Welcome to the Presentation of Trifork's First Quarter Results for 2025. My name is Frederik Svanholm, Group Investment Director at Trifork, and today our CEO Jørn Larsen and our CFO Kristian Wulf-Andersen will be providing a presentation of approximately 40 minutes, followed by Q&A. Before we start, I would like to say that the presentation will be recorded and it's made available in its full length on our investor webpage. Also, if you want to download the presentation for today's call, you can find it on the front page of our investor website. Third, for the Q&A, we invite you to ask questions and engage with management. Let's jump to the presentation, and I now hand over to our Group CEO Jørn Larsen. Jørn, please go ahead.
Thank you, Fred, and thank you everyone for taking your time to listen to this call. I'm looking forward to the questions at the end, but first we have our presentation of Q1 2025. Overall, we started the year on a good pace, and we make this slide here where we illustrate one of our products in action. The headline we put here is "Good Progress Towards a Product-Led Future." I would like to put a few words on this because the whole industry, the software industry and consultancies and software companies are in a big transformation, not just by the effect of AI and the big changes that that has that we can talk about later, but also the big geopolitical situations. Now we see there is an unemployment in the tech sector, which we did not have one or two decades ago. Now we have.
There is a lot of changes in the world right now, but in tech, I think even more than in other industries. We see that the future of Trifork is to become more of a product company than a service company. As you know, we have always divided our business in Inspire, Build, Run, where Run actually was recurring revenue and based on products and hosting and support. In 2024 and in 2025 and going forward, we are, you can say, a transformation. We are transforming Trifork from the old way of doing things 10 years ago to in hopefully five years where it will look quite different. Right now we are in the middle of this transition. What we say is that when we talk to customers, we will bring our capabilities forward, our products forward.
We will listen to what problems they have. We already have a very good idea about a specific industry's challenges at any given time, and we address these challenges that they have with the capabilities and the products that we have on the shelf. When we say product-led, it does not mean we do not do service anymore, but the service we do is way more focused towards implementing our products and making sure our products fit like a hand in a glove into the organization of our customers. Let's just carry on with the presentation. When we look from top down, we have the Trifork Group, we have Trifork and Trifork Labs. In Trifork, we have Inspire, Build, Run, and we have the private and public division of our business. Inspire, Build, Run is composed of business into various industries.
You will probably notice that we do not report on digital health and fintech and those things anymore because now we actually focus on specific industries such as energy and aviation. We still do digital health and fintech, but there are more than just three verticals at Trifork now. There is a vertical for each product family, and some of our product families, we will also talk about later, actually have a more horizontal effect, so we can sell them to more verticals. In Trifork Labs, we have 24 companies. Our book value is just short of EUR 83 million. Let us just continue. If we look at the development over the past many years, you will see that 2024 was this year where we had this disruption in growth. We believe with our guidance and our Q1 that we are on a growth track again.
As we could see also in Q4, we were already growing, and Q1 is an add-on to Q4. I will talk a little bit about the distribution between quarters for Trifork. Also on profit, we believe we can recover from the disruption in good profitability we saw in 2024, and we are good on track with the numbers of what we see in Q1, but we also have some more comments on that. Let's move on. Here we see the last many quarters of Trifork since 2020, actually. Of course, we can see a general trend line growing as it should, but I mean, we do not take it for granted. It is something we work hard for every day, and everyone in Trifork is doing the utmost to make this happen.
We actually see if we look at Q4 and Q1, there are some interesting differences here. You will see that there is a rather large orange add-on in Q4, and that is our conferences in Australia and in Copenhagen. We see that there is hardly any in Q1, which is normal if we look back to all the other Q1's for the former years. This year, we still expect a good chunk of orange coming in Q4 2025. We can talk about this in three quarters' time. We also see that the dark color is rather high, actually also all-time high, and that is our run component with scalable revenue. You can say that is the highest quality of revenue we have. We can see the trend is that it is growing, but specifically in Q1, it is rather high.
