Good day, and welcome to the Columbus Interim Report Q1 2025 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listening-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask questions during the session, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone keypad, and you should hear an automated message advising you that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Alternatively, you may submit questions via the webcast. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand you over to your speaker of today, Søren Krogh Knudsen. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you very much, Peter, and good afternoon to all of you. Welcome to our Q1 financial results, uh, results report. Today is slightly different from those that join us on a regular basis. I'm, I'm in the U.S., so the technical setup we're using today differs a little bit from our normal one, but I think this will, this will work just fine, and we will, we'll go through it in, in the usual way. As always, I'm joined in by Brian, our CFO, who sits in Copenhagen today, and he will take us through parts of the presentation as well. Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A session, as the present, uh, as the webcast supervisor said. That will come at the end of the conference. Let's please go to slide four, where I will start with some of the commenting on some of the financial highlights.
In Q1, revenue ended with a slight decline, mainly driven by continuous challenging conditions in the Nordic market, whereas the U.K. and, as you'll see later on, also the U.S., were on a positive trend, the U.K. being up 17% in the quarter and is one of our big markets. EBITDA increased by 32% when we adjust for the extraordinary gain or income of DKK 20 million from the one M3CS legal case we had in Q1 last year. I think this confirms the robustness of our Columbus strategy and our business model, as well as our EBITDA 15 plan. This means that the EBITDA margin was at 10% compared to 7.9% in Q1 2024, again, when adjusted for the M3CS legal case.
The contribution or the raw performance of the business, if you will, increased by 2 percentage points, to 25% in Q1 this year, compared to 23% in Q1 last year. This is primarily due to our improved project execution and, I would say, a fairly strong cost discipline, which we've exercised in the past quarters. The cash flow from operations decreased by 27%. Adjusted for the extraordinary gain in Q1 2024, the cash flow actually improved by 3 million in Q1, going to DKK 17 million in Q1 of 2025, which, again, is underpinning the soundness of the business. I would like to go to slide number six, if you can just confirm that. Good.
Three things to comment on: the earnings, quality, and then something that drives our ability to generate growth onwards, and then finally a comment on the strategic revenue. I think it's clear from the results that we have been able to continue our journey towards the EBITDA 15, despite a relatively flat development of our top line. This is driven by several factors. As I said on the previous slides, the project execution is a key part of that, but also the overall efficiency, which is sort of the vocabulary we use to describe how much of our delivery capacity we're able to deploy to customers, but also the price point we sell that at. We are very content with the development of these points.
That leads me to number two, which is what is also necessary to drive our future growth. If you look to the graph on the right on the slide, you'll be able to see sort of in indicative terms that what we would describe as a hesitant market in the past 15 months has resulted in a really cautious approach to the workforce. We've seen a flat to slightly declining size of headcount in our organization. We see the bottom point of that development now, and we are starting to add size to the organization again. We're going to do that whilst we still maintain the high efficiency level and the same price point, just before, those being the three key indicators that we look for.
What leads us to this decision about adding growth to the organization is a combination of the current backlog that we're working against, but also the sales pipeline, where we are starting to see some pickup in some of the markets that have not developed favorably in the past quarters. The turn, as indicated by the lower part of that slide, is not going to come super drastically, but more like a groundswell where we start to add slowly to selected area of the business and integrate that, deploy that towards the customers, and then gradually gaining pace as we go through it. The final point, there's already been a question also I could see about the strategic review.
There is not so much we can comment on at the present time, just to say that we are going carefully through that process as we described from the very outset, evaluating both the long term, but of course also the consideration offered. I think we as the executive team are managing that just fine, whilst still being very focused on executing the day-to-day operations.
With that, I would like to hand over to you, Brian, and then I will be available for questions towards the end of the call.
Thank you, Søren. Let's move into the finances a bit more detailed, if we can have slide eight, the service revenue per business line. As Søren mentioned, we experienced a slight decrease in Q1, and if we see the split on the slide here, Dynamics, which is by far the biggest business line, actually had a flat to -2% slowdown in revenue, quarter over quarter. It's basically the Norwegian market saw a slowdown within the Dynamics business, and Denmark came out fairly flat.
