Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Columbus Annual Report 2023 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please use the Q&A box available on the webcast link anytime during the conference. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Søren Krogh Knudsen, CEO.
Thank you very much, operator, and welcome to all of you on the webcast and the call-in bridge. My name is Søren Krogh Knudsen, and I am the CEO of Columbus. I'm accompanied here today by Brian Iversen, our Group CFO. At today, today's call, we will be covering both the financial highlights for Q4 as well as the full year. We have a short strategy update, and we'll go into the guidance for 2024. So Brian will be covering the financial performance for Q4 in 2023 and the full year, as well as a short update on our ESG numbers. And we'll end the presentation, as always, with a short Q&A session. So let's go to slide four to begin.
Yeah, we start with the financial highlights for 2023. Like most businesses, we've been navigating a nervous market, somewhat affected by, I would say, geopolitical turmoil and also some macroeconomic uncertainty, resulting in slightly longer sales processes. I would say some, although moderately postponed, decisions and project starts. But despite all of this, and also perhaps because we were anticipating it, we have gained market share, and we have managed to grow our business in the past year. We concluded our three-year strategy, which was called Focus23, with a goal of reaching 10% profitable growth by 2023.
And in a market that was estimated to grow by 7%, we surpassed our financial expectations by delivering 11% growth in 2023, measured in Danish kroner and also amounting to slightly above DKK 1.5 billion. Adjusted for currency and acquisition, we actually delivered a revenue growth of 15%, and I know Brian will get back to the currency fluctuation, which has affected it, and it's also something that we've shared on these quarterly updates before. Yes. So, it's fair to say that all major business lines and most market units contributed to the revenue growth, especially our strategic business lines, and by strategic business lines, we mean also the units where we have high growth expectations.
That would be Data and Analytics and Customer Experience and Engagement, and they did show a very rapid growth. Overall, EBITDA increased by 28% to DKK 118 million, with an EBITDA margin of 7.6%. This is an improvement from last year, but raising our EBITDA margin will be a focus area for the coming strategic three-year period, the 2024, 2025 and 2026, that New Heights covers. But I think it's also fair to say that, obviously, we started work already in the latter half of last year, and as you can see from Brian's presentation, the Q4 results from last year, we're starting to see some benefits.
For the year of 2023, we raised efficiency from 63%- 67%, which is a strong development. We can expect to see some further improvement, but compared to where we started out and what we consider sort of top-end performance, we're starting to reach a really good level here. And we can then move on to other improvement criteria. I'm particularly pleased with the robust growth in our operating cash flow. This is a very positive indication also that we have our business on the right track.
So all in all, I'd say we're satisfied with the results in 2023 and expect, also based on what we're seeing now, the positive development to continue in 2024. So let's have the next slide, please. So, in Q4, Columbus made positive progress in most areas of the business, despite the aforementioned uncertainty in the macroeconomic climate. And we did deliver a growth of 13% in line with expectations, and again, adjusted for currency and acquisition, the growth was 16%. Our EBITDA for the period amounted to DKK 40 million, with an EBITDA margin of 9.6%, up from 8.1% in Q4 of 2022. So-...
Q4 was also contributing to draw up the full year result for 2023. We're pleased to see the earnings trending upwards towards the end of the year, of course, because it tells a little bit about that when the exit velocity of one year is high, we tend to have a better entry velocity into the new year. The results in Q4 were generated by positive developments in all business segments, with especially strong development in the UK and in Denmark. All in all, we are satisfied with the Q4 results, ending the year with positive expectations to continue the growth and improve our profitability in 2024. I'll now hand over to Brian, who will cover the financial review.
Yes. Thank you, Søren. As we have had on our previous Q calls, just a brief update on the currency. As we talked about during 2023, the currency do work against us, especially on the top line. Around 50% of our revenue is arising from Norway and Sweden, which have seen a heavy devaluation of their currencies, especially in the beginning of 2023. The full year impact, as Søren showed you on the previous slide, was 6 percentage points on the growth, or eighty-six million. Sorry, DKK 68 million. In Q4, it was 5 percentage points and DKK 18 million negative impact on the growth calculation.
So, we are actively calibrating our operation to mitigate these changing currencies, although we do see a slight negative impact on our EBITDA as well, but it's not something we quantify in general. My next slide will then look at the business line growth, so a bit more detailed, where the growth arising from. And I think I'm happy that we can say that it's actually coming from all our business lines, although there is some slight variation in the pace they are growing. Dynamics and by far our biggest business line is moving fast, and we see a strong growth in both Denmark, Sweden, and UK.
