Good morning, everyone, welcome to Netcompany's Capital Markets Day 2023. My name is Frederikke, I'm Head of Investor Relations here in Netcompany. I've been here for exactly a month today, it was about time I got to host a CMD. We are around 60 external participants gathered here today, and a number of Netheads. We have participants listening in online who will also be able to ask questions in the Q&A module. We have reserved the end of each presentation for Q&As, please do not miss the opportunity to ask questions directly to some of our sharpest minds here in Netcompany, and not just Thomas and André for once.
When that is said, I will just make sure that we're not gonna discuss current trading today for those of you interested in that. You can see the agenda behind me, and it is also available in the slide deck you can find online. We have made some minor changes to the agenda, we'll start with the country update today to make sure it suited everyone's calendar. What we're gonna start with is the country updates from all of our markets. Afterwards, Leni will present our delivery model, and after lunch, you will hear more about our platforms and products. Finally, Thomas, he will present our 2026 targets we announced yesterday. First of all, you'll get a strategic update from our CEO and co-founder. Please welcome André.
Thank you. Thank you, Frederikke, and good to have you all here in our new premises. I hope you enjoy the surroundings. If you're wondering about the art on the walls, it's a Ukrainian artist straight from Kiev, who did many of the paintings. I'm actually extra proud of the way the whole thing is decorated, but also how it represents the entire culture of Netcompany, where everyone can work together. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that right now because I have only 15 minutes, 20 minutes, being nominated as one of the sharpest minds, together with Thomas Johansen here, to present a strategic update on where we are.
I know you're all waiting for 2:30, where we will have the financial update, but before that, let's go into what Netcompany is all about these days. If you have to remember, after today, if you have to remember two words only, if you can only bring home two words, that would be responsible digitization. Responsible and digitization. This is what we are all about. This is the narrative that we are using everywhere, and it goes further than just being responsible for the products or services that you deliver. It's much more than that. If you think responsible and digitization, you also need to think Europe. What we are working for and doing every day, this is very important, is by digitizing Europe, then we create responsibility by promoting democracy, justice, transparency, social security.
I think for most people today, it is evident that digitization and business goes together, but digitization and politics also go together. Digitizing our society is the way we've done and are doing with artificial intelligence coming, with all the new tools and all the productivity gains out there. It is important that you have digitization partners and players who understand the dynamics and create responsible digitization. This is what we are all about. How do we do it, then? Well, we still do it by the most simple things, just creating solutions that actually work, putting them into production, and making sure that they are there for a long time. Solutions that provide the flexibility, the productivity, the security needed for societies, primarily societies promoting these values that I said before.
If you look at it from a macro perspective, most countries in Europe right now, they need digitization, both governments and private businesses and enterprises. To put in and empower these societies and companies and institutions is what we do. I will go through three unique USPs, selling points, that will denominate what we are all about. As you probably remember, the most common USP for Netcompany over the last 20 years has been about the delivery. It is still there. Delivery is still there, and it's one of the USPs, but it's not the first one. The first one is reuse, and we will reuse in a way even more than we've ever done before. In order to scale the business and create these many responsible digitized solutions, we need to reuse a lot.
Remember, to reuse and create solutions, it's not that we're doing one-size-fits-all solutions. We are doing all kinds of solutions, putting in things that has to be legislated differently in each country, differently in each business. Reusing also means reusing on a level where you can configure and put things into place fast that are unique by reusing. You need both components, but reusing is important, and that's why we have introduced a terminology we call platforms. We have both platforms and products, and you will hear later that we have three platforms. I'll introduce these three platforms, but you will also hear about our products. One of them, of course, the airport product, AIRHART, but also the brilliant products that we have through Netcompany- Intrasoft.
Alex will talk about that later, where we address, for instance, the the tax and customs area in Europe. We have both platforms and products. Then the second USP, I think you all heard about this endlessly throughout the years, it's the people. We hire a lot of young people. Well, we hire a lot of people, not only young people, and we give them a career that is unique. We make them productive very, very fast. We have an academy that is truly, I think, one of the world's best. This is a very unique selling point. Even when we are out with customers discussing particular systems or particular functionalities, whatever, I always get the same question: "Can you just describe me your culture, your people?
Can I be sure that the people coming here, working for me, doing this together with my people, understand the dynamics and how to work together and are truly motivated to succeed?" Motivation to succeed is extremely important, especially in a sector where, let's be honest, a lot of people think that just by being technically capable, you are a true hero of digitization. You are not. You are certainly not. You need that delivery kick somewhere, and you need to love the fact that you are one of the few people in the business that actually deliver every time that you are part of a project, and this culture is unique and is very important for us. Then thirdly, this one you've heard before, and Leni will talk about that. She's been around for, I think, just as long as I have, 20+ years.
Our methodology, the way we deliver systems, the way we are truly delivery-focused. There's a lot of talk about agility, I sometimes call it the hippie generation of IT. You know, we sit around a table and discuss everything, at the end of the day, you gotta deliver. You gotta deliver some product or some service, if you do that, most customers will buy more or be an advocate for you as a vendor. This is very important. Of course, it's very important, you know this one very well. Diving into the platforms, which is a new thing. Over the last many years, we've been delivering a set of solutions that have the same characteristics. Every time we started a new project, we were like, "Hmm, have we seen this before? Yes." Is it software?
No, because if we just take a software package, we end up sometimes putting the customer into a software prison. Most large enterprises today, if you ask them, I think they're very open about it actually nowadays, but they will probably tell you that their license costs and their operating costs, just to keep the lights on, is probably 80% of their IT expenditures. A lot of funding goes into just keeping the business going, having set the power on, and a lot of it goes to software licenses. With the platforms that we're introducing, that we're using, we give our customers a chance to start, not from scratch, but with a lot of components. See it as boxes of Lego, 3 large boxes of Lego.
In each box, you have Lego that you can combine and build solutions with really, really fast. The Lego pieces are very standardized, the solutions are not. You can build solutions extremely fast by doing this. This is the future of the IT business. The future of the IT business is not standardization, standardization. I think you guys probably remember a time where when people said, "Is it standard?" Then was, "It's standard." "Great! Then I'm... Oh, it's standard." While you want to differentiate your business, and business is IT, standard just means you become just like everyone else. The parts of your business that needs to differentiate, you need to be able to be flexible and create new solutions really, really fast. This is how we're gonna do that with platforms. We're already doing it.
And then, of course, having all the other stuff, reusable deliveries, methodology, documents, all the things that you need in order to find similar solutions that your customer is asking for. Now, having platforms as a backbone, I mean, these Lego pieces, see it as Lego pieces, as your backbone for systems. Systems can look differently, different, but they're built of same building blocks, just like skyscrapers. You can also have artificial intelligence helping you maintaining, creating, and governing your systems. This is also very interesting. Right now, I think you all know that over the last one to two years, AI has become the talk of town. Well, AI as an embedded part of platforms is extremely important.
If you don't have your data, and if you don't have the building blocks, it's gonna be very difficult for an algorithm to help you by doing anything. It's not magic. It still needs data, and it still needs the building blocks. If you move into standardized building blocks, and you have control over your data and get more data, then you are a winner in each industry. That's for sure, because AI is gonna be a change agent, I think, bigger than even the internet was. This is also very important. You can't really use AI for much more than generated texts or putting down expenditures in existing functions as it is now. If you have platforms and data, then you can actually change your operation entirely, and hereby also change the way you are as a company.
We will hear much more about that when we go through the three different platforms later on this afternoon. I know that Mehdi will talk about the airport, where we will show you some really good examples about that. The platform approach, which is the USP number 1, the reusability, gives us an extreme business agility. I think this is very important. When you come out to many customers today, they always say, "Can you give me a lower dependency on IT software and vendors? I need to get out of my IT prison, eliminate some of my expensive fees in order to just keep the lights on. At the same time, I need you to make sure that what you come with is battle-tested.
I can't really afford to take any big chances, please make sure that when you come with something, it's actually been tested many times before, and it works. As you know, Netcompany is not building peripheral solutions or nice small things. We are building society-critical, really society-critical and enterprise business-critical solutions. When we put something into production, it better work. 'Cause if it doesn't work, it's gonna affect businesses and societies. This is the way to do it, and I think it's just showing, we will give you some examples this afternoon, how this works. Is this entirely new from anything else we've done the last five, 10 years? No. It's just put into formula, and it's much more structured than before. It's not entirely new. It's all about delivery. It's still all about delivery.
Just making sure that you deliver with the highest potential chance of succeeding. Now, I've got to show you, and this is not my style to show you videos, but we're gonna do it anyways. We're gonna show you three short videos. The first one is about PULSE. It's the platform that was inherited by the way we've been building the airport. In the airport, PULSE is called AIRHART, named after the first woman that took a plane over the Atlantic, and she actually succeeded. Unfortunately, she also took a plane over the Pacific, and she didn't succeed that one, as far as I know. We choose the Atlantic voyage as our inspiration. Well, think about it as an organism, and I will shut up now and show you the video.
PULSE is a real time platform where you get data in real time, you react real time, and then you push out actions back to where things are happening. Just like in an ecosystem like the airport, but it could be any ecosystem where you need real time data. Most businesses today are run in a batch mode. You don't know what's going on before one month or two months or even a quarter, and you guys know that. You know, you don't know what's going on before the quarter has elapsed or even more, right? Here, you know what's going on every second, and you can change just like an organism. This is where you can put in AI on top of that. I'm sorry for the music.
You, you're gonna listen to it, 2 times more because the other 2 platforms is the same music. We very rarely show the 3 videos in a row, so we should have chosen different music in each one of them. PULSE, I think you understand, I mean, we'll hear much more about it. I think, the next thing that is also very interesting is that most of our systems, I mean, PULSE is gonna be very relevant. You know, it could be anything where you have an ecosystem. It could be a hospital, it could be a train station, it could be something where real-time data is extremely important, even supply chain scenarios. AMPLIO is where we work, and this is, we've been doing this for many, many years.
It's case management, it's boring administrative systems. Boring, I mean, don't get me wrong, but we need administrative systems where we case management things. AMPLIO is the building blocks to build an administrative system. Most of large enterprises today have huge administrative systems that they need to transform from older platforms into newer platforms in order to have AI, and also in order to just get out of the IT prison, as I mentioned before. These are the components forming AMPLIO. Yeah, this is what we've been doing the last five, seven, eight years in Denmark, I mean, as you can see, most of what we're doing here is taking what we've done in Denmark and trying to bring that into different other markets, it's really something that works well.
The Danes message is actually pretty good when it comes to administrative systems in particular, because we are very much ahead of the rest of Europe. We don't think so as Danes, but that is actually a fact. The last one is about communication and letters and official communications between businesses. We are using that for particular usages. For instance, we're gonna hear about the EU wallet that Thomas is gonna talk about, which is a huge European initiative. It's also based on this technology. Having your own data safe, stored with you, being able to conduct business from different parties, communicating with you, even business to business communicating, instead of making system to system integrations, create integrations through wallets or AMI. This is the last one.
Think of it as, you know, we were behind the COVID-19 passport during the COVID crisis. Now we're behind the EU wallet. This is the technology that supports that kind of solution. It's a very much citizen-driven, centric, citizen-driven. It can also be used to do B2B communications and archiving. That's the three platforms that we have introduced over the last year. Giving them names and putting these components into these three boxes of Lego, as I described before. This is how we do our common GTM approach. When we go into the markets, we have these things in our bags, creating a fruitful dialogue very, very fast with our customers. Instead of only coming around the corner and saying, "Listen, we are Netcompany. We're just a little bit better than everyone else.
We have a great delivery. We have great people." Yes, you have to say that, but you also have to come up with a way towards how you can modernize the existing older systems that most European countries are striving with. I think that's where I wanna end this thing, because you're gonna hear much more about it. And you're also gonna hear much more about the products that we do and the terrific business we have with Netcompany- Intrasoft. I think I'll end it here also, if we have time for a few questions, we're supposed to have. To be fair, we started 10 minutes past, so I have only done 20. Normally, I spend 2 hours on this, so forgive me. Questions? I think we've got a question there.
It is extremely interesting. Sorry. It's extremely interesting to hear the way you explain the current situation for Netcompany. When I heard the same situation from Microsoft in 2005, they compared, you know, the company's situation with the car industry, where they needed to have, you know, seven engineers employed just to concentrate about the noise when you close the door. How should the noise be in that car when you close the door, as a customer? Today, my question for you is, the organization is, of course, it's so interesting the way you have tried to pick it out, the key success factors of the company.
How is it possible to handle all that in the head of you, André, in the head of you, all the other specialized top guys, because it's so complicated? That situation, 2005 in Microsoft, was set by the CEO when he compared that situation here in Copenhagen. It took them 10 years, where they lost the control of the company, or more than 10 years. Now, they're more or less back financially. How are you gonna handle all that in the current situation?
I'm not sure I understand, quite understand the comparison, but, I mean, right now we have in Netcompany, many customers who dive into these types of solutions. What we're trying to do here is actually simplify. What I do understand your question about, is about, is every project or every engagement that we do has a lot of brilliant minds and engineers, and they all have their own opinions. They do. I mean, you cannot. You can forcefully put some methodology or culture into their heads, but by having these components and bringing more solutions alive based on components like this, you can actually also put them into some paths of delivering that are more standardized. You cannot take away their creativity or the fact that the customer is actually asking for a customized solution.
What we're doing here is we're actually putting structure into something. We're building on something existing. We're taking the most successful deliveries, the most successful ways into customers and saying, well, how can we formulize that even better? When you want to grow your company internationally and go into different cultures and different countries, what really combines us is that we are engineers or technologists. The discipline needed in order to create a solution, you can do that by methodology, you can do that by culture, but if you add the components, is in as many cases as possible, not all cases, you cannot, but then you have a third tool that where people actually go in the same direction, and that's the reuse thing. I think that answered your...
I don't know about the door in Microsoft in 2005. I'm not entirely with you there. I think the business is doing really, really fine. We have many other great customers coming in internationally as well. What they like, besides the culture and the methodology, is the fact that we can reuse as many components as possible. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We have another question there.
Hi. Yeah, [Oson Raut] here from Barclays. Thanks for taking my question. We've heard a lot now already about artificial intelligence. I thought it would be interesting if you could give us a very brief update of sort of the progress Netcompany has made to date. We've seen a lot of other IT service businesses go via partnerships with the likes of Google, Microsoft. I was just wondering, is your approach to sort of develop in-house and go by yourself, or are you also looking to strike similar partnerships going forward? Thank you.
Great question. I mean, AI, I could talk for... I actually do that. I do that. I could talk for 2 hours now. It's so extremely interesting. I think as a company, you need to look 2 ways. One is, of course, your internal processes and how you can use AI to do something in a more clever way. We're certainly doing that. We have a task force in Netcompany working with AI, looking into everything from documentation, testing, even programming. How can we, over time, use AI as a productive tool? That is happening, and we've been working... I mean, I started neural networks in 89. We just didn't have the power. I think that is happening, and that will happen in every business.
Maybe what is even more interesting is how you can deliver AI to large enterprises and governments and customers. Now, there's a lot of large issues to be handled there. I know we will hear more about it when Mahdi comes on stage and talks about the airport. I think AI will come in different variations and degrees into every business, but it needs data.... It needs structure in order to be optimal. In order to do that, you need the platform. We're actually selling our solutions many times with the AI AI argument. Imagine if you could almost websites, for instance. We spent 25 years building self-service websites, and I think some of you feel that you're doing the work of other people because you're sitting there and doing self-service by yourself.
You're swiping, you're doing this and that, and you're thinking, "I'm just like a spider, and I have all these self-service things that I have to do. Why don't I just talk to my phone and computer and say, 'Listen, pay that bill,' or everything that is about this or that, I'm not really interested. Do it for me." Businesses to businesses, right? "I need to reorder this thing. You know what I ordered last time, and you know that I'm in a situation where I just need half of it or whatever. Conduct the rest. I don't need to put in my detailed knowledge into it anymore." This will happen, but we need structure for it to happen, and we need to get out of the old systems. Many of our customers who that...
They want to harvest AI benefits over the next two, three, four years, they need to get out of their old systems before they can. Maybe even taking them out of their old systems requires AI. We just move them into AMPLIO or something, you know? That's the way it has to be because AI cannot work on something that is not that structured, then it's gonna be very, very difficult. I hope that answered your question. Yeah. It is a driver, huge driver for digitization right now. Yeah.
Yiwei from SEB. Thank you for taking my question, André. Also a follow-up question on AI. Do you see any change in the market dynamics or customer demand for the solution? We know Netcompany has been sort of mainly focused a lot on the customized application development. Do you see any holes in your service offerings and capabilities, or if you sort of capitalize this mega trend for the next four, five years?
It's a huge mega trend, it's gonna be seen in different levels. Now, in all of your companies, depending on whether you choose to use a global algorithm or not or whatever, there's gonna be some small choices there. In all of your companies, you will gain effectivity gains just by putting AI into existing functions. Typically, functions that are not even digitized functions, maybe. You will gain a lot of effectivity. Operational effectivity in the entire company requires data and structure. Now, do I see any change in market dynamics? I do. I think the change is that most big enterprises and governments want to get out of their legacy systems. They can't really embrace.