But then also what we can see, because now you can ask yourself, okay, what is going to happen in Q2? If we look back to Q2 2024, you will see that was actually an orange bit. This orange bit, we do not expect to see in Q2 2025. The other thing is that we did have a good license agreement that is recurring coming in Q1. That will happen again in Q1 2025 and 2026, but that will not happen. That component will not happen in Q2. There might be another component happening that will then repeat later on. Kristian can talk more into the dynamics of this. A good Q1, all-time high revenue, and I put a little expectation on what we can expect to see in Q2, but also for the year and Q4, a few words. Let's move on.
Overall, we have at present time comfort to maintain our guidance. From what we know right now, we maintain our guidance. Also, what gives us in this moment a little comfort is that we know that we will see some effect from previous agreed cost savings that they will kick in later in the year, Q3 and Q4, more than Q1, actually. We know that there is some EBITDA components coming in later. Let's move on. Also, the way of looking at Inspire, Build, Run, we are changing a little bit. For many years, actually, we have seen this circle, and we are used to talking about it goes from Inspire, then Build, then Run. Actually, we are thinking to change this because the dynamic of the new business we have is different.
What we do more and more is that we put our products forward, as mentioned in the beginning, but that means that we are in contact with hundreds of customers to figure out if there is a match between their problems or challenges and our solutions and product. That is very different from how we did business just five years ago. We do not necessarily go through this Inspire, Build, Run anymore. Actually, we go, if we can, directly to Run. The way we go to Run is maybe that we run a pilot. In the future, we would like to track Inspire as we do a pilot with a customer. They test our product, and that will serve as an inspiration for them to do things differently. Hopefully then they will say, "That's a good change.
We'd like to buy the product." And then they buy the product, but then they want to implement the product in the organization, and then it becomes Build. The whole order will change a little bit. We can also see that record high Run, 32.2%. We have never seen this level of Run before, but I also told you about the seasonality about it. We cannot expect that now it's always just 32% or more. That's not going to happen. It will flux a little bit up and down, but the general trend will be, and what we aim at is Run will take a higher ratio of the total revenue. That's the whole idea. Let's move on. If we look at some main events in Q1, then from the customer highlights, we won some tenders in Denmark in public business.
This is with the municipalities and regions of two major regions in Denmark with hosting and operation. That's a big win because it's a long-term contract. We also won our first digital health engagements in Oman. Now we are active in Denmark, Switzerland, Oman. It's almost like stepping stones down through Europe and to the Middle East. Hopefully we can fill up some of the spaces in between. The reason why we have success in rather small countries between 5 and 10 million citizens is that we see that it's easier to transform a healthcare system and digitalize it in a smaller society than, for instance, in Germany, the U.K., or the U.S., where these areas are more challenged in implementing countrywide and region-wide systems. That is a good signal for us. In Switzerland, we're still very early in the journey.
In Denmark, we are quite mature, and in Oman, we just got started. Also in Switzerland, we are working with a major insurance company, which is a really good win for us and where we contribute to the continued success of our customer. From the organization, we will see that churn is still rather high, and that is an effect of this transformation we are in. When we transform the business from being more from service to more product-led, it actually requires a number of changes in the organization, which has effect on churn. Luckily, we see compared to 2024 that there was a little less sickness. Still high. I'd like to see it below 2% because that's where it was in the past before COVID.
We also see that we have been able to maintain the average age in the company, which is a good thing that we just do not get one year older per year. We are actually succeeding in bringing in new talent. Partnerships are very important. We are present together with customers on stages in Denmark, in international conferences in the U.S., and also all over Europe, and typically together with Apple events or SAP events. Let's move on. As you remember from last year where we had a little shock in how the world took some turns and it has had some effect on us, we prioritized some must-win battles for Trifork, and we have continued this work. Here you see what is top of mind of management. First, I already talked to it, more Run and this product-led business.
