Thank you for joining today's webcast, where we will be presenting our financial results for 2024 and also have a look at the Q4 results in isolation. I am Søren Krogh Knudsen. I'm the CEO and President of Columbus, and I'm joined by Brian Iversen, our Group CFO, to help me present the results. I will start going through financial highlights and some operational highlights, then Brian will take over for a more detailed run-through of the financial results. At the end, we'll have time for a brief Q&A session as well. Let's start with the financial highlights. First, regarding our revenue, we've achieved what we consider relatively strong revenue growth.
The reason we call it relatively strong at 8% is that some of the markets we operate on, we have seen a bit of a downward trend that pertains particularly to the Swedish and the Norwegian market, but other markets have—other geographical markets have performed extremely well. All in all, leading to an 8% growth, 7% of that organic growth. We saw a 30% increase in our EBITDA, taking us to DKK 153 million vs DKK 118 million in 2023. That results in a margin of 9.2%, which is up from 7.6% in 2023. Our profit before tax increased by 47% to DKK 58 million, and that's mainly arising from improved operations and less net financial items as well.
The cash flow from operations increased by DKK 59 million, or 77%, compared to 2023, and that's mainly due to this continued focus that we've been having over the past years on a more commercial mindset, how we drive the business, and also an optimization of our working capital. Let's go to the next slide. The next one again, thank you. I will just very briefly comment on this strategic review because I suspect some of you would like for us to comment. It's still going to be very limited what we can say about this. To point one, we're following the plan we set out. As you can imagine, it's fairly structured, fairly detailed. It's a stage-gate plan, and we are proceeding exactly according to the plan we set out. Of course, we're aiming to finish this as quickly as possible.
However, we will absolutely take the necessary time to complete all the stages of the review to the fullest extent, and that's the best I can say. In terms of where we are on this plan, they all look pretty similar. We are still in the early stages of engagement with interested parties, so I can say there's still some stage- gates for us to pass through. We will come back, of course, with more information when the time is right for that. Going to the next one, I would like you to follow me through this sort of a brief review on how the New Heights is finding its way into Columbus. We're going to go through these four sections in the Blue Overlay.
First one is just revisiting all the assumptions we had when we defined the New Heights strategy to check if they're still broadly aligned with the reality we operate in. We did foresee already back in 2023 when we did the strategy work that the next three years would be marked by high uncertainty in the markets, and we also foresaw a rather flattish development in terms of market growth, so a marked decline in market growth compared to the previous years. We knew we had to be a bit more nimble, not front-load too much cost and investments to be able to adjust to these conditions. We were already at that point sort of fairly stabilized, and we've consolidated some things. That section has proven to be pretty accurate in terms of what we're experiencing today.
Strategy was then set out as a Growth Excellence strategy, meaning really doubling down on the things that were working in the Focus 23 strategy, taking on board a few select new areas that we wanted to double down on, and then keep our growth momentum in this slightly more restrained market, and then work a lot on our bottom line improving, which is also exactly what is happening. That takes us to the third section, which is sort of how has the experience been in the first year. Markets have indeed developed at this mixed pace, so we are very, very focused on continuously optimizing pockets of operations because they all experience different market conditions at different times. We are very attentive to optimizing down on a sort of sub main business unit scale. We cannot just look at the main business units.
We really have to look at each business unit in each geography to find the best plan. We've taken some actions to stay financially fit. I'll just come back to them on the next page, some of them. Overall, we're seeing good progress on all our strategic initiatives. For the future, we still maintain our ambition with the strategy, the 10% year-on-year organic growth , 15% EBITDA margin by 2026. In terms of the revenue, especially the revenue, of course, we would like to see some improvement in market conditions, especially I would say on the Swedish market is going to have a big impact on us. Yeah. With regards to all this, I would say, let's say geopolitical and also to some extent macroeconomic uncertainty, we continue to monitor this very closely and talk to our clients about it, and we'll make the necessary adjustments accordingly.
Let's go to the next one. Brief highlights about some of the things that we've achieved in our first year of the New Heights Operation. We said we would establish the Life Science as a standalone industry vertical, which we've done. We're seeing really good progress there. New customers coming in. I believe we have a 20—we'll come back to that point—22% revenue growth. So we're very pleased with that, and we will certainly continue with that. Accelerated BOLD is around the investments in our maintenance, optimization, integration, and innovation ongoing agreements with customers, which typically take over when we don't have big projects. This has also grown faster than the rest of the business on average, which is what we want to see.
We've had to conduct last year also a small performance exercise to right-size certain parts of the business in certain geographies, as we talked about. We reorganized our Digital Commerce area to reflect these new circumstances. We also had to restructure our security to move it closer to our core business units, which we've done. We finalized now the integration of Endless Gain, the acquisition we did within CRO. We have launched an investment program into generative AI mobilization across our own business, but also towards our customers, which is getting a lot of publicity internally here with us and helping us stay up to the latest developments.