It's not only AI, they can't embrace new technology and new digitization means like AI, before they get out of their old systems. It takes them 12 to 18 to 24 months to do a minor change in their existing business processes. They have IT departments with thousands of employees. I mean, banks have IT departments with thousands of employees. What is it actually you guys do? The same thing you did last year, right? If you really want to use AI for something, you might want to get out of that prison at some point, otherwise, it's gonna be very, very difficult. Market dynamics definitely is pushing the existing static structures to disappear in a higher pace.
It's pacing up the market, and it will be pacing a drive for technology change, getting away from something that is, in many cases, 30 and 40 years old, and people that are 30 and 40 years older. It is changing, but it is just pushing that, and it's pushing it hard for sure. We have a question down there.
Hi, this is Aditya from Bank of America. With these labels that you've given to the 3 platforms over the last year or so, have you sort of seen customers saying: "We want to use this platform, which we're not using currently?" Are you seeing that sort of cross-sell happening already within the existing customer base? I mean, is there anything on, let's say, you have X% of customers who are using more than 1 platform, and then you can see an upsell or cross-sell in that going forward?
I think we are not really competing with existing infrastructures there. We just put our platforms on the side or replacing. I think when you're there in the core of businesses, which we are, whether it's real-time optimization or it's core processes like with AMPLIO or it's a communication infrastructure, if you're there, you will cross-sell if you deliver. That's a fact. If you don't deliver, you will not cross-sell. You will have a very short career in that business. It is a fact, right? Because we're dealing with so business-critical, society-critical things, if you succeed, you're just a friend of that company for a long time, because this is business. It's not really IT anymore. It's business, just as much as it's IT.
If you change a huge supply chain set up for a large company, or their service channel just gets 50% much better at servicing customers, and you do that in nine months, you are a true friend of that company. You will cross-sell anything.
Yeah. That's it? Okay.
No, no more questions?
Okay. I think we move on. I think we went over time,
but I th ink we're gonna make it. Yes. Thank you very much, André.
Thank you, guys.
Next in line is our Country Manager from Denmark and Sweden, Gustaf.
Thank you very much. No clicker?
There's one over there.
Cool. Thank you, everyone. Great to see you here. I'm really happy that you're here physically and just didn't send your AI bots to attend. It's much, much nicer. I'm here to tell you a little bit about where we are with Denmark, then I'll touch a little bit base on Sweden as well, but mostly Denmark. Where are we with Denmark? Well, in the Q1 numbers, we were showing that the growth was there, still growing, but maybe we didn't grow as much as we used to. Still impressive numbers that our competition probably would be very happy with, but it wasn't up to the par that we used to in Denmark. I guess the natural question is: why is that? I think for us, it has been a challenging time.
It has been 2 sort of dampening factors happening at the same time in Denmark. The one thing is the public side, which is quite a substantial part of our business. The public side was having an election. They happen once in a while. In Denmark, you can't really control when they happen. It's the sitting government is deciding within a period that now it's going. This time, I think everyone knew that it would come, and most likely when it would come. We have a period up to the election when everyone is positioning in getting reelected, so it's election time. Afterwards, we got a new government. It took a little bit longer this time than we're used to.
The positive side was, where, I'm sure, the Danes here at least are aware, that we got a coalition government this time with an agenda to create reform. For us, doing IT systems, reform is good. That was very positive. It took a little while to get the government in place. What's then happening after the government is in place is they start to make the new laws, what to do. There's a period after election, and there is a period after election, and that's been like a dampening factor over the public side of business. Still growing, still growing quite good, and that's, I think that's a testament to the stickiness of our business.
Even when that is happening and not a lot of new things are happening, we have a lot of ongoing projects. We have a lot of things that are still moving. The things we didn't have was sort of the big reforms and the newish initiatives. That's definitely what we're looking out for now. I can tell you're probably asking when will it happen? There's a lot of work going on in the government right now, so I can't give you a timeline, but it's definitely moving along. That's sort of a one-off that we have to go through, and we've had that, I mean, it happens once in a while. This time it happened at the same time that we have the private sector going through a little bit of uncertainty, as you are well aware of.
There was, after last summer, a little bit uncertainty of where is the economy going. We didn't really see a lot of sort of cutbacks or big things happening, and at least not in our business, our strategy, strategic part of the business, 'cause the projects we are doing, they are not the ones that you cut down first, so they're running. We saw things moving on in the private sector. We just saw some hesitation in starting new initiatives. Better see where the economy is going first. Well, no one better here than to look out in the crystal ball what's happening in the economy, but I can't really say. I can just say that I stood seeing some positive signs.
I think that people are starting to look out for new initiatives. I guess that's the most I can say. That was really positive. What we did during this period was to sort of regroup, and especially in the private sector, and use some time on what André just told us about the go-to markets, the platforms. How do we make this even a stronger message? We had there was a good investment. That's basically where we are in Denmark. What we have been doing over the Q1 is we've been winning some big framework agreements that we're now working on capitalizing on. And we've reconfirmed our position within the tax department, where a lot of things happening, rewinning, extending, growing further in the tax.
Working with the business authority, which is one of the places where a lot of reform and new law is going into. That's been quite good. We are at 12%, so that's obviously quite a big market share, but the market is growing. I definitely see us still taking market share, and I think we're in a good position here. The team behind me, some of the sharpest minds as well. There's a lot of sharp minds here. I have 10 business units in Denmark reporting to me. That's a scalable structure that we have been using for quite a long while now. Each one of these have a distinct responsibility. They have a profit and loss responsibility for a unit. The units are around 2 to 400 people.
They're responsible for growing their organization, developing their organization. They're responsible for making sure the projects get delivered, and they're responsible for selling within that business unit. Business units are centered around some verticals, so we know who is responsible for each customer, and both the delivery of those customers and the growth to new customers. That's centered within the business units. I think what we're really good at is making sure this is scalable structure. Even though 10 might seem like a big number to me, it's definitely a good number because a lot of these are running the business. I spend some time very close to them, figure out what to do. We also spend a lot of time how to make sure that we prioritize between the business units.
I think that's a key thing that we always been really good at. I meet with these 10 business unit directors every week, often more often than that, but at least once a week. We look at where is the strategic opportunities, where should we send the people out, and then we realign between the between the different groups. It's not static, and that's really a strength of ours. We have 4 business units in public, I'm not expecting you to figure out what the 3-letter acronym here is. We don't use that externally. It's mostly makes a lot of sense for us. We have a business unit on tax and customs and the education projects. We have a business units of the digital government.
All the projects that go across the digital government, think Digital Post, borger.dk, and the like, including public safety. That's the police, defense as a definitely a growing area. We have the welfare benefits is solutions with health. Last of all, we have the CSA, which is basically the climate, the green transition, the basic data that powers Denmark in that unit. That's the four public ones. In the private ones, we have four private ones, and it's the utilities and telco, obviously a big sector. We have the transportation and logistics here under the airport, for example, and we have financial services, FSI, which is probably the acronym that makes sense to most people outside ourselves. We have the unions business. That's the four private ones.
Across all of this, we have APS, which is application services, maintenance, smaller development projects, the long tail, and the operation that really make sure that everything runs stable in our own data center or in the cloud. That's the 10 units. Really happy with this team. What are we gonna do the next three years? I think it's no big secret. We'll definitely use the platforms accelerators to make sure that we get into new customers. We'll deepen our vertical story within the key verticals. Looking at the platforms, I think right now there's a lot of focus on the 2 ones in the middle, PULSE and AMPLIO, as André just mentioned.
Basically coming into customers saying, well, they tell us that they need to change their legacy systems. They need to get to new levels so they can start utilizing AI and the things we have been talking about. Well, AMPLIO is the perfect answer for that. AMPLIO started in public, but now we're expanding it on the two financial services and other areas. PULSE is also a very strong offering, a lot of people asking about PULSE, how we can get real-time, how can we make sure that we can take decisions faster, as André was saying, how can we optimize our business? That's both in public and private. For completeness, we also took ERMIS in here. ERMIS is in the Intrasoft product for customs.
Great reference case in Denmark, reference case that we're taking along also in Europe to show what can be done and what needs to be done to support the new customs code. Obviously, AMI, with a lot of potential around how do we utilize the mit.dk platform, how do we expand that further to a much more interactive dialogue with customers? How can we expand it in other areas, like, for example, archiving, make sure that we have the internals, documents of the organization in place. A lot of good things happening here. What we'll do over 26 is basically keep on doing what we have been doing for a long time, servicing our existing customers, make sure that we keep to the stickiness in that.
Going into the areas where there's still a lot of existing legacy, and in public sector, there's a lot of potential in tax, and I think in public safety in general. Using the platforms to win some new customers, and do that on a new strategic level. I think in private has definitely been growing over the last years from being the smaller one, where the big projects was in public. Now, the big projects are as well in private, and the strategic partnership we have with customers is at a new level. We're definitely keeping enhancing this, the strategic partnership. We'll grow the organization.
There's still plenty of good people to get ahold of, so that's really not a factor that we see utilizing the sourcing countries we have as well. Churn has been a topic for a lot of questions around churn. We definitely see that normalized and don't see it being a big factor over the coming period. I guess there's a lot of questions. I mean, I think we're at a good level when it comes to churn in Denmark. We are a high-performance culture, so some churn is good. We have seen a trend Last year when it was a very hot market, and maybe some unvoluntary churn that we definitely was a little bit too high for us.
Now it's shifted over the last period, so we're more in control ourselves and making sure that we keep the good orientation. That's, I think churn is at a good level. Definitely, still room to grow, and I think we're in a good place in Denmark. Looking forward to a new government coming in place, looking forward to all the promising dialogues we have with around the around the platforms. I'll save the questions for last. Now, going to Sweden. Full disclosure, I'm a Swedish citizen living in Sweden. I have been working in Denmark since 1996, so my heart is sort of split between Denmark and Sweden.
Unless it comes to a football game between Sweden and Denmark, then I'm still Swedish, which is a little bit unfortunate because Denmark is way better right now. We have been spending some time over the last years now in building the presence in Sweden, as you know. We started in public sector. We started in 2020, which basically was the period when nothing was happening in public sector in Sweden, 'cause it was fighting Corona and keeping the status quo. That was the sole focus. What we have been doing is to spread the word, and spread basically the word about 2 things: one, the Danes story, what have we been doing in Denmark, and spreading the story around the platforms.
'Cause like André said, it's one thing to come and say, "Well, we're really good. We have done this another place. We have good people." But if we come and say, "We have done this another place, we have good people, and we actually have accelerators, so you don't have to start from scratch, you can start from a proven level where things have shown to be working," that's definitely a much more appealing proposition. We have been talking about the Danes story, we have been talking about the platforms, I think that's taking on now.
Actually, one of the big decision makers in Sweden was quoted as saying, "We definitely need to be inspired by Denmark." I think that's because not maybe not only, but definitely a contributing factor due to the work that we have been doing and selling the story, telling the story about Denmark. When they say this, I think in their minds, they equate that with Netcompany. I think we're in a good place in terms of visibility in Sweden. Definitely big interest for the platforms as well. Those two things are now converging, and I think there are some interesting dialogues. We haven't really seen, like, a single competitor that does the same kind of things as we do.
They all like to say that they would like to take more commitment, they'd like to take bigger engagements, go out from the traditional body shopping, come with a platform, but they don't really have it. We're in a good position here. We're building this organically, so we're doing it right from the first time. Unlike, you know, there has been some adjustments to the acquisitions we made in other countries. This time we're starting from scratch. We're doing it the Netcompany way from the start. It's very promising. We have won some contract, we have won some framework agreements. One of the big ones is Inera, where we still have to see some revenue coming out of that one. It's, Inera is basically two sides.
It's the supports for the municipalities, like KOMBIT in Denmark, and it's the regions. Region side is definitely where Inera has had their focus up till now. We're bidding for some things there. I'm quite confident that there will be revenue from that, but also looking at the transition for the municipalities to turn into more of a KOMBIT-like model, and that's quite interesting with the experiences we have from Denmark. The market share we have in Sweden, I think, saying less than 1% is probably not an overstatement, at least. There's room to grow here. We have a good team up there.
Basically, we have around 30 people sitting in Stockholm. We have, counting Denmark and Sweden, and all the Swedes working here, I think we have at least 250 Swedes, and obviously, we can deploy that to the projects. It's quite a big base that we can deploy to Swedish customers. We're getting some knowledge around in the schools. We haven't really. I think we're still going into our 1st year, and when we get the projects, we'll accelerate at the same pace. We're getting some knowledge in the schools, and it's a big base to get good people from. We're doing it with people that know the methodology, so things are done in the right way at the projects. I think very positive on Sweden.
It's just out there and get some customers, and then grow the organization from there. With that, opening up for questions.
Yiwei from SEB . Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions here. If you talk about this decentralized model structure, with each partner in charge of, like, 100-200 people, my question is, how easy to reallocate your resources between those organizations? I guess the growth outlook and growth profile has been also different with each sector.
Yeah. A great question. I think we have a good position here due to two factors. The methodology is one methodology. I mean, internally, like from the outside, it looks like it's a lot of things in private or it's public, the way we do projects is the same. Regardless what customer it is, it's the same way of doing things. Basically, we can take a person from a private project and set into a public project. They wouldn't tell. It's basically the same methodology, the same way of working. That's a big strength. It's not like we invented one way of doing things per business unit. The other thing is the technology. It's basically the same kind of technology solutions in bit per business unit as well.
Coming down to the platforms as accelerators. There's also a foundation underneath everything that is exactly the same. You could take someone out of project, and they will directly be able to move into the same technology on another business unit. That's why this is not really a factor for us. We can take very quick decisions, and we're very much addressing this holistic view of make sure we do the right thing for the whole company, the whole thing for Denmark, and I would say as well, the whole thing for the Group. If there's a better opportunity in the UK, then we'll send some people to UK. We're quite good at doing this in both from a governance perspective, but also because we have the same base.
You can basically deploy a person to a new project, and they will feel at home from day one.
The second question is regarding the market growth. Could you give us an update on the growth for your addressable market?
The market growth?
Yeah.
Well, I think, as I was saying before, there's some different factors right now, so I won't comment on specific numbers, but.
3, 4%.
3%, 4%. Yeah. CFO knows. Thank you, Thomas.
Hi, Claus from Nordea. First question goes to Denmark. As to your 2026 target, how big will platform revenue be?
We don't distinguish between platform revenue and other revenue. You should see the platforms as accelerators for a project. We go into an engagement, and we go into the engagement with an engagement model, which is people, and there are some accelerators to that. It's not like it's two sides of the business.
Will it then be more profitable? It will be a margin enhancing?
We'll definitely go into the project with accelerator, it's, I mean, one thing is winning the project. That's the first step of an accelerator, is make sure that we get a project. That's basically the level we're looking at.
Okay.
And-
Sweden, when we meet in 2026, CMD, how you know, what will you say about the Swedish operation at that time? You know, what will be the size of that business?
When I don't like to give you a specific number, but I definitely see us being a factor in Sweden in three years' time. That's, I mean, that's quite ambitious being the size we are right now in Sweden, but I don't think it's ambitious, given the strength of the portfolio that we bring in terms of experiences and platforms. I think we'll be a quite a factor in [Swedish] IT in three years' time.
Maybe not a revenue number, but how many employees, for instance, do you think?
Gonna round up here. Very nice, Gustaf. That's it.
Yep. Cool. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Gustaf.
Good morning, everyone.
Oh, sorry.
Yep. Hi, I'm Alex Manos. I'm the CEO of Netcompany- Intrasoft. I've been with the company for about 8 years now, and we are now getting close to coming into the second year of being part of the Netcompany Group. I need the clicker, right? Which is this. Yes. There we go. 2022 was actually a very strong year for the company. We did better than any other year in our 30-year existence, almost, with very strong growth in all our business segments. Moving into Q1 of 2023, the good performance continued across our businesses, both for the European institutions, the public sector, and the enterprise sectors.
As we discussed last year, there is very significant funding coming from Europe to most European countries around the Resilience and Reconstruction Fund. Greece is one of the bigger recipients of this funding, and for IT, they have earmarked about DKK 2.7 billion. That has been a target since last year, to be able to win and then absorb as much of that as possible by our company. We have a leading position in Greece. We are the leader, let's say, in IT, and that's what we are in the process of materializing. In the EU institutions, that is a quite significant size market.
It's over EUR 1 billion per year, spent purely on IT, and there, we have also managed to reach the leading position within IT, winning business again and again, building a very healthy backlog, and at the same time, continuously growing our organization in Belgium, in Luxembourg, and in Greece in order to be able to deliver these projects. While Enterprise, which is our third business unit, has also continued to expand, let's say, its scope. We are very heavy on telco customers, heavy on financial institutions and insurance, but we've also managed to enter some big retail customers in the past quarter. Key wins, a very large project funded by the RRF in Greece, a very core project for us.
A customer that we have been working for for the past 20 years, we have managed to re-win. This is one of the biggest challenges in front of us. It actually contains one of the products that we have developed, but since we haven't announced it widely, you will allow me not to say who it is. That has been a very significant win that we have been working for a long time. If you look at ADNOR is a the high voltage transportation, transmission utility. That's where we have won a rather sizable cybersecurity project. As a matter of fact, it is one of the few recent wins that we've had in the space of cybersecurity. We are slowly building a significant size team around that.
