Financial statements summary 2024

Johku focused on optimizing profitability and productivity and on automation, so that truly sustainable growth becomes possible.

The 2024 financial year in a couple of bullet points:

• Resourcing for Johku's development continued at a strong level.

• The volumes processed by Johku showed positive growth.

• Optimizing Johku's productivity and profitability has paid off. Pass-through invoicing and project business were stripped out of revenue.

• The focus of Johku's optimization and automation was on income and expense flows.

• Johku began an extensive overhaul of its entire backend and preparations for the migration, which has a considerable effect on operations.

Optimize and automate

Despite the subdued home market and growing competition for consumer spending, the company's development during the financial year was positive. The volume processed by Johku grew by 11% to about €40 million (tourism + other). The number of merchant accounts grew by 12% to more than 2,700 accounts, of which about 37% were active. The role of Johku's basic revenue model, commission based on merchants' volumes, grew as a source of revenue. Whereas commissions made up 66% of revenue in 2023, in 2024 their share was 72%. At the same time, the company cleaned pass-through invoicing out of its revenue and reduced its dependence on project income, which is why revenue for the financial year grew by only 2%.

In 2024, optimizing profitability and productivity focused on income and cost flows.

Grow sustainably

During 2024, the company continued its dialogue with several different stakeholders about Johku's internationalization and growth. Johku's strengthening position in the Finnish tourism sector is attracting attention, and our technological capability remains significantly better than our competitors'. During 2024, a wide range of operational opportunities and prospects for internationalization and growth were evaluated.

The Finnish field of booking systems falls roughly into four main types:

1. Legacy systems
   Legacy systems have operated in the market for a long time and have reached an established position. Typical of the legacy systems found in Finland is significant technical debt accumulated over the years, which only a couple of players have the financial means to cover.

2. Startups
   Characteristic of startups is “think big, fail fast” thinking, which seeks a path to rapid growth through big ideas and aggressive sales and marketing. In the early stages, cash flow relies heavily on venture capital provided by investors. Typical of the few systems in the Finnish field that position themselves in the startup genre are considerable accumulated losses, which will steer decision-making in the coming years. Statistically, more than 70% of these companies will fail in the coming years.

3. Small and local entrepreneurs
   Finnish tech entrepreneurship has always included building a solution for the first customer's needs and then selling that solution to others, modifying it where needed as needs change. A few solutions like this can be found in different parts of Finland. Typical of them is a project-style, assisted onboarding process and broader customizability, on which the company's profitability also often rests. The systems themselves have low maintenance fees, but at the same time they are weak in profitability.

4. Foreign systems
   Foreign systems are in use in the Finnish market, and new ones are constantly trying to enter it. They appear as competitors most often in Northern Finland. These systems are either booking systems that serve business owners directly or part of a larger sales channel (e.g. Booking.com or AirBnB). Typical of them is an emphasis on the reach of sales channels and a strong reliance on support in English. The strong emphasis on sales channels is a clear competitive advantage, as many business owners fundamentally need a better occupancy rate.

As an ecosystem, Johku stands apart from all of the main types defined above:

Development of Johku began in 2016, and it has been continuously and actively renewed. Johku's basic principle is to be an evolving system whose technical debt is kept to a minimum. During the 2024 financial year, several extensive updates were made to Johku that increased the system's resilience in a rapidly evolving operating environment. In the last quarter of the financial year, a large-scale migration of the server infrastructure began, from the cloud of the US-based AWS to the cloud of the Finnish UpCloud. The migration was completed in early May 2025. During the migration, all backend systems were renewed. In addition, several new components were added to the architecture to enable future development in the last stages of the customer's decision journey, that is, in loyalty processes and in discovering new products within the merchant ecosystem.

Johku's character traits include prudence, stability and responsibility. We do not hype what does not exist, and as a rule we do not hunt for unicorns with other people's money. The people behind Johku are all long-time entrepreneurs who carry the responsibility and the risk for Johku themselves. We seek profitable and sustainable growth. It is built around a thriving merchant ecosystem and around automation and self-service developed as far as possible.

Johku develops and works every day for the benefit of all its merchants. This principle is built into everything we do and is one of the core values of the whole company. Johku's revenue logic is based on commission: when a merchant succeeds, Johku succeeds too. We support all merchants as effectively as possible and try to listen to them attentively. For this development work to be sustainable, it has to be profitable. That is why the innovation and evaluation processes of Johku's technology development, as a rule, prioritize features that are needed across the whole ecosystem. In this way, we make sure that all merchants succeed and that the conditions for a continuously evolving system are maintained.

As a starting point, Johku supports numerous tourism sales channels, and we recommend that our merchants build their sales channel strategy carefully. However, we emphasize the role that reducing the layers of sales channels, and at the same time increasing cross-selling between merchants, plays in building future profitability, especially now that AI-based decision journeys are increasingly reducing the role of, for example, traditional search engines.

Business figures 2024