Columbus. Today's topic is, of course, the financial results you released yesterday. There was some pre-announcement and, of course, your guidance for next year. I think we will dig a little bit deeper into the results, what has driven them, and, of course, the expectations for next year. I will do today's presentation and answer questions in the end of the presentation. You 're joined by CEO Søren Krogh and CFO Brian Iversen. As always, you're very encouraged to ask questions in the box down below. Do it during the presentation, but we will take the main part of the Q&A in the end. For now, I think I will hand the call over to you, Søren.
Thank you very much, Mikael, and thank you to all who have joined. We look forward to taking you through this presentation. I can see we've already received some questions, so I think I'll just head straight into the presentation and aim for creating a few minutes at the back end for those. Just before we start, I would like to point out the disclaimer here that we've signed a disclaimer about forward-looking statements. Just take a second to familiarize. As Mikael said, it's Brian and myself that will take you through the presentation. I will just go through a few financial and operational highlights first, then Brian will dig a bit more into the details. We cover a little bit on ESG. We will have a section quickly on the guidance, and then it's over to Q&A.
If we look at the financial highlights for 2024, we saw a relatively strong revenue growth, especially compared to how the market developed that we operate in. We did see some challenging conditions, in particularly Sweden and Norway, where the market did not develop so favorably. Despite that, we achieved 8% all-up revenue growth, 7% of that being organic. We saw a 30% increase in EBITDA, which took us to DKK 153 million, up from DKK 118 million in 2023, resulting in a margin percentage of 9.2% versus 7.6% in 2023. Also, profit before tax increased by 47% to DKK 58 million, mainly arising from the improved operations of the business and also less net financial items weighing in.
Our cash flow from operations increased by DKK 59 million, or 77%, compared with 2023, mainly due to our focus on sort of commercial mindset, which means running our core projects at better gross margins and also optimization of our working capital. Again, that follows sort of a trend we've been on for a couple of years now to improve our operational cash flow. Moving on, I will just briefly comment on, very briefly comment on the strategic review. I can see there are also some questions. There is not that much we can say by now. I will actually just take in two of the questions now. We are currently going through the motions, as you would expect, a structured process. As you would also expect, a stage-gate process.
We are still in the, I would say, in the relatively early stages of such a process, engaging with interested parties. One of the questions that came in is that when do we expect to finalize that process? I am not at liberty to comment specifically on that. I can just say, as the CEO of the company, I, of course, have a preference to conduct such an exercise as quickly as absolutely possible because it does take capacity out of my day and people around me, which we need to direct back to the business. We are doing it as quickly as we can, but obviously, it needs to be done absolutely correctly as well, and we need to explore all options. It is that balance. I am pushing for speed, but we are also taking the time required to do it right.
Not really an answer, but it tells you the mindset we have behind it. I'll cover the brief questions about whether the trading window is open. I can just say that we follow all rules and regulations applicable to the scenario that we find ourselves in, and that's all I can say for now. Moving on, a brief temperature check on our strategy implementation of New Heights, 2024 being the first year. I'm going through these four pillars with you. The first one is basically just to double-check whether the assumptions that we set for the strategy when we defined it, whether they are actually turning into reality. You can see here that we were expecting high uncertainty in our market. We certainly see that. We were expecting some sort of flat development. That can go either way. We did see that as well.
We have been taking a little bit of risk off the table in terms of front-loading people, investments as such, running a bit more nimble and a little bit more oriented towards stabilizing and consolidating our business. In order to counter these conditions, we opted for this growth excellence strategy. We thought our previous strategy was quite successful. It had more oomph to give us. We continued, I would say, the vast majority of the components. We slimmed it down somewhat, and we added a few new components, but it is very much a growth excellence. By excellence, I mean really perfecting what we were already doing and then keeping that growth momentum, which we already built back in 2022 and 2023, keeping that growth momentum and now sort of turning more and more attention to improving the bottom line, which is also exactly what is happening.
I think perhaps on external conditions, we did see a little bit more, a little bit starker decline in terms of market growth rates in 2024. The market was certainly a challenge, especially, as I said before, in Sweden, but also Norway. We've taken the necessary actions. We've adjusted organization. We're growing in parts of the business. We've taken a little bit of capacity out where we don't think it was required, or we've grown slower in those areas. Overall, we see progress on all our strategic initiatives in all areas. In terms of the future, the strategic ambition we had for this strategic period remains. 10% growth year- on- year and achieving an exit EBITDA margin of 15% by end of 2026.