We also know that there are more of our products and services that can serve one and all our customers. Once we are in and we already gained the trust, we are confident that the customer can take advantage of more than just one product or service from Trifork. We are strengthening our partnership with especially the big like SAP and Apple, Nvidia, and Lenovo. It is crucial for Trifork that we are very close to these partners and that we also are meaningful to them. With tech, that is why we keep Inspire. Some could say, "Why do you not just eliminate Inspire?" Inspire is extremely important. It is important we inspire our customers. It is important that we are inspired from the tech world. That is why we maintain the conferences. This year, it will be a very good event in Copenhagen.
We already have more tickets sold since COVID than ever before. Also, in Australia, things are moving pretty well. We also have a strategy to maintain our M&A. You can see the stars to the right is how well we think we have succeeded with each of these priorities so far. We need to put more attention into M&A again. That is a priority for management. Let's move on. This already mentioned that we are focusing way more on products. One of the products we announced late last year was our COWOX AI platform, and what is already in the market for a few years, our COWOX Data, but also new products like COWOX Twin and Digital Twin platforms. These new platforms are really showing good traction.
Also with our Arkyn, our lab company, Arkyn's tools and products like Fastwork in particular is very successful. Last quarter, we announced Energy Transfer, which is a large American energy company. We have a good trend in growing pipeline on the different products. We also like to, like we did with COWOX AI last year, we'd like to announce, it's not a big launch, but it's just a heads-up for you that a number of people have approached Trifork and said, "Can you do something about this U.S. dominating position of foundational software such as cloud, such as social media, such as communication tools?" Actually, we have picked up this challenge. We have developed a first version of a new communication platform called Iris.
We will talk more about this in the future, but if any of you know companies that have a desire to make sure that you know where your communication is stored and that it is safe and secure and that it is like seamless communication in your organization, then you should take a look at Iris. There will be a landing page on our trifork.com, and I am already testing this and have been doing this for weeks now, and I'm very happy with the progress. Why this communication? Actually, Trifork played a little role in the inception of WhatsApp years ago. Over the past many years, we have implemented the communication and chat functionality with more than 50 organizations worldwide. This is something we have done many times, and now we want to build an actual product and not just help other companies build their products.
I'm very bullish on this product. If you have any interest, please reach out to me. Let's move on. Basically, already mentioned, we see AI as a foundational and elementary tool nowadays. It's moving very fast. You probably hear and read a lot about AI, and we are taking it to our customers every day as we speak. Here we have a quote from one of our customers where we have optimized a process within grants. There are a lot of things going on with AI, and everyone is asking, "How can we use AI here and how can we use it there?" This is becoming normal day to follow what's going on, but also to use it in everyday solutions with our customers. Okay, let's move on.
One of the new industries that we look at as an industry and not just as a few customers. For 15 years, we have been working with some airlines in Europe, and we have been very fortunate to innovate a lot of stuff for especially cabin crew, optimized scheduling, peer-to-peer communication, and also in the last one or two years with spatial crew training. Here you see the world map because airlines, they fly all over the world, and they are also headquartered all over the world. We have identified 100 airlines that we really like to work with. We love to work with airlines because we know we can really help optimize, and we have some cool technologies and products. Here we just give you a little track so you can see how it's going.
It's the beginning of a scale-up, but we already have a deep relationship with some airlines, but we would like to have it with many more. Let's move on. I think I already covered fieldwork, and also we are spending time a little bit too quickly here, but fieldwork, and especially in the energy sector, is really a focus area for us. Next. From Labs, not to forget, we had a good Labs here last year. We have a portfolio of startups that I'm really proud of. And we are, of course, constantly working to optimize, tune, and also create new companies. One of the big news in this quarter and what we've been working on for a few months, but was announced in May, is a capital injection to Dawn Health that will take them a good step into developing business accordingly to the business plan.
