Visma, a Norwegian software company with 13,600 employees and €2 billion in projected revenue, is going public in 2023. The company grew 20% annually by shifting to cloud services during the pandemic and expanding across Europe, but faces a critical shortage of engineers that outpaces supply.
Chapters
Visma is one of the leading providers of mission-critical software in Europe. We're the number one SaaS ERP provider for SMBs and also top 5 software companies in Europe. Currently, we're expecting €2 billion of revenue this year. And we've had— we've been performing consistently over the past 20 years, growing by 20% approximately top line every single year. Coming from the Nordics, headquartered in Oslo, and then expanding to Benelux and then gradually also expanding to continental Europe. Today we have approximately 13,600 employees, more than 6,000 developers, and approximately 80% of our revenue is coming from cloud.
So pretty impressive and consistent, it sounds like, growth numbers in recent years. Where are you focused moving forward in terms of product growth but also geographic
Well, we are— I would say the pandemic has definitely boosted our strategy of entering into cloud. So we are investing in modern cloud ERP solutions to our customers. And during the pandemic, from one day to another, all of us suddenly had to do whatever we could from home, either that was schooling or actually driving your business. So in that period, we saw a boost of all our modern ERP solutions that made it easy and efficient to work from home. And that's where we are expanding, both in the current markets in which we operate, which is the Nordics, Benelux, and, and also naturally in Central and Eastern Europe, but entering into new markets like our recent acquisition in Spain, Holdit, which we believe can be the market leader within these deliveries in the time to come.
It sounds like the pandemic did present a very good business opportunity for your firm as more and more people were remote working. Now that many economies are opening up and encouraging workers to go back to the workplace, do you think that business growth is going to start slowing down because of some of these potential headwinds of people no longer having to work remotely?
We are naturally following the workplace. We believe that our employees are sort of the core of our deliveries, and we make sure to, to create value to our customers every single day. But we see that our employees, they want a hybrid solution, and so do our customers, both going back to the office because we are social creatures. But we see that we can do so much more also working from home, creating work-life balance and a lot of other positives. I see our projections in Visma is that we will continue the growth pace that we have had over the past 20 years because the software space is expanding. I think the positive is that the software space is expanding. Anything that can be automated is making it easier for our customers to focus on what they really believe in. Either they are small cornerstone shops or large enterprises. We deliver both to the private and the public sector. The challenges I see for the overall overall software space is talent acquisition. There is a high demand for engineers, and there are not enough software developers or engineers being educated. So if you look to Europe, actually, a lot of the best schools are public. So we are currently now talking to the government to increase the education. In Netherlands, we actually see for the first time ever, there's more open positions than actually people who are out of a job. And this is something that we've never seen before.
Interesting, because it also reflects what's happening at a broader macro scale where many companies, not just yours, are talking about the need to hire workers, but the lack of worker availability because of a mismatch of skills. So it's interesting to see how your company is trying to change that somehow from a grassroots level. I want to take you to something else. You mentioned to my colleague Juliana that you have big growth plans. But let me just ask you about your potential IPO plans as well. You've said that you're looking to IPO the company in 2023. Why not sooner? Why, why 2023?
Yeah, with regards to expanding and building, I just want to also allude to the fact that we grow by both buying through acquisition, buying companies that fit our strategic position, but also growing organically, the ones that are already a part of the Visma family. In respect to IPO, I think that with regards to our size, we were listed in 2006 and have been off the stock exchange and believe that 2023, as you put it, is a good place to, at least depending on market conditions, go back to the stock exchange. This seems to be the right timing both for our current investors but also for the company as a whole. Naturally, several of our owners today, HG being the majority owner, they will typically continue to be a long-term owner also on the stock exchange. Several of our other owners will as well. But some will sell down. So we really want to make sure that we have the right investor base with a long-term perspective and also make gradual moves also in 2022, getting the company, the employees ready to list.