Obviously, especially the last couple of months here have brought, again, I would say, sort of additional geopolitical concerns, also some more technical trade tariffs, which we continue to monitor. I would not say we are directly affected by it, but it can have an effect for some of our customers. We keep monitoring that and make necessary adjustments if required. Quick run-through of some of the things that we have done in 2024. We set up the Life Science practice. More formally, we have taken on board a number of new customers, grown some of the ones we had. Life Science grows a bit quicker than the average of the business at 22%. We put a lot of focus in on this Accelerate Evolve. This is the business relationship we have with customers post big projects. It is a different revenue model. It is typically longer contracts.
Also, the evolve part of the business is growing faster than the average of the business, which is exactly what we want to see. I want to do much more of that. Even though it's growing faster now, it needs to grow even faster than the rest of the business. We did, towards the end of the year, just do a right-sizing of certain areas of the business just to adjust to the market conditions. Part of that was also interlinked with the next one, which is the Digital Commerce reorganization. We set that business unit up in a completely different way. They were very exposed to Sweden, very exposed to retail in Sweden, which was one of the harder hit areas. We have really strengthened the business development part of that and how we're set up.
We're starting to see some progress also on the Swedish market, which is important for us. We integrated and restructured the security business that we bought. We've learned a lot from buying that business. It was more difficult than what we expected in the beginning to integrate that with the offering. It now sits really well within our Dynamics business, and we're seeing good traction on that. We had another integration of an acquired business, Endless Gain. That one was actually pretty straightforward, and we finalized that one now, and it's given us additional competence that we didn't have before. That was actually fairly straightforward, and we're very happy we conducted that.
We have a lot of mobilization going around, as you can expect, from AI, generative AI, not just generative, actually, which is mainly related, I would say, at present time, understanding and building expertise within Columbus on the offerings coming out of our big software vendors. They are being made available at a very great speed to our customers, but it's not easy to derive the value of it. That is our job now. It means that we have a lot of internal training. We're actually using it internally as well a lot to be ready. We see kind of four horizons, which we'll come back to talk about later on this AI waves, which we're currently mobilizing for. We also took on board new leadership, new Chief People Officer, new Chief Marketing Officer of the company, and we changed the number of leadership setups.
I'll just come back to one of the more important ones in my next slide here. Again, we've also continued this doubling down on industry expertise. It is just one of the winning and differentiating factors for us is that we really know the industry verticals we operate in. We are investing quite a lot in making sure we take that knowledge and we distill it so that we can reuse it and we can perfect the way we advise our customers in these industries. One of the bigger changes, as I said, we merged our two business lines, Dynamics and Customer Experience. Dynamics being our biggest business line and CXE being sort of a mid-sized business line with just a little bit less than 100 people.
The reason for that is really threefold, as you can see, but we have very close dialogue with the senior teams of Microsoft now to understand where they're going future-wise. We see a big convergence of technology. ERP being the enterprise resource planning systems, financial planning systems, supply chain, and all of that, as you know. CXE, more front-end oriented, CRM, field service, membership portals, marketing automation, a lot of other things. The platforms are really merging from a technology perspective. We could also see the way we go to market, the way our consultants operate. It did not really make much sense to have them separately anymore. We also see some pretty strong synergies coming out of it. We think it's a prudent move and it's front-future oriented to merge them, which we've done.
Actually, going forward from the next reporting, Brian, you will report them as a combined unit. You could then ask, well, what about revenue from CXE? And was CXE a Microsoft-only unit? No, it was not, but it was 90%+ based on Microsoft. The few bits and pieces that are not Microsoft will be integrated into other business lines. It has been a fairly straightforward integration of those lines. That was really it for me to start with, and then it is over to you, Brian. I will switch to your first financial highlights line.
Thank you, Søren. Let me start with Q4 before we jump into the full- year numbers. We just finish off with a small update on the quarter. We ended the quarter quite flat on revenue growth, 1% point, with some major differences in the underlying markets.