This is a continuation of fundraising that was done a few years ago. That is very comforting that this came out in a good way. I would also say that the most strategic lab company to develop right now is Arkyn, because Arkyn is one of the growth drivers for Trifork and has a huge potential in growing as a successful lab company going forward. Let's move on. Here you see the overview. Apart from what I already mentioned, no big changes. You will see Framio coming into the top 10. Framio is this picture frame. If you do not already have Framio and the app Framio, please check it out. It is really a cool product, and it is taking off in many, many markets around the world.
It is this feature where you can send photos to your family, and it connects and stores memories, something really important. Also, XEI continues to show good traction, and after the small divestment, it is kind of like XEI next level that we are building. Let's move on. Kristian, the word to you.
Thank you, Jørn. Now I will just go through the highlights in relation to the first quarter of 2025. Overall, as Jørn showed here, we had a 14.1% growth, and the first quarter of 2025 ended with the highest revenue in one quarter in Trifork in the history of Trifork. The Trifork Group segment revenue, as you see, the 14.1% growth, then 3.5% was inorganic growth coming from the two acquisitions that we did last year of Aspantry and Zapir.
That would count as inorganic growth until the end of May and the end of June on the two different acquisitions. In the second half of the year, we do not have any inorganic growth yet based on the past acquisitions. Any new acquisitions coming in would then be additional to the second quarter. We have not included any potential new acquisitions in the current guidance. In relation to the cost-saving program, Jørn talked a little bit into it, but we are on plan, on track, and we have identified the 10 million we wanted to identify. Not saying that we will stop, but this is now identified, and we have taken actions to implement this. The full impact will be from September and forward in the 12-month running phase.
Here, initially, when we have done the adjustments in the organization, there has been additional cost to some of that as well. We do not expect the 10 million to be full effect full within 2025 as a whole because there were also these additional costs. All the cost is taken in as normal business operations. We have not added anything as adjustments, but just taking that in as the cost in Q1. The cost savings will be back and loaded to improve the second half of the year. In relation to the performance, looking into the quarter, we realized 12.8% in EBITDA margin. As said, this was not too much impacted by cost savings in the first quarter. The second quarter will be a little better, anything equal, and the remaining part would be in the second half.
Overall, for the Trifork Group performance on EBIT, then we realized 2.8%, which was more or less double from Q1 last year. EBIT was impacted by the same things as EBITDA. We had a little higher depreciations and more sessions from the new acquisitions done last year of Aspantry and Zapir, but otherwise was more or less in the same level as in 2024. Overall, looking into the different subsegments, then here we see the revenue quarter by quarter in relation to the Inspire. As you see here, you see as Jørn talked into, the Q4 is increasing in revenue based on the conferences we have in Copenhagen and in Australia. This is also how we expect that to be in 2025. The other highlight we see is Q2. Q2 this year, as said, we do not expect to be as high as last year.
You can be prepared for that, but then slowly to improve the EBITDA margin. Expecting actually for the second half individually to be break even to a plus, but still have some cost in the first half of the year. These are the actual numbers here. I'm not so much more into this. In relation to Build, we have shown here the same revenue development quarter by quarter in this way. When comparing to last year and the first quarter, then the first quarter in 2024 was actually before we saw the decrease of revenue caused by a few of the larger companies or customers in the U.K. Comparing the figures in Q1 last year was to some extent higher and before we saw this drop in revenue from those customers.
Being on par in relation to Build is then caused by the growth that we saw in the U.S. and in the Danish market primarily. Margins slowly improving from Q3 2024 and on to now. As I said, we expect also to see future improvement in the market margins in the remaining quarters of the year. Overall here, once again, more or less the same EBITDA results in Q1 as last year with a slightly lower margin. The margin here is also impacted by the changes in organization that I talked into before, where we have some front-loaded cost when doing changes in the organization. On to now, in relation to Build, we have not seen any new customers announcing that they want to stop engagement, etc. You see more or less the same behavior as we've seen for the last many quarters now.
