Good afternoon, and welcome everyone to this webcast with a presentation of the annual report 2025 from Columbus that was published this morning. In the first part of the presentation, you'll be in a listen-only mode, which will be followed by a Q&A session. During the Q&A session, if you have dialed in by phone, you'll be able to ask questions verbally by pressing pound or hash followed by five on your phone's keypad. If you are watching this webcast online through a browser, you can ask your written questions in the chat below. Those questions will not be published, but I will read them aloud. I will also translate Danish questions to English and ask them in English. With that said, I'll hand over to Columbus CEO Søren Krogh Knudsen and CFO Brian Iversen. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and welcome everybody to this webcast where we will be presenting our financial results for 2025 and also the Q4 results in isolation. Before we start, I will just present you with a short disclaimer which I just ask you to briefly look through. As the operator said, I'm Søren Krogh Knudsen and joined by Brian Iversen here next to me, and we will be presenting to you today, and we will also be answering your questions at the end of the call. If we start with the financial highlights, Brian will go into a bit more detail later on. Our group revenues declined by 5% in what we would describe as a challenging market.
It was primarily driven by setbacks in our largest business unit, Dynamics 365, and from a geographical perspective, we saw the headwind coming from the Scandinavian market where we are heavily represented. Our EBITDA declined by 26% compared to 2024, adjusted for other operating income and expenses. The EBITDA margin improved slightly from 7.4% in 2024 to 7.6% in 2025. Our profit before tax decreased by 19% year- on- year in line with the EBITDA development. Although we would like to emphasize our financial expenses continued to decrease. We again delivered a positive cash flow from operations, which was at DKK 77 million.
This is lower than in 2024, and that is mainly due to the lower operating profit, but also some changes in working capital and, I think also, in a small part due to some taxes paid as well. So that's the financial highlights. Just to expand a little bit on point one, what we describe as a challenging market, what does that actually contain? We saw relatively quickly in 2025 the what we could describe as the tariff turmoil, which has probably been one of the bigger geopolitical factors affecting us this year.
It did affect many of our customers, and also those who were not directly affected or ended up not being very affected, briefly or for longer periods, waited to or opted to wait and assess their situation. This cautious behavior is something that we have seen throughout the year, which means that we have longer sales cycle than normal, when we complete a sales cycle, typically, we work with very large customers, and they tend to be large contracts. There is a risk until the very end that some of these contracts will get postponed without any sort of further questions to us as the supplier or even the company's own technology department.
It may just be that the board wants to reassess the situation, and that drives a waiting time. T he positive, which we choose to see in this is that most of them or many of them actually come back, sometimes we've already negotiated all terms and conditions. We have negotiated all commercial terms. We know what to do. The scope has been decided. The project plan has been made. After perhaps one or two board meetings, the customer comes back, and is ready to start that project. There is a bit of a catch-up effect, which we saw some of in Q4 last year. That describes a lot of the customer behavior.
I think what is also important to mention is that we, in the meantime, in the waiting time, there is no standstill in terms of dialogue and planning between us and these customers. They're often customers that we've had for years, some of them even decades.
At the moment, there's heavy planning work going on between us and them, which mainly is concentrated on how to phase in new AI-driven technologies beyond what we're seeing today, which is obviously sort of the LLM chat-assisted worker, but much deeper integrated assistants. I would say coworkers, assistants, but perhaps even more interesting, the agentic workforce, which I've mentioned before, which is the fully autonomous coworker, which once set up, perhaps for a while, will run with a human in the loop, but ultimately is meant to be able to handle a workflow independently of a human being, unless we need to reconfigure it or change some parameters around it.
Despite that we have slightly lower activity from a revenue perspective, our time spent with customers to define the future is higher than ever before. I'll just continue on to the next one here. Four points for you, and then a brief update on the actual efficiency. As I just said, the market headwinds did persist. We also informed in Q4 that we saw a lot of our big contracts, which as mentioned before, had been postponed or had taken a long time to negotiate, came through to fruition in Q4, and we did win some very large ones in November.