We have recently also had successes for that within the EU institutions. Practically all projects require some sort of security, either on the development of the software or on the running of the systems, the operation of the systems, and we are now in a better and better position to be able to deliver this service to all our customers. The European ID wallet, that was a major win that we have announced.
We have undertaken by DG CONNECT, the responsibility to develop the wallet that's gonna be used in all the European countries in order for citizens to be able to store their ID, their passport, their driver's license, and down the road, their academic certificates, and any other file that will allow them to travel freely throughout Europe, and securely and safely share only the information that they want with any either public or enterprise organization that wants to get this information so they can do a transaction. Thomas is gonna talk a lot about this. I'm not gonna steal away.
It's one of the most exciting, I think, projects, but also something that ties in very well with what Netcompany has been doing in Denmark with AMI, and through that, we see a clear path to develop that business in Europe. Finally, customs, which I love, and I'm gonna get the chance to talk about twice, I guess, today. There's a big project in Central Europe that we have been chasing after for a while, and we are winning, okay? Sorry, Thomas, I know I'm not supposed to be too excited. The addressable market in Greece, we have 20% of the market. The market is still growing, which is hopeful for us, both for the public sector and the enterprise sector.
The EU institutions, we have about 15% of a vast market, very competitive. Any IT company you have ever heard of is trying to get a piece of that market, so the pricing is very competitive, but a solid track record for the past 25 years is keeping us in the game continuously, so we see further growth there as well. In Belgium, we're only doing a little business, but this is one of the areas where we definitely wanna grow in. Let me move on. The leadership team, we are organized in a similar, but not exactly the same way, as Gustav was just saying. We have 3 business units, our EU institutions, our public sector, and our enterprise sector.
We have all the activities within those sectors grouped under these three business units that span across countries. Luxembourg, Belgium, Greece, and all the other countries we are active in, they all share one structure across the countries. Led by the, my teammates on the left, Chris, George, Spyros, and Manolis is our CFO. Very experienced people, have been in the market, in the IT market for a very long time. George has actually been working for the EU institutions market since 1990, when they were founded. A very strong team, which is then followed by the delivery groups, as we call them.
Younger people, but again, very knowledgeable, that have grown within the organization, most of them, and are slowly but steadily building more and more business, both on the sales front, but also on the delivery front. As you can see, we are making a conscious effort of adding more women to the higher management layers. We have two out of, I don't know, what is it? 12 here, 15, but we are definitely from the layers below, we have more and more talent that is coming up the ladder. When you look at 2026, as I think is evident in our numbers, we have accumulated a very significant backlog, especially in the EU institutions. A big backlog.
This is one of our main goals, of course, is to be able to absorb as much of that backlog as possible, okay. It is a path of continuous growth, which means that we continuously need to attract more talent in order to be able to even absorb this backlog, not just win new business. Most of our large EU projects, if I can remind for the ones that maybe were not in this meeting last year, those contracts are framework contracts. They run between five and seven years, and they're usually multi-million. They're between a few tens of millions up to a few hundreds of millions, and then there's some like DIGIT PM, which are EUR 2.5 billion, okay. Over 7 years.
As you can understand, it's very important when the time for renewal comes, because it's not just that you're gonna lose 1 little deal and you're gonna replace it with another little deal. It's huge deals that may affect 200 people, plus, working on a specific project. Thankfully, we have re-won all of those, and the next time around is around 25, 26. We consider that we are on a good track with good stability for our EU business, which is also the biggest part of our business. In the Greek public sector, indeed, the RRF money has been spent, not spent, has been allocated, not as fast as we would hope, but the projects have been tendered.
We have won a very healthy number of projects, we are now, again, staffing up as well there in order to be able to deliver. There's also a tight timeline. We need to deliver everything and invoice before the end of 25. The next two years are gonna be extremely busy in order for us to deliver all these projects. One of our biggest goals as a group, as mentioned before, is to actually take 2 of our products, Hermes within customs and NC Tax within taxation, expand this business throughout Europe. This is something that we have already started, especially for customs. As I'm gonna talk about this afternoon, you will see that we are in more countries than we are not in Europe. We have a solid story.
As part of Netcompany, we have a solid force pushing this business in all the countries we're in, and also the countries that we're not. As that is going on, we see a very good potential for that in the future. Enterprise market, we are close to becoming number one in Southeast Europe, you would say. There is still space. We will continue to grow, although not at a very high rate. What we're looking for is how we can take some of that know-how and technology and bring it into Northern Europe, the markets that the other companies of the group are active in. Finally, one of the big opportunities we feel is to actually penetrate Belgium, the Belgian market, the Belgian public and enterprise markets. We are there.
We have over 900 people in Belgium and in Luxembourg. We are the biggest provider of IT to the European Commission. We have not even scratched the surface of the federal or the Flemish Government. We went jointly with the colleagues from Netcompany. We presented a vision where, you know, the company that has supported Denmark in becoming number one on the DESI index is now here locally and is capable of helping you move up. I think Belgium was 13 or something. They wanted to get within the top five. The reception was incredible. What we are doing right now is we're looking to staff appropriately so that we can start offering our platforms, products, and services in the Belgian market.
I think that's a big goal for 26 that we need to bring results for. Growth acceleration through products and platforms, just to give a few solid examples of achievements. Around Hermes, our customs product, there is a UCC regulation, which basically forces all European countries to switch to this standard in order to do all the customs movement within the countries. We, through our position in TAXUD, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but we have been the partner for TAXUD for the last 20 years. TAXUD is responsible for customs and taxation in Europe. Through that, we have always had, let's say, an advance, you know, a foresight in what's coming up. That has helped us in investing, in developing an actual product for that market.
A lot of the countries are left behind. They have not managed to switch their systems fast enough. We are coming in with a product to these countries, and we are promising them a very fast transition. This has been a very successful selling tool so far, again, as Lars is gonna talk about later on, which has helped us enter many new markets or grow our business in existing markets. DX4B, that's another story where we started from our profit score banking system that we've sold to about 20 smaller banks, I would say, in Southeast Europe and Middle East.
Based on that, and as everything has started moving towards payments, we developed a comprehensive solution for Deutsche Telekom in Greece for their payments platform, and they using our components from the core banking system as a core. They launched, I think, last November, one of the biggest and most successful launches in the country. Hopefully, they're gonna be moving this to the rest of the Deutsche Telekom subsidiaries and mother company in Germany. They've already, I think, signed up 125,000 users within a space of six months. Based on that, and as we continue to evolve on top, we have developed the DX4B, which is what you see here, which is in its last stages of development.
We already have a customer that's gone live in Cyprus, and what we're gonna try to target is the new EMIs, the Electronic Money Institutions, digital banks, okay? That need a very, very flexible solution in order to be able to do either their B2B or B2C transactions. Here's the chance again, through Netcompany, to try to address the Northern European market, which is definitely much more ludicrous than the Southern European market. Just another example, a Southern European airport that we did zero business with. We went in, we spoke to them about AIRHART.... and PULSE and what happened in Denmark, and that opened the door. We are now in discussions with them, and I think they were here last week to see the system, to talk to the people at the airport.
That also opened the door for us to talk about big data, about analytics, and we're also developing other business. Just three little examples of how having platforms and products can just open the door, and from there on, you either materialize that business or you get to talk to them, and you do some other business. Okay, wrapping up. I don't know, we're running late, right? Wrapping up, we... Our strategy is to focus on areas that will benefit from the unification of Europe. We have one foot within the European institutions. We have presence in many countries as Netcompany. What we are looking to do is try to work in the areas where what happens at the center gets translated to national systems.
That's what we've done for customs, that's what we're gonna be doing for taxation, and that's what we can do also for other areas like the environment, the carbon border management system, and so on and so forth. Of course, it's gonna be a challenge, as I said, to deliver all these projects in the coming two to three years. We're also using a lot of the success stories here to penetrate, to deliver, design and deliver new systems in other markets, Greece being the first one. The drive for customs and taxation I've mentioned, Belgium, again, is a main, is a serious goal. It's a big market, I think it is lacking a player like Netcompany. On the people front, obviously, we all went through the phase of COVID.
It was difficult with all our people working out of the company. We decided, we made a big investment, just like Netcompany Denmark, we got new offices closer to the center of the city. Beautiful, more what people, young people want to go work in. In doing that, we are bringing, you know, a lot of new talent into the company. Younger people, I guess, are more interested in having a very having an office that looks like a living room, rather than, you know, having a huge salary. In combining these things, we are trying to, again, bring the best talent to the company, but also rebuild that glue that has made the company so successful in the past years. Of course, together with Netcompany, we are trying to converge on how we sell.
You know, it's technology versus business. We're trying to combine and increase the business profile, but maintaining a lot of the technology, strong technology know-how that we've had. I think I've touched. I know we are short on time. You see what I was gonna talk about. If there's anything you'd like to ask, I'm at your disposal.
Yeah, let's just take a single question here from Mads. Will you give it to Mads, back?
Thank you. Obviously, the RRF in Greece is very attractive. DKK 15 billion-DKK 20 billion is a high number for the Greek market. Can you tell us, you know, what is the timing on the projects here, and how much has been front-loaded in the market?
It's DKK 27 billion. About DKK 2.7 billion is for IT. I would say.
Yes, I'm talking about Danes, DKK 15 billion-DKK 20 billion.
That's DKK 2.7 billion.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, fine.
Anyway.
Can I speak euro or?
Sure you can.
... multiply by seven? I think they have already awarded a good DKK 7 billion. Okay? There's a lot that is in the tendering phase, but as I said, just the fact that everything needs to be invoiced by the end of 2025 is gonna push for practically all of that to be tendered and awarded within 2023. We did have elections, and that did have an effect, but the signs are that the government that we had is gonna continue being the government. They got double score from the second, 41% versus 20%. On the second round, which is on the 25th of June, I think they're gonna win, which means there's gonna be continuity, at least on that front.
I think it will happen, they will award the rest within the year, and then we will all be trying to deliver by the end of 2025.
Perfect.
Yep.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
... Alex, for being super excited. Please welcome our next speaker, Richard, our Country Manager from the U.K.
Thank you. Do I need the clicker? It's over there. Good morning, everyone. Absolute pleasure to be here in Copenhagen. Gonna spend the next 15 minutes just giving you an insight into where the U.K. is headed in Netcompany terms over the next three years. Give you an insight into some of the strategies, and then obviously have some questions at the end. I was very interested in Gustaf talking about governments. How does this clicker work? No. Bear with me. A quick overview of the U.K. will show you, we've had quite a few governments in the last year or two. In terms of the market overview, you all read the papers, but it's been pretty turbulent. You, you name any measure of economic performance, and we're up and down like a yo-yo.
We can't get inflation down, food prices are high, huge volatility. Still talking about Brexit after... What is it? eight years. There's a lot of going on in the background, but that shouldn't actually take away from the fact that, as a company, we had a very good year last year. 30% growth is good. Certainly, when you look at the performance in the past, I've been here two years now, and it was very pleasing. Some of the things you're gonna see happen are, and are happening in the UK, both in public sector and private, are there's a lot of pressure on cost. If you talk to the government at the moment, they are taking sways out of the large public sector departments, some cases up to 40%, which is huge.
In the private sector, it's a very mixed story. If you look at the FTSE, oil and gas stocks are high, tech stocks are slightly not so high, and retail is on its knees. There's a huge variance there. We have to be, as an organization, very focused on the markets we go for, and that really means that if you look at some of the latest trends, defense spending is going up. There's a lot of spending going into big infrastructure projects. There's a lot of change going on in the large industries like rail and transportation and so on. For us, as an organization, you look at those macro trends. You also add in the fact that UK productivity is very low. I've put here at 2014 levels, by any measure in the G8, UK productivity is poor.
That gives us a very, very good opportunity as a challenger in the UK to focus on. Last year, we had some very big key wins. The National Transit Program, which is goods that come in through the UK and out of the UK, large program, 200 million transactions a year. We are now the prime partner to deliver that, along with Intrasoft and the ERMIS software. We won a very large project in the government to run the National Security Network. This is a network where, in times of trouble, like Ukraine, people move to out. Because it has to be secure, some 40,000 senior people on that network. That's right, puts us right at the heart of some of the areas of government.
We have a major transportation win, where we're really involved in the transformation of a company that's part of Dubai Ports, and in defense, we won a new client where we actually beat a tier one head-to-head. That gets us in, and obviously, we hope to expand. Some of the key wins have been instrumental in, one, getting us into both solid public and private sector organizations. From a UK standpoint, private sector is a big market. It's 6x the size of government, so we have to be very clear where we're gonna focus there. Current addressable market share, well, you can see for yourself, the UK is a very large market. It's a very mature market, so we still have less than 1%.
For us, massive opportunity, but we also have to be extremely focused on where we play, because you, it is. You don't want to spread yourself too thinly, go after a sector and not be able to bring out the differentiators. I'll come on to that because it's platforms that we think will give us a good differentiator into the private sector. I'll talk about some of the platforms and where I see that going in a minute. Quickly, in terms of leadership team, this is not the UK leadership team, as defined by Gustaf or Alex before me, but this is very much people who have just joined in the last 12, 14 months.
There's been quite a transformation in our leadership team, both in our infrastructure division and in our applications division, because if we're going to be a challenger, which we certainly are becoming, we have to have a team capable of coming in behind that. There's been a lot of change, and that change is now settling down, but I think it's a very healthy thing because, you know, we are competing against organizations that, you know, have very capable people. We're a people business at the end of the day. This change has been good, and I think you'll see that and are seeing that reflected in some of the financial performance. In terms of the growth opportunities, and I'll go through each one, brand recognition is incredibly important. You know, we are a challenger.
As I've mentioned before, the U.K. is a very competitive market. It's a very mature market. It still has a very large American domination from a services standpoint. The ability to be heard and the ability to get the messaging across becomes key. We're having a big focus this year on how we position the brand, what sort of messaging we want to portray. COVID Pass, for instance, gave us a platform, but we have to continue with that. We've just signed a new PR agency because, again, there's gonna be a lot more focus for us as a team this year on that. I think talent, we've talked about people, talent is incredibly important, and we want to be and remain an employer of choice in the U.K. We spent a lot of time building up our benefits.
Just as Alex said, we have moved our premises. We are now neighbors of Google, which is good on two things. One is it's where all our teams want to be, and secondly, they are laying off staff. We are finding recruiting is not a real challenge in the UK. We are a very attractive company to work for. We're seen as a challenger. We're seen as young and vibrant. From a talent perspective, things are going well. We have to, and I think André touched on it at the start, deliver, deliver. One of the opportunities, and I'll come on to it a little later, about the UK market, is it's been the domain of very large U.S. companies, and I'm from that background myself.
for many years, Delivery is still an issue. It's an issue across government, and it's an issue across the private sector. If we can deliver faster, better, more effectively, that is a good thing. We have to have that focus. All the projects that I put up as wins last year, I'm happy to say, are delivering very well. Probably one thing I didn't mention and I should. The Transit Program is a cross-Netcompany team. It's people from Greece, it's people from the U.K., it's people from Group. We think as an international market, and the U.K. is quite an international market, we will see more of these projects emerge. Access to key commercial vehicles, I think frameworks have been mentioned before. There are a certain way of doing things, and the U.K. is no different.
We have to get on the framework agreements from a government standpoint, and we are bidding for some very large framework agreements as I stand here now. We also have to get on master services agreements, if you're familiar with those, which tend to be run by most utility companies, energy companies, and so on. We have to maintain that. In terms of those economic conditions, one of the opportunities that I keep coming back to is this productivity question, and it really links very much to the platforms that André mentioned at the start. There's always an assumption with digital transformation that it's this wonderful thing that suddenly comes along and everything changes. Digital transformation is a journey. It's hard, and I think it's very...
I think it's okay to say that a lot of the large government departments and a lot of the large utilities or energy companies still are trying to get off legacy, and they're still trying to modernize and digitize that back office. Something like AMPLIO becomes very important there. That productivity issue that the UK has in general becomes very important for us as a challenger because we have a great story, and I'll touch a little bit more on that. I think that differentiation in the private sector becomes very important. It's a big market, therefore, you have to have differentiators. For me, the two differentiators that we're working towards in private are, one, around the platforms, and two, something called Facility Security Clearance. We have 5 markets in the UK that we're looking at.
We're looking at health. Obviously, have a good platform in NHS. We're looking at tax, customs. We're looking at government, defense and manufacturing, transport, and utilities. In defense and other government sectors, security clearance is a big issue in the UK. Something like Facility Security Clearance is your ability to deal with certain levels of work on your own premises, highly classified work. Getting that accreditation enables you to also do your own security clearances. We have a strong base of customers in that space. We see that as something that will help us over the next three years to become more known and take more market share there. Secondly, the platforms will and already early discussions with particular clients in utilities and in energy are showing us that, yeah, there's a real opportunity there.
Lastly, focus marketing that really supports some of the things I've just said. That's key for us. Again, it's gonna be a lot of focus on that for us as an organization. We've talked a little bit about products and services. Am I okay for time?
Yeah, sure.
Yep. The three in front of you, ERMIS, we did win a very large transit program. These are defined by legislation. They have drop dead dates of November 23 in case of transit. We're working with a major SI partner as well within Tax and Customs, and we are now beginning to look at the whole tax area, collections area, and so on. These are big opportunities for us. Alex has touched a little. I think he's gonna talk more this afternoon about the capabilities there, but that combination of software with the services built around it have really given us an ability to, in some cases, walk in and win bigger deals than we could have from an original standpoint. I think that's incredibly important to mention. PULSE, André touched on this morning, this ability to make real-time change.