Overall, we still see market to be more or less in the same area within Build. That said, we are still focusing on that a lot more of our Build-based revenue will be tied into the product-based revenue. As Jørn talked into, this would be product-led. We also expect in the future to start reporting on how much of the Build-based revenue would then be directly related to the product revenue that we do. Overall, you see here the inorganic part from the two companies I just mentioned before was 4.5% growth in the quarter, so minus of 1.2% overall, everything included. Once here, now we go to the Run. As you see, it was the highest quarter for Run in the history of Trifork. That was helped here in Q1 based on one of the large engagements that was finally coming in.
It was been delayed for some time, but now it came in, starting with the hardware revenue. In the end of hardware-based revenue, we then have implementation, and we have all the other things that we need to do. That is always being a start of something new and something good when we also see those chunks of hardware-based revenue. We saw the margins being lit down. We do not have that high margins on hardware. That is primarily the explanation for margins being down here. Also, there are some seasonality in always Q1 being lower in run-based revenue and margins, sorry. Here we have the Trifork segment distributed to the different areas of revenue streams. Here you see the large portion of hardware-based revenue, just about EUR 4 million in Q1 2025.
It was an engagement where we saw this delayed from 2024 into 2025, and this was also communicated earlier. The most important part here is the license and support, the dark orange. This is really where we focus in order to increase the revenue on our own products to support also the hosting and security operations. The two dark orange and dark gray in the bottom is really where we focus in increasing revenue in the future. Overall here, compared to the first quarter last year, we improved the margins. I could say if looking into this and taking out the impact from the hardware-based revenue, then margins would be around 20% in the quarter. Our Labs segment going into this, as Jørn said, we did not have any major reassessments of any of our investments. The investments we got into Dawn Health was realized in Q2.
I would expect a small value decrease in that investment due to that we will be diluted a little bit in the investment, but not anything significant here. In the first quarter, we had cost of running the organization of EUR 0.5 million. Then we had some dividends proceeds coming from our Labs investments. There were only fair value valuation that was changed was the investments that we hold related to USD. Based on decrease of USD compared to EUR, we saw a decline of the value there, but that was more or less leveraged by the proceeds that we have in realized gains on the dividends. Overall, we now have EUR 75.4 million in realized gains since 2016 where we started reporting on this, and we have a total book value of EUR 82.7 million.
The cash flow in Q1 was positive, both from operational cash flow, but also from investments. We cashed in on the part exit of XEI as was announced in Q4. We decreased our debt and financing in the banks. Net debt after Q1 was recorded to EUR 36 million, a decrease of EUR 10 million compared to end of 2024. We are just in the process of a share buyback program. As stated here, 43% complete as of 2nd of May. We expect this to last until the end of June. This is handled in a safe harbor process where we cannot impact exactly how much is bought, etc. That is controlled by the bank. This is all here. Now we move on to Q&A.
Thank you, Kristian. I would like to ask you to limit yourself to two questions, please, and then get back in the queue for more questions. That will give everyone a chance to ask their questions. Just to reiterate what it also says here on the slide, if you want to ask a question, please click the raise hand button. I will announce your name, and then you can unmute yourself. We will start with the first questions from Poul from Danske Bank. Paul, please go ahead.
Yes. I assume you can hear me. Thank you for taking my questions. First question is on the guidance you have given for the full year. I was just wondering, you gave that before Trump started his tariff war against more or less the whole world. I was just wondering, to the risks to this guidance, what do you see among the clients and if you see them pulling back? There have been many negative comments by peers so far. Do you see a risk or do you feel very confident or do you have to see how it develops the next three months before you can make a more concrete review of second half?
Of course, there is a lot of changes in the world and the tariffs and all the other big events are influencing the markets. Our take on this is that there is not much we can do there, but what we can do is to fill more into our pipeline and faster into our pipeline. What we are tracking is just to build way more into our pipeline.
With products, you can do that because you can, as I said, we used to work with a small amount of airlines. Now we address 100 airlines. If we can 50x our, you can say, our impact into the market, yes, then of course, it might happen that the airlines are affected by the tariffs indirectly from whatever, people have less money, travel less. Yes, but the offerings we have into airlines is really cost-saving. If they want to save cost, they should work with us. If they want to get better products and services to the customers and passengers and better tools for the crew, they should work with us. The products we put in the market right now, it goes for the productivity tools for Fastwork, is cost-saving. We focus solely on cost-saving products.
