Forterro highlights and company performance in 2024

2024 successes: cloud acceleration, customer and employee retention and strategic M&A 

Dean Forbes, CEO, provides an update on company highlights and performance in 2024. 

Against general economic headwinds, 2024 closed successfully for Forterro with a number of key metrics trending above plan and industry averages. Our continued march to the cloud, customer and employee retention, and recurring revenue growth were all stand out areas of performance in what was generally a tough trading year for similar companies across Europe.

Cloud acceleration

New sales performance grew 24% year-over-year, with cloud sales growing at 177% year-over-year with strong cloud performance in all major markets such as Germany, France and the UK. The accelerated deployment of our cloud solutions by our customers is testament to the investments we have made in our products and an acceleration in market demand to be served in the cloud, a different buying behaviour to what we observed among our customers 24 months ago. We are excited by this trend as our unified Forterro Cloud Suite platform begins to take shape and will start to be widely deployable to customers by the start of next year.

Strategic acquisitions

2024 was also a solid year in M&A where we concluded five transactions ranging from the exciting AI oriented start-up – Prodaso, to the global market leader, Orgadata (signed in October, expected to close in Q1 2025). 2024 was the largest ever M&A year for the company based on capital deployed. Most pleasing is the strategic nature of the acquisitions which bring a mix of expanded geographic footprint, new product capabilities, complimentary product modules, high quality recurring revenue and critical talent into our business.

High retention rates

We continued to focus on employee and customer satisfaction recording high retention rates for both. Customer retention was 94% combined with 111% Net Revenue Retention plus employee retention was 86%, all respectively above industry averages and a reflection of the steps taken internally to improve the service and experience that we deliver to these two critical stakeholder groups.

Strong overall performance

All of this led to strong overall economic performance with recurring revenue growing at 17% and EBITDA growing by 12% across the organic business. Combined with 2024 acquisitions, we delivered €330m in total revenue and €100m in EBITDA placing our company ahead of our five-year plan and well positioned to continue this positive momentum into 2025. Our 2025 plan calls for 25%+ sales growth and a similar trend of recurring growth at 15%+. We continue to focus on overall efficiency through both the internal and customer facing deployments of AI and greater leverage of the company’s scale through unification of processes and systems.

Thank you to the excellent team at Forterro who drove these results and continue to scale our business and serve our customers.