Particularly we have mentioned a big contract in Norway, the biggest yet in our history, which also marks a change for our Norwegian operating company performance, because it's large enough to have that effect. We saw that pretty much across the board. However, in the U.S., I guess that goes back to the effect of the tariffs, we did not see this disturbance on the market, and we've had a very positive development of our U.S. market, which we continue to try to harvest momentum on. Also the U.K. market developed quite positively for us. Not as strong as in our best years, but still positive development.
In that sense, the portfolio of countries and business units we have has helped us offset this weaker performance of the Nordics. Also, we did very significant investments in our data and AI unit. We employed a lot of new people despite that we had to do a capacity adjustment last year in some areas of the business. We've also grown in other areas of the business. We continue to see them growing, and they lead many of these new customer dialogues that I was elaborating on before. Third point, we have been very disciplined around our execution. We have exercised strong cost discipline.
We, Brian and I, and others have discussed what is the most viable option for us should we just power through and continue investing at normal pace. But we have chosen to introduce a strong approach to cost discipline. We've also used the time productively to even further strengthen this global delivery we have where we can deliver across borders. That gives us a very good capacity leveling out ability. Instead of having excess capacity in two markets or and then not enough in others, we basically have a global workforce that we deploy.
It also makes it more feasible for us to employ very niche-focused experts, which we don't need in every country, but where we can have one that then serves all our markets. With that, we have focused on margin preservation, I would say, and balancing that with positioning for future growth of revenue. To be perhaps even more clear, could we have driven out a little bit more revenue at the cost of margin? That would probably have been possible, but we chose this balance. Again, the pipeline has presented us with some large wins. As we notified you and the market about, they came late.
We saw a lot of them coming in November, even into December, and as such, they did not have an effect on 2025, which is the year we present to you now. But we could see a little bit of influence on the efficiency on the fourth quarter. You can see here to your right that following a very weak performance on efficiency in Q3, we jumped up by four percentage points again in Q4. A lot of this was driven by post-November closings of these deals.
Obviously, our projects run, all of them almost, for at least a year, most of them several years, and therefore, it's a momentum that we can carry with us into Q1 of 2026. Okay. Then I will just share with you some highlights again on what we have done in terms of our strategy implementation. It is focused on some of the important areas, as you would expect.
The industry leadership, which is very, very core to our, to our strategic, competitive edge, but also of course, from a technology perspective, the adoption of AI. Just to, on the, I think the AI one is fairly clear to everybody, the industry leadership, I will just try to explain in a bit more detail. Some of the work we do will find use in every industry, public sector, private sector, financial services, pharmaceutical, manufacturing. And from that perspective, you could say, why be so industry specific as we are, where we choose only four private sector industries which all have that in common, that they produce, and distribute physical goods?
That is for the reason that in order to do what we do well, you have to fully understand the operating model of the customer, and that is not an easy task. Just imagine your own industry. There's a lot of the tricks of the trade. There's an industry, there's a thousand business processes and role descriptions and competitive scenario, understanding the value chain up and downstream, which obviously is a comprehensive task. If you master that, you're much able to engage in a strategic dialogue with the customer and not just be a supplier of IT services that doesn't really understand how the business work. That is what gives us a large part of our competitive edge, so we continue to invest in that. Good.
Starting from the left, we did merge two of our business units. CXE is a customer experience which we merged with our core Dynamics business line. The reason here is that where CXE is much more front-end focused, so that could be CRM, but also extranet, to use an old word, solution. Field service solutions would be in here, technicians using that. We merged that with the core ERP offerings. The main driver is that that's how the customer perspective is on this. They perceive this to be embedded in the same solution. Technically, we see that slightly different, but we let the customer's view on this define that design, and that has worked well for us.
We did exercise a capacity adjustment last year. 86 individuals affected. Unfortunate but necessary for us to do. We reorganized our whole marketing department to be more fit for purpose, and for what we need to communicate in the future. We did a lot of work on what we refer to as OnTarget, and that is the project delivery model and engagement model that we use across all our business units every time we have large engagements. Again, this is a competitive, if not a competitive edge, it's a competitive must to compete in this segment we are with the large international corporations.