We are selling way harder than ever before. That is the way we mitigate whatever will happen because we assure something that we do not even talk about today will happen in one or two months because that is how the other months and quarters have been. Something totally unpredictable shows up. That is our tactics, Paul. Right now, we do not see an effect of tariffs or anything else directly into something that currently changes our guidance.
Do you see it in the time clients take to make a decision or if they are reducing the scope of projects or whatever?
I think in the U.S., we can see that there is a little more reluctance in closing deals. This we see. On the other hand, we see in Europe more urgency in doing things faster. We see that the whole defense discussion about Europe should stand up for its own share of protecting freedom and democracy. We are positively affected by some of those trends. Luckily, we see more urgency there. Yes, we see reluctance, let's say, in the energy sector in the U.S. Even there, the energy sector we address now is, you can say, traditional energy, which Trump is saying, just go ahead. Renewable energy, less so. Our tools work equally well. If it is green energy, we prefer that it is green energy, but it also works in oil and gas. We try to hedge these trends and effects. If it makes sense, Paul.
Yeah, it does. My second question is about the transformation you started off by talking. You said more products into the company. I was wondering, when you talk products, is that your own IPs or is it selling standard solution by others or is it your own platforms? And then the impact on your M&A thoughts, where you're focusing to add things.
Yes. Good comments and questions. I think the best answer is to show the graph of how run is compiled. Before we find the picture, I would say that we focus on own IP. Of course, we also, I mean, as Trifork grows bigger and the brand is stronger, we also have the opportunity to resell interesting, innovative IP from partners and startups. We can get, you can say, way better margins on that than if we sell big tech or hardware. Because there we already guided many times that third-party licenses, for the most part, is low margin.
License and support of our own is high margin. It can also be high margin if it's a close partner where we have a strong position in the market and they have a weak position in the market, then we can get maybe 20-30% margin. We do not have to invest in the product because that's what we buy. What we can control is our own IP. Most of the thing you see is our own IP push into the market.
The M&A extension on the question where you're focusing on,
Yes. There is another mega trend, you can say, and that is it's way harder for startups to get funding now. That's also why I mentioned the Dawn funding and the Arkyn. That counts for every startup in the world. No matter how cool stuff you have, you still have a way harder time getting it funding, with a few exceptions, than before. What you could do instead is just to find a partner that can sell your software, which will reduce the level of funding you need. There we are a good partner. The next step could be small M&As in product. We will not buy big product companies. We could maybe buy us into first a non-controlling interest, maybe, and then a controlling interest in a product company. The multiples for valuation have come down quite a lot. Where we said five years ago, there is no way we can buy a product company. Now, there could be a way, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Paul. The next question will be from Yiwei Zhou from SEB. Yiwei , please unmute yourself, and you can go ahead. Yiwei , are you with us?
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you.
Perfect. Thank you for taking my questions. I just want to ask about the margins in Build. You mentioned in the report it was diluted by the presale investments in Q1. I was wondering if you have seen the return already here in Q1, or you expect some sort of large contract wins or incoming quarters?
Yes, maybe I can answer that because, I mean, we especially have focused a lot on the e-health area. Jørn talked into, you could say, already some wins, but we also see more potential in the areas that we are in. This is one of the areas where we have accelerated, you could say, on the presales activities. It's too soon to say whether, you could say, if it will give a big win or not, but this is how we work, you could say, always. We have been loaded a little bit higher than we would be on a normal basis.
Okay, great, Kristian. Secondly, on the private segment in Denmark, 14% growth in the current market. I think it is quite impressive. I was just wondering, is there easy comms here in Q1 last year in the private segment, or is it underlying performance? Also, if you can comment on what is your expectation for the coming quarters? I know that you are more in the private segment, probably have short-term projects. I was thinking that if this can continue the trend.