Further strengthened our leadership, onboarded a new CPO and a new Chief Marketing Officer, made a change also in terms of the Swedish leadership team, which is working well, and also doubled down on the existing industry expertise forums that we have for our three verticals already, and the fourth now being Life Science to make sure we capture and we use that knowledge systemically when we go to market. That is a little potpourri on last year. I have one more. Before we go to you, Brian, I just wanted to inform you that we have done a further change of how our operating model works. We have merged two business lines. One is the Dynamics business line, previously focused on Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations , but also Business Central.
We had a separate line for what we call CXE, the more frontline-oriented platform. That would be CRM, it could be field service, Membership Portals, etc. We have merged them for the three reasons I have listed underneath. We see a big trend primarily from Microsoft to merge the two technologies more and more, driving operational and architectural synergies. We experience also when we go to market that it is harder and harder to separate our go-to-market efforts. We prefer to take this to market collectively. We also expect some operational synergies from running them as one team. That has been done operationally. I believe from next time we report, Brian, they will be consolidated in the reporting.
Yes. Yes. Correct.
Good. You might ask, what about the parts of CXE that do not pertain to Microsoft? First of all, I would say that this was to 90% a Microsoft-based business unit before, and a few of the resources working in other areas will then migrate to that area. It's been a lesser exercise. It's more been in combining the two teams. There are some similar activities going on to build the same sort of capability within our M3 team. Yeah. Over to you, Brian.
Yes. Thank you, Søren. Let's first have a brief view on our Q4 numbers. Here we actually saw a relatively flat development in our revenue, 1%. Again, Dynamics had a smaller growth of 2%, and M3 ended with a small decline of 2 percentage points. We did start to see some flattening in the activity at the end of 2024. If we look into the markets, it was mainly Sweden and Norway, which we also have seen in previous quarters where we saw some headwind and some slowdown in activity. Although we have a lot of interest from our customers, there is some postponement and some delays in decision-making, of course, due to the general market conditions overall. Denmark, U.K., and U.S. continued a strong growth, which double- digits actually, also in Q4, which we are very happy about.
We have some very strong teams that are really pushing and continuing a good trend in these markets. Bottom line-wise, EBITDA also fairly flat compared to the same quarter last year, or a small decrease of 5% points if you take it into the 40 compared to the 38 million that we ended up with. As I mentioned, we see a smaller slowdown in activity. We have also adjusted our FTEs. If you look carefully in our report, we actually see a small decline in our average full-time employee of 4%, or around 50 people, if we take it average over the two quarters. That is, of course, as Søren also mentioned, we continuously look at the markets, the activity, and stay agile and align our organization to the activity as good as possible because that is, of course, the key point in a consulting business.
Efficiency-wise, ended at 62%, flattish. Some of you would remember that we started a bit slow in the beginning of the year compared to 2023, but now we are on par for the fourth quarter here. Not that we are fully on full expectations or expectations, but still a slight improvement. Good. That is two short updates on Q4. Let us then go back to the full year, 2024, and have a look at the business line growth or revenue. Here we see that our main business line, or the biggest one, Dynamics, had a solid and very strong 11% growth during 2024. They continued. Again, Denmark and U.K. were really two markets that took off and continued the strong growth pattern. M3, 6% growth, accepted. They had a very good first half in 2024. Then they see a lot of, let us say, change in major projects.
Some were ending, and a new is starting up, which unfortunately goes a bit slower than anticipated sometimes, also in the current market. They ended up with a fine 6% growth. Digital Commerce, - 8%. We have talked a lot about it. They had a major restructuring, and they are also heavy into the retail market in Sweden, which is basically two minuses. Sweden is a tough market, and the retail on top of that. Therefore, they ended up on a low or decline. Again, our strategic business line, Data, AI, and CXE continue the double-digit growth, which we are very happy about and expect to continue also in the coming years. Good. Let's move to the next slide, which is the profitability business line, or what we call the contribution margin, the way we measure it also internally.
Again, Dynamics, our biggest machine, is delivering a nice increase from 26% to 27% contribution margin. That means a lot, also depending on the size, as you can see also from the graph here. M3, flat development. They struggle a bit when they are changing bigger contracts. You do tend to see some people sitting a bit longer on the bench than you would like. On the other hand, it is a super good consultant, and you would like to keep them for the longer run. We do also look into some exciting contracts coming up the coming quarters. Digital Commerce, yeah, we have been through that the past quarters as well, severe hit. We also had some heavy restructuring costs in that one. They declined around 40-45 people over the year, and that unfortunately do take some cost with.
Data, and AI, and CXE, slight decline in profitability for the full year. Again, it's a smaller business line. If you invest a bit and you do spend some more time on development and sales, it has a pretty high impact on the bottom line percentage. It is also something that we see, and as you saw, the heavy growth is continuing. For us, that is a key factor for these two strategic business lines. Yes. Other local businesses, primarily our EEM or Document Handling business, that had a good uptake and also a much sharper focus on profitability in the business that definitely showed off in 2024 compared to last year. Good. Let's have a look, as we normally do, how did it go in the market units or the various countries that we are in.