If you cannot display a solid and proven project methodology tool set, you're simply not invited to the party. We have continued the build-out of our data and AI team. All countries have worked on this, but in particular in Denmark, close to our headquarters function, I think they have doubled the size of the experts or the size of the team in one year, and have really been truly driving both the customer dialogues and the sales, but also some of the Agent in a Day initiatives that we've been driving across the country several times.
Needless to say, they had a lot of strategic hiring, but also in the second point, we had strategic hiring in other select areas and positions as well. Norway perhaps also deserves a mention here because some of the big wins we had up there really meant that we can now look at upgrading on some of our positions and expanding that. We chose to do an acquisition almost simultaneously in Norway with the big win. The customer was in the food and beverage sector, and we chose to take on board a company that gave us a little bit more capacity in Norway, which we needed.
Actually we deliver from India, we deliver from Sweden and Denmark, but of course also Norway and this customer. They also were highly specialized in this industry vertical. Going back to what I said, they know the business model, the processes, the regulations, so we were able to onboard them for that. We worked a lot on this agentic framework. I think I have tried to explain it as well as I can in a short session like this, but agentic, again, think about the fully autonomous coworker which can oversee high frequency but still relatively low complexity tasks. Obviously the complexity level will continue to increase over the years.
This is where we see the potential that needs to be realized for our customers coming from in the short- to medium-term. As you can see, I saw something from Boston Consulting Group coming out yesterday. Most customers asked about this, despite spending a lot of time on this, having a lot of interest. I think this study said about 5% of them are only seeing significant savings coming from this, which is, I would say, borderline disappointing. The technology has a great potential and has been matured, but I think we all need to recognize that the rubber needs to meet the road, and that is not so much about technology.
Mainly driven by ability to execute, ability by organizations to adapt, adopt this technology, refine organizational design, role description, business processes, security, quality, ethics around this. It's very heavy work and it's obviously very good work for us to be involved in and a big part of what we're preparing right now. Finally, I think on this one I just want to mention that we did also do a full restructuring of our digital commerce partnerships, so all the technical partners we work with, but also the way we've organized ourselves. They were also part of this capacity adjustment or downsizing. And we have also hired a different kind of talent into this.
We consider that to be a much more future-proof setup that we have established there. Overall, we've done everything we can to sharpen our commercial focus, improve this operational resilience, which is necessary for us because we continue to see some shocks through the system. Now we have an oil price which is fluctuating a little bit. It doesn't hit us directly, but some of our customers get a little bit nervous, and we need to be able to absorb that into our operating model. With that, we have positioned ourselves for what we expect to be gradual improvement, not abrupt or very fast improvement, but we do see in our sales pipeline a gradual improvement, which started there late Q4 and which we take with us into Q1.
I will hand over to Brian for a little bit more detailed breakdowns of the financials.
Yes. Thank you, Søren. Let's start briefly with Q4, where we ended the year with an 8% decline in revenue. You might remember that we had 2%, 4%, and 7% decline in Q1, Q2, and Q3. We also start to see that now it's we reached the bottom, also based on what Søren mentioned on new bigger contract came in end of Q4 2025. Again, it's mainly our Swedish and Danish marketplace that is still seeing some challenges or postponement or hesitations in committing to new bigger projects, and it's within the Dynamics area.
On the other side, we actually start to see also in Q4 some good signs in M3 and also in our digital and data and AI business line, which we invested heavily in during last year, and that is very encouraging to see. EBITDA ended on basically same level as last year, DKK 3 million below, but percentage-wise 9% of revenue. Profit before tax same level, DKK 18 million, as last year, and a cash flow of DKK 34 million, which again is a key parameter for us that we basically earn money on what we do, and we have a strong and solid balance sheet and continue to have that in this still slightly turbulent period.
That's how Q4 ended, but let's jump into some of the full year numbers, more specific. I would like to start with the business line revenue. Søren have mentioned a few of them, but during 2025, we saw that especially our Dynamics 365 business line decreased with 8%, and as they are covering around 65-ish% of our combined revenue in Columbus, it does hit us heavily. It's also Dynamics who is having some of the biggest projects, and where the companies is a bit more hesitant to jump out in major and big investments. Of course, that does mean that we see some postponement and hesitations and chopping off projects in smaller bites. M3 ended with a flat development. They had a strong Q1.
