Trifork Group AG (CPH:TRIFOR)
Denmark flag Denmark · Delayed Price · Currency is DKK
88.80
+0.40 (0.45%)
May 13, 2026, 4:59 PM CET
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q2 2025

Aug 19, 2025

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Okay, let's start. Welcome to the presentation of Trifork's second quarter results for 2025. My name is Frederik Svanholm, Group Investment Director of Trifork. Today, our CEO, Jørn Larsen, and our CFO, Kristian Wulf-Andersen, will be providing a presentation of approximately 35 minutes, followed by Q&A. Before we start, a bit of practical information. First, I would like to inform you that this presentation is recorded and will be made available in its full length on our investor webpage later today. Second, I would like to inform you that if you want to download the slides for today's call, you can find them on the front page of our investor website. Third, we invite you to ask questions and engage with management after the presentation in the Q&A session. Before we get started, we have to present this disclaimer. Okay, thank you very much.

I will now hand it over to Group CEO, Jørn Larsen. Jørn, please go ahead.

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

Thank you, Frederik. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for listening in to this call. I hope we will have some good questions at the end. Let's get going. First of all, as you know, Trifork Group is Trifork Segment and Trifork Labs. The main thing to bring across here is that we have actually seen an increase in public business over the past period. Now we are approaching 40% of public business. It used to be around more like a third or a little less. A good track on winning public tenders. We have some stats on that a little bit later. Let's move on. Here you can see how we are tracking on the year. After six months of trading in 2025, we are on a good way on the revenue. I'm very confident that we will reach our guidance that you can see here: $215 million -$205 million.

On the EBITDA, it seems like we are a little bit behind on the guidance for EBITDA. Kristian has a very good breakdown on the bridge from where we are now to our guidance. As we will talk about on the next slide, we will maintain our guidance, but more about this later. Here you see our guidance. Every time we record a quarter, especially after what happened last year, we are really digging deep into our numbers and analyzing and analyzing. This is our best estimate. This is our guidance maintained after almost seven months of 2025. The cliffhanger is when Kristian breaks down how we're going to meet our yearly EBITDA.

I think you can easily see that our revenue and also how the quarters always normally go for us, that we will have more revenue in the later part of the year than in the beginning of the year. It is the same with the profits. Let's move on and dig a little more into what happened in Q2. First of all, as we have been talking about for many quarters, Trifork is really passionate about looking into the future and collaborating with the best minds of this world within AI, quantum computing, the latest modern ways of doing drones or robots or cloud. We still do that. What we have done over the past quarters, which has been a tough ride, we have cut it more into the bone in Spire.

We haven't seen a lot of revenue in the first six months because the two major events we have in the group will be GOTO Copenhagen and then YAO Australia. Those two conferences have traditionally been good events. They are profitable and they are very popular among our partners and our attendees and also our co-presenters. In Build, we see that going from a service company where we provide custom-built software and consulting into a product-led company, we are actually carving into some of our Build revenue. Where we can, we convert it into Run revenue, which is a longer, you know, it might be contracts for two, three, four, up to 10 years. We have won a few of 8 years- 10 years contracts in this quarter as well that we can talk about. This is a transition from being more Run.

I will not guarantee you that the next quarter will be 35% or higher in Run. This is a long play. It requires a lot of focus and dedication from the whole organization. A product-led company is not the same as a service company. There are a lot of internal changes within Trifork. We approach our customers in a radically different way. You see already some of these traces, but there will still be some fluctuations between Build and Run going forward. Right now, it's like this: 18.4% increase in Run if we exclude hardware and third-party licenses. We have landed our own IP, which is, of course, for many years to come with the collaboration between us and our customers. Let's move on. Some main events. First of all, what I just talked about, that we have won the digital wallet.

That is really interesting because many countries in the EU need to have a digital wallet. This is a part of an EU movement and development. We are very happy that we managed to bring this in. It's a public contract. Also, in Oman, as you know, we have brought some news now and then. We hope to do a lot more with Oman in the future in energy and in digital health as we go forward. We want to contract with the health authorities in Oman. I hope that we can also sell our health platform to Oman. That would be my wish for Christmas. We have also in Switzerland, where you know we have already two customers for our health platform. We have won some new work together with Deloitte. Not only do we do this alone, we also have some really good partners in Switzerland.

It's just the beginning of a hopefully many-year journey for us in Switzerland. In spatial computing, we will not talk a lot about spatial computing here. We have had it as a topic earlier quarters, but it's going really well for our spatial computing unit. It's just the beginning. Spatial computing is here to stay. It will be a revolution for training, simulation, remote maintenance, and a lot of other applications. We're working very close with Apple on this. On the organizations, first of all, we'd like to welcome Charmaine to Trifork. It was a difficult hire to hire someone that works together with Kristian and me on C-level and strategy. Charmaine is already very much in the field. She has only been with us for seven weeks, but of course, a few months leading up to her start full-time. We have gotten to know each other fairly well.