I think André is right. You know, most organizations aren't set up to run in a real-time way. There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done to the existing technology for that to happen. Already, we're talking to a major U.K. airport. In fact, a presentation is taking place as I'm talking to you, around putting PULSE or AIRHART as the data platform into a major airport. Utilities, we talk... Utilities business is all about how fast they can shift to renewables. Again, real-time data, having access, being able to make real-time change in your existing core systems becomes incredibly important. Transportation, new rail franchises. You don't want to build franchises like we've done before. You want to build them based on data. Some very interesting initiatives going there. Manufacturing and supply chain.
We're talking to one or two very large manufacturers about how to, again, get visibility of their supply chains. They are large supply chains, you can't see what's happening at every stage. Something like PULSE will enable you to have that dashboard and that ability to make those changes, so the productivity enhancements become huge. Lastly, AMPLIO. You know, it is, for me, something I'm very excited about because we very much are talking to one, two... Probably four large government departments at the moment about how this or this particular platform, and this particular platform is tried and tested. You're taking the risk out, but you can use that platform as part of your delivery to digitize those back-end services. It's no secret that most government organizations, whilst the front door may look digitized, the back door isn't so digitized.
This becomes incredibly important as an enhancement tool. These platforms together, I believe, will allow us both to penetrate harder into the public sector, will also give us that differentiation into the private sector. Where do we go on 2026? Yeah, we have to maintain this focus because each of the markets I've talked to you about have huge addressable spend. They have a lot of competitors. They're very mature, so that focus becomes important because we want to go in, and we want to win, and some of the tools that we're going to use I've mentioned to you this morning. We've got to continue to invest in the brand, and we will do so.
This improved productivity and real-time decision-making is landing very well with a lot of senior leaders, both in the public and private sector, in organizations based in the UK. We have to increase our market share in defense, manufacturing, transportation, and utilities. That really is a growth driver for us. Those markets alone are huge. We're well placed for that. We're a people business at the end of the day. Again, that continued focus on people, that continued focus on becoming an employer of choice. We are spending money to ensure that our benefits are not just comparable, but as a workplace, you know, we were up there in that top quadrant because, again, it's a very competitive market.
As I said before, our ability to hire has been a good reason why, in the last 2 years, the organization's grown over 50%. Lastly, execution, and it is all about execution. In a market such as UK or a market like France or Germany, it doesn't really matter. As long as you deliver, you earn the right to have the conversation for the next set of projects. I would never underestimate how important delivery is, and certainly as someone who's been in and around the UK market for 20 years, and I'm sure some of you will know, there have been some very large failures in IT delivery, very public failures.
That is still a very strong message and a very strong card to play, and it's being well received as a challenger now to some of these tier ones. The mechanics have to be in place for us to deliver the platforms. Again, you know, these aren't products. They are platforms that we use as part of our deliveries that give us that advantage to deliver the right outcomes. It's the way that we're positioning these. Gradually, as you get it more into these areas, we move more to fixed-fee projects, something which we do more in other countries. The UK tends to have an obsession, certainly from a government, on T&M. Again, that's starting to change because those budgets are getting squeezed. People are looking for productivity. It's fair to say by 2026, you...
We will see more fixed-price projects coming into the UK. That's me done. Any questions?
There's one over here.
Yeah.
Thank you. I wanted to pick up on the point of fixed-price contracts.
Mm.
How do you think about sort of the scale that you need to have in order to take on these fixed-price projects without sort of venturing the margin in the medium term? Just how do you see sort of the organizational maturity versus sort of the capability of taking fixed-price projects?
The organizational capability is there for fixed-price projects because I wouldn't pretend we're just going to use U.K. resources for that. We have a whole history of being very good at scoping that as a group. I don't see that being an issue. I think it's more a question of, at the moment, we have a balance of projects, many of which aren't fixed price. I don't. That scaling doesn't worry me. It's more just being in that position to have the dialogue and be working with organizations that want to operate on a fixed-fee basis, because not every company wants to do that.
We have one last question.
Hey.
Hi.
From Barclays.
Hello.
I was just wondering if you could talk about some of the progress in the UK over the last 18 months and maybe what's changed, because after acquisition, it did take some time.
Yeah
... to hit the right strides. In terms of growth, there does seem to have been sort of a step change if I look at the last year. I was wondering if you could talk maybe from a perspective of the Netcompany methodology, integration, and sort of...
Yeah
some of the cultural changes that have had to be made.
Yeah
to adjust the organization? That would be helpful.
I'll try, and I might not do it justice in this one question, but we can pick that up. You know, I'm around all day and evening. I think it was a confidence thing, ultimately, that Netcompany have a huge amount of attributes, you know, whether that's delivery attributes, cultural attributes, some of the IP, that really wasn't being organized in the right way and then positioned with either the public or the private sector. You cannot do anything in a turnaround unless you have the customer dialogue and the opportunities to drive the rest. The biggest change, first and foremost, was getting ourselves in a position to bring the best of the company and be talking to the right people in, whether that was the public and private sector.
As that got better and as we generated more revenue, we were able then to change some of the other things in the organization. We were able to invest in benefits. That was huge. We changed pension systems, we changed a lot internally. We moved premises. We were able to do that because we were more successful financially. It all started with getting that front-end piece right. We put in a, what I think has been a very successful go-to-market plan in the UK, that subsequently has been adopted, because, again, with the size of the market, you've got to focus. I think we started with focus, and the market, and talking to the right people. Once we started to make change happen, we coul d then deal with the other things.
It's still a journey, when, well, I wouldn't say we're there yet, but we certainly now have a platform, I think, upon which we can step forward in some of the areas. Does that sort of help?
Yeah. Great.
Thank you very much, Richard.
Lovely. Thank you.
We're just gonna have a 10 minutes break, when you can all stretch your legs and grab some fresh coffee. See you in 10 minutes. 10 to 12, please. Welcome back, everyone. Please get seated, and we'll be ready for our next presenter. Almer? Please welcome our country manager from Norway, Geir.
Thank you. Nice to see you all. I'm going to kick off by after the break with presenting the situation in Norway. I've been in Netcompany three years. I came together with the pandemic, and you do the calculations after that. It's been an interesting travel. Looking into Norway, even Norway is not shy what's happening in the rest of Europe. We see the effect of the economics changing, the inflation, and so forth. I'd like to start off with quoting our Prime Minister, who a few weeks back said that what we lack of human resources in Norway, we are lucky to have the oil funding supporting every one of us.
Now we see in 2022, that that is, in fact, picking up by them enforcing and submitting a lot of new projects in public sectors. It's a very different market in 2023 and 2022. Nevertheless, we see that in Norway we will have a higher unemployment rate going forward. We see that inflation is still struggling. The Norwegian currency is one of the weakest one in Europe as we speak. We also see that the tender activity, especially for public sector, is very, very high and very different from what we've seen over the last two years. We started off this year with a lot of new key wins. We have the Norwegian Agriculture Agency.
That case is modernizing the reindeer husbandry, so if you ask me how we're gonna accelerate that in rest of Europe, that might be hard. It's a very distinct Norwegian area. We have a system of patient injury. We have the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority, and the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs. On top of that, we also had 13 new municipalities signing up on the Molde child welfare case. There's now news for you that we had some challenges last year. We have more or less overcome them. We have overcome them, and we see that those cases, those solutions now are picking up pace in the municipalities. I'm getting back to that shortly.
When we talked about the market share in Norway, we are less than 2%. Nevertheless, how the market developed, there are still a lot of business to pick up in the Norwegian market. As Richard mentioned, we have more or less the dramatic change in the management team. Out of the partner group, 3 of them started over the last year, and the last one, Vidar, over there, has his first day today. He entered Netcompany after being the CEO of Visma Consulting over the last few years in Norway. We think that's a strong recruitment. We also enforced the principal layer, who's taking care of our methodology and delivery with 2 principals, very strong principals from Denmark.
If anything, I'd like to mention, we have focusing also on building up the next level of managers in Norway, up and coming, we are using a lot of training, on-the-job training, building up the next layer of manager, the future of Netcompany, so to say. Beneath this, there's a very strong young group of talents working and very motivated, and also, after the last few years, very trained on the methodology. The transformation towards Netcompany way of doing business is, in our opinion, done. If you look into 2026, I said what the Prime Minister quoted. Next week, the current Prime Minister is addressing the digital agenda for Norway, and his topic is that the demographic is a challenge for us, as for almost everyone in Europe.
There's one solutions for that, and that is find a new way of digitalization. We're gonna address the platform also in my presentation. The public organization are challenged when it comes to fulfilling the business needs by consulting, by frame agreements. The current government like less consultants in the public entity, but they still have the same goals. The answer for this is what André was talking about earlier on. We can jump start the digitalization process for a lot of them by using the platform, by reusing what we also did in the Corona passport and the track and trace app and so forth. We see that the public sector is has a huge underinvestment in legacy solutions. What does that entail?
If you are an immigrant in Norway and you apply for anything, to stay, training, school, food, anything, the average time to handle that request is 12 months. It takes 12 months to find out whether the request is wrong or not. That is a huge challenge. This year, we will have 38,000 immigrants in Norway. That goes very well because our platform, UDI, the Directorate of Immigration, are using our grant management platform and by automation, grant management over to the municipality, so they have the funding together with the 38,000 immigrants coming. A huge benefit using the platform solution. We also see that the AI, as today you discussed with André, is picking up. We see that the PULSE is picking up because a lot of this is reuse of data and analytics.
Several sectors also, because I know that a few of you have previously asked about everyone requesting framework and time and material and consultants. As I say, the request from the government is changing towards more innovation in how to conduct digitalization. For us, the platform is obviously a differentiator towards the competitors, who have mostly one thing, and that's only people. We see that a lot of the tenders now, even though they are frame agreement, agreements, also entails the possibility to have even fixed price project, other ways of deliverables than only people. For us, as a rather small company in Norway, we try to act beyond our size when it comes to public relation, when it comes to how to handle it, handling, the awareness amongst our clients.
We use a lot amount of time working and nurturing everyone, not only in private, public sector, but also in private sector, especially FSI, transport, logistics, and so forth. Thomas will probably come back to some of the methodology. We gather them in round tables, one by one. We have had executives meeting only this year with over half of the municipalities in Norway. If you are wondering, there are 356 of them. There are a lot of business to do with them alone. Very important, we live by our reputation.
How we deliver, how we conduct ourselves, that we have reference customers who can tell the rest of their peers and network what Netcompany is and their experiences with us, is extremely important for us in a small country, visible country like Norway. Therefore, I feel that, or I experience that, we have very good reference clients in our base in Norway, who really like the different way of doing business. When it comes to platform, platforms, obviously, Hermes is and the NC Tax goes towards tax and customs. Everyone in Norway knows that customs gonna change their platforms coming, over the coming three years, starting later this year or early next year. We know that there's a possibility there. They know about us.
We have close contact with them and as well as tax. We also see on PULSE that we have gained a total different and new pipeline. PULSE as a platform, going forward, hopefully and obviously, together with AI. We see use cases in municipalities, in water measuring, utility energy measuring, data collecting, citizen information, everything. We see it in transportation, as well as central government. On AMPLIO, both when it comes to grant management and case management, we have a very strong pipeline. There are several cases, and we know a lot more of them coming up the next half of the year and in 2024. To reduce the case handling process is extremely important.
It's very different, difficult for those who need 12 months, 15 months to get the reply that your request is wrong. You have to start over. You can all imagine that, for a lot of people, you are basically bankrupt. You can't celebrate your kid's birthday or anything, and those solutions will help them to narrow down the processes time, as we do on the child welfare solution. On Ami, we see that Norway is looking very much to Denmark. That's no surprise for at least your Danes here. They've done that during the pandemic. Every Norwegian goes to Denmark for holidays and so forth. Denmark is perceived to be a little bit ahead of Norway when it comes to digitalization.
You are a little bit tougher, a little bit tougher to decision, and you do decisions across borders, across municipalities, where the local democratic democracy in Norway may be a little bit stronger, but that is turning a little bit. When I have Thomas Risko with me talking to the municipalities in Norway, he is becoming the new rock star on looking into or challenging the way they are doing their digitalization. That is very positively received. 2026, where are we? We need to win a few of the large tenders that is going on. Some of them we are working on today, some of them we know will be coming out for the next couple of years.
Frame agreements we use to get a foothold in the different companies, so we learn from the inside. We also recognize, since last summer till today, it's also changed in Norway. Our competitors is asking us whether we can partner up for different cases. That is new for us in Norway, but it also tell us that they respect us in a different way than they have done previously. The goal is to be the preferred digitalization partner for the clients. On private sector, we look more at the specific areas and specific clients, so we are a little bit more total focused. The partner team you saw earlier on is also divided into specific domains and customer segments. Senior resources.
We build up, as I said, the partner team. We still need to build up the resources working with the clients to be trained. We are not completely finished yet and to deliver not only fixed price, but complex projects that entails also other vendors from the client side. The multidisciplinary way of doing project is very important for us. I believe, as I said earlier on, that the organization has matured, learned a lot over the last three years. We have an up-and-coming team that has been trained well during the previous time, and they know how to conduct the processes and methodology that Leni going to tell you about later on.
To be a preferred strategic partner entails that we have the references, that the projects are perceived positively, that the client are using it, that the effect of the project is achieved, and that we also challenge the clients in different ways of conduct the IT projects with our platform, whether it's AMPLIO, PULSE or Ami. With a strong pipeline, as you all know, is the conversion of the pipeline that is now very important. We close them and move them over to tangible project as fast as possible. That is more or less on speed, the presentation from Norway.
Yeah. Do we have any questions? I'll start here with George.
Hi, it's George Webb from Morgan Stanley. If I look at the Norway business unit, and we look at the churn rates, you've kind of flagged it on that last slide, it's running at much closer to 30% than 20%. It's the only region, I think, where in the Q1 report, the 3-month churn was actually slightly up.
Mm.
-not down. Why do you see that as being the case, and what are the things you're doing internally to bring that down?
Different reasons. In Norway, the statistics show that we are about 40,000 less IT consultants in total for a small country, from now till 2030. There's a huge demand. We are a different country, where you can have a job at tax or customs or in public entities and have same, if not better, salaries and benefits than from private sector. We are competing against everyone. We also see that the churn rate is lowering down. It's very different now, only the last few months than it was last year. After the war, after the inflation, after everything, after also the startup companies are challenging, have been challenged, the competition towards the consultants is very different these days than it was.
John?
Hi, [Austin Rao] here from Barclays. Was just wondering if you could touch in a bit more granular detail on sort of the slowdown last year, because in 2021, Norway was a bit of the poster child in terms of being the region which actually had high growth rates and was seen as the example of positive integration with the Netcompany methodology. I was wondering if you could touch on some of the factors that led to the slowdown. Was it just based on these contracts, or was it also cultural integration issues and sort of still getting the right formula? You said you're now behind that. What's changed now since the last 12 months where you see an improvement?
From my perspective, I see that we started to turn around when the pandemic started. We started to do different projects, start to take different methodology. We start training people differently. Hindsight, we obviously should have seen some of the challenging doing that remotely and from home than we did. It's a training, it's a culture, it's on-the-job work process. Last year, we were enforced to complete the project, make sure that everyone was landed, that we can build up a child welfare solution, that only, not the first municipalities will have, but the rest of Norway. We have learned a lot, and that's why I am focusing also on the lower levels of management. They have been doing this job.
They have been trained, they have been working together with the principals and peers in Denmark. They have learned the way of doing this kind of business. It's very different. We don't have a discussion in Norway now, whether we are doing this or that. We obviously had that two years ago. I believe that the whole organization is going in the same direction. They understand and motivated by the new kind of cases. They're motivated by the wins and motivated by us being something different than our competitors. If that's an answer for you.
Thank you very much, Geir. We're gonna skip the rest of the questions. You can take them at lunch and sit next to Wei. I'll promise you. Perfect, now to our next speaker, Perry, our country manager from the Netherlands.
Thank you. This? Good afternoon. My name is Perry van der Weyden. The Netherlands, we are the new kid on the block. We are the youngest office in the Netherlands, or in the Netcompany family. The Netherlands, if you look to the market in the Netherlands, it's about EUR 15 billion going on for the advisory and the system integration. That's a lot of money. In the central public sector, there's about EUR 2.3 billion, and it's a growth of 2% a year. I think that's a good market for us. We also have some problems with inflation. Last year, there was 12% inflation. Last month, it was 6.1%, still, the economy in the Netherlands is growing with 2% a year.
The expectations will be 2% a year till 2026. What you see also in the Netherlands, they got some problems, and the problems will be some cuts in the budgets of the government in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, always the first action when you have to cut your budgets, is to look to external people. The lowering, the hiring of external people, because it's a very big part of your budget. The systems in the Netherlands are very old and have to be replaced, but I tell you something more about it later. There are focus on open source and digital services.