They finished off some projects and is now gradually moving into some new bigger ones. A few were announced end of the year, and they will continue to come in during 2026. Digital commerce, -4%. As you remember, we did a major restructuring back in 2024. Still working on it, but we start to see a turnaround. That have been a tough year or a bit more in this business line, but we gradually start to see some improvement. Then we have a new, call it small business line, EIM, Enterprise Information Management, that we in the last year we called it other revenue, but today it's only revenue from this small business line that we have driven a bit on the side.
As you can see, there is a decline of -4%, but actually EIM has an increase of 40% in 2024. The revenue number was diluted by some other income that ended up in this area. It's important to say that the revenue might be small, but they have a very strong contribution margin, as you will see on the next slide. They are starting to be an important area that we also would like to focus on and share with you how it's going.
At the end of the day or end of the slide here, I just mentioned that our product sales actually increased by 5% to DKK 70 million. A few years back, we actually expected that to decline. It would probably be wrong to say it is as expected. It's probably a bit more better. That is something that we, of course, are looking into how we can gain most possible from this area. That's a little positive or ending up on two positive trends with our EIM and our product sales. If we look at the contribution margin Dynamics, which again, as I mentioned, is biggest, went down by two percentage points.
This is mainly because when you have project delayed, you have people sitting a bit longer on the bench. As Søren mentioned, efficiency was in the low end of what we would expect and what we are aiming at. Of course, that will hit the business line contribution margin. M3 saw a slight improvement, which is good. We have some strong project management, and we see a continuous upwards trend. We would have loved it to be faster, no doubt. We still have some positive trend that we look into for 2026. Digital commerce, big jump still, a low number of 12% contribution margin in 2025. But after the restructuring, it's good to see that they are moving backwards.
Forwards, yeah.
Upwards. Then at the end of our data and AI, a drop of 5%, it's a smaller amount, as you can see, around DKK 5 million down. This is mainly due to investment in new capabilities. It takes time before they start running and then get out there. Especially end of 2025, we had some good intakes of new employees around in our countries. We already now see, and I'm happy to see that in the first months of Q1 that is slowly paying off. That is a very important investment. So that's good.
EIM, briefly mentioned on the revenue side, as you can see here, the number that they actually make in profit is DKK 16 million, I think it is. In 2025, or 44%, it is a very profitable business in our terms, and something that we constantly push, so we can see some strong growth and increased margin here. That's why we are reporting it on a standalone from 2026 and just, let's say, warming up here in end of 2025 numbers. Good. Let's move to the overview of our revenue per market unit.
Again, as you can see, the Scandinavian market, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway is down with 5% in Sweden, 11% in Denmark, and 14% in Norway. That is also, as mentioned by Søren, where we typically have run some of our major project, where we see some hesitation and some abrupt stop of projects. Not that we lose them, but they're still postponed, and we see some of them coming back already during this year. U.K. delivered a 2% growth. I think it's worth mentioning it. It's on the back of 38% last year in 2024.
They continue the growth path and that is to get people in, to get them out there, to get them trained. The business is certainly there. It's also a profitable market. Although if you read all the news from there, you shouldn't really think it's more difficult, but it's also fair to say we are still a pretty small player in a huge market. We definitely see some good trends there. U.S. came out after a few years with some slow or even decreasing revenue. We start to get some kind of a foothold, if you can say it, in U.S. It's big. Especially M3, it's about 50% of the revenue in 2025 is seeing some very positive progress.
Also the Dynamics is starting, and we saw that at end of 2025. that's good to see that there's some different baskets that we can dip into in a challenging market. Good. That was all about figures. any questions you can pass them on as mentioned in the beginning. I still want to spend one slide, two slides actually on sustainability. the ones of you who have been reading our annual account, we still have 59 pages in there about sustainability and what we do. this year it's the second year that we reported it, and we have it audited, et cetera.