Basically, our two biggest business lines, as I normally refer to, Dynamics and M3, ended with a + 2% and a - 2%. So fairly flat. Underlying, our Data & AI and CXE actually ended up with a double-digit growth, also in Q4, whereas our digital commerce, which has 60% of their business in Sweden and a lot within the retail business, again, came out with - 11% for the quarter. Sweden and Norway, which has also been mentioned during the year, is where we see the biggest headwind, and that continues. Although we start to see some light at the end of the tunnel, it's still rough weather up there. They saw a decline in Q4. Denmark, U.K., and U.S. continued as the rest of the year with a double-digit growth in Q4.
We are happy to see that we continue to gain market share, especially in Denmark. U.K. and U.S. are so big, so talking about market share is probably a bit early. When we look into the future and we looked into Q4, we decided to adjust a bit, as we also mentioned, especially within our digital commerce business. In the quarter- over- quarter, we are around 50% people less, 4%. It's not normally a number we have such comments on, but I think it's important for us to say that we, of course, constantly adjust the machine room to cater for the activity and also to have the right people on board. Yes, efficiency level ended at the same level as last year in Q4, on 62% points.
Still slightly under what we would like it to be, but that also reflects the actions we took on a smaller adjustment in some of the business line up and in some of the countries where we see some headwind. That was Q4. Let's move into the full- year again. Revenue, as Søren mentioned, 8% growth overall. Where did it come from? I almost said it's our Dynamics business running very well and ended with 11% growth for the year. Very strong growth, in particular in Denmark and U.K. markets, if I have to mention a few. M3, 6% growth, solid growth. They ended a few very big contracts in the first half, where you saw a probably higher growth percentage than in the latter of the year, average 6%.
When you are changing major contracts, you tend to see some people sitting a bit more on the bench than you would like to because it's a big chunk of good colleagues that have to shift to new projects. Digital commerce, mentioned before, full- year, 8% decline in revenue due to the heavy hit retail market, especially in Sweden. Our two, not small, but strategic business lines, Data & AI and CXE, continue to see very strong growth, also as I mentioned in Q4. We are happy to see that it's continuing, especially the AI business. It is really running well. Good. If we look at the profitability of our business lines, we measure that on the contribution margin. Dynamics, which is by far the biggest contributor, if we look at real money, DKK 251 million they brought in, had a small increase of 1% from 26%- 27%.
Remember, our overall goal is to be on the top end of the 20s to forward. M3, which I mentioned, did see some slowdown in the middle of the year, end of the year due to a shift of projects. We are pretty confident that that will come back here in 2025. That meant also that they stayed on the around 20% margin for the year in 2024. Digital commerce, we spoke a lot about it during the year, major restructuring, and that had simply hit them on the bottom line as well. Also here, we feel comfortable that they get back in the double digits at least for this year, 2025. They did drag also the group down during the year.
Data & AI and CXE, just take them jointly, they see very strong growth, and we continue to invest in them, also in the people and the delivery. That does sometimes hurt a bit on the bottom line if you do not manage to match 100%, and you never do that in consulting. I learned the intake and new projects and investment in people. There we see a smaller decline in these two fast-growing business lines. Yes. That was all for the bottom line in our business lines, which is approved. As a CFO, I always want more, but I think if we looked into the general market, the general headwind out there, competitor situation, I actually think it is very well done by our combined team around the globe.
If we just look at the revenue per market unit for the year, Sweden also mentioned during the year, and I doubt it's the last time we will mention it, still seeing some rough times up there. The general outlook for Sweden, depending on which bank you are listening to or where you are hearing the news, is starting to look brighter. We also get the spring feeling, but we still need to go through a bit headwind. That is my thinking. Denmark, we continue very strong growth in 2024 as well as I remember in 2023, the same with the U.K. U.K. also where we acquired a new company in the Endless Gain. The underlying organic growth was around 26%, if I remember right. These two countries, we actually have very strong teams and super reputations among customers gaining new market share. Norway, flat-ish.
