Economic value

In part because of the limited effects of the Covid-19 crisis on its business activities, Unica once again recorded substantial growth. Unica’s revenue from production in 2020 was €539 million (2019: €483 million). This means that, for the first time in its history, the company has broken the barrier of half a billion euros in revenue. Revenues grew by more than 11.5% compared with the previous financial year.

With these results, Unica comfortably achieved its targets for 2020. The revenue increase was greater than had been forecast due to the effects of three acquisitions in 2020. Acquisitions contributed to Unica’s revenue growth in 2020 and preceding years, but organic growth is still the biggest component of the growth figures. In the past five financial years, organic growth accounted for more than two-thirds of recorded growth at Unica on average.

EBITDA increased from €38.3 million in 2019 to €41.2 million in 2020. While this shows continued growth in profits in absolute terms, the EBITDA margin fell slightly from 7.9% to 7.7%. Some consequences of the Covid-19 crisis are the main reason for this slight fall, whereby the profit growth was smaller than had been forecast. Over the course of the year, dealing with the Covid-19 restrictions has become a more routine part of the business operations, and the expectation is therefore that there will be less pressure on profits in 2021 and that the margin will recover.

In previous years, Unica has always presented invoiced revenue as the key revenue figure in its annual reports. This revenue figure includes work that has been invoiced in advance, which accounted for a relatively large share in 2020 compared with previous years. In 2020 the difference between production revenue and invoiced revenue was approximately €28 million, compared with a difference of only €13.5 million in 2019. Due to annual variation of work in progress, production revenue depicts a fairer picture of the developments in Unica’s revenue. For that reason, production revenue will be used as the basis in its annual reports from now on.