We mainly do it and keep doing it even though we are a bit out of scope now after the change in the Omnibus in EU. It's that some of our major customers still require that we are keeping good records on these terms. I think more important, we have established a very solid automated setup, so it's a very limited investment for us to do. The biggest area for us is basically people. It's the social, it's the S in the ESG. That we would do anyhow because this is basically what we live on. We have one slide on that in this connection that Søren just would like to-
Yeah.
Share with everyone.
This is the employee engagement score, which you can see has developed positively, from 2023 to 2024 and again to 2025. Obviously something we focus a lot on, and it's always important to us. In 2025 we've been particularly paying attention to this number, for several reasons. The first and easiest one to explain is that we've done capacity adjustments, and we've done some reorganization, some restructurings where we found it needed. We know that this often, if not explained well to the organization, will cause a decrease in the score. It's a test of management's ability to explain why we need to take some necessary measures.
The second one, which is, it's a little bit more difficult, is to understand the impact on all of our consultants of today's business environment. They work very hard. They are looking forward to starting to work for a new customer. They're all riled up about it. When that gets postponed, it's not just from an overall financial perspective, it has an effect on us. It's really felt on a personal level by those consultants because they've been looking forward to working.
That requires that we are able to pick each other up, find the positives that we can take with us, and understand that it might come back, but then we have to move on without declaring a full victory, which is not something we are very accustomed to and not something we like to do. We think that the 85 score is an indicator of a very resilient workforce within Columbus. We're very proud of how they've handled the year that we have now put past us.
Good. Thank you, Søren. Last point before we open for questions is the outlook. I'm sure many of you have looked into that as well. First, I just would like to mention, as we also announced the 27th of January, that end of the year we'll come up with a new strategy. As you know, our old strategy is old. It's a few years old. Back is ending this year, and we had ambitious some financial ambitions with a 10% organic growth and a 15% EBITDA margin. It's important to remember these were made before the major change in the macroeconomics, after the election in the U.S. and whatever have happened.
It's also important for us to say it's not that we don't have these ambitions anymore, but we also realize that they will be impossible to reach in 2026, the last year of the current strategy, New Heights. This year we end up with a guidance with an organic growth from 0%-5%, coming from -5% last year. Back in growth, that is very important for us and something we are working hard on and we strongly believe in. Secondly, we report or we have an outlook on our EBITDA margin of 8%-10%, coming from 7.2% this year or in 2025.
It's also key for us that we can show that we can continue to improve our bottom line when we are back in growth. Obviously, that is pretty hard in a consulting business when the growth is negative, but after all, we managed to keep the margin on a solid level last year. We would like to see or be sure we can see some improvements for next year. That's why we increase it now to 8%-10% EBITDA margin. Good. It's time for questions, and I'll hand over to you, operator.
We are now ready for the Q&A session.
To repeat, you can get in line and ask questions by phone by pushing the pound key or hashtag followed by five on your telephone keypad. Should you wish to withdraw from the line, you can push the pound key or hashtag followed by six. If you are watching this webcast online through a browser, you can ask your written questions in the chat below. Those questions will not be published, but I will read them aloud to management after the dial-in section is complete. I will do my best to translate any Danish questions to English. We'll start with the dial-in as mentioned. The first question comes from Yue Zhao from SEB. You are now unmuted. Please go ahead.
Hi, it's Yue from SEB. Thank you for taking my questions. I have three questions to start, and I will do one at a time. Firstly, the question on agentic AI. We have seen some studies showing that this new technology will reshape the ERP systems significantly. Today it's more static, but then going forward will be more automatic. Do you foresee how it will impact your business given you are very much exposed to the implementation of the ERP systems?
Great. Thank you, Yue, and thank you for dialing in. I think I would start with saying that in terms of the agentic workforce, which we are just about to infuse with our human workforce everywhere, I don't see a super specific agenda for ERP. I see it on all core systems. Let's do it ERP specific. Like, any ERP system, the human workers working within the system, there is a lot of tasks that they're doing which is just time-consuming for them, and they're not really using their analytical skills or so they're basically just clogging up their day. We expect pretty great breakthroughs within that.