Till now, the Dutch government mainly do their own building applications, do their own maintenance, but of course, they also have a problem with finding the right people, and they are looking to different solutions, so more management services, more integral contracts with trusted suppliers. That's a little bit the change in the Netherlands. Sometimes take longer in the Netherlands, so we have to have a long breath for that. Recently, we have some good wins. CAK, that's an organization that do all the payments in the healthcare in the Netherlands. We gather the first assignment to build all the new portals for the payment in the health. We are also building a new app.
That's a good first step in the big organization, and they're gonna replace 200 people the next years to more management services. RWS is the execution department of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and we're building their new environment for the measuring the water heights. That's the most important thing the Netherlands have to challenge, eh? The water heights. We are in the middle of the system of the safety of the Netherlands. VSPF is organization for the teachers in the Netherlands. They do the payment for the teachers, but also taking care of the health, and we are building there a new system to avoid teachers to being ill.
Of course, we are small in the Netherlands, less than 1%. We only can grow in that market. When you look to our team, I think we have a good balanced team. We got some experienced people. A lot of experience from the government. Britt van den Berg, she was former CIO of the benefit organization in the Netherlands. Rene Mossel is very experienced in the private market. He has a lot more than 30 years experience in selling in the Netherlands. I'm also coming from the Ministry of Infrastructure. I worked there for eight years as a board member.
Of course, a balanced team in the principal area, some technical people, some people also from the government and some people from the private sector. I think we have a good balanced team, and we are ready for the future. What are our opportunities and challenges for the coming years? I think we are young in the Netherlands, a few years ago, nobody knows Netcompany. We're working hard on that, and I think we are now well known by every decision maker in the government, and we also try to do in the private market. We have also existing contracts. They're running for three years, so there's a good basis for the organization, and we must grow that 10% a year out of existing contracts we have.
This year, I think, that will be frame contracts. In the Dutch government, there are a lot of frame contracts, and I... When you are in, yeah, you have the opportunity to get new work, but when you are out, you certainly know that you are not having work in frame contracts. We're really focusing on those frame contracts, and we have a few already, and that make us a part of the competition. The focusing is on the tax authority, on the customs. Logius. Logius is an organization in the Netherlands. They supply the infrastructure for communicating with people. For example, Digital Post and the letters from the tax and that kind of organizations always go by the solutions of Logius.
The CAK I already mentioned, and why we are focusing on this kind of customers, I will tell more about it by explanation about the platforms. I think this gives us a good challenge for the coming years, and it's balanced, so I'm very hopeful on it. You look to those platforms, André already told about, when you look to the Netherlands, I already said there's a lot of legacy and a lot of government organizations having problems with it. Such big problems that sometimes the organizations come in a newspaper because we can't change the decisions from the Parliament of the Netherlands in our systems. When we want to reduce the VAT, for example, for healthy products, it's impossible because the IT systems don't allow that, or it take two years. Yeah.
That's a big problem in the Netherlands, and the way of working is building everything by yourself. The old situation is, hire people, and you give them the assignment to build a new application. I think the match with those platforms, with the pros of Netcompany, to build with building blocks and already existing software, you can see it working. You can, you time to execute, make shorter. I think that's really match in the Netherlands for solving this problem. That's why a lot of IT people and decision makers are very interested in what we have to offer. It's new, so we have to explain, we have to show them, we have to, yeah, build some trust that this is a totally different solution than they are used to.
For example, with ERMIS, we are really having good conversations with the tax and the customs of the systems, and also with the bills platform, CAK, for example, the payments in the healthcare sector. They are very interested, but also a commercial company of Vialis work in the construction area, more working with data and how they can use data on the highways and the tunnels, and the stools, and the bridges, how to operate them. It gives them all an advantage when you can work with those platforms. Of course, also AMPLIO. The benefit area in the Netherlands is also very built on old legacy systems. Nobody dares to work on those environments because you never know what's happened. No documentation, nothing.
They have to be replaced because we're going to a new phase in the benefits area. Our pension environment is we placed this week, the parliament make a decision. All the pension will be changed in the Netherlands. All the old systems have to be gone and replaced by new systems. Of course, AMI, also the archive function is therein, it's a big challenge for the tax to replace their archive function. All kind of regulations they have to fulfill, the old systems doesn't support it. We also have some interaction with the Dutch Government about the e-wallet. Of course, later on, you're gonna hear something about the e-wallet, the Dutch Government want to be front runner in the development of the e-wallet.
That's good. They have ambition. They want to be innovative. Then it's also smart to cooperate with some organizations who have some solutions or some vision or some related relations in that. I think this gives us a big opportunity in the Dutch market, and yeah, I think we're ready for that. You know, we are not so old organization in the Netherlands, already said, so we have to learn a lot. The strong delivery from the Netcompany methodology, I think that's a very good way to deliver, but the Dutch people have to learn that. It's new for them.
Also the combination of getting sales and delivery, you've been integrated, responsible for the delivery, but also having contact with your client to help him to next phase. Of course, marketing activities, we must work on our brand. We must say to the people what we can and what we do, and what are the platforms, and we can use them. Yeah, that's our challenge. We do that with roundtables, we're giving seminars, we're doing a lot of things to get people well-known with our approach.
Yeah, of course, the Dutch market of employees is very stressed, and we are working hard to that, to keep people in the organization, keep them engaged, keep them happy, having a good feeling by the work you are doing for society and also together, because we are strongly working as a team, and we help each other and support each other and learn together. Also because we are a new organization, we have to build our own culture. You build your own culture when are happening things, when you deliver a nice project, and sometimes it's going tough, and you find a solution, and you fix it, and that's how you create a culture together and friendship and whatever.
Execution, I think one of the biggest profit from Netcompany is we are working together. We are small office in the Netherlands, we have support from the other offices from Netcompany. I can scale up very fast. I can get knowledge in the organization very fast. I think that's... You don't need an office of 2,000 people in the Netherlands, not on this moment. When we need the knowledge, when we need the cases, when we need the organization, we have that. I don't have a problem when I need 10 extra developers. I get them. When I need the knowledge, use cases, I get them. I think that's fantastic for us. I think we much more think in working together, flexible and scale up, scale down when it's necessary.
That make us a flexible organization. I'm ready for some questions.
Yeah. Let's just grab a single one here from Claus.
Hi, this is Claus Almer from Nordea. Two questions. The first is: When you are driving your business, what is the key KPI or focus? Is that revenue growth or is it profitability? That would be the first.
I think the most important is that we show Netcompany in the Netherlands, who we are and what we are doing. The relation, building the relation is on this, I think, very important.
Sorry, that I don't understand. Does that mean that profitability is not part of the focus?
Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.
Key performance indicators, they're equally important.
The second question, coming to the employees. You talked about this culture, et cetera, et cetera, but you just also say that you're going to up qualifying the technical skills. Does that mean you are struggling to get, you know, young, high performers into the organization? Or how should we really understand your ability to attract the right employees?
Of course, it's a stressed market, but we still find the right people, and on different levels, yeah. We find juniors, we can teach them, educate them in the organization itself and also some senior people. That's not a problem. Only the market is so stressed that other companies buying some people from you, and that's a problem in all the Netherlands. When the market is going down, it takes us three years to fill in all the vacancies in all Netherlands. That's calculated, yeah. That gives a stressed market.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Perry. Now next to Leni. Here you go.
Hello, my name is Leni. I'm from Group IT, previously in delivery. I am probably the one today who's going to be the closest one you will meet to the delivery heart of Netcompany, because we are all about delivering IT solutions. André said it, Richard said it, "If we don't deliver, we are not going to sell the next solution to our customers." I'm normally in the engine room, but I've been dusted off, taken up here, excuse me if I'm not as fluent as the rest of the guys. I'm not used to giving presentations like this. I can only scratch the surface, because delivering IT system is really easy if you do it the right way, and of course, this is our way of doing it. It's detailed.
It's very detailed, so I can only just really scratch the surface of what it is that we do in our methodology, but it is actually quite easy. For me, I love fixed price projects. It's the best you can give me. What is this delivery culture? I think you've seen this before. We are the people, we are the culture. This, we want to deliver. It is really important that we want to deliver. If someone comes up with an obstacle for me, I'm constantly going: "Okay, how can I dodge this? How can I get past it and get to my finish line and deliver?" I'm not going to say, "Okay, then, well, I can't deliver. You delayed me, I can't deliver." I will always find a mitigating strategy to get around it.
That is the culture. We want to succeed. The methodology is the structure in our delivery model, so the methodology will help us to create the structure that will enable us to deliver every time. Of course, given that we follow the methodology. Why do we have it? Because we want to deliver consistent quality to our customers. It's all about that, being consistent in delivering quality, so it is part of our quality management system. As it was quite easy last year for us to get an ISO 9001 certification, because we've been doing this for years, so it was actually just explaining to the certification body, "This is how we work." They said: "Yeah, yeah, it's structured. Stamp, you are ISO certified." We've just been doing it for many, many years.
There's benefits in our methodology, both in sales, of course, as a project manager, because it's basically a cookbook. Do like this, you will be a success. For the project participants, they will get into a project, and it'll be known to them. This is how we work, because we always do it like this. It's easy. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. I mean, I hate reinventing the wheel. That's also why I use ChatGPT a lot at the moment, and also heading our internal development of our own ChatGPT, so we call it Cortex, because we want it to be inside our company, supporting our methodology. Our methodology is the first part that is getting ChatGPT internally, so that we can make all our deliverables more efficient and effective and with a higher quality.
Where does this methodology come from? Because you've probably met a lot of companies doing SAFe, Scrum, other methodologies, so why don't we at Netcompany just say we're a Scrum house or a SAFe house? We don't, because those methodologies were made for delivering products, like coming up with ideas, being creative and inventive, and you don't do that. If you have a deadline, if you have a fixed scope, you have a fixed price, then stick to it. That is why we have our own methodology, because it's safer. Where does it come from? We have taken stuff from the structured methods out there in the market, the old schoolers, old-timers, myself being one of them.
PRINCE2, of course, for the project management part of our methodology, ITIL for the operations maintenance part of our methodology. We have since, back in the days when we delivered the Motor Vehicle Registry, we've been agile, because agile is not a matter of having stand-up in the morning and doing retrospectives and, you know, doing all these, release train planning. It's not about that. Agile is a state of mind, and it's your ability to move with all the stuff that gets thrown at you and all the surprises that you meet, just get around it. Already back in, I think, 2005, 2006, we adapted the then first agile model, which was IBM that produced this Rational Unified Process, which was agile already then.
Doing sprints, iteratively getting to know more about your customer. Over the years, we have, of course, sprinkled it with all the agile principles, because we are also becoming more and more agile. For us, it's not like a ceremony or stuff that we have to do. We only take the bits and pieces out of all these processes that make sense to us. Every time there's something new, we will evaluate. Is this useful? No. We won't do it, but if it's useful, we will do it. This is where our methodology comes from. It's taken the best out of everything that's out there. We're not reinventing anything. We're just putting together the bits and pieces that make sense and enables us to deliver. Sorry, a little bit nerdy, but this is our methodology. Very simple, right?
We have some checklists for everyone to remember if they do something, do test, what do I have to remember before going into production? What do I have to remember? We have a project plan template. When you do a fixed price project, take this plan. It comes with all the iterations and all the deliverables, all the dependencies, all the roles that have to deliver something. That's a project plan. Guidelines for everything you do from operations, design, analysis, test, maintenance, all the project management discipline, you've got guidelines for that. Templates, if you need to do an installation guide or an operations guide, you have a template, so you don't have to start from scratch. You know, it's always hard to sit down and do, like, a design, and you just have to think of everything.
Doing an integrations design, it's always the same things you have to consider. We have templates for that and best practice. We have done this a million times, just look at the best practice documents that we have. It's very simple. We break down a project into iterations. We put activities in there, activities that produce deliverables and roles that are responsible for those deliverables. We are basically all about deliverables. We're not about processes. We are about deliverables. We have to deliver something for the client, that is what we are here for. The guidelines tell us what we should deliver and how we should do it. Also trying to help people and remember when they should do it and how they should produce it. I'm trying to speak really fast so that you can get lunch.
How do we ensure that the projects actually follow our methodology? We have had some deviations, and when we see deviations from what we tell people to do, then we do something else, because then we start to train. Every time we see something goes wrong, we put it into our academy and say, "Okay, you have to do it this way next time." We teach our, at our academy, the way of work in Netcompany. Of course, we have tooling, and we have our own toolkit. We use Azure DevOps, so we have that standard. When a project gets started, they get it out of the box. Here you go. You don't have to think, just start and concentrate on the client's domain. Get to know the client. That's the most important in delivery.
Of course, a couple of years ago, we found out that we had become quite big, we couldn't follow everything that was going on on every project. We started to do audits, internal audits of our projects. I'm doing most of the project audits. We have a core of, I don't know, 30 architects doing the design audits, and we're doing security audits as well. It's a twofold thing. It's not like an exam for the project. It's more like we need to go out and see what's going on out there, because we're saying that our methodology is by practitioners, we have to see what are the practitioners actually doing today, and it's for practitioners. It's a two-way thing.
We, from the auditors, we help the project, and they show us what they do, so we can go back and enhance our methodology. Otherwise, it just gets a stale, dusted thing that won't work. Yeah, we have these three types of audits. The project audit comes in at the beginning just to make sure that the project gets off to a good start, that they don't start by taking the wrong foot first. This looks very waterfall. It's not. It's just good common sense, because we do high-level design upfront, because you have to think before you start sprinting. Otherwise, you might sprint in the totally wrong direction. We say you have to make a high-level design first, and we have some very experienced architects coming in and looking at that high-level design.
We start sprinting, when we have built stuff, we come in with a security audit to check, is this secure? We have done a lot of public sites, security is quite important for them. We try to keep the citizens' data rather secure. We found out that sometimes when time passes by, things have been in production, like the Motor Vehicle Register now for 13 years, an old lady, it might get, you know, people forget processes. We have to come in again and just see, are they still doing it the right way? We do that after a couple of years in production. That was I think I saved some time.
It did went well. Skip a couple of questions.
Yiwei from SEB. Just one question here. If you suddenly got price pressure from computation, how would you adjust your delivery model?
If I got what, sorry?
Price pressure from computation, price cut from your computation, how would you adjust your delivery model to maintain your profitability?
You, you can't. I mean, if you go in as an IT expert and you do an estimate and you do a quote, then most of the sales people will adjust the price, you know, to be competitive. Then you have to take the hours back to the project, because they cannot deliver at a lower cost than was given in the quote. You can't. I mean, you can only work effectively and reuse, reuse. That is how we try to do it. Reuse foundations, everything. Like I was together with a team of, like, 35 people. I was giving birth to AMPLIO back in 2015. It, and it's just, you know, thinking of how can you do things smarter? That's the only way you can save time and thus money.
By always doing the right thing, don't try to do something just because you want to save money, because it won't work in IT. You always have to do the right thing, because IT are just zero and ones, and it won't work if they're not in the right combination.
Perfect. We have a last question from Mads.
Thanks. Yeah, Mads from Carnegie. I guess Intrasoft has also been onboarded with this methodology. Is it simply plug and play, or what has been sort of the main challenges with getting Intrasoft on this methodology?
At the moment, we actually have two methodologies. Intrasoft is an old company, even older than us. They have their methodology.
Okay.
They run their project. We have projects where we run together, where we have, like, the tax in Denmark, then we run our methodology.
What is the plan going forward then? If you run on this one, if you do combined projects, wouldn't it just be easier just to go on this methodology?
Oh, yes. That takes a little while.
Okay. How long will it take?
I've got no idea.
Okay.
To be honest, I don't know. I mean, Intrasoft is a big company, and they are a very qualified systems integrator, just like we are. If you go in and ruin their business by saying that you have to do it our way, they have a very well working their way, and there could be two ways of doing things right. We are not as arrogant as to say that ours is the only way. This is just the way that works for us.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Lene. Thank you for speeding up. We now have 45 minutes for lunch. Please follow Anne to the canteen and be back at half past one. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. I'm very sorry that we had to skip the tour around the premises. I'm sure you will get to have a look around when we are done or after the last presentation. Now I would like to welcome Alex and Lars. They'll present our products and platforms. Here you go.
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the lunch. We're gonna try to keep you awake here. Customs and Tax already touched upon it before. I'm gonna be talking a bit about the products, trying to keep it as high level as possible, so you can get the main gist of what's behind them. Lars, who is heading the team for Customs and Tax across Europe, is gonna be talking about how we actually take these products and try to penetrate customers and markets. This all started a good 23 years ago, when we started doing little bits and pieces of solutions for customs, for different customers. We realized that that's part of a bigger ecosystem, and that maybe we should start tying them together.
That came around 2006, I think, with ICISnet, the, the full custom system in Greece, where we tried to combine many different modules and build a complete system, which worked out, and they still have the same system. Hopefully, we're gonna replace it soon with our newer system. We got involved with a major integrator in Belgium, also through our work in TAXUD, and we started working on the MASP in Belgium. That's where, also in partnership with this big integrator, we realized that it makes sense for a system that goes in every single country and does pretty much the same thing, to invest and build a product. We started with them.
They did a lot of the analysis, we did a lot of the development. We ended up with the DMS system that we successfully sold to the Netherlands, the import part only, and later on in the UK. Around 2017, 2018, it also became clear that these systems need to be more modern in architecture, in the components they use. They need to be open source and so on and so forth. Our partner was not too hot to invest more, so we decided to go ahead and invest it, and keep the majority of this to ourselves. That's how we thought, and we came up with Hermes, which we started developing in 2018.