We continue in all our markets to be a strong partner and keep a very strong relationship with Microsoft. For M3, the business line M3, we have seen a strong growth in Q4, 19% in constant currencies, and for the full year, 6%. So still a fine growth, but in the low end compared to our other business lines. We did start out the year, as you remember, in M3, with a fairly low growth, but it had really picked up at the end of the year, and as you can see in Q4. Both arising from increased activity on some of our major client and also a strong win in of new clients across the borders.
Digital Commerce does see a decline in Q4. We have had some headwinds in both Norway and Sweden after a strong growth for some years, but still they came out of the year with a growth of around 10 percentage points, measured in constant currencies. Digital Commerce contin-
Data Analytics.
Oh, sorry, Data Analytics continue with a robust, robust growth primarily led by UK and Sweden, and we continue to see a strong cross-selling and leverage on our strong consulting pool in this business line. CXE demonstrate growth in and is progressing across all our main markets, and we continue to invest in additional consultant teams to meet the strong demand within this business lines. All right. Security, the new member of our family, we don't have any comparison, but nevertheless, they have landed well within Columbus. We have been working hard on getting them into our operating model, creating cross-selling and pipelines, and I can say that they have been well integrated and are now also physically here in Ballerup.
They moved to our office in Ballerup from a different location where they were sitting. So all in all, a good start, and a strong member of our family. Strategy and Change business line is a minor one, and they have been very strong in facilitating the sales and the management of major projects across the business lines. But we have decided from next year to include them as part of the market unit setup, and we will not report on Strategy and Change as a separate business line from 2024. So overall, we are satisfied with the growth in our business lines, and we anticipate a continuing growth the coming quarters.
All right, let us have a look at the business line contribution. I think we have the page up now, and the contribution margin. This is, as mentioned before, one of our absolute key performance indicators, that is also something we decided from 2023 to report on in our quarterly and annual reports. So you can follow the development, a bit more detailed than before. And, if we start with our Dynamics business line, they continue to live, to deliver both on the growth, as just mentioned, but also on profitability.
They saw a growth in the contribution of 20% in Q4, and for the full year, they improved the contribution margin with one percentage point from a strong high level. One of the key drivers for the business line and where they have been very strong is to work with a high efficiency and to use the strong pool of consultants across our different markets. M3 ended on a high in Q4. They had a solid efficiency and a good use of the consultants in some important projects across the markets.
On the full year scale, you will see that they were flattish development, 20 percentage point or 20% contribution margin, mainly due to a fairly turbulent, slow start in 2023. But we are happy to see that there is a pickup at the end of 2023 and also in Q4. Digital Commerce have demonstrated a rapid growth, but they have seen or been very heavily involved in the Norwegian development the past years, and they have also seen a slowdown, as you can see on the market development in Norway, also in Q4. But so they are digesting a heavy growth, and that have resulted in a flat margin development in 2024.
But we expect them to grow further on the margin and margin percentages the coming years, in line with with our long-term strategy. Data Analytics and CXE, both strong development in contribution margin as expected, and they continue to harvest on strong customer deliveries, and increase synergies within the business line when they turn bigger. There is increased usage of the consultants also across borders. So we are very happy to see that besides a very strong top-line growth, we can also continue the growth on the business line contribution. Security, as you can see, we probably, we will definitely conclude we are not 100% as expected, the first nine months, but we have initiated different activities to improve profitability for the coming year.
And, they have been working hard on the integration and getting part of the Columbus family as well. But, I know that there is 100% focus on the bottom line and profitability from 2024. So overall, we are very satisfied with the development and contribution from our business lines, seeming light on as Søren mentioned, a tough year, some headwind on the exchange rate challenges, and we, of course, continue to invest in our business line as well, when they grow. So all in all, a strong and improved development in our business line contribution margins. All right. Let's move to the next slide. That is two of our other KPIs that we have been reporting on during the year.
Efficiency, not that I want to mention much here. We have seen a slight take-up of 2 percentage points, and people working in the consulting industry know that the higher you get, the more difficult it is to grow with high percentages, at least to make sure that you have happy and efficient and strong consultants. But we are still growing. We are not at the end, but it's a continuous work to make sure that we have the right scale and the right number of people across our markets to deliver the right efficiency level. Recurring revenue, we are running around 13%, I believe it was around 14% last year, so more or less the same.
It's still a high focus for us to make sure that we have a good, stable base of recurring revenue. It's a focus area to continue to strengthen our Care business, and we do start to see some progress that we certainly will hope will come, and we will talk a bit more about during 2024. All right, the last slide on my list is the market unit growth. Remember that we don't measure profitability and market units, only the top line to see how it is going in our different countries. And again, I will talk about the development in constant currencies, as that give the most clean picture of the underlying activity in the market.