I'm very happy and grateful for Charmaine's arrival. She is full on in the market and especially growing a good traction on our U.K. market, but also globally for some of our product lines. We are 60 people less than the previous Q2. This is one of the bricks for bridging the EBITDA where we are now towards our target. Kristian will talk more into it. There are other elements, this is one. In partnerships, I should say that our partnership with Wingmen... Actually, I want to talk about two things here. One is an announcement we made this morning with Wingmen , where we have made a deal with them to go into the security market together with Splunk products and our Trifork's cybersecurity offerings. The other thing I want to mention is our increasing collaboration with our lab company, Arkyn.

It is one of my absolute favorites in our labs because they have some really good products. We have a strong pipeline. It plays very well along with Trifork's product-first strategy. Especially in the U.K. and the U.S., we are very bullish on closing our pipeline and turning it into real revenue and recurring revenue. Let's move on. Okay, strategic priorities. We always tell you a little bit about what we are working on, on short and long term. Here's our own self-scoring about how we have been doing. More than a year ago, we announced that cybersecurity is an area we cannot lift alone. We need a partner. Hence, we made this agreement with Wingmen . We believe it's a strong partnership. It was actually triggered by Cisco's acquisition of Splunk.

Sometimes when big things happen between big global companies, it does have an effect and a consequence for us. We need to navigate in that. This is exactly what we have done. We're very happy with this collaboration. Also in Run. What you can see, the first traces of here in this reporting is that we are succeeding with converting and transforming Trifork from being a service-led company to a product-led company. It's not a simple transformation. This is a deep transformation, and it will take many quarters and many years before it's fully completed. I'm very confident and I'm very happy with how our organization is pulling this strategy forward and implementing it. Let's move on. What I already said, this is just supporting it. We are first targeting that + 50% of our total revenue will be associated from our products, either product sales, AI itself.

You can also see we've had two quarters, Kristian will dive into that, of significant hardware sales. We don't sell hardware just for the sake of it. We sell hardware because then we are going to build software and services and operation for years to come on top. It's a signal to investors that, okay, if they can do that, then that's a signal that there will be more recurring software and services and products like Contain that is installed on top of the operating system and is making our on-prem cloud offering. It's also implementation of products. We will talk a little bit about aviation in a moment. Let's move on. Here you see a case of one of our product lines. Think about a product line as an organization within an organization.

Within Trifork, we are building an aviation capability across multiple business units, across multiple countries, targeting more than 100 airlines globally. Here you can see our sales funnel. It's not hard to identify an airline. We know we have very competitive products within the cabin, within catering, within in-flight communication, also within spatial training and simulation for both flight deck and crew, such as firefighting emergency procedures. It's a lot easier to simulate something in an Apple Vision Pro than it is to set fire on a plane. This is strong offerings, very competitive products. We are tagging along. We need to have many more being orange here. You see, we have business with six customers, six airlines. We already have framework agreements with another 12. We have active dialogue with 33.

The 69 is just pending work for the next months for us to get into a dialogue, get into the decision makers, and show our stuff to them. We are doing this with the other product lines as well, such as Contain and FastWork from Arkyn, etc. Labs update. We are quite happy with where Labs is now. We completed a few good capital raises together with partners. One is Dawn Health, where we had Augustinus and EIFO and Trifork supporting the continued Dawn Health journey. We have AxonIQ that had a little flat development over the past quarters, but it will be reignited with enforcement of management and new money to the company. I'm really looking forward to follow that journey. If we move on to the next slide, we have an overview of where we are now.

81% of our total book value is either profitable or has cash flow in the plus next 12 months, which is a very strong position if you are into venture and startups. This is not usual to see. This is a very solid picture in my view. More to follow in the next quarters. I guess, Kristian, you're up.

Kristian Wulf-Andersen
CFO, Trifork Group AG

Yes, I am. I'll deep dive a little more into the financials for Q2 and the first half year. Overall, as Jørn showed, we have the overall numbers here with $112.6 million for the first half. As you see, there's a small part which is inorganic revenue. This came from the acquisition of Spantree and Sapir Group in 2024. This is the, you could say, the last inorganic growth from past acquisitions. The second half is not having any impact from past acquisitions. That said, of course, there will at some point be a deconsolidation effect from the announcement in relation to Trifork Security, as Jørn also talked into. The exact closing date is not clear yet. We have authority approvals for that. When that is known, we then will also communicate more about that.

Overall, in relation to the Trifork Group or segment, when looking into revenue, where the Trifork segment is all of the revenue in the group, we see an overall increase in the second quarter of 5.1% and for the half year 9.5%. Here you also see the inorganic part as part of this. Compared to Q2 last year, as you might recall, we had a good Q1 in the U.K. During the second quarter in 2024, we saw this decrease in investing from previous very solid customers, etc. That was where