The development team, at some point, reached 110 people, the idea was to basically follow the UCC, the Union Customs Code, as is dictated by TAXUD, and build a full-blown system that we could then sell to many countries. Hopefully, that system would be standardized enough so that the amount of work that needed to be put in every country would be relatively low. This is the map of where Netcompany today has installed one or more systems, okay? As you can see, I tried to count them this morning. There are about 25 different installations ranging anything from a full system to a component, a risk management component, a transit component, or a combination of those.
The ones in the squares that you see are where Hermes has already been sold, a component of Hermes. I would say the most complete Hermes system today lies here in Denmark, where we have put in operation, import, export, and transit. We are continuing and are gonna be on time for the requirements of the European Commission. One more slide, if this works. Okay. Don't be scared. It's just a custom system is a framework. It is not just one big application, okay?
What we focused on after working in such environment for 18 years, was to build a system that separates the business processes from the technology, so you can always improve on the technology later on, but not have to piss off every user, whether customs officer or, you know, external trader or operator, change their work completely. We just separated the two. In that way, the system acquires longevity, obviously. We have also made it modular, so that each one of these systems can be deployed pretty much by themselves. That allows us to enter new markets easily. They don't need to buy the entire framework. They can buy transit. Once we're in and they bought transit, and they see how well it works, usually we start selling other stuff.
We start selling the EMCS, we start selling the tariff, we start selling all the other components that in the end bring us to Hermes. One last word for this. The green shows how much of the product has been completed, going back to your question before. With Hermes, we are very far into finishing the product up based on the requirements that we know up to today and will be applicable up until 2027. After 2027, there's gonna be new requirements, so we will have to again continue. Before I hand it over to Lars, it's modular. It separates business from technology, which means we can continue evolving it for many years. It allows us to very quickly put bids together. It allows us to put bids together very quickly because we have done it many times before.
It allows us to be very competitive, depending on the market. Some markets are more willing to pay amounts, some markets are less. Having a product allows us to balance the price, and it also opens a lot of doors. That's the story between Hermes, and I'm gonna hand it over to Lars to talk about what we've been doing since doing.
Thank you, Alex. Yeah, as Alex said, my name is Lars. I've been with the company for 15 years. Since 2016, I've been developing the Danish tax aPdministration, and since the beginning or just before New Year, I've been heading our global focus on tax and customs, primarily within Europe, across the group. I'm going to briefly talk about how we utilize Hermes as a platform or in this as a product here, to ensure that we get the most of it. We use it for two things. We use it to expand in markets where we're already in. I brought the Danes case, and I brought the UK case, which I'll show you in a while, and then to open new markets.
I sometimes joke that this is the easy vertical to be the lead of. The reason for that is that we are being helped a lot by the European Union and the UCC, and the MASP with the deadlines that are in it. For all the 27 countries are forced to do something about their, about their custom solutions. On top of the European Union helping us with the deadlines, we also have the Hermes platform, which is a unique selling point for us as a group. That makes it easy to ensure that we have these high-level discussions with stakeholders in markets that we're already in. If they don't have ERMIS, they are probably struggling with meeting some of the MASP deadlines.
Having ERMIS gives us access to high-level stakeholders within the markets that we are already in, that's, of course, something that we're utilizing, which, for instance, you'll see in both Denmark, UK and soon other markets as well. If they have ERMIS, and if they have the full implementation of ERMIS, we don't stop there because there's a lot of things that needs to be done as an IT landscape, which is also something that the UK case will show us. It's not just we're not in for selling the product alone. We are in for delivering on the European milestones, on time and in quality, helping the different countries in meeting the deadlines for the set by the European Commission.
In new markets, we can't be everywhere, where we try to focus our efforts on the markets where we know the countries are struggling with meeting the MAS deadlines. That's something we know. That makes them want to listen to us. Of course, we position ourselves as the partner of choice, not only because we have the standard product, but also, as you'll see, because we have already delivered on the European milestones here in Denmark. We can basically do an end-to-end implementation for the countries. They don't need to worry too much about anything, just they give us the full responsibility and use the methodology to deliver on time.
I think I'll due to time, if we take a look at the DK case. I brought the DK case here to show you that we have again a holistic view on how we do customs within the different countries. We are not just in for selling the product. There's actually a lot of other revenue that comes around selling the product, which we are the right ones to deliver on, and we have the many, many years of domain knowledge that will make us the right partner of choice. If you look at Denmark, actually not a lot of it's a large contract, so a lot, but not a lot is actually spent on the platform.
A lot of the effort is spent on the project itself. Even though it's a standard product, there's a lot of EU requirements how to deliver this. You have to have comply with EU certification standards. You have a lot of conformance testing, you have a lot of integration testing with other countries. You have a complete system landscape already existing within Tax and Customs within the customer. There's a large implementation project. As you see with these contracts, and it's the case in Denmark, as is the case in many other contracts, countries.
When you get these contracts, they are everlasting, they are without an expiry date, which also makes it extremely important to ensure that we come in not only with the software, but also ensuring that we will be developing and maintaining these at the customers for the years to come. The Danes case has also showed, and with some other countries, will show that if we do well, which we did, the original Danes case was import only, then we will expand our footprint. In Denmark, we have, we were awarded the transits and exports as well, which was actually the size of the original contract as well. That's something, it's extremely important that we do well within the customer and deliver what we promise on time. Again, ERMIS is the starting point.
When we get into the customer, we have discussions with them, we try to figure out what their pain points are, and we try to find out what value can we bring. Sometimes in some cases, maybe it is only the product, and then maybe we shouldn't push for a lot more, but often, they have a whole range of problems that they tell us about and that we will listen to and try to help them with. I have the U.K. example then below, but I'll tell you about just now. For instance, in the U.K. case, we had Netcompany- Intrasoft had won the contract of implementing transit as a module, selling the software and doing some integration around it. We use this to have high-level discussions with the HMRC.
Luckily, in as in Denmark, it's both revenue and customs, which means if you have high-level discussions with customs, because of ERMIS, you automatically have high-level discussions with the revenue authority as well. That's aside note. In our discussions with them, we became aware that they were concerned whether the traders, the one who was supposed to use the system, had enough time to test and onboard on the system. We came, and we showed them the plan from Denmark, where they actually have from a half year to four months to onboard the system, and they were very happy about that. We ended up not only having the software, the product, and the implementation, but also having everything around it.
It's a case where we take the risk on behalf of the customer, not only implementing the product, but ensuring that they meet all the deadlines, that they receive the certificates from the European Union and so forth. This is what we're doing within the customs area, and that's also what we'll be doing within the taxation area. We've been talking a lot about customs here. Probably next year, it will still be customs, but it will be a lot about taxation as well.
Well, that's your slide, Lars. Yeah, okay. Another similar story, another 25 plus years in taxation, having developed many systems and deployed many systems, having worked with third-party systems like PSRM from Oracle. That's actually how we met Netcompany. We did the tax system around PSRM here in Denmark. We also did systems for Qatar, Kuwait, in Australia, in Mozambique. As Intrasoft, we were all over the place. Now we're coming more towards Europe. Again, around 2019, 2020, and after a lot of back and forth, and after many of the partners backed out and didn't continue with their platforms and products, we decided that the time had come to also invest in building a tax platform, which we called Icarus.
Which was a bad name, but thinking of AIRHART and what you said before, I think we need to reconsider. It's now called NC Tax, which is wonderful. I have no problem with it. If we go to the next one, Lars, just to... because we are running out of time. Again, the design for this is very similar. Again, separating business from technology, again, building different modules, knowing that customers many times want to change one part of the system or put in something new, and we intend to use the same strategy that we did for customs to try to penetrate as many customers for tax as well. Tax is gonna be as big as customs. Most of the taxation systems around Europe are old or beyond old. Things are moving forward.
The commission is also trying to put some ground rules that affect all countries. We think that this is gonna be a very important area for us, for Netcompany, for the future. We have released one in July this summer, that's gonna allow us to do demos and proofs of concept and so on and so forth, something that most customers want to look at. Then we're gonna have a system that should be ready to start deployment sometime early next year. The gradients of blue are similar to the gradients of green before. It just shows where we stand with maturity on each one of these modules. This is a product that is about two years behind, I would say, customs.
As far as market need, I think we can be very, very close to when that's gonna be needed. The good news is, usually in most countries, the Ministry of Finance is responsible both for customs and tax. If we manage to get into most ministries of finance around Europe with customs, then we should already know who to talk to for this. I think Lars is already doing this in some of the customers, building up the knowledge for what's coming down the road. I think that's that. Questions?
Yiwei from SEB. Thank you for taking my question. I understand when you reuse the complete system, the framework in the international markets, you will have a lot of cost benefit. Would you pass on this tax benefit to the customers or rather just keep the high profitability in the tender process?
Should I answer that? You said it before. It depends on the customer. Yeah. The market. If we will offer the highest competitive price with which we will win. Ideally, if the technical part is the weight is very big and the financial part is low, and we know that the customer usually spends significant amounts for that type of system, of course, we will try to get the highest price possible. Having this product also allows us to go with customers that cannot spend that much, or they're looking for, you know, a solution that just works. If we decide to go for that gives us the flexibility to be competitive. Did I cover your question?
What have you experienced so far? Is it more a low pricing or a high margin?
Both. We've experienced deals where we have high price and very nice margin, and deals where we decided to go in strategically because we feel that there's gonna be a lot of business coming behind, where we had to sacrifice a significant amount of license fee to get in and then make it back from services down the road. That gives us that flexibility.
Maybe one question on competition. Can you talk briefly about the competition today, especially within customs? Maybe also, I guess EUROPEAN DYNAMICS also has a quite good system, so why is Intrasoft better, you know, beating them in the tenders going forward?
That's gonna be difficult to answer. Why is it gonna be difficult to win? First of all, I don't think the solutions are comparable, okay? That's what I mean by difficult. I think ERMIS is a real product designed from the beginning to be a product, to be able to be maintained as a product, to be able to be further developed as a product, and to be able to be modular. The competition is developing on the back of contracts, and what they have is not really replicable, okay? I don't think our track record can even compare to EUROPEAN DYNAMICS, okay? I think that together with Netcompany, we will now be moving away from, you know, we're gonna be the clear leader of this market. I think you're gonna see this in the upcoming tenders.
Maybe just a follow-up. Looking at the slide, you were in five countries, right, with your system? plus five countries. You get the map.
Far in the last two years, yes.
Yes. Do we have any dominant players in the other countries?
The only player that has probably as many installations as us is ED. Not as many, the next level. There isn't any other dominant player with a custom system right now. Yeah. The space is also similarly small for tax.
Perfect. Thank you very much-
Yeah.
both Alex and Lars.
Thank you.
Now it's time for our next speaker, Thomas, who will talk about EMMI and our EUDI Wallet. Go ahead.
Thank you. That's the one. Hello, everyone. My name is Thomas Christensen, and I have now been with Netcompany for five months. Before I came here, I was the CEO of KOMBIT. That did a lot of the transformation of the municipal sector, their infrastructure, and so on. I was actually a major customer here in this store. I have a obviously an insight from that side of the table, too, which is kind of fun when you're traveling around now with a company hat around Europe. Kind of cool. When we're talking about digital government, I have decided we're going to zoom in on a couple of things that I think are exciting right now that are going on.
We're gonna talk a little bit about EMMI, the platform that was, you know, part of the presentation this morning as well. Then we're gonna talk about the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which is something that's very exciting. The EMMI platform is really our platform where we connect with the customer. The businesses, the authorities use this platform to connect out to the customers, and they do that through a single access point where you have different services. You can basically deliver a lot of services through this platform. What's really cool about this platform is that it's compliant with a lot of law, it's compliant with a lot of different GDPR, things like that. We can use it in a lot of different contexts.
I think this platform is probably gonna be one of the platforms that we're gonna see a lot of utility of in the future. You're gonna see a lot of different use cases for this platform. What we're seeing right now is obviously, the authorities think this is a great platform, and we're seeing, you know, banking, insurance, those type of businesses can see a real use of this platform. Obviously, when we're talking wallet, this is also what we can use as the foundation. I'll return to that in just a second. Today, what we're using this platform for is, obviously, we're looking at our EU wallet foundation, MitID, which some of you may know here in Denmark, where we have, you know, a portal where we can have public as well as private services.
Today, we have this portal out there, and we're actually, for a lot of Danes, providing their email, different other services through this portal. The COVID-19 passport was also done on this platform, so that shows a little bit of how broad this platform is. We can archive, which is kind of cool because what we can do is we can actually have data from a lot of legacy system in this platform, and then we can use it to provide services, which I'll show you in just a second. The Digital Post that we have here in Denmark is now on this platform as well. All the mail that we are sending to the citizens is going through this through this platform. Let's do a deep technical dive into this. No, we're not.
We're basically just gonna talk about a couple of things here that's important around this platform. First of all, you know, we can connect, so there's a lot of different ways we can connect out to clients, to customers, to citizens. This is what comes out of the box with this platform. We can act, so there are certain things we can do. We can request signatures, payments, things like that, so we can have this much more event-driven than we've seen in the past. Then again, the archive, which is a lot of companies are asking for this: how can we bring in the data from all of our systems, our legacy systems, and then use it in our business processes to actually come out to the clients?
Like I said, in the bottom, you have a base where you can have GDPR security, MIMO, which I'm gonna touch on, and a lot of capabilities that comes right out of the box. This is a great advantage for a lot of companies and institutions to be able to use this platform as it sits today. Here are some of the use cases. Right now, again, we're looking at the wallet. I'll get back to that. You know, Digital Post, MitID, where we have a lot of big partners, private entity in the platform, and we have a lot of obviously authorities in there that are using it for their communications. The Digital Post, you can see the numbers.
When we're talking about Denmark, you know, a lot of the communications that we're doing in the public sector goes through this platform. We're also talking to a number of banks, 50+ banks about how can they use the archiving function to pull in data from their legacy systems and basically use it in their service, the way they provide services. Here's just some of the use cases that we're running through that you can do now in real time once you have that data. This is very powerful, and it is a powerful way for companies that are sitting on a lot of legacy to basically put it into play when you're communicating and doing service journeys with the customer.
This will become a very powerful tool for a lot of authorities as well as private companies. This is just for banking. This could be insurance, but it could also be an authority, an authority anywhere in Europe. Let's talk about the most exciting thing going on right now, the digital identity wallet, the EU Identity Wallet. This is actually a proposal that was done by the Commission back in 2021, and this is, by all means, a move against all the big tech companies, where EU is saying, "We need to control data here in Europe.
We need to find a way to take ownership, to that data. Some of the goals of this wallet is basically having a digital ID across all member states in Europe. It's also about storing our own data on our devices, so basically carrying our own data. It's about making services available from the public sector as well as the private sector, so also across borders, and then being able to share only the data that we need to share. Today, we share all data all the time. This is the way the EU is actually saying, "Let's get control of this data," and then obviously, make it easier to move around Europe.
As you'll see in the bottom, the success factors that the EU has pointed out, you know, obviously, usability and security, interoperability, and the wide applicability is also about how many sectors can we get in here, how many private companies can we get in, as well as the public sector. One of the discussions we're having right now is obviously the usability versus the security. Can you go with the highest level of security and still attain good usability? That's at least the discussion that we're taking part in right now. Here's a picture of basically what this thing is gonna do. You are gonna have verified services in there, could be your driver's license, your passport, could be a diploma. And you're gonna be able to use those in different business contexts.
You're gonna have the person-to-person validation, so basically showing ID across borders, ID that's now verified, and you're obviously gonna have person to business as well as business to business attestation that you can use. If you look down in the corner, this is what we're working on right now. This is what we are. We won in the end of last year. Basically, we are now developing this framework together with EU. It was Intrasoft that won this contract, and we're working together as Netcompany on providing this. This is gonna cover all 27 EU member states. This is the framework they're gonna work on. This is how the standards are gonna be, this is how it's gonna look.
This makes it very interesting for every member state, cause they need a national wallet. Basically, once this act is passed, it will say every member state should have a national wallet within a certain amount of time, and I'm thinking we're gonna be looking at 26, 27. Then you're gonna have issuers of different documents that's gonna be in this wallet that's gonna be certified. This is just a rough schematic of how the ecosystem looks. As part of this, there is a lot of use cases that are being looked at right now. There are four big consortiums where you have a number of EU countries, as well as a number of private and public sector players, and the first one is on travel.
You have payments, you have all kinds of e-government services, e-prescriptions, e-signatures, and then you have education. They're covering major areas with this in their pilots. I think the way Netcompany looks at this, I think we look at it a little different. I think a lot of the member state may look at this just being a container for certified documents. Basically, like here in Denmark, you can have your driver's license, you can have it on your phone, you can show it to somebody, but it really isn't that different than having it in a paper form. All it is, it's on your phone. We see this much more as a business platform, which is event-driven, where we can drive different business applications from the public as well as the private.
I think the way we look at it now and what we're building into the platform are all these different capabilities. The ability to read, pay, sign, chat, book, give consent, and so on. We're building it on a format that's been developed by the Danish Agency for Digital Government, which is called MIMO. Instead of sending you a flat PDF, we're going to start sending you a document that can contain data. In that document, we can actually prompt you to do something, make a payment, go somewhere and sign up, give consent, whatever it is. We can do that in the document. We can also collect data in the document, so when it comes back, we can actually take that data and put it in our back-end system. This means we can avoid a ton of big integrations from systems to systems.
This is a huge deal, the way we look at this. This actually means that we're gonna be able to design journeys around services. When I'm out and I travel around Europe now, I talk to them about maybe it's time to let go of the idea that every service needs to be on this big homepage with thousands of services, and then the citizen need to figure out where they need to go and how to do it. Maybe we can do it much smarter. Maybe we can do it on mobile devices, and maybe we can do it in a way, so we actually guide the citizen or the customer or the client through this. When I travel around, obviously one of the things they tell me is, 'Okay, what is this gonna look like?'
How is it really gonna be different? I bring with me a couple of these different use cases. How can you use your national ID in the future? Once you have a certified ID, how can you select to just share certain parts of your information? Somebody just needs to know that you are above 18 or below 18, that you have a valid driver's license. Why do we have to provide all data? This is one of the things the EU is pointing to. How can we have our educational diplomas and so on, so we can share them easy with employers? There's tons of use cases and ways we can use this wallet as a business application, as opposed to just a holder of documents.
This is where the ME platform really gives us a huge advantage when we're talking about this with different member states. One of the big issues around Europe right now is actually on healthcare. In Denmark, we have very good registries around healthcare, so as a patient, I can find a lot of information about my health. That's not the case when we go a little bit south of the border. They don't have the registries. Here the idea is: why can't we carry our own health data? Why can't we have it on our device and share it when we need to, with the doctor, with the hospital, or with an insurance company? This is becoming a much more relevant discussion when we are down there, where the maturity is a little lower.
This is something that's really getting different people in the different EU countries excited because this allows them to maybe digitize in a different way than we did here in Denmark, without all the big registries and so on. Maybe we can do this using an infrastructure of mobile devices. This is just an example of how you can tie together services when you rent a car. Why would you have to go stand behind a counter? You've got your ID, you've got your driver's license, you got insurance, you got your payment form, and then you just throw your key over in your digital keychain, and it's valid for the time you have the car.
These are the kind of service journeys we're gonna see in the future and a different way of delivering services. I just threw in my travel schedule for the next couple of months. As you can see, there is a ton of interest around this. This is not something where I necessarily need to call around and say, "Hey, what's going on, guys? Do you think you want to hear about this?" This is the other way. We are getting calls. I mean, France have not necessarily been aware of Netcompany, but they are now. Their government know they need to do this, and maybe it is a good thing to talk to Netcompany. We're building the infrastructure, we're building the framework, and this is maybe worth talking to somebody like us. We are really getting a lot of attention on this.
I think that was my quick run-through.
Hey, it's [Moravia]t from Barclays. Was just wondering, talking about this use case specifically, we've read some headlines in the news outlets over the last month or so that there's some pushback from some banking organizations saying that essentially implementing payments within the digital wallet would require investments that are too big from sort of a merchant's perspective. Was just wondering if you have to assess sort of the likelihood within payments that that's gonna be disruptive for the merchant space at this point of time? How are the negotiations going, is there a lot of sort of back and forward at this moment?
I think, you know, when I, when I'm approached, I'm also approached a lot by the banking sector. They're worried. I would be worried, too, if I was the banking sector, 'cause this is a different way of delivering a lot of the services that they're delivering today in their standalone app. Yeah, you know, I'm hearing a lot of that, but I'm also hearing banks saying: This is a great opportunity. Maybe we should join this and maybe get an advantage by actually integrating into this ecosystem and being able to deliver our services in a chain of a lot of other services. I'm hearing both sides.
Question here.
Could you put into perspective the market size to Netcompany when you're talking about the EU ID wallet and the add-ons?
I mean, we can do the math. I mean, there's 27 member states, there's no way that's for sure gonna look at this. A lot of these member states are obviously looking at how can they do something nationally using national companies and so on. We are in talks with a number of member states about how we can become part of maybe a partnership with whoever is doing it. They love the fact we have the expertise. They love the fact we have a platform behind it that may be able to give them some of the things that they're actually looking to gain. You know, at this point, it's early in the game, I think we'll definitely have opportunity across the EU. Again, I'm seeing vast differences in maturity.
There are some things that certainly will determine who's gonna be first movers and so on. That's what we're looking at right now. I think if nothing else, this is gonna be a great catalyst for digital processes in Europe. I mean, this will force government to rethink the way they're doing digital.
Okay. Thank you very much, Thomas.
Thank you.
We will now welcome Mehdi on the stage. Here you go.
Thank you. I'm basically the guy making sure that Thomas has planes to catch, traveling around the world. Hi, everyone. My name is Mehdi, and I've been leading our adventures Copenhagen Airports, since the launch of our joint venture back in 2021. You've probably heard of. Today, I'm gonna be talking about PULSE, which is the platform that has been the remarkable result of the convergence between technology execution, our delivery, and the domain knowledge of Copenhagen, that combination. Also about how the platform has realized Copenhagen's digital ambitions and also set the groundwork for our common ambition of, you know, revolutionizing the airport industry with the platform.
Finally, the PULSE angle on this, how we in Netcompany are gonna be utilizing the same platform to help transform various industries, working in complex ecosystems as the airport that has the benefit of weaving real-time data and AI and knowledge. Copenhagen Airports, to start there, again, going into this, to this joint venture, they had digital ambitions that were reaching far further than what other platforms out there could deliver. Their growth ambitions around maximum capacity, which is the first bullet here. As you can imagine, a lot of different quirks need to be turning in order to achieve such a maximum increase in capacity.
I'm gonna get back to how many different angles and how many different processes, data, AI, operational capacities that need to be lifted in order to achieve this. This was one angle. Another angle, which was completely different from what we are seeing out there today, was that we had an ambition of actually creating an ecosystem across the airport. Typically, airports are run by individual companies, 46 to be exact, in Copenhagen, running in silo system, parallel processes that were not combined. Copenhagen Airports today is the first airport actually to introduce a platform, where over 4,000 people are working on the same processes with one source of truth, combined to ensure that we get off and on at the right time.
Finally, back to some of the elements that André also mentioned, ensuring a platform that can have the flexibility that airports need, because getting a platform like this is not something that you're gonna be exchanging over the next 20 years. You need to ensure that you can further develop on this, you can keep innovating and keep creating value across your supply chain in the airport. That flexibility is extremely beneficial for the airport. To dive a little bit down into the first one, this is pretty much an overview of the processes that we are controlling with the platform.
Everything around the aircraft, from landing to takeoff, and there is a lot of processes you can imagine, a lot of safety regulations, a lot of logistics that needs to happen, everything from baggage to de-icing, to a lot of different processes around turnaround of the aircraft. We were also controlling everything happening in the airport around the passengers getting in and out of the airport, in and out, both domestically, in transit, and all of that. As you can imagine, there is multiple processes within these disciplines that needs to be controlled, and you need to have a common way of looking at data across the many different stakeholders, delivering each their parts of the chain in order to achieve successful delivery on your plan.
There is a lot of different aspects to the value drivers. These all combined is the fact that they can deliver a maximum raise in the capacity overall. I thought bringing in some not so technical drawings, but still, I think everyone can keep up even though there is no technical background here. This is just an example of how the platform actually works as it does, and what kind of use cases and application can be built on top of this. This is important also for later, because a lot of different industries, companies are struggling with the same challenges. Imagine we have our platform, we have one common UI, one source of truth, all the processes, all the data available in the airport is available to everyone who has the access to it, of course.
We have extreme amounts of data coming in that we need to manage in real time. We need to manage it not only just by raw data, but we also want to structure the data, so we actually have one common language across 46 different stakeholders. One way of looking at an aircraft, one way of looking at a passenger, one way of having a process that we can recognize. The very basic of things when it comes to data is actually taking that raw data, structuring it, and turning it into knowledge that can be used in decision-making, in the planning or in the execution of the operations. This is exactly what has been done here. In this example, we are receiving information from the runway. Let's say there's an example.
As soon as the aircraft touches the runway, we know that this aircraft has a certain capacity, this is the passengers on board, this is the velocity, this is the weather, everything conceptual around that aircraft, we have that knowledge. With that, we can actually ask our processing engine or a decision-making, a AI model, what the taxi time for that given aircraft would be before it actually arrives at the gate, because then the ground handler needs to be ready in order to successfully offboard the passengers and ensure the turnaround of the plane. This is exactly what this specific use case is about. This can be every sorts of data from IoT camera sensors that we are using image acquisition on top of that, for example.
Any sorts of information that we can pull in order to help our planning or mitigation or execution, is what we can do through this, the platform. Looking at the platform from another angle, as you're also familiar, we acquired the IP of the platform, so in airports, it's called AIRHART.
In that company, we are going to market with it as PULSE, which means that we're actually utilizing the same capabilities, the platform, that ecosystem orchestration, actually tapping into real-time data, combining processes in an ecosystem and putting AI on top, is exactly what a lot of industries are looking for. This is an example for example, saying the supply chain area, which is different disciplines, different use cases, but still the same complexity of huge ecosystems, multiple different vendors, multiple different processes that you need to combine and ensure that you have optimal planning and optimal execution based on the information you have overall in your ecosystem. This is exactly the go-to-market with strategy with PULSE, ensuring that we can target companies, organizations who have these two different angles of challenges.
Having a platform, data available to do better forecasting, better prediction of their planning, their operational plans. Anything from predictions, forecastings, predictive maintenance, it can be increasing CO2 efficiency by having better planning of the energy consumption in the operation. On the other hand, actually having data available also, and processes to be able to mitigate once real time hits you and your plan doesn't hold up, but you still need to be able to deliver on the promises. Having mitigating actions that can be delivered, suggestions, co-piloting, AI models that can actually help achieve this, while in the same time, creating this ecosystem across either internal ecosystems or ecosystems across third parties. That is extremely important. The very basics of the components, the Lego bricks in the platform, this is the very generic part of it.
Having ensuring integrations, ensuring processing, having the right foundation for AI. I know that we've been talking a lot about this, but there's a lot of details in this. What the platform here does and what we want to ensure is that we have all the context needed for AI models to be able to actually look at the past, predict patterns, and by that mean, foresee the future, the forecasting, the planning. The platform here ensures that we have that context and we have that rich contextual data that we can tap into. Of course, the ecosystem orchestration by combining the UI, combining processes, combining actions that can be taken. Finally, the top part is the extension part.
That is the Lego bricks that can be added on top of it, either ours or the customer being able to actually develop on top of this platform themselves and extending it. This is some illustrations just highlighting some of the bullets that I've already been through. So creating ecosystems across multiple data sets and multiple different stakeholders in either industry or. I will be coming back to some of the industries that we are looking at. Having the one source of truth, the combined processes across multiple stakeholders again. I want to just briefly touch upon this, what kind of AI models that we are using already and looking into. So there is three different types of AI usage, as we see it. One is, of course, using specific modules for decisions support.
This could be the case that I mentioned. I wanna have a model predicting the actual arrival time, taxi time for a given aircraft. These are very specific models that do micro-optimization on certain areas. That is the decision support box up there. The other one is using, like, large language models, as we all know by now, to help actually get insights into all of that data available across the ecosystem, because there's millions and tons of data, but how can you actually get sense of data? How can you actually, in natural language, ask the platform, the ecosystem of something, and get a intelligent response? Getting that situational awareness through language models.
Lastly, on our roadmap is looking at how can we simulate, how can we actually take a decision now and simulate how our operation will look like three months forward in time if we were to change this and this? Simulating the operations in the future and making decisions based on predictions on that. Finally, this is the one with the Lego boxes, bricks, actually being able to extend the platform and ensuring that that lock-in is not there, and then the platform can be future-proven in that way. Finally, I thought just briefly looking through the market that we are addressing. From the airport perspectives and AIRHART, which is Smarter Airports, addressing that market, we are looking primarily in, within Europe to start with.
This is medium and large airports, especially the larger ones, because this is also based on the ambition level of the airports, who is really having digital maturity and digital optimization at the top of their agenda. This is an extremely positive reaction we've gotten. This is completely new. This is revolutionizing the way that we are looking at airport operations and completely different one, everyone else is doing. Secondary markets, as obviously is, yes, we already have selected Asian, US, and Middle Eastern airports reaching out to us actually, because they heard what we're doing. That is again extremely well-received out in the general industry.
From a PULSE perspective, these are 3 plus 1 different areas that we see huge potential, huge dialogues going on right now, where again, as you can see within the transportation, again, huge ecosystems, multiple different stakeholders, huge complex systems and inter reliabilities between the players within that space. Supply chain, the control tower aspect, as I mentioned, whether if it's manufacturing, whether if it's the logistics part, there is all sorts of different challenges here that are actually the same as in an airport, but just in another scale, in another context. Utilities, infrastructure, the use of real-time data, again, collecting and combining that, having that holistic overview, again, very important right now. Also a hot topic, as the green transformation is hugely relevant.
Other areas of conversations that we are having that are more opportunistically because they can see the benefits that we can create with this platform. Yeah, I think I want to close it there. Any questions?
Hi, it's George at Morgan Stanley. If we focus on the airport opportunity, how do you think about the point at which this becomes... You know, there'll be a list of customers that will start to want to take this solution. I guess when I think about these sorts of deployments, you always need good reference cases. Can Copenhagen Airport be that? I mean, it feels like that's a different rollout, right? You develop the platform alongside. You've known them for a number of years. Will potential new customers say, "You know, we need to see someone else beyond Copenhagen successfully implement this before we're really comfortable?
Of course, you need to have that, and I mentioned it also, you need to have that production-grade platform in place. You need to have that track record, and that is exactly what we have achieved. I try to avoid the question about Copenhagen Airports, because I know that there is a lot of work being done on the press for that, because we're gonna be coming out very soon with the news of the launch. What I can say is that we have been running in parallel in production since September, and what we're doing here, we are implementing the platform gradually because we want to reduce risk. This is, you know, a critical infrastructure. You can't just do a big bang.
We are there now. That is why we are actually approaching the market now, because we have that reference. We have Copenhagen, we are running. You'll get more info on that very, very soon. Several dialogues are ongoing right now. I can't, of course, disclose them, but these are tendering processes, as you could imagine. I would say it's the right airports. It's the absolute right airports, because what we want to have is have the right partners in to begin with, strategic partners, that can help us further expand the platform in the directions needed with the processes that are maybe different than Copenhagen Airports, but the right platform and the... a good pipeline as we're looking into, at the right time as well.
Isn't Copenhagen Airport owned by some Australians? My question is, have they been interesting to buy in for other airports under that ownership in Australia?
Yes, they are owned by Ontario Teachers' Fund, and so you can say that the owners have been very, very active in the process, of course, investing massively into the platform. We have had dialogues. I can't again disclose names, but we are actively now, based on the situation, we are with Copenhagen, now going to the market. That's why it's been quiet, because we're doing what Leni is talking about. We have been doing delivery over the last 2, 3 years, right? Now we are ready, and this is the fact that the point in time where we can actually go to the market and have something very tangible. Sorry, I can't get into more details.
Okay.
Yeah?
I don't think we have any more questions for you, Mehdi. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Next presentation is up. Thomas will guide you through our 2026 guidance or targets.
Thank you for that, Frederikke. Good to see you all. Before I start, I just want to say thank you for moderating today, Frederikke. New in the role here at Netcompany, you've done a great job, thank you for that. We released our midterm financial targets yesterday, there should be no surprises on what I will present now. DKK 8.5 billion in revenue based on organic growth in 2026, 20% margin and DKK 2 billion in cumulative cash redistribution to shareholders. Those are the main targets within our midterm financial ambition. We're gonna see growth in all geographies.
We're not going to go into the specific bits and bytes, so if any of you hold a question as to how much is Denmark going to grow and how much is this going to grow, I'm not going to be able to disclose that, but we will see growth in all geographies. We will see a broad-based expansion of margins, also in all geographies. Just to put things into a little bit of a perspective, in 2022, when we did 20% margin, we did have two of our geographies that were not performing that well, accounting for close to 10% of the revenue, so that would be Norway and the Netherlands.
You've heard both Geir Arne and Perry van der Weyden talk today, we've heard about some of the projects that we're looking at. Clearly, we would not anticipate that those countries would be continuing not yielding a margin. That will, of course, have a positive impact on margins also going forward. A lot of the things that we've been doing in the Danes organization this year, we have been discussing for some time, and some of it is more one-offs compared to 2023, so there will be something coming back in 2024 and onwards also. In addition to that, we will start seeing more licensed revenue. Lars and Alex Manos presented one of the verticals where we have some real products that are strong, specifically within customs.
They will yield license revenue when we sell projects. Both Mehdi and Thomas Rysgaard Christiansen also presented the areas where we can have an ambition to sell projects that will have some sort of license embedded more or less. We will see more projects coming from the RRF that is down in Greece. Those projects will be better priced than the ones we see currently in Greece, and they will also, to some extent, have an element of licensed revenue within them. When we add all these elements together, that is how we get to the build-up of the margin above 20% by 2026. We often discuss what is the seasonality within Netcompany Group, and that's really difficult to give a straight answer to.
If we look at the last three years, they have been truly extraordinary. Normally, extraordinary means that something happened once, but over the last three years, we've had three very different years. First of all, we had COVID, and then we had the aftermath of COVID and how to get people back. We had a period of, and still have, high inflation, high interest rates going from 25 bips to 500 in a matter of four months. Finally, a war in Ukraine and fear of recession. Three years that, of course, have been quite unusual and extraordinary, which also impacts how revenue falls throughout the different quarters.
With the introduction also of more licensed revenue in the future, it is fair to say that we still expect revenue to be lumpy through the quarters, and it is difficult to give a clear trend line as to this is how it will look, and then we're just gonna put a ruler to it, and then everything will fall according to that. That's also why we are refraining from giving any guidance on a quarterly basis, but stick to a annual basis. On the allocation to shareholders, we've said that we will redistribute DKK 2 billion by 2026, so that is within the physical period of 2026, so it's not something which will be paid out in 2027. It's the period from now and until the end of 2026.
For all practical matters, that will most likely be in the means of share buybacks. Share buybacks because they introduce much more flexibility if some strategic opportunities should present themselves. Historically, we've said that we want to grow Netcompany in a combination of organic growth and growth through acquisitions. Over the last couple of years, we have focused very much on organic growth. The DKK 8.5 billion built up revenue by 2026 is purely based on organic revenue growth. If something interesting presents itself, of course, we will look at it. If something interesting presents itself with characteristics of introducing technologies, products, sticky customer base that we don't have, and that can help us, Netcompany Group, to accelerate our growth in Europe, then that is something that we will look at.
Just to remind you, we still have a acquisition facility at hand with our financing partners to the tune of DKK 2 billion, if so needed. I'm not saying that we are gonna spend DKK 2 billion, but we have a facility in place if something interesting presents itself. The fact that we are now saying that we'll pay down or pay back DKK 2 billion to shareholders, is not the same to say that we forever will shy away from looking at interesting acquisitions. Of course, right now, we are focusing on organic revenue growth. There's been some questions and discussions about what it is that we're actually putting on our balance sheet in terms of capitalizing. This is wrong. This one, sorry.
What it is we're putting on our balance sheet in terms of capitalized R&D or development of own software. You've heard, especially Alex and Lars talk today about the development that's been going on the ERMIS platform and also on the NC Tax platform. Those are development projects that we are taking on, basically to accelerate and yield revenue growth in the future. In 2022, that total sum was DKK 98 million of own internally developed software, and then DKK 20 million in acquisition of a copy of the code base for AIRHART, which is PULSE, so around DKK 120 million. Going forward in the period of the midterm targets, we expect to have a run rate of around DKK 120 million in terms of capitalized cost on an annual basis.
That is amortized over five years. That will then mean that amortizations will increase, of course, as we get the same amount capitalized every year. As we build up the balance, then that will increase amortizations. Depreciations are more or less stable. They were a little bit higher in Q2 this year, expected to be high in Q2 this year, and that is due to the fact that in this specific quarter, we have both the full write-off of the old headquarter in Copenhagen and new depreciations on the facilities here at Christiansbro, our new corporate headquarter. With our corporate headquarter here in Copenhagen in place, with our corporate headquarters or...
local headquarters for Alex down in Netcompany- Intrasoft in Athens, with the locations we've moved into in Norway and in Poland, to a certain extent, also in the UK. We don't see a lot of need for additional housing facilities, if you so will, to be needed to invest into to realize our growth in the coming period. That's why depreciations, to a certain extent, will be more or less flat from Q4 and then onwards. Of course, there can be a little bit of a deviation from quarter to quarter, but there are no major investments that we foresee to undertake.
With that, we end with a total D&A this year, around DKK 305 million-DKK 315 million, growing to DKK 360 million-DKK 370 million. If you look at the amortizations alone, or the capitalization of intangible software, let's just say that we expect that to be on the same nominal amount of around DKK 120 million as it was last year, also for this year. That means for the years 2024, 2025, 2026, that also means that the ratio of capitalized internal development to revenue will decline from 2.2% in 2022 to 1.4% in 2026.
We're not a software company, and that's important to stress, so we don't expect to continue forever to increase development into R&D when revenue increases. We are an IT services company that facilitates and enhances our growth and our delivery by usage of platforms and products, which I think you will be able to put into perspective with all the presentations that we've had today. When we look into the future and the future reporting, then we're not going to introduce a new format today. It's fair to assume that at one point in time, we will include some sort of reporting on products and on platforms, but we want to make sure that that makes sense before we do it, also from a scale perspective. 2023 is going to continue to be reported on as is.
When you looked at Q1, that's going to be the same Q2, Q3, and Q4. Generally speaking, we will have fewer guiding items. We have guided this year for top-line growth and for EBITDA, and we've no specific guidance for 2023 in terms of cash flow, but now we have a long-term aspiration or midterm aspiration in terms of cash redistribution to shareholders, and we'll probably stick at those areas. In 2022, we had eight different KPIs to guide on, and no matter how we did, we will always have one KPI that looked a little bit soft compared to the remaining seven.
Nothing wrong with that, in terms of making sure that we focus on what is really the important part for Netcompany, we've narrowed down the amount of KPIs that we guide for to make sure that we will stay focused in the discussions with our shareholders and other interests. That is how we will continue to guide. With that, I actually have no more slides. Somebody during lunch was kind enough to tell me that at this particular Capital Markets Day, there are only specific numbers in around the 3%, 4% of the slides, which is significantly different than previous Capital Markets Days. That is on purpose and on design.
By design, we released our financial targets yesterday so that we could spend much more time today on discussing the strategic objectives and what is driving our future growth and our future margin buildup, and I hope that we've succeeded with that. Let's take a few questions before we break for the day.
Claus, Thomas, is about your net cash and net debt situation. How do you plan to end in 2026? You know, the same net debt as you have today, or is it % of revenue, or how should we think about that?
We have a target of at least to be below 1x net interest-bearing debt to EBITDA in our capital structure. When we look at our capital structure, then we've calculated what's the optimum amount of debt that we can carry and still have a positive impact on our own internal EVA. And that is somewhere between 0.5 and 1. So our target is to be below 1, and that is what we are communicating in terms of the long-term targets or the midterm targets, 2026. We expect to be around 1 already by the end of 2023, and then we'll see how far we will de-leverage further into 2024 and 2025 and 2026.
Way is to think 0.5-1 times. That's what you're saying?
Yeah, well, our target is below 1, and our optimum, when we calculate our EVA, and depending on what requirements we have on equity, is between 0.5 and 1 from a theoretical perspective.
Okay. In the last CMD, as I remember, you had some ambitions for how big you will be in Europe. Is these ambitions, targets, is that gone, or how do you think about Netcompany in more European perspective?
I don't think that our ambition, and really, André is also a person to discuss that with, but our ambitions in terms of the presence that we're going to have in Europe has not changed. We said something about, you know, by 2030, we would be a leading player in Europe. By leading player, we don't necessarily mean a company with the most employees, but the company that is doing the most significant level of digitalization throughout Europe, the company is going to be the ones that are doing the digitalization which is needed, but doing it responsible. The company that will lead the way in terms of how to utilize AI to make sure that we don't do something which is overly stupid.
We will still be in that, in that strategic objective. Our main focus right now and what we're seeing until 2026, is basically organic growth and going into potential adjacent markets like Sweden, where we already have a little bit of a presence, but do that basically based on the platforms and products that we have at hand. Can we see ourselves selling some of those product platforms into other countries in Europe? Yes, we can. Can we see ourselves selling a solution with ERMIS into other European countries? Of course. Can we see ourselves selling a product like AIRHART through the JV we have with Copenhagen into other countries in Europe or maybe even outside of Europe? Of course, we can.
It's going to be a combination of that lot. Hey, Wilson here from Barclays. Just wanted to touch on the top line targets first, because in the past, around 2019 or so, when you were still growing sort of high teens levels, you often referred to the fact that you were consciously slowing growth in terms of growing profitably. I was just wondering, the growth target now implies 11% or so, okay, so quite far below historical levels. Thinking about the discourse in the past of consciously slowing growth and thinking more about profitable growth, is this again, a factor to think about within this guidance, that you could be growing quicker, but you want the right level to be able to do that profitably?
Maybe you can speak onto some of the factors as well, why the growth target is slower than past levels. Is it just sort of being a bigger scaled player now than in the past, and that leading to an automatic slowing of growth? That's the first question.
Let's take one at a time, because I can't remember them all. Sorry, it's kind of a long question. On the growth, clearly, when we look at the Netcompany today compared to Netcompany in 2018, where we IPO'd, in 2018, Denmark accounted for more than 80% of revenue. Today, it's 49%.
Denmark is a country where, as you heard in the beginning, Gustav said that the market share is around 12, 13%, in a market which is not growing more than 3%, 4%. To continue to grow 25% in Denmark, means that in eight, 10 years, more than half of all the companies in Denmark will be, you know, served by Netcompany. That's a nice vision to have, but it's also just, you know, doesn't make sense. At one point in time, growth will be a little bit lower in Denmark, and then it will be picked up by some of the new geographies.
It takes some time to scale. I think we've heard that today, both from Rich, from Geir Arne and from Perry, and also Gustaf touched on it in Sweden. On top of that, we've added a big chunk on the business, namely Netcompany- Intrasoft. You heard Alex talk about that. Part of Netcompany- Intrasoft is with the European Union. Even though they are continuing to spend money, we have a large market share already with the European Union. Probably difficult to continue to grow that at, you know, 20%. We have a fairly high market share in Greece, in Netcompany- Intrasoft, which also means that growth outside of the RRF is going to be convoluted.
When you add all of that together, then we have a lower growth but of a bigger pie. If you do the math and you just calculate with the numbers I've given here, including the D&A, and then apply 21%-22% tax rate, and assume that we buy back shares for DKK 2 billion at the current rate, earnings per share would more or less double in the three-year time. I think that's maybe another way of looking at it, you know, only looking at the margin, because we are a different company. We don't necessarily want to slow down growth, but we want to grow in a responsible manner.
As you heard Leni talk about the projects, as we grow bigger, the projects get, you know, also fairly bigger. It is extremely important that we deliver quality in everything we can. We are never better than our last project, and if we start to neglect that, then sure, we might grow fantastically in one year, but that's gonna be a short-term gig, so we don't want to do that. It's not per se that we don't want to grow more, and, you know, but there are some things on the organization that has changed. We are a different company than we were in 2018. We will look to continue to grow, and we will look to also improve margin.
Okay, that's super useful.
Thanks a lot. The second question I have is just on the reporting structure, which you said you're not going to change straight away. First of all, I'd say thanks a lot for the disclosure on the D&A. I think that's really useful and to do the modeling. Was just wondering, you said there's a possibility of introducing new product reporting. Are you also considering giving more detail below EBITDA in the future in terms of sort of an adjusted EPS, adjusted net income number? Or will the priority in terms of the reporting still be on the EBITDA level?
As of now, that's the only thing I can ask to have, because the minute I say something else, then what are we doing here, huh?
As of now, we're focused on adjusted EBITDA, and we're focusing on group level. In 2022, license revenue was less than half a percentage point of total revenue. Of course, it needs to have a little bit of a bigger scale before it starts to become meaningful. When we start to engage and when we start to look in changing the reporting structure, we will make sure to engage with interesting parties that it's not going to be a total surprise as to what's coming and what's not coming. Make sure that there's a nice handover of that, but it's not something which is in the imminent planning. You're welcome.
Thank you for taking my question. A question on the Danes operation, and just looking back over five years. Previously, when it comes to the large tender, large contract, Netcompany was basically the sole vendor to win the large ones. Over recent years, we also see the trend that, you know, some competitive players also included in those framework agreements and contracts. Is it fair to assume the competition has increased? I'm asking because we have heard public agency have talked about they want to introduce more competition, especially in the, yeah, in the public segment.
... I think the competition in the Danes market has not changed. It's the same names that we see that we also saw five years ago, and then there's a few new ones, but basically, it's the same. It's true that we don't win everything, which is also going to be difficult for the government to award us everything, even though we're the best. I'm biased, but it would create a new monopoly, which is not really what is needed. Generally speaking, we win what we want to win and what we pitch for. Sometimes we lose, and we don't really like that.
There's been a few cases last year that we didn't, you know, particularly wanted to bid for and then lose, of course, but that's just how it is. Overall, we see sufficient demand also in the public sector, and we see new sectors emerging with demand for digitalization, even though that Denmark is fairly digitized, and that's within areas like defense, within security, within health. Then, of course, also tapping into what Lars, Alex was talking about, the whole area of personal taxation in Denmark also needs an overhaul. You know, yeah, you win some, you lose some. Generally speaking, we win more than we lose, which is still good.
Can I just follow up here? Could you confirm that Netcompany has not been more aggressive on the pricing when it comes to the large tenders?
What I can confirm is that we are always competitive when it comes to the bids that we render. In terms of what kind of prices we bid for and the likes, that's, you know, difficult to have a detailed discussion on way, because it's things that we cannot classify or that we cannot disclose. Overall, the margin compression that we've seen in the Danes business that we're alluding to is mainly for things that are not directly related to pricing. In 2022, in the beginning of 2022, we took new benefits in place, which was a reduction of a full 3 percentage point to margin.
We have more sickness, which we've discussed to endlessness in 2022, and we have also a matter of right-sizing a pyramid structure and the likes in 2023. There are different blocks in terms of what is what has been dilutive to to margin before we start looking into pricing.
Last question here.
My question, my first question is Netcompany vulnerable to inflation? I mean, revenue-wise, and cost-wise.
Mm-hmm.
Is it advantage for your company, when the inflation is high?
The answer to that is no. This answer to the sub-question is also no, and I'll elaborate on it. The vast majority of the cost that we have is salary cost, so that's around, what, 85% of our cost. We have a model where we hire 80% of our new starters every year straight out of university. We have a model where we grow. Historically, we've been growing, you know, 10%-15%, and then we've had a churn, so employee turnover of 16%-18%. Now, when people leave us throughout the pyramid structure, and when experienced people leave us, then we don't replace them with similarly experienced people from the outside. We hire more graduates, and we educate them ourselves.
The impact on the cost structure of that is that as long as we keep up, filling, the pyramid from the bottom, so to speak, then, the equation in terms of the salary that we give people will lead to a 2%-3% overall salary increase on average. The salary that we give people, the salary increase we give people, is performance-based. The top performers in Netcompany will get a salary increase between 14%-15% every year, and they have been doing that over the last 10 years. We did not adjust that last year and added another 8% because inflation was high, and we did not also subtract X% when there was no inflation.
That's the model that we have, and as long as we continue to grow, and as long as we continue to manage our pyramid structure based on performance, then we are not as impacted on inflation as some of our peers. Is it an advantage here for us? Can we just take, you know, the underlying CPI and then pass on to our clients? On our contracts, we have an opportunity to change prices according to the underlying CPI, but we have long-lasting relations with our clients.
Given the fact that our cost base is not increasing by 10% year-over-year, the salary is increasing, like, 2%, 3%, 4%, it would be a little bit problematic, we think, for a long-term relationship with clients to say, "You know what? Inflation is coming, and you're going to pay me 6% margin without me doing anything." That's, of course, a case-by-case-by-case evaluation. No, we don't have any easy points in terms of inflation driving revenue. One more right here.
Hey, this is Aditya from Bank of America. I guess one thing we haven't heard much about today was the offshore, nearshore headcount.
Mm-hmm.
We have people in Vietnam, Poland. How does that fit into the delivery model?
Sure.
Also, I mean, there's also a pretty large headcount in a market like Greece with Intrasoft. Is there room to use some of that talent?
Mm-hmm.
across Netcompany projects and, you know, different parts as well?
Sure. It's true, we don't talk about offshore and nearshore because that's not how we see it. We have people in Poland and in Vietnam, and we are in Poland and Vietnam for talent availability purposes. We are not in Poland, we're not in Vietnam to have some sort of advantage on cost. We are there because it gives us access to very talented IT graduates, IT skilled people, which we need on our projects. Historically, the level of people in our talent pools, which is Poland and Vietnam, has been around 18%, 20% of the total workforce and has been fairly stable.
It might increase a little bit as we go along. What we've learned under COVID is that we can deliver fairly good also in a remote session or in a remote environment. Given the projects that we have and given the complexity of our projects, we have a need to be close to our customers. We will still have, and always have, a large proportion of our employee base where our customers are. With the addition of Netcompany- Intrasoft to the Netcompany Group, we've also get to know a lot of very talented people down in Greece. They are to a increased extent being utilized on international or projects around the Group.
It's not something that we've done a lot of, as of now, apart from the projects that has been won on joint projects, so, taxation, customs, or the like. That, of course, is something that we will look into. We're not talking about offshore or nearshore because we don't use those terms, but we still want to have our talent pools in Poland and Vietnam because it makes sense from a talent acquisition perspective.
Thank you.
I don't think we have any more questions. Thank you very much, Thomas.
Thank you.
Since we are back on time, I want to just thank you all for participating today. The presentation is available online, and if you have any follow-up questions, you are always welcome to reach out to myself or Thomas. You know how to get in contact with us. I want to thank all of the Netcompany employees who has presented today. Thank you so much for taking your time to come meet the investors and shareholders, analysts. It's been very good to see you all on stage. Now, we would like to invite you in our Friday bar, that completely exceptional is open on Thursday. If you go to the reception, you can go outside and have a glass of wine.
Please bring all of your stuff, and then, I'll just close up here for today. Thank you.