Companies that have great technology, but haven't found maybe the product market fit or that the local market is just not ready for them, but that we could then take to the wider market and really bring out the best in them. There's quite a few of those kind of companies on the market at the moment. And then, of course, the direct competitors, the financial markets are rough for small companies. And for that reason, then for us as a stable, profitable, growing company, the market is good for M&A, I believe, this year.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeOkay. So all the pressure to [indiscernible] for this year. Perfect. I am out of questions now. So is there something you want to add?
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveSo I'm super happy to have all you here and nice to see so many also participated in this event. And I'm very happy about the last year and we're all here now to make 2023 a success and our team is ready to take on the new challenges that 2023 then brings on. But I would like to thank everybody for participating in our earnings call and the fireside chat and hope to bring you then great numbers also into the future.
Henri Palomaki
attendeeYes. Thank you, everyone, and thanks for the great discussion. And the recording will be published in the LeadDesk's website on the Investor pages after the call. So thank you, and have a wonderful day.
Olli Nokso-Koivisto
executiveThanks, everybody.
Paul Stenback
executiveThank you.
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