Hopefully, we'll start to see a more stabilized exchange rates within our markets. We can drop these constant currency numbers as well. But let's see how it works out. Sweden is our largest market, around 36% of the total revenue. Came out of the quarter with 18% growth in constant currencies. And this is, as mentioned before, clearly to our M3 business that has really come back on track in the latter end of 2023. And then for the full year, 15% organic growth in Sweden, which we are very happy to see. And we really get a bigger and bigger foothold in Sweden in all our different business lines.
Denmark is growing fast as well, 31%, ICY contributed with 11. Oh, sorry, 35% actually in the quarter, and 31% for the full year. And without ICY for the full year, it was 19% growth, which is also a very strong achievement in the Danish markets. And we definitely gain a lot of market share each quarter at the moment. The development in Q4 in Norway was less impressive. As you can see, minus 6% for the full year, basically flat or 1% growth. We have definitely seen some headwind up there in our different business lines, and we are working hard to regain the momentum in 2024.
But this flat development is also coming on two to three years, very strong growth, before 2023. UK continues to grow fast. It's a huge market. We are a big player if you look at the revenue yet, but we are really gaining market share and been growing for a quarter with 66%. The quarter in the smaller markets can, of course, vary a lot depending on closure and some major project coming in and out. But still, if you look at the full year, we see a very strong growth of 66%. And I think this is something that we will hopefully continue to see going forward as well. US, smaller market, we mentioned, talked about it before.
It's still a key market for us. We do see a lot of activity there, and we are coming out with a slight growth of 5% for the year, which we are happy to see as they also have some headwind over there. So overall, besides Norway, which is not bad but flattish, it's a strong growth and a balanced growth across our markets, and I think this is a very healthy sign for us in 2023. So that was all- No, sorry. I actually have the ESG.
We have that each year now, and I think it's fair to say it's getting more and more important, and that we actually have spent quite some time on the report this year and to prepare for the 2024 CSRD compliant reportings that we are gearing up to. Overall, I think we are making a lot of progress within the area, both internally, where we are looking at our double materiality assessment, and where we also try to look at our business in with new glasses on and how we should report and where we actually impact the different areas within the CSRD framework.
But also as important externally as we do advise, and we do know a lot about numbers and collecting of numbers with our clients, and we have some different offerings that we are working on and did initiate with some of our customers to see how we can support them in this area. On the social aspect, our gender distribution, which we have a high focus on, we know the industry is not known for having too many women, but we are working on it, and we have seen a flat development. I think we are more or less in line with the industry.
In 2022, we made some initiatives within diversity and inclusion, such as introducing a new diversity, equity, and inclusion policy, new courses in our Columbus Academy, and we also launched a Woman Inspirational Network, set up. But our overall goal is to attract more women. We definitely see a big benefit of getting that up to a more equal setup, and only for Columbus, but also for the industry. Our employee satisfaction for the year was 50% or +50, compared to +47 last year. This is an all-time high and general, and that's what it says, is we have happy employees.
We try to keep a balanced setup in the way we work and the way we operate, and that gives a positive response on that one. On the attrition and sickness and absence, our attrition and sickness and absence have decreased. Our attrition was 17% in 2023, down from 25% in 2022, and the sickness was 2.15%, which is, in general, a very low number as well. So, all in all, I think we have good progress in our ESG matrix. We continue to work hard with them. There is also new ground for us in some areas, but we are progressing very well. So now I'll give the word over to Søren again.
Super. Thank you very much, Brian. And I will give you a very short strategy update on New Heights. Mainly, if some of you haven't been able to yet see our presentation of the new strategy, and also just go into some operational milestones that we've set for the year of 2024. But just going into the top line of the New Heights strategy, we launched it in November 2023. And we have the financial ambition to deliver a compounded annual growth rate of 10%, which is actually around the level we are already operating at, slightly lower, and improve over the three years our EBITDA margin to 15%. Very short comment on the 10%.
It takes into reference that we see a market where the market growth has significantly slowed down already this year. So we continue to take market share, but we feel it's a prudent growth number to have a sustainable growth number for the three-year period. So let's go to the next slide to cover the four strategic initiatives that will drive growth. So in the strategy, we have these four strategic bets to drive growth in the coming three years. The first one is that we aim to strengthen our market position by harvesting the benefits of the new acquisitions and potential coming acquisitions into high growth services. Last year, we did expand into the security market with the acquisition of ICY Security.
In January, we invested in extending our office offerings within digital commerce with the acquisition of Endless Gain, which is primarily based in the UK and in India. Furthermore, we might invest in our own expansion into areas by hiring new profiles and building new expertise areas ourselves. The second one, we're expanding in terms of sector. We had three focus sectors before: manufacturing, retail, food and beverage, which has served us very well to be super focused. We feel it's now time for us to add a fourth sector vertical, and that will be life science, and has already commenced. Perhaps it's fair to say we already started a little bit in 2023, so we already have a pretty big number of customers within that sector.