M3 had a slightly bigger decline of 9% compared to the same quarter last year, primarily because we saw over the year, and we also spoke to that during last year, they shifted some major project, or finalized some major projects last year in Q1, which then ended pretty strong, and then saw the shift over some quarters and is slowly regaining momentum on new and also very big projects that start up. This project process can take some quarters, actually, even though we would love them to jump from the one to the others, but it's not always like that. Digital Commerce, also mentioned earlier, we saw a major restructuring last year. They are slowly recovering, still seeing a decline on top line.
We also adjusted the capacity significantly during last year, but we actually do start to see some pickup. One of our key points here is also to regain the profitability in the business. As you remember from last year, they were pretty low, almost at zero compared to that. Still, they declined. They are also heavily in Sweden and the retail market, which is basically to hit areas, both Sweden and the Swedish economy in general, and then the retail up there. Finally, Data and AI continue a strong growth, 28% in the quarter. Basically all over we see a solid request, and here we are looking for more people to support the growth and the request that we get within this area.
It's, it's, looks very positive, although on a minor, minor size than our other businesses. Good. Let's move to the contribution margin slide, slide nine. That's where we look at what is then the profitability in our different business lines. I think here, as Søren also mentioned, we move combined for all business line, we increase the profitability from 23% - 25%. That's what we call the contribution margin, which is a very strong move. Also, what we have been working really hard to look at the bottom line and make sure that we have a profitable setup. If we look on each business line, Dynamics 365, which is the new name since they merged with the, or we merged them with our CXE business, they saw a slight uptake of 1%, which is basically not a slide.
That is a lot of work in just moving this 1% in average up to 20, no, yeah, 26%. We are very happy with that development in a market where they do see some headwind on the top line. M3 declined with 1%. As I mentioned before, they had a very strong quarter back in 2024. If you remember, the full year, that made 19%, so we are happy that they sort of regained the momentum and are back in an acceptable level on the contribution margin. Digital Commerce, 11%, same as last year. Although they are up compared to full year last year, we do see some regaining in profitability in this business line after the major restructuring we made during last year.
Finally, Data and AI, probably a very bad quarter to, or, or at least a good increase of 21%, but they also had some headwind in Q1 last year. I would not celebrate that as, even though it looks very impressive, they are just up on a level on the + 20% that we would expect them to be on. Overall, a strong uptake in our contribution margin, which is the basis of the uptake you have seen in the EBITDA margin. This is where the bulk part of the business, the cost, and the management lies. We are very happy to see that, especially when this has been one of our key focus areas the past quarters in this turbulent market. Good. Let's move to the next slide.
That is slide 10, market units. We are not as such measure our market unit on profitability. We measure that on our business lines, as mentioned earlier, but still we look at how it is going in the different geographies we are in. Sweden, a decline of 11%, the biggest one, from DKK 148 million - DKK 131 million revenue in the quarter. Again, we continue to see some uncertainty, some hesitance from our major customers in starting. We do not feel like they are closing or abandoning projects or whatsoever, but many of our customers need to think twice, just wait and see if there is something new around the corner and so on. Eventually they do tend to start maybe with a bit smaller bites in the first round, but still it is moving. We follow that very closely.
Every time we ask our businesses how's it going, what does it look like, there is some positive sign, but still in the figure for the quarter, it's - 11%. Denmark, a decline of 6%, actually for the first time in many quarters, slides, slowdown here. Again, roughly the same activity, but a small decline over the quarter. U.K. continue to move upwards, a + 17%, as Søren also mentioned. We have a very strong base and then consultants over there. They are also extremely good in involving rest of the delivery setup we have from India, especially in some of the major projects. We are happy to see that. They continue on their good momentum.
Norway is also hit like Sweden, with a lot of nervousness up there, and reduced the decline of 18%. U.S., although a smaller amount, we are happy to see that they are slowly turning over there and as a 50% increase, 9 million still, but it's good to see. We expect them to have hit some kind of a button in the revenue side. You might remember that there was a slow decline during the past years, but they also seem to regain some momentum over there. Overall, 2% decline in the quarter, which is okay in the tough market out there, but we also certainly expect that to slightly turn the coming months. Good. I will just move to the outlook slide that is slide 12.