If you look 5+ years forward or 3- 5+ years forward, that could have an effect also on how the systems need to be set up, and I'm sure that will be reshaped. We are very focused on the first wave right now, which is just about enabling that workforce. Despite of all the media pressure, I think we all have to recognize that the actual booked efficiency gains, effectiveness gains are still quite minute and we need to help our customers create some progress.
Last year brought a lot of technology progress, maturing of the technology platforms, and now I think we are left with what is more classical, which is sort of an adoption, which is getting your head around how do you do it? How do you govern it? How do you run an HR organization which consists both of human employees, but each of these human employees might oversee a number of autonomous agent? Who has responsibility? How do we keep it secure, and all of these things. Yeah.
Just wanna follow up on this. I mean, we have seen that Microsoft, they also introduced those agents function. In your business, over the last, you know, 1-3 months, are you getting more sort of concrete requests and projects on the sort of implementation or on those agents for your customers?
Absolutely. I think that's the big change from 2024 to 2025. We already knew about the agent approach in 2024, of course, but in 2025, we saw it maturing, but we also saw the interfaces being so Copilot Studio becoming available. A lot of the customer activities we have right now are very specific. Sitting down for an entire day with these customers basically setting up agents so that they know how to do this and so you take everything that's abstract out of it and because for many people it's still quite abstract. It doesn't have to be anymore because it works.
A lot of our customer activities are talking about the first we talk about what can be done and all of that, which tends still to be abstract, and then you basically just sit down and you pick a workflow apart and you say, "Okay, that one is not value creating, and it's very stable in terms of the decision tree." You know, it doesn't vary. If you express it in old automation language, very few of them would be kicked out for manual handling. That's a good way to understand it. That's a good place to start. High frequency, low complexity, few of them getting kicked out for manual handling. That's where you start, and then you set up an automated workflow from that.
Mm-hmm.
You learn how to then refine it. There's other things that are involved here. What does it actually cost? Because it drives the cost, so you also have to have business case around it and all of that, and that's what we're doing with the customers now.
Okay. Thank you. You have talked about the hesitance of your customers over the last few quarters. Initially you mentioned that there was this geopolitical tensions, uncertainties postponing the project's initiation. I was just wondering over the last three months, and you also mentioned there's still this geopolitical tensions, uncertainty postponing the decision-making. Based on data, are you also seeing that the delay in the projects or the pipeline are moving more towards that the customer want to know or evaluate the new technology because of the agentic AI?
Can you rephrase that way? Whether the customers are
Yeah. Just wondering. Yeah. The reason for postponing the projects or, let's say, hesitance in the investment, was it still mainly because the, you know, there's geopolitical tensions or market uncertainties? You also think that the reason to delay it being sort of they want to evaluate the new technology?
Yeah. All right. Great. Great question. So I think there's this broad blanket of geopolitical trade policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. It's important to say that actually not all of our customers have been heavily affected, but some of them just don't know-
Mm-hmm.
That means that they tend to pause for six months.
Mm-hmm.
sometimes they come back stronger. Some of them are actually hit, and it just drives this hesitance. That's, I think that's broad and that's in our sector, certainly maybe not so much in the public sector, but where we work, it's across the board.
Mm-hmm.
That also have an effect on AI and agentic investments, as you say. I think it's a good question because I still think we have to take responsibility for and the industry we are part of, and also the customers themselves, that extra hesitance is driven out of, we need to become better at to the top management teams of our customers to show them a clear path. It has to be less technology explained and much more this is how we approach the, you know, the organizational and operating model transformation of this customer. This is what we propose. This is where we start. This is how we break it down.
Mm-hmm.
This is how we organize, because there are some investments for any customer that have to be group-wide, and then there's something where we can approach them on a division-by-division level.
Mm-hmm.
I think it's fair to say that has also not been as good as it can get. That has probably been on top of the geo macro turmoil. A good challenging year.
Okay. Thank you. Very clear. You also mentioned that you made some big investments in AI. Could you be a bit more specific on this? What have you invested exactly?