We do a big effort to get a bit more substance up there. Market is still difficult, like Sweden, but we're keeping a fine momentum and definitely on top of it up there. U.S., flat development, but smaller numbers. We are staying there because we have a lot of customers that would like us to be there, and we definitely see a lot of referral work as well coming that way. Good. I have added an extra slide this time. Some other performance indicators that we use a lot internally. One is the cash flow. As Søren also mentioned, we have seen a nice uptake in our operational cash flow, 77% in 2024 compared to 2023, which we are very happy about. For me, it's an indicator that as long as our customers pay on time, they are happy. If they're not, they won't.
We actually have a good track record there and a high focus in the organization to keep them on the toe here. The other one is the enabling functions. That is one of our strategic pillars that we would like to over time dilute and make that more efficient. We measure that in percent of revenue. We are making sure that we over time dilute this cost base. What we mean with enabling functions is all the back office functions: finance, facility management, HR, and IT. Good. That was a fast walkthrough of the numbers. My final slide is sustainability. It is around 56 pages in the annual report. We simply also have to spend one slide here. We spent quite a big effort to establish our own ESG organization. We now report under the full package, CSRD, directive.
We have been audited, and everything went fine. We have been through the different and I would ask you to read that in the annual report because that would simply be too technical and too long to go through here. Basically, our main effort is to support our customers in running a sustainable business. That is where we by far have the biggest impact around that area. All right. I'll hand over to you again, Søren.
Thank you. We'll just cover the outlook and then ready for the questions. Based on the financial performance of 2024 and the current order book and pipeline forecast, we maintain our full year guidance for 2025 as announced in our previous message, which means that we aim for an organic growth of 7%-9% and an EBITDA margin of 10%-12%.
You can see that in comparison to 2024, where we achieved 7% and then a growth of organic growth and 9.2% EBITDA margin. I'll just come back to because I think there are some questions about growth and what is this growth outlook based on. I think we should go straight into some of the questions here.
Perfect. Let's do that. The first question is, you are in this strategy process. Have you seen any effect on your employees? Some key employees looking going away from the organization due to some uncertainty, such a process always can instill. A little bit on the key employee side. Have you seen anything from you going out with this to market as you need to?
Okay. Great question. Obviously, this is a process that interests our employees, and so it should.
The short answer to do we see any of them exiting because of that is a clear no. We also measure very carefully our employer satisfaction score, our engagement scores. We do what we can to communicate. We are also limited there. I think most of them understand that we come very much from a position of strength into this process. If there was any negative, I think in terms of attracting new talent, sometimes you can have new talent that say, "Okay, you sound like the right place for me to join, but let me just wait until we've seen the strategic review." That would typically be more senior people. In essence, it's not really a challenge for us.
Perfect. There is a little bit about your 2026 target on the growth side. Could you please clarify your 2026 growth target?
I understand the 10% is not driven by all organic growth. Is that correct that you also have included in that some potential M&A activities?
Yeah. Okay. Let me try to talk to this one. Achieving 10% growth, and some of it could be non-organic, but actually, we have been producing previously in 2022 and 2023, we have been performing at that level organically. I would look at it like this. I think it is proven that you can see that we have been outperforming the market by quite a lot in the past year since 2021. We are not immune to the market conditions. The data we benchmark against has shown that we could grow about double the pace of the market, which I think is also true for 2024 on the organic part.
As we enter into 2025, what we have seen is there was a market slowdown towards the end of the year. We're seeing some turning points, but the market here in Q1 is not up to full speed yet. We're seeing momentum gathering, and in some of our business units, they are actually already busy. For instance, M3, we talked about our second biggest line, has already sort of gone up into a much higher activity level, but not all business units have followed through. That's what we're monitoring for 2025. What is the market growth %? We will have to keep outperforming that market growth % by something. Of course, going back to the cash flow and also the, I would call it, a very low debt leverage of the company.
Again, depending on the outcome of the strategic review, M&A is a theme, which is likely to have a bigger part of our future once we pass that. That's what I can say to that.
Perfect. There is some calculation, but as you include M&A, then it's not that relevant because that can give some bumps there. A little bit on your guidance here. Sweden, is that a swing factor? As you mentioned, are you seeing some green shoots in your pipeline also? Everybody is talking about that's an industrial economy. That is what maybe we'll see a boost next year and should also then, I guess, fell down on the consumer side. Have you baked anything into your guidance, or are you seeing anything in your pipeline?