The third one, we're going to accelerate our position in the what we now call the Evolve services. This is what we named, Care before, and these are the ones that you will see as the ones that have a recurring revenue. It has grown in 2023, but it grows slower than our overall consulting business, and we have some initiatives coming up to bolster that. We would like to see that having a slightly bigger share of overall revenues than what we see today. So there's investment going into that. And finally, we have initiated the EBITDA15 program, which has a number of activities that will see us improve EBITDA margin on our journey towards the ultimate goal of a margin of 15% in 2026.
So that's the overall one. Then, moving to the next slide, a couple of milestones. Just to show you here, yeah, in January, we did reach our first milestone. We got in New Heights with the acquisition of Endless Gain. Very short on what they do. They fit into our digital commerce space, and they specialize in something which you can call conversion rate optimization. So it's basically optimizing e-commerce user interfaces for a better experience and ultimately for our customers a higher sales conversion. So we're very happy to have them on board, and we're in full swing of integration.
They're very strong in the U.K., but we would like to see them expand their offerings into Scandinavia, where we are quite strong on the commerce side. Yes, and go to the next slide, please. So, the milestones summarized for 2024, life science is a new market for us with great synergies to our existing businesses. And our ambition is to build a strong market position in this sector vertical or this market seen as sector vertical. Our market unit in Sweden, and also in particular, I would say our business line Dynamics, are in full swing and also leading internally in terms of establishing themselves in this new industry vertical for us.
Also, in 2023, we launched a global AI innovation program with the purpose of exploring new growth potential and increasing business efficiency for our customers. So it's essentially very much about all the new AI functionality embedded in the big platforms they've invested in. It's being made available to them. And our role is to make sure they see a benefit for it. That's the shortest I can say about it. In terms of the EBITDA 15 program, if we try to sort of... What are the four main streams, simplified, we will continue to focus on efficiency, although as I said before, we've reached a pretty decent level. There is still some benefit for us to gain from this one.
We will further rebalance a little bit to our service centers, and by service centers, we mean our centers in India, in Poland, in the Czech Republic, and in Chile, which have delivered very, very high quality, and we can make better use of them going forward. We continue to have a focus on, I would say, sort of general commercial excellence, expertise in the company, which is about. For instance, Brian was expanding on the currency issue. We need to have that better mirrored in our contracts to rebalance the risk of currency and other matters for that. And then I would say the last one is a more generic one, leveraging our Columbus business model.
This is something we've already seen great benefit from, but it's more like a maturity journey in terms of making best use of experts, resources across the borders, cross-sell potentials that will, will, will drive down overall sales costs, et cetera. So that's several streams that we have embedded into this one for now. This is a very compressed run-through, and I hope you will have time to see the full strategy unfolded from previous presentations. And then I think we should move to the outlook for 2024. And I have to go through this statement before I get to it. So here goes. The outlook is subject to the general uncertainties in our markets, such as the current macro economic conditions, higher than normal ex...
Exchange rate volatility and continuous geopolitical situation that may impact the general business environment. Although we continue to see a strong demand for our digital advisory and services, we do anticipate that some reluctance in IT investments and the need to divide projects up into smaller bites, if we say smaller phases, will continue throughout 2024. If the general uncertainties worsen during 2024, it may impact the group's growth and margin negatively. Then, based on the financial performance in 2023 and the current order book, as well as pipeline, and forecast, our full year guidance for 2024 is as follows: For the organic revenue, we guide a growth of 8%-10%, and for the EBITDA margin percentage, we guide 9%-10%. That concludes the presentation.
I think we're already a little bit short on time, so we will go straight to questions, and provide our answers to them.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. If you wish to ask your question via the webcast, please type it into the box and click Submit. Please stand by. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. As there are no questions on the phone line, I would now like to hand over for questions on the webcast.
Mm-hmm. Okay, and at the moment, we show no questions. Just give it 10 seconds. All right. Thank you, everybody, for joining, and sorry for keeping you six minutes over time. We'll adjust for our next run-through. Michael is asking us here: Have you seen any slowdown in the business in the first month, or, yeah, I guess that would be months, for January and February of this year, that's in your guidance? So no, we have not seen a slowdown in the first two months of the year. So our guidance should be seen in a full year perspective that we continue to keep a very close eye on, as I said before, how geopolitical turmoil and any macroeconomic developments will affect our customers.
But in terms of our current activity level, our current pipeline, and our current order book, we have not seen a slowdown yet. Thank you. All right, and we end on that. Thank you very much. Hope to speak to you again as we present the first quarter results, which will be about two months from now. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.