I think we can just limit it to two buckets. One is new skills.
Mm-hmm.
represented by people. This is the area where we have basically been even though I said we've been sort of margin protecting overall in 2025, that area has been given fairly free rein to recruit what they need. Which drives an investment from our side because we cannot avoid when we have big intakes that the efficiency will drop and that basically has affected their contribution margin. That's the one, that's the first bucket. The other bucket is. Well, okay, perhaps three buckets then. Where the other bucket is tooling. There are some new tools which we are investing in, which we need for our consultants to be productive.
It goes across the board, but specifically it goes for the more technical part of our community that need access to that. The third part is development work which we undertake ourselves. We are no longer a software company, but we are starting to see some perspective in developing some IP ourselves, which we believe is necessary for a successful implementation with our customers. They are the three buckets.
What kind of IP are you talking about? Can you elaborate a bit?
That could be a few examples of something we need for integration. In terms of integration setups and making sure customers' platforms are fully integrated. We can see some holes in the chain where we can provide that. There can be things around the agentic, if we take that one from before, where we can basically produce something which does a lot of prep and groundwork for the customers so it's easier to implement.
Because with all our knowledge of the business processes, we can if we call it a strawman setup or a blueprint setup, which is sort of pre-configured, I think that's a good way of understanding it.
Okay. Those are the sort of the AI-embedded solutions, if I understand?
Yeah. They are some of them. Yeah.
Okay. It's on top of what you are building up or integrating for your customers?
A lot of it, I mean, is driven by customer-specific scenarios, and then we can see, okay, this one is bound to come up again and again, and then we choose to have a little bit more. We might as well approach it perfectly from the first time, so we have a toolset which we can reuse.
Yes. Okay. Clear. Thanks. Last question from my side. I recall that you have quite a lot of time and material contracts with customer. Are you seeing any price pressure on those contracts? I think that a lot of people in industry stakeholders talk about the AI will negatively impact the hourly-based consulting business.
Yes. I think I have two viewpoints that go in opposite directions. Our hourly rates continue to develop positively. Not dramatically positively, but they develop positively year-over-year in line with a plan we made, which considers things like salary pressure and inflation. We have certainly not lowered our hourly rates. The other perspective is there more competitive pressure on the industry? I think we see a bit of that. Certainly, a market like Sweden has had some of a little. There's always price competition, but perhaps it's been a little bit more fierce than in previous years.
Yeah. How could you justify your sort of premium price or price increase when your competitors are bidding down?
Yeah. The way we justify that has not changed actually as part of what we've experienced in 2025. Some of the major drivers we use to justify our premium is the most important thing is the track record. You know, having a huge catalog of previous implementations with customers that are in the same industry, that are about the same size, that had about the same set of challenges, and having worked successfully through that is a very important part of being able to charge any kind of a premium. Well, I wouldn't say it's a premium. It's just to show that you belong in that segment because there are others with us. It's just differentiating yourselves from the lower cost segment.
I would say another important part. I go back to this work we did on our delivery methodology. You know, being able to accurately plan the work, absorb changes to the project plan, which always occurs. How do you early detect that the plan is? This sounds negative, but it's always the reality that the first plan will never survive. How do you have a good methodology for continuously monitoring where you have plan deviations, make contingencies for that, agree that with the customers, and basically just until you go live and the customer has their expected value, how do you drive that?
I know methodology sounds like a small thing, but it's a very big and task which needs to be embedded with every one of our consultants. The industry knowledge I talked about, I think, is a big part of it. There's also something about size. If you're only present in one geography, you are not able to command the same price because basically, your customer, if they are international customers, will then have to contract with different partners everywhere, which brings a big onus on them. When they contract with somebody like us who are represented in hopefully all of their countries, and if there's somewhere we're not, we have sub-suppliers that we've worked with again and again, so we take the contractual ownership of it.
Yeah, these are some of the things that we work with to put us in that. We belong in a certain segment. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
Good. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks. If I may ask one more question here.
I think, Yue Zhao, just quickly, we only have six minutes left, so just to leave some of the others a chance also to ask questions, that would be. I'm happy to take another one offline from you.