Because that seems to be the swing factor that will bring you to the bottom range and the top end of your guidance.
Yes. Obviously, we guide on what we see. I mean, I read a lot of our big customers' financial results because it usually indicates their willingness to invest in new technology. We read the macro reports to see PMI numbers. We also look a lot at our own pipeline. How many deals are we negotiating for? How much are we bidding for out there? A number of these indicators are turning to be more positive. The next stage for us is to close the contracts. This is what I said has already happened in M3 to a large extent, is starting to happen also in the digital commerce area.
The final step, once we've closed the contracts, is actually you'd think then we're up to full speed the next day. For these big projects, for big customers, you don't achieve full speed the day after contract signature. The way we run projects here is that usually there's a smaller team that enters first, and they do the exploration. They find out if all the planning assumptions were right. They mobilize the project, and then we roll on more and more resources. That's what we're going through now in a number of these business lines. We've not seen it fully materialize, but we are seeing some positive signs. I think it's fair also to say that people should not expect miracles to happen from Q4 last year to Q1 this year.
Usually, the way consulting works is that once it's up and running fast, it runs for a long time. Once it's been a little bit slower, it takes a few months or quarters to get it up to full speed. That's how I read the market for 2025.
Perfect.
Okay. I'll just run quickly, Mikael, here just to cover a few more questions. I realize we're over time. There's one about hirings for 2025.
Yeah, hirings. Can you do it by efficiency?
Yeah. We guide our hirings a lot by efficiency. That means that we've always been hiring also in 2024, but it's very, very targeted. There's no blanket like, "Let's be 150 people more. Everybody tries to increase." It's not that kind of market we're in.
We look at each business unit in each geographical market and sometimes in each competence category, and we say, "This we're definitely short on," and then we have a push for hiring that. At the same time, we could be adjusting sides downwards in another unit in another country. This is about being so the job of me and Brian and other executives is really about truly understanding the details of the business here. You can't paint with a broad I don't even know what that's called in English, but you have to be it's a sharp pencil that you need to do your hiring plans at the moment. Yeah. I already commented on the strategic process.
Yes. There is a little bit about the security line.
You mentioned you have integrated, but you can't open a newspaper without seeing that the attacks on Danish companies are rising. Is there some possibilities for you out there, and are you seeing that performing well?
Yes. Definitely possibilities, and we have a lot of activity on this. It has been a little bit of a difficult market to operate in. As you say, you can read about it every day in the paper. I can have a meeting with virtually any board or executive team in all the companies we know. Turning it into actual business has proven a little bit more difficult than we thought despite bringing on board really good resources. I think our recipe for success here is that the companies are actually not willing to spend that much money on their security setup in isolation.
For us, the response has been it has to be baked into all the solutions, which is also luckily how Microsoft and other big companies see it. They bake a lot of functionality into their infrastructure as a service solutions, their software platforms. The customers, it's not automatic. They're not automatically secure. There's a lot of obligation on our customers to be able to make use of those, and they're not. We have our security business much more integrated into our core business lines, which seems to be working. It took us a while to figure it out, but I think we're on the right track now. It's an area I'm expecting a lot from in the coming ye ars.
Perfect. There's a little bit on AI traction. I've seen something by customers. There's a lot of talk. The costs are going down, but there's also a lot of talk that companies are not ready for it. A quick answer here so we can get to the questions, but I know there's no quick answer here. Try some.
Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of traction, and it means a lot for our customers. I would definitely say it's already driving revenue both in our data and AI business line, but also in our core ERP business lines. There's only one short way of saying it. I cannot stress enough how much we're just at the beginning and how much value is still, so we're still at this technology stage where we're really impressed by what's possible. Turning this into value is really where the difficulty lies for many of our customers. We've just started the journey.
Once that journey, I'm part of some technology planning discussion forums. I think there are two or three waves to come before we can even, so it's quite abstract, but this will be one of the biggest drivers of work for consulting companies like ourselves for the next decade. We're just at the surface of it by now. I see also, I don't want to seem like I'm avoiding it. There was this that we need to answer more clearly on that insider trading side. I'll come back to that with a written comment. Just, yeah.
Send an email to your IR and contact, and then you can answer that. There's Denmark. It looks very great. You must be taking market share on all the data I'm also seeing. Which areas is that, and is that sustainable?