As we have mentioned a few times, there is still some headwind out there. Sweden declined by 9% over the year. Of course, that does hit us as it is by far our biggest market. On the other hand, Denmark and the U.K. continued with strong growth, gaining market share and really outcompeting some of our good colleagues in the market. We are happy to see that. Again, here, Dynamics is one of the bigger ones that is impacting this strong growth. Norway ended on a fairly flat note. If you adjust for FX, it is a smaller part locally this year. We have a sharp focus on that. Norway, as such, also saw some difficult conditions. The U.S. is flat, down in the smaller markets, and the same with our other smaller markets like Germany, where we primarily do have some minor business there. Good.
I have now, it's the full year, brought in an extra KPI slide. Something that we pay a lot of attention to internally in the business is cash. I learned once that cash is king, and I try to massage that into the organization here. We do see some growth, nice growth in our cash flow from operation. It's continued to grow, should, with improved operations and EBITDA. It should fall down to the cash and into the bank account. That is also what we see and what you can see from our balance sheet eventually. The other KPI that is a key point for us and actually also a strategic pillar is our enabling functions cost. The cost should be measured in % of revenue.
One of our main points is that that has to or should dilute over time because we do believe we have a very strong, well-functioned back office setup here. I mean, facility, finance, marketing, HR, IT, group function. That is definitely set up to be able to handle increased activity, definitely. I'm happy to share that we do see that this is decreasing over the past years that we have started to look at that this way. All right. My last slide, sustainability update. There is a lot of nice opinion about that. We are within the CSRD. Let's say we are sized that we have to report according to the new CSRD rules. You will see that in our annual accounts or annual report. We have 56 pages, I think we have, which we are very proud of presenting.
There has been a lot of work going into that. We have also been learning a lot, to be fair. Overall, we see ourselves as that we enable sustainable impact for our customers. That is where we by far have the biggest contribution to this. Of course, internally, areas like diverse and talented culture, ensuring responsible business conduct is key for a consulting business. That is also not something new. You will see in previous annual reports that is what we have been reporting on and are focusing on to make sure that we have happy employees, that we have the right culture, the right setup, and the right opportunities among our colleagues and countries. Yeah. I will not go further into that. We could probably spend an hour or two, not myself, but somebody who could help me in this area.
Let's leave it for that for now. Good. I'll give back to you, Søren.
Yeah. Great. That leaves just the outlook before we commence the Q&A session. If you have any questions, you can start to prepare them. Exactly as it says, based on the financial performance in 2024 and the current order book, our pipeline forecast, we maintain our full-year guidance for 2024. We issued that already earlier. The outlook is as follows. For the organic revenue growth, we guide 7% to 9%. The EBITDA margin, 10% to 12%. You can see on the right side, this should be seen based on the 2024 performance, which was standing at 7% for the organic growth and 9.2% for the EBITDA margin. With that, we would go to the questions and answer session.
Thank you.
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Yeah. I do not see any questions so far. Just give it a few more seconds.
The report is also 161 pages.
There is, let's just say, a lot of information in there for people who have an hour or two in an evening, boring.
Yeah. We got a question here. Given the slightly slow development in Q4, what makes you confident that you can grow 7% to 9% in 2025? How has 2025 started, and how much visibility do we have for the rest of the year? Okay. Great question. Let me start by talking to what gives us a bit of confidence for the new year. I think a good way to start would just be to look at some of those growth-driving units we saw last year, particularly the U.K., which continues to deliver good growth for us.
We also see a strong, I would say, in terms of how much visibility we have, we also have a pretty strong bottom, if I can say, sort of a guaranteed bottom performance that will give us some confidence in the year. In terms of upside potential, Brian was talking to the M3 business unit that achieved 6% growth last year. You tried to describe they came into last year strong. Then we had some slower quarters, and then we had a pretty stark intake of new orders in Q4. We are expecting some upside potential from the M3 business unit. We are also working a lot on strengthening pipeline further in the Dynamics area. These would be some of the sort of highlights of what can make the impact.
I think you're right to point out that if Q4 is slow, Q1 is not likely to start markedly different. We are very attentive to sort of slowly achieving this pickup in Q1 and then building on that momentum in Q2, Q3, and Q4 of the year. Another thing to keep an eye on, I would say, is sort of outside of Columbus, but that we monitor closely, and that is the activity level of the Swedish economy, which just seems to be improving. We've now seen five rate cuts, five consecutive rate cuts. We're seeing GDP numbers improve slightly, PMI numbers improve slightly.
I don't think we're out of the woods yet, but there are some indicators, both externally but also internally from Columbus, the way our pipeline looks for Sweden, that indicates that in the later quarters of the year, we could see a pickup in Swedish activity level from Columbus. Thank you. I think the Sweden one I just answered towards the end there. On Norway, I would also say we expect an improvement. We didn't see such a stark decline in Norway in 2024. It should be said that Columbus had very, very strong growth in Norway in 2022 and in 2023. We kind of plateaued a little bit in 2024, maybe not so much just because of the market, although the market was also hit in Norway. We continue to invest a lot in winning new contracts in Norway.
Hopefully, we can also achieve an improvement there. Okay. Thank you very much. Yes. What did they say? Stay tuned for further news from our side. We'll let you know as soon as we have something to report. Thank you very much for joining the call.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.