Okay. I jump back to the queue, and if there's no more question, I come back.
Thank you.
Okay.
We do not have any more questions in the dial-in, but we do have some in the written part, so we will move into that part now. There is a question which asks, do you expect to make acquisitions in 2026 or will there be any distribution to shareholders?
We certainly have the ability to do acquisitions in 2026. We have what we perceive to be a very low debt burden of the company. I think the net interest bearing debt is-
Almost zero.
Almost zero, thank you. The cash flow is, as Brian was alluding to before, so there's a debt capacity which is currently unused. That being said, we will only do things that make sense to us at the correct price point. We know that if we do acquisitions in this industry, it's not easy, and we have to give it a lot of management attention. It's not something we do lightly, especially not if it's big. I'd be surprised if there's nothing. I certainly think there will be some smaller acquisitions, and we will see if there's anything bigger which makes sense to us. I believe, yes, the dividend.
I was just looking at the confirmation here. The dividend policy will be in line with last year's dividend.
Great. We have another question here. It's translated from Danish. It says, "It is disappointing that there is such large deviations in the previously communicated 2026 plan, and there is a thin guidance for 2026 on revenue and EBITDA targets. What is the most central thing for you to recover from in 2027 to 2029? A, growth or, two, profitability?
All right. Thank you. Yeah, obviously, it goes without saying, from both Brian and me, we would have loved to deliver on our 2026 end goal as well. What's the most central to restore in 2027-2029? In terms of the top line, we have produced 10% organic growth before, and I think all we need is a little bit of normalization to return to that level again. We know how to do that, and we've also been above that, and in any kind of normalized market, we will be able to do that.
When it comes to the EBITDA margin, it is hard for us to get up there to the 15% in a year where we have to do capacity adjustments. We've designed our enabling functions to support a certain level of revenue, so our enabling function can support the engine we've built to run the company can support a lot more revenue than we have on it now. We have been very cost conscious of that, and we've also tuned it, but we don't want to take it out of commission because we do believe that we will have the growth coming back again. This is where the political answer comes in. We're trying to have a very balanced approach.
We're definitely not going gung ho for growth and just letting our profitability drop like a stone in this market. We want to preserve margin, so you will see the same kind of approach probably as in 2025. The difference being that we have to be very good at when we start to see positive signs and that we can't wait out too long, then we have to be prepared to go on the gas pedal again, and this is something that we're very mindful of. With the current outlook, where we're still not. We don't think we have sufficient clarity to see that full demand will be restored in the market. We will be a little bit balanced in our approach.
You should expect when we see some sunshine, we see some momentum in the market, which is more systemic and not just one month or two months or one quarter, well, maybe a quarter, then you have to start being a little bit more forward-leaning in terms of what we hire and how we approach the markets.
Great. We're almost out of time. We have one last written question about AI, which I know we've spoken a lot about. It says, "The AI segment grew 3% in 2025. Is there any AI-related hidden revenue in the other business areas?
Yes, absolutely, I was kind of expecting this. It's a clear yes to that. Obviously, it's not just the AI segment that works with AI. It's a big part of our Dynamics area. It's becoming a big part of M3. It's a big part of commerce. Without throwing you under the bus, Brian, I think we are working on a way of finding a meaningful way of reporting on AI-driven revenue. We do want to make sure that once we present you with a model, everything can be relabeled to AI these days. It has to be in a meaningful way that truly describes what has changed in our business model.
As with everything we introduce to you, we want to ensure it has some sort of longevity to it, because if we report on it one time, and then we find another way which is more meaningful, doesn't really have value to you. We need to report in the same way over time, so you can track our progress. Yeah, good call-out.
Great. I see the time is also 2:00, and we are out of time. We seem to be mostly through the questions, so I will pass back to management for final remarks.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for joining. There are more questions, but we will make sure to pick them up next time. Thank you for joining. Thank you for the interest shown. Brian and I, you can be very sure we'll continue to pursue this. We have a good plan. It'll be interesting to see what we can achieve in 2026. Thank you.