Yeah. You could say, oh, then the public sector grew more in Denmark than the private sector, as we also showed. The distribution in between private and public in Denmark is more leaning towards public than for the whole group. We have a higher ratio of public business now in the Danish market. That said, I would say that we still see, you could say, the same behavior at our private customers as we've seen and talked about for the last many quarters, that it does take longer to decide. Decision cycles are longer, etc. We do not see any improvement there. As Jørn talked into, the more pipeline you have, the more anything equal you would win over time. I do believe that this is something that has to do with the acceleration that we've done in business development. Of course, we cannot promise if we can continue in that ratio or if we will flat out more or if we can keep this low.
Great. Thank you very much. If I may ask a very quick question, it was actually a follow-up to Paul's question. Jørn, you answered you have more or you benefit from this defense trends. Are you referring to that, is the European company customers reducing dependency on the U.S. or is it the defense sector you refer to? Could you please clarify?
It is primarily authorities and agencies within defense. It is not so much into private companies in defense. It is public business. I think that is what I can say. Of course, we are not making hardware, cannons, and weapons. We are making software and intelligence systems and AI. It is in that area.
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
I'll jump back to the queue. Thank you very much, Yiwei . We currently do not have any other raised hands, so I'll just give it a few seconds to see if anyone else wants to ask a question. Yeah, we have Paul back in the queue. Paul, please go ahead.
Yep. I have a few ones just to follow up on Yiwei's about the public and private sector growth in Denmark. This third-party and hardware sales, is there any of that included in the growth rates in Denmark on the two segments?
Yes. So the hardware sale that we talked about, the large one that was, you could say, a delayed impact and coming in now in Q1 was in the public sector in Denmark.
Okay. So if we adjust for that one, then private potentially did better than public.
Yes.
Okay. I don't know if you want to, but you are taking the restructuring cost you have as ordinary, and I think that's well done. That was incredible for you guys. Can you put some indications on what size are we talking about? EUR 1 million or?
No, we haven't disclosed that in this way.
What? Kristian, maybe we have talked a little bit about it in the past because there are several components. HR is one, so human-related. That's a major part. I think you talked about that earlier. We have, of course, the rent, the offices. Some of them where we reduced offices, but also we consolidated offices and moved from one to another one where we still might have the one we are moving out of. It's, Kristian, correct me if I'm wrong, it's mainly these two components, right?
Yes. No, you're totally right in relation to the components, but just saying that we didn't disclose exactly, you could say, how much impact was related in Q1 in relation to, let's say, restructuring related to employees. Or we could say that, and you see that if you compare it to last year, that we reduced, you could say, roughly about 75 headcounts all in the company, taking into account that we actually also acquired two smaller companies in the second half of 2024. The primary cost is related to that. You could say the cost savings have more or less been leveled out by the additional cost in relation to do the transition, you could say, in the first quarter. That is why we say that we didn't see any effect of the positive impact from the cost savings to a significant amount in the first quarter. This is where it will be back and loaded and come in again.
Okay. Perfect. A question about clients who want to or are looking for alternatives to U.S. products. That is also a comment heard many places. Are we talking about that they want to have European consultants, or is it hosting, or is it looking for alternatives to U.S.-based software? What specific areas is Jørn looking for alternatives?
I think it is a really good question, Paul. Unfortunately, I also find it quite hard to answer because there is way more talk than there is walk in this area. I think it comes from top down and people who want to create an agenda. When I ask companies, they say, "Oh, so do you consider not using Microsoft anymore?" I mean, it is just like they shake their head and we are in too deep.
If Trump wants to look in all our data and he can because it's Microsoft or Google or whatever American product, and so be it. It's not a war we want to fight. I think this is more politics than it's real. What is real is the increased defense budgets. That's real. I already talked to that. This whole change of private sector desiring European software is, so far as I see it, more an idea. I also mentioned that people came to me and said, "Okay, how can we help?" I think there will come a market because it's an even after, maybe the pressure is not there anymore. I think everyone can see that the balance might not be right, but it's going to take a long time to adjust that balance.