Very briefly, we maintain our full-year guidance, organic growth of 7%-9%, and our EBITDA margin expectations or guidance of 10%-12%. We are of course in the current market, and then we also look at how's it going and our colleagues out there, et c, monitoring that very closely and then have also increased the constant follow-up on our pipeline, our projects, and how's it going. We still have a trust in that, so we keep the current outlook. Yes, I believe that's all from my end. It is over to questions if there is any. To both Søren and I, Søren is still on.
Thank you very much. At this time we're gonna conduct a question- and- answer session. As a reminder, if you want to ask a question from the phone, you need to press star one one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. If you wish to ask questions from the web, please do so now. We currently do not have any questions from the phone conference at the moment, so I'm gonna hand it back to Søren and see if there's any questions from the web.
Okay. Thank you very much. I'll just give it a second here. So far I'm not showing any questions. I do appreciate we had the one from the beginning regarding the strategic review, but at present time there's no further information to be shared on that. All right. With that, I think we'll close the call down here. It's 4:20 where I am in the U.S., so it's been a good early start. Just see if there was one question coming in here. Can you give an estimate, okay. So there's one question that has just come in, which is, can you give an estimate of the Easter effects on the margins?
So, just to explain that question to everybody, that means that the Easter alternates between being part of Q1 results or Q2 every year for all consult, well, for all companies, I guess. This year it was part of the, Easter hits Q2, so the quarter that we're currently working in and is not in the Q1 results. That means, to Michael's question, that Q1 is positively impacted by the Easter effect. From a margin perspective, we don't really do a detailed calculation on that. It's roughly two working days. Brian, can you comment on, do you have an estimate on that?
Yeah, not a specific number, but I can say that for the full quarter, we had one day more because we also have to take into consideration how the new year ends. The quarter is not two, but one day. The month starts with two. I would say it's minor. It's minor. We cannot blame this day for a big chunk. You are down to these details where you could bring in other pluses and minuses, extraordinary terms.
Mm-hmm.
Of course it will hit us again in Q2, somehow, the one day or whatever holidays there is. For the full year, for the half year, it's a plus and minus.
Yeah. Okay. We have a question from Jonathan Sharp here. The full year guidance implies a pickup in growth. What visibility do you have on improving demand? Okay. Let me try to talk a little bit to that one. Clearly we do have some visibility of that now. As I am in the U.S. now, I will start here. We have a very good visibility of our U.S. business compared to that. It is a relatively small business unit. As you could see from before, we saw a 50% uptick quarter over quarter in this quarter. We have closed some contracts that have not yet gone into full delivery, which gives us a positive indication on the U.S.
From a, I'll say from a, from an M3 business division, the second largest business division, as Brian was just talking to before, we have also seen a very strong pipeline, and many of them have now been signed and will, during Q2 and Q3, Q4, go into full delivery mode. Dynamics, we are seeing a stronger pipeline in some of the countries. I would say, particularly Sweden as a country where we have developed a strong pipeline. We still need to close some of them, but they are in the final stage. The final one I'll just mention is the commerce one, which has been one of the harder hit business units for some quarters now. As Brian was saying before, we've done a capacity right sizing of that business unit late last year.
Again, as Brian was saying, it's very driven by the Swedish economy and by Swedish retail in particular. We are seeing a big uptick in some of the pipeline and sales activities we have there. That's some of the visibility we have now in combination with the current stock of work and the current business performance that's measured by efficiency, which has sort of been crawling up slowly in the last two months . Okay. I show no further questions. With that, I would like to thank you all for joining us, and we will be back with the Q2 results. If we have anything to share earlier, we will of course do that. Sorry, did we show one last question in the start of Q2? All right.
We show one last question, which I will just cover here. Can the start of Q2 reassure you that Columbus can still grow by at least 7% for the full year? We have obviously taken the start of Q2 into consideration when presenting these results. I do not think I can answer just yes to that question. It also takes, of course, a successful Q3 and Q4 to deliver on those results. Okay. Good. Thank you very much for joining, and looking forward to seeing you or talking to you again when we present results next time. Thank you.
Thank you. So this concludes today's conference call. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect.