At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode throughout the presentation, and afterwards there'll be a question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the call over to the speakers. You may now begin.
Thank you very much, Operator, and excuse for the slight delay. Most important, good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining this webcast. My name is Pär Fors, and I'm the CEO of NNIT. With me today, I have our CFO, Carsten Ringius, and together we will present our result for the fourth quarter and also the full year of 2024, which we released yesterday evening. Please turn to slide two. I will walk through the key business highlights, including a regional update. After this, Carsten goes through the group results, including our financial outlook for 2025 and our adjusted financial aspirations toward 2027, which we announced on the 11th of February. Before heading to the next slide, please pay attention to the disclaimer in the bottom of the slide. Let's turn to slide three. No doubt that 2024 was an eventful year for NNIT.
We faced challenges greater than we firstly anticipated, such as the slower than anticipated recovery in our data migration business, a more cautious customer behavior, a more moderate market slowdown in Europe, and continued challenges in Asia, most notably in China. On the other side, we saw a solid growth trajectory in the private and public segment of our business, and also a turnaround effort in region Asia positively materializing. In Q4, we managed to change the growth and profitability trajectory from Q3. Our revenue for the fourth quarter amounted to DKK 470 million, equal to a growth of 7.1%. Organic growth was also 7.1%. The margins picked up in the last quarter as planned, ending at 9.1%.
The Q4 financial performance resulted in an organic growth for the full year of 6% and a margin of 6.3%, which was in line with our latest outlook announced end of October last year. Even though our initial expectations going into the year were higher than what we delivered in terms of financial performance, we are happy with ending the year on a solid note. Please turn to slide four. During the year, we have made good strategic progress. We have reached several important milestones after the divestment to ensure that NNIT has a strong platform to stand on and further evolve. In our corporate strategy, we have made some deliberate choices to diversify our business, focusing on global life sciences and the private and public space here in Denmark. In 2024, we have proven that those choices have been the right ones.
Besides improving and growing our life sciences business, the public segment has really had a strong year with close to 30% growth, where we also won important contracts. A key revenue driver for NNIT is our ability to grow engagement with existing customers. This can be done only if the customer relationship is strong. Our customer satisfaction score for 2024 is a direct testimonial of that. We reached a score of 4.5 out of a scale of 5, which is actually the highest performance ever. In terms of net promoter score, 2024 ended on a 43, which is helpful because our customers at large are willing to recommend us to others. For the past years, NNIT has acquired companies in Europe, the US, and Denmark. Now all group companies, except SCALES, have been integrated into NNIT during 2024.
This has been a major effort by all our employees in order to make this happen, and we have even completed the integration faster than planned. This means that Excellis Health Solutions, Migration Powerhouse, and ESSEC Controls are now an integrated part of NNIT with location in both the U.S. and Europe. After the divestment, NNIT has streamlined the system landscape and simplified the IT backbone. As part of the divestment, we have completed the IT separation. We have implemented a new ERP system and also a new HR system. All of these projects have been completed in 2024, which again has required a huge effort from all our employees. The benefits are great as all entities are now running on the same systems. Access and quality of data have increased, and the costs have been structurally lowered.
Lastly, I would like to mention the relocation of offices we have done across the globe. We did this for two reasons, one being to strengthen our employer brand and also to lower our facility costs. We have actually managed to do both things, and we are happy with the outcome. Please turn to slide number five for a regional update. The business and financial performance across our regions is fragmented. Despite an overall organic growth of 6% for the full year, we saw that the regions were facing different challenges. For the U.S. and Europe, we have seen a moderate slowdown of the life sciences market, causing cautious customer behavior and price pressure emerging, and this is especially true for Europe. Also, both regions have been negatively impacted by the decline in the data migration business.
In Asia, a challenging macroeconomic environment in China has resulted in significant price pressure, especially from local competitors. On the other hand, region Denmark has seen solid traction within the private space and strong growth in the public segment, as mentioned earlier. A few more comments on Europe. During 2024, we managed to organically grow our business in region Europe with almost 10% in a difficult market, where we saw new projects that were characterized by their shorter time frame, more narrow scope, and some of them also postponed or put on hold. Despite the solid organic growth, the profitability came below last year's level, which was underwhelming. This was mainly due to having too many people with low utilization.
In January, we welcomed Pia Ingels as a new head of region Europe, replacing Ricco Larsen, who has been an important part of the company for the last 25 years. Pia comes with great NNIT experience, where she lastly has overseen our engagement with Novo Nordisk very successfully. Besides having a consultancy background, Pia has a strong commercial mindset and great understanding of project background execution and also a background in consultancy, as said. The immediate focus for Pia and region Europe is to strengthen the backlog and pipeline, and of course, also to improve profitability. Turning to region U.S., the organic growth for 2024 was, on a full year basis, disappointing. The decline was mainly driven by the data migration business, but also some slight decline in other parts of the market, especially within R&D.
Despite the revenue decline, regional operating profit margin increased compared with last year, as I were less bent on external subcontractors, and also we did some capacity adjustment early in the year and also had a continued focus to drive down costs. We also saw a significant pickup in performance in Q4. Region Asia returned to growth and profitability in 2024. The material improvement compared with last year is due to the initiatives carried out during the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, where Asia right-sized its capacity, making sales function a part of the delivery unit, and an enhanced commercial focus on project execution and fight the price pressure. We are happy with the development, but it is too early to state that we are fully back on track, as we remain cautious due to the continued challenging macroeconomic environment and also the strong price pressure.
As mentioned earlier, we have progressed well in region Denmark. We continue to deliver solid growth during 2024, especially within the public area and for the SCALES group company that was performing very well. The growth was supported by the existing contract we had going into the year and also some new important contracts that we won. We grew our profits. However, the margin was slightly lower compared with last year, mainly due to a significant amount of billable resources completing crucial internal projects, such as the IT separation during the year. We have now concluded on those projects going into 2025, which will support margin expansion. Please turn to the next slide. On the 11th of February, we released our preliminary figures for 2024. In the same announcement, we also shared the outlook for 2025 and our adjusted financial aspirations toward 2027.
I will briefly go through the figures, and later in the presentation, Carsten will go through the details and also the assumptions behind them. Firstly, the outlook for 2025, we target an organic growth between 7%-10%, which is above the latest external market outlook from the Evers Group, which sits around 4%-5% for the life sciences and around 8% for the public sector in Denmark, meaning that we will grow ahead of market, gaining market share. In terms of profit margin, we target group operating profit, including special items, between 7%-9% for 2025. In regard to our financial aspirations toward 2027, the ambition for the organic growth is between 7%-10% and a group operating profit margin excluding special items above 10% in 2027. Please turn to the next slide. This concludes my part of the presentation.
Now I will hand over to Carsten for the group financial performance and the details around our financial outlook and the financial aspiration. Carsten, please go ahead.
Thank you, Pär. Please turn to the next slide. In Q4, we returned to profitable growth on the back of an unsatisfactory Q4 or Q3 results. Revenue amounted to DKK 470 million, equal to the organic growth of 7.1%. As Pia alluded to, the growth was mainly driven by expansion of engagements with existing customers across regions, with the exception of region U.S. We are happy with the performance in the light of the moderate market slowdown and the uncertainty around the macroeconomic environment. Our group operating profit margin excluding special items was roughly in line with last year's level, mainly due to the decline in the data migration business. Please turn to the next slide.
As Pär mentioned, we ended the full year of 2024 in line with our latest outlook. Of course, we are pleased with that. However, we had expected better performance when we started the year. Revenue amounted to DKK 1.85 billion, equal to an organic growth of 6% in a challenging market. Group operating profit was in line with last year, and margin was slightly below. To improve margins going into 2025, we do see a number of levers that I will go through on the slide for the financial outlook for 2025. Please turn to the next slide that specifies the special items for 2024. Let me start by saying that special items came in higher than we initially planned for. The total net amount was DKK 69 million, which was the same amount as the year before, 2023.
The level of special items materially increased in Q4 by a number of variables. I will go through the elements now. We had DKK 26 million related to earnout payments. We expect these payments to be final in 2025, and therefore we see no further earnout payments from 2026. New IT platforms and integration of group companies amounted or accounted for DKK 27 million. This was higher than we initially planned, mainly due to us completing the integration faster, moving in special items from 2025 to 2024. Additionally, we also progressed further on the phase two of the new ERP implementation, which was also moved from 2025 to 2024. Restructuring cost was DKK 20 million, which was also higher than anticipated, as we had made more capacity adjustments during the year due to lower utilization and streamlining the organization.
In connection with our relocation of the headquarter in Denmark, moving out of the premises in Østmarken, we also had some special item costs of around DKK 9 million. We occurred one-offs associated with the divestment of our infrastructure business, amounting to DKK 6 million. Lastly, we released an accrual of DKK 20 million in Q1 2024, which was related to a reservation made in relation to the divestment of our infrastructure business. Please turn to slide 11 for the financial outlook for 2025. As announced on the 11th of February, we expect to organically grow our business in 2025. We continue to see good opportunities to outgrow the market across all our business areas based on our current pipeline and indications from customers. Organic growth is expected to be between 7% and 10%.
We also expect to grow our profitability compared with 2024 to between 7% and 9%. The drivers for the margin increase are driven by several improvements within commercial excellence. Additionally, we do expect that the full year impact from the restructuring initiatives carried out in 2024 will have a positive impact into 2025. Special items are expected to be materially lower than 2024. Earnout payments amount to around DKK 20 million, and restructuring cost is expected to be materially lower than last year. We expect the first quarter to be below the guided range for both organic growth and group operating profit margin, excluding special items, as financial performance is expected to gradually improve throughout the year. In the outlook for 2025, we assume that there will be no further deterioration of the current macroeconomic environment. Please turn to the next slide.
In connection with our pre-release of the full year 2024 figures, we also adjusted our financial aspirations. Before going into the adjusted figures, I will elaborate on why we updated the financial aspirations. There are three important drivers for why we changed. The first being that the financial performance in 2024 was lower than we initially expected. The second being that the external market outlook has been downgraded. The market outlook for Evers Group now projects a CAGR of around 4%-5% for the life sciences segment, which is around 3 percentage points lower than the outlook we were in possession of at our capital markets day in September 2023. Lastly, we do see that the macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty is impacting the business greater than we initially expected.
With that being said, we remain certain that the strategic direction we set in 2023 remains the right one and that NNIT is well positioned to continue to profitably grow the business. As part of the adjusted financial aspirations, we changed the structure of the aspiration. There are three changes. Organic growth is now measured as annual growth instead of CAGR. The profitability measure continues to be group operating profit margin excluding special items. However, instead of yearly average, it has been changed to an open-ended range by the end of the period, and the period has been prolonged with one year to 2027. Please turn to slide 13. The adjusted financial aspirations towards 2027 constitute an annual organic growth between 7%-10% and a group operating profit margin excluding special items above 10% by the end of 2027.
As for the outlook for 2025, we do see great opportunities to outgrow the market across our business areas, which we have also proven the past two years. The margin expansion will be supported by a number of levers such as economies of scale from top-line growth and optimization of utilization. Our continuous focus on improving organizational efficiency increased the solution repeatability across regions to leverage our great service offering and structurally streamlining our cost of the business across regions and corporate functions and leverage the synergies from the integration of group companies now finalized. As for the outlook 2025, we assume no further deterioration of the macro environment and that we are able to alleviate cost and salary inflation through price adjustments. Lastly, we have not included any M&A activity in the financial aspirations. However, we are continuously looking for targets and opportunities. Please turn to the next slide.
Before we head into the Q&A section, Pär will provide some closing remarks. Operator, please turn to the next slide.
Okay. Thank you, Carsten. Now we turn to the Q&A session.
We will now start the Q&A session. To ask a question during the Q&A, please press five-star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press five-star again. We'll have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question will be from the line of Ms. Krizker from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Yeah, thank you for taking my questions. I have a few, and I will take them one by one. First on special items.
When you say restructuring cost is expected to be significantly below the level in 2025 compared to 2024, is it then below DKK 20 million, or is it below DKK 50 million, which is the number stated in note 25 in the annual report? That is my first question.
It is the latter, Ms. It is below the cost we have for restructuring in 2024.
Good. So below DKK 50 million. Perfect.
What is sort of a sustainable gross margin in the U.S. going forward? Is it still about 50%, or is it close to 40%, or how should we see it?
It is not in the line of Q4 at 54%. It is still higher than in the beginning of the year. We expect a level above 40% of the U.S. business going into 2025.
Okay, makes sense.
Maybe on free cash flow and also depreciation and amortization here in 2025, can you probably give some comments around the DNA operating cash flow and potentially free cash flow here for this year?
Yes, I think it's important to note that for 2024, we had some significant project activities ongoing impacting our cash flow. First of all, we had the IT separation, which was, from an expense point of view, accrued for in 2023. Of course, we had the negative cash flow from the salary payments related to this work going on in 2024. This amounts to more than DKK 50 million. The second element is our investment in our new ERP platforms and HR solutions, which amounts to more than DKK 50 million. Just these two elements alone constitute a negative cash flow of DKK 100 million in 2024.
As we have completed these activities, this will, of course, not be repeated into 2025, thereby improving our cash flow.
Okay, makes sense, Carsten. Thank you. Final question from my side in terms of seasonality. How do you see this year? Do you see there is a ramp-up from Q1 to Q4? Again, Q4 will be the strongest quarter. Maybe you could provide some comments around the demand environment here in the beginning of 2025.
In relation to the profitability, as we have done some capacity adjustments also in Q4 last year, we expect to see the benefits of that, of course, into the new year, both in the US but also in region Europe.
If you look at the seasonality, as I mentioned during the webcast before, we expect Q1 to be at a lower level than the guided range, but with gradual improvements throughout the year. As you have also seen, we have made an adjustment to the regional management for region Europe, and we expect the effort that Pär is putting into restructuring region Europe will improve the profitability throughout the year as well. We see gradual improvements throughout the year.
Makes sense. Okay, thank you.
Thanks, Ms. The next question will be from the line of Paul Jessen from Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thank you. I have a question or just a clarification coming back to Ms. question on restructuring. I assume that restructuring in 2025 will be less than DKK 20 million. Isn't that correct?
We expect it to be at a significantly lower level than in 2024. We have currently not plans for increasing it more than to DKK 20 million, but we are not guiding specifically on the amount. What is important for us is that we are quickly addressing our capacity as we go through the year. If we see significant need for restructuring, we will address it sooner so we do not counter experiences like we did in Q3 last year, significantly decreasing our profitability. My expectation, just to repeat it, is that we will have a significantly lower amount of special items into 2025 than what we have seen in 2024. As mentioned just before as well, you have seen that we have made some changes to the management of region Europe in Q1, which, of course, will be coming with some restructuring costs in Q1 already.
Yeah, I was just wondering what's the base number when you say significantly lower here? The 69 is including earnouts and new IT platforms and so on. I was just thinking about the restructuring was DKK 20 million last year.
Yeah, and my current expectation is that we will also be below that amount for restructuring.
Okay. You say no more earnouts in 2026, but if you look at the balance sheet, you have a long-term earnout on the balance sheet of DKK 5 million, I guess. Long-term, that means that it's something for 2026.
It is for payout in 2026, but we have earnouts related to SO controls and transfer services in 2025, which will be expensed throughout the year in 2025. This is what it's amounting to now, estimated DKK 20 million.
Okay, so there would be no payments or expenses in early 2025.
It would be expensed, but the cash flow effect will be in 2026.
Okay. On the guidance, you talk about a strong pipeline, strong backlog moving into 2025. Is that referring to public sector Denmark or across? Does it also include expected wins during 2025, or is it on the book for you?
Hi, Paul. I mean, I think the pipeline is pretty well spread out through the regions. Of course, the two strongest regions regarding the pipeline are clearly the Danish business, both for the public sector business in Denmark, but also the private business. Outside Denmark, it looks hopeful and good in the U.S. and also in Europe, the kind of Danish part of the life sciences business in Europe. We have had an impressive growth of normal this year by 14% totally. In Denmark, it looks good.
Outside Denmark, a little bit tougher, and in Asia, a bit tougher.
It's including expected wins when you talk about the outlook is strong. That's something necessary. You have one by now.
Yeah, we also have expectations that we will win some contracts during 2025. If you look at the life science pipeline, these are by nature smaller projects. So we need to, of course, during 2025, also ensure that we win projects to fulfill our revenue growth ambitions. If you look at the public pipeline, we have quite an okay historical win rate. If we look at the tenders that we have been part of, our current outlook does not expect that we have a 100% win rate, but a balanced win rate in line with our history within the public tenders that we have submitted to previously.
About the salespeople and others who have been working on internal projects. Should we see now that they've become client-facing that that will boost the growth as they have not contributed to growth fully in 2024? When they now can look at external clients, should that be an accelerator?
Yes, let me give a comment on the SCALES performance. As you know, we have been using SCALES to deliver our new ERP platform in NNIT, and that work commenced in the second half of 2023 and has been running throughout the current year. If you look standalone at SCALES business, considering revenue towards NNIT and external, you would see a continued growth in the SCALES business. Of course, the revenue towards NNIT is coming without margin.
Thereby, if you look at region Denmark as a whole, it explains part of the decline in the regional operating profit. With the ERP implementation now being complete, you would see a pickup in margin just contributed by SCALES now, replacing the NNIT internal revenue with external revenue again. That has a positive impact into 2025.
Okay, and then I looked at the admin expenses. They were up 11% in 2024 versus 2023. I would have assumed that you became more lean and without an operations business that should not go up that much. Is that just salary increases, or are you expanding your overhead, or how should we take that?
No, I would take the 2023 number with a certain amount of caution because, as you recall, we had the first four months related to—oh, sorry.
We had the first four months of the year with also running the infrastructure business. Of course, the correct split of back office cost, corporate cost, are based on extrapolations for the first four months. Of course, there has also been a lot of work gone into the separation after the split that is under special items in 2023. I think a direct like-for-like comparison is difficult between 2023 and 2024. The 2024 number is more the base to look for. Yes, I would say that.
We should expect lower both for local and headquarter cost allocation, lower leases, of course, to go.
We should see a decline into 2025 when we are reaping the synergies from our investments in new platforms, relocation of offices, etc.
Final question for now.
Novo Nordisk, if you look at the note on their revenue, they actually have accounted for close to 28% of the growth, meaning 27.8% of the 7% growth. They have been a real contributor to growth last year. How should we look at that? Will that be a main generator also for the future?
I mean, I think we are extremely pleased by that growth because, as you recall, Paul, for many years, the revenue with Novo Nordisk was just declining and declining in the old NNIT setup. Now, with the total new NNIT setup where we sell services to the line of business, we see a pickup of growth. I think I have a very positive forecast for 2025, I'd say, in line with that performance of 2024.
Okay, and how do you look at it?
They are, of course, currently in a huge spending mode. When you look at it on the long term, is it the business level you expect to maintain, or should we see at some time that Novo potentially also reduces or moderates their growth on spending?
Do you mean for Novo specifically? Yeah. No, I mean, honestly, I mean, it's hard to look at the crystal ball of what would happen in the very long future. I mean, we have a lot of positive—a lot of investment going into Novo that does not just cover 2025. We have a positive prospect for the future that we can look into. Of course, what will happen five years from now, I don't know that. At least for 2025 and also looking into 2026, there's a lot of projects going into that year.
For that period, we are at least positive.
Okay, thank you.
Thanks, Paul. The next question will be from the line of Mikkel Kousgaard Rasmussen from ABG. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thank you for the presentation, Bjørn Carsten. I have two questions. I'll take them one by one. The first one is related to Paul's question previously. In terms of backlog for 2025, I mean, you obviously have to win some contracts in order to get it within guidance. Just assuming that you don't win anything new, how much could you realistically grow revenues this year?
I mean, I think we have given a revenue guidance for 2025, which is that assumption or that forecast for 2025 is built basically on two components. Firstly, we have backlog into the year, which we think underpins that number.
Of course, on top of that, we need to expand some existing contracts and also win some new contracts. It is a balance of those two. We are, as those numbers are fresh out of the press, we think we have a solid plan to make them materialize.
Okay, thank you. Next one goes to the, say, medium to long-term margin target of now only above 10%. I remember at the Cambridge Markets that you spoke about, or at least your target previously was an average of 10-13%. Given that 2024 would be sort of a transition year, that meant that it would be more back-end loaded, you'd probably see margins above maybe 13% in 2026. Now you have postponed it one year.
Is there anything structural in the way we should think about margins, long-term margins in the business, obviously aside from the lower market growth?
We strongly believe that we can improve our margins, of course, reflected in the guidance. We do see also with the adjustment of our revenue trajectory that we see this materializing slower. That is the entire assumption about the updated financial aspirations. As I went through the presentation, we see several levers for actually expanding our margin. One is to get, of course, our capacity adjustment in place and running that as part of the sort of normal business practice to adjust that very agile compared to how we have done that in the past. That is one major contributor. The other one is, of course, addressing our regional and corporate overhead costs where we see opportunities to improve that further.
Of course, extend the repeatability of our solution portfolio to a higher degree. That is an area where we can still improve quite a lot by cross-selling the different solutions that we have across regions and thereby driving up our profitability more than what we have done historically.
I think not the least, I mean, as a consultancy company, the efficiency or utilization or billability, we call it, is an extremely important lever for us to push that up. Every percentage point contributes significantly to our bottom line. For that period, that's maybe one of the larger levers.
There's no difference in the way we think about long-term margins. There's not a structural change.
No.
Okay, sure. Thanks. That's all for me.
Thanks, Mikkel. As a reminder, if you have any questions for the speakers, please press five star on your telephone keypad.
The next question will come from the line of Ewe Joe from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Hi, thank you for taking my question. Also follow-up question on the special items. Maybe just to challenge you a bit, Carsten. Do you treat the capacity adjustment cost as restructuring cost? If the market demand continues to be more volatile than you think, should we expect you to continue to increase special items in the future? I mean, isn't it just a part of your normal business operation? At least we know some of your peers, they just treat it as a normal cost.
I think there are two sort of separations on this. One is sort of the ongoing adjustments of teams where you see projects materialize and you have to adjust your capacity.
This is something that we are handling as part of normal business. What we consider special items is, for example, when we do organizational changes, integrate companies, do significant reductions, consolidating teams, taking out management layers. These kind of very, yeah, restructuring the organization to a higher degree, not just taking out one or two or three employees as you would normally do when you have to address capacity surplus or too big a bench. We are differentiating between these elements.
Okay. I'm just hoping that you can be more specific in the future when you guide down these special items. Thanks. My next question here is on the minimum target. I can understand the low organic growth outlook, but what is the uncertainty for you to lower also the margin outlook? I mean, Mikkel has asked the same question here.
What I understand is that those cost initiatives you have been completed as planned. We should see that those margin drivers start to materialize here in 2025. Isn't just the capacity adjustments will continue to be the main uncertainty for you to reach the margin target? Because when I compare your EAT margin to the peers, you are still much lower than their probability. If you see there's no structure difference, I mean, isn't just this utilization is much lower at current level than most of your peers? If you can help me to understand the dynamics and what you have assumed in the medium-term target, especially the updated one.
Capacity adjustments is one thing, but I think, as Pär also mentioned, one of the biggest levers we have is increasing the utilization on the individual consultants.
There we see a big potential from the current level that we are coming from. That is one significant driver we need to drive throughout 2025 to realize these profitability gains. The regional and corporate cost reductions will only get us so far. I think the driver around solution repeatability is also a significant one that we need to utilize to get above the 10% where we want to be.
Maybe as the topic of that, I mean, I think if you should be humble and self-reflecting, I mean, the transformation from the old NNIT to the new NNIT, as we call it, has taken a little bit more blood, sweat, and tear than we anticipated.
The negative consequence of that, you see in the numbers that we presented, but you also see a greater potential to improve the operation on many aspects, both in terms of overhead, but also our utilization and our efficiency numbers. I think we are demonstrating that in our outlook for 2025, that we are moving yet another step in the right direction. We were offered a good start in 2023. We are not pleased by the performance in 2024, but we see definitely a better 2025. As I said, there is also some needed action in Europe to get us in the right place with the new leadership in place. Those actions are actually ongoing, as you speak.
Okay. Let me put another way. You are saying it sounds like you are talking the 10% adjusted EAT margin mid-term. Previously, it was at 10-13%.
If you compare it to your peers, I mean, it's around 13% or even higher. I mean, what are the sort of the level you think? Is there any structure difference you see compare your margin to the peers?
I mean, I think there are many reflections on that very, very good question. One thing is I truly believe that the way to get to higher margins is actually to have the type of focus that we have as a company, meaning that we are building two-legged people who understand technology, but also understand the business. I think those businesses generally are the ones that are able to generate the greater margins. It is true that there are some competitors that are at 13-15%. Many are at a clearly low level. Our ambition is definitely to move as a first stepping stone towards 10%.
Is that the end station? No, it doesn't necessarily need to be that. We need also to set realistic goals, which we can deliver upon. That's why we're given that guidance. I think if we reach a 10% EBIT margin as a starting point and as a floor, because that's what we communicated, that we should reach 10% and hopefully larger, but we also want to set targets that we can achieve and hopefully overdeliver upon. Definitely above 10% long-term. To 13%, probably will take a little bit longer time.
Okay, clear. My last question here, you mentioned the new customer in the Danish private sector. Is it also life science or is it other verticals you have a warm?
In the Danish market, I think we mentioned in the U.S. market, right? In the last. No, Danish.
You're saying you bring new customers in the Danish private sector. I remember you were mainly targeting the public sector here in Denmark. You said that you bring new customers in the private sector.
Yeah, I mean, in general, I mean, the Danish business, if you look at the Danish business, it constitutes basically of three parts. First, you have the public business, and that's talked about. You have SCALES who continuously are bringing in new clients to grow their business. I mean, it's a project business. They do not have any kind of repeatable business. They have projects which could be 24 months long, but their whole business model is continuously bringing in new clients. That's one source. The third leg of the Danish business is actually our consultancy business, which is cloud, cybersecurity, BI, DevOps, etc. They are also continuously working on new clients.
That is why we kind of phrase it that way.
Those new customers in the private sector, is it a SCALES customer or is it your own customer?
It is both in SCALES, but also in the third part of the business here in Denmark. Because as I said, it is three different parts of the Danish business. It is public, it is SCALES, and it is also the consulting. The two latter parts, to a large degree, operate on private business outside life sciences.
Okay, thanks. I will jump back to the queue.
Thanks, Ewei. If there are no more questions in the queue, I will hand the call back to the speakers for any closing remarks.
Thank you for very good questions. Appreciate you listening in. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me or Carsten if you have any further questions.
With that, I thank you for participating and have a great day.