I think France is leading in this, but we do not have markets in France, so I cannot say anything about that. In Nordics and in Switzerland, I do not see big movements.
No, that was my point. You do not just substitute or Salesforce or CloudStrike or Microsoft. Do you see that people look for alternatives in the hosting? That is an easy or relatively more easy tangible way of moving out of U.S. solutions.
Yeah. There I see, especially in public, that there is an increased interest in European-based hosting and cloud. This we see. Still, it is not something that just moves very quickly. Also, even if you do that, it is still, where does the technology come from that you put in a hosting center? It also comes from U.S.. The chips are designed, the computers. This is very difficult.
Yeah. It's a challenging exercise. Okay. Thank you. That was all.
Thank you very much, Paul. Next up, we have Wei from SAP again. Yiwei , please go ahead.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
I also have one follow-up question here. On the U.K. revenue, I realized that EUR 4 million in Q1, then it was only EUR 6 million in Q2, Q3, Q4. Could you please provide a phasing of the EUR 6 million in last year for the modeling purpose?
Maybe, Kristian, you talk about the specific numbers that we have disclosed, and I can talk about general trend and development.
Yes. Yeah. U.K., as said in Q1, I'll just find the numbers here. U.K. revenue in Q1 last year was before it was impacted so much from the customers that we already talked about suddenly stopping engagements or at least downscaling quite dramatically. As you say, we more than halved the revenue in the U.K. in Q1 2025 compared to 2024. We are now, you could say, at what we believe is the low point in relation to this and building new business up in the U.K. again. We do believe that we are coming from the low point now, and then we'll start growing as well in the U.K. revenue in the future. You could say the impact started in the end of Q1, started Q. Based on those customers, we have then resized the organization. That is where we are right now. Maybe to you, Jørn.
Yeah. It is a very good question. You can say, okay, we are in the U.S. a little bit, in the Middle East, but then in continental Europe. Our biggest challenge, one of our must-win battles this year, is to get back on a good track with the U.K. We could also just give it up. I mean, now would be a good time because we would not lose a lot. I do not want that because I believe in the U.K. market. Maybe it is a weak market right now, but I am sure it will come out of sync with the U.S. and Europe. Maybe at some point in time, it will be the strongest of our markets, the fastest growing. As we can see now, the U.S. is the second biggest market. Maybe in three years, it will be the U.K. that is the biggest second market.
Therefore, we are very much focused on getting back on track and see all the new opportunities in the U.K. because there will be new things that will develop because of the independence of the EU. I'm certain about that. I do first calls with customers in the U.K., and I'm amazed with all the things that are produced in the U.K. and brands and productions I never heard about. They face similar challenges as everyone else and where we have some products that can mitigate that. I'm pretty positive that we will turn things around there, and that will be a big win for us.
Okay. Thanks for the answers, but I understand this is the first quarter you provide the regional revenue on a quarterly basis. My question is more like, if we're looking at this EUR 6 million revenue for the Q2 to Q4 last year, how was the phasing here? Because I would like to have the number when I consider the estimates for the coming quarters.
Yeah. It's very hard to compare directly because, as I said before, we saw that the impact from the customer that scaled down dramatically, that happened in Q1, beginning Q2, and then getting more and more effect. The issue we had last year, you could say, was that the effect became larger than we expected. That's why I say from a starting point now, you could say looking only to the U.K. business, then you have the baseline of the EUR 1.5 million. As Jørn explained, this is where we want to grow from. This is more maybe how you should look at that, that we actually now believe that we have a low point and want to grow from there moving forward.
Okay. Thanks. I'll jump back to the Q then.
Thanks, Yiwei . We're actually out of time now, so I will suggest that we take any further questions offline. I just want to say thank you very much for following our results and tuning in today. We look forward to seeing you again very soon. Thank you so much, and have a good day.
Thank you.