The feeling here that this can be sustained, this high growth rate in Denmark?
Yeah. I think it's natural to expect from what we've seen in the past four years is in the beginning, we had Sweden and Norway as the powerhouses of growth, and then Denmark and particularly the U.K. have taken over. I wouldn't say that I expect sort of an unbroken record of this. We're also getting in some of our business units to a very significant size. That's the Dynamics one particularly. There could be some fluctuation. All in all, we're seeing Denmark as a really good market. I would say definitely on the Dynamics side, we've been taking market share.
It's important to understand about our Dynamics or ERP market also stronger. It's one of the stronger markets.
That market share for Dynamics is higher in Denmark than in most other geographies. I think that's fair to say. That also means that there's a longer history. That also means that we have a very skilled team here in Denmark. We actually do make use of them in other countries as well. This is the balance we got wrong four or five years ago. We were overinvesting our Danish resources in building out Sweden and Norway because the talent base hadn't been built up in those two countries yet. We sort of needed to export. We're not doing that at all to the same extent, but we're still seeing them deployed in other markets. We have to be careful that that doesn't take away from our business development effort in Denmark.
Brian and I, we lead the business based on the overall business. Of course, we keep an eye on the individual markets, but we more look at Dynamics as a division. We shift resources as needed where we get the most bang for the buck.
Perfect. Let's turn to a question. I know you have something you need to ask. Have you viewed on the market change since you released the new height strategy?
Yes. We would have to say yes. I believe the research, we commissioned research before we wrote or defined the new height strategy. That research, basically, this is like a Gartner. What's the growth prediction of the market? Except we ordered something bespoke for us, which we thought for our geographical markets and exactly where we operate.
That did tell us that a decline was coming, and we were going into these more flattish markets. That has happened. Since we launched it, we have seen a decline in the market growth rate. I personally look at this as pent-up demand. All our customers have the same digitalization plans, but they've been more cautious. I think what we will see once they get a little bit more planning clarity or, I don't know, adopt to the new normal. We seem to have one event after the other at the moment. Their fiscals are actually fine so far. That investment, I cannot see—and I should say this is my personal opinion—I cannot see that this overall digitalization market should be less than a 10% growth rate. It has always been that for decades and decades, and sometimes much higher.
I look forward to returning to something like that. I look forward to Columbus trying to beat that market growth rate. Continue.
Last question. Which things should be—which things need to be improved in 2025 to increase your efficiency? How much of the percentage of the employee you are able to bill the customers, and you're still maintaining your profitability? It's a little bit—are there some things that should be improved for you to increase your billing per employee?
Okay. Great. Okay. Let's take the things that we're sure of first. I think in terms of the rates we're achieving in the market, we're—Brian is never happy, but I think we're doing really good. We've managed to adjust our rates in the past years. That is an important component, of course. That's pretty solid.
The quality of the work we conduct so that we do not have to do free work, guarantee work, is very low. We got that one under control. I think even the efficiency, which the question is mainly focused on, is also under control. I can actually, even in a market which is a little bit constrained like it is now, see us improving that a little bit further. Not to the full, full, full swing of what we can do, but we can even improve that further with fairly high certainty. What we really want to do here, and coming back to the overhead percentage that Brian was talking about, is grow the headcount again. Because the business model is really working for us.
At the current time, as I said previously, we have to be a little bit cautious in how quickly we grow the organization. In terms not of this is a learnsomehit. In percentage, I think, is one thing. The absolute number that we can produce, that we can churn out, is really what's depending on the market. We can be more people. The organization now, the model, the systems, the processes, operations, cash flow, everything that we talked about is set up for more. At some point, we would like to bring on more activity, more revenue in terms of more people organically, or we could go M&A on it.
Perfect. There are some questions about the multiples you wanted to buy at, but that we have actually talked about in a later program. I'm sorry, it's not to be harsh, but we don't have time. You can actually watch the former presentation where we went through which multiples you like to buy at. That's a possibility. Thank you to you, Brian and Søren.
That also changes over time, I should say, because it's a while ago we talked about it.
That's okay. Thank you to you two for taking us through your results and answering questions. I know you have somewhere to be, we need to stop now. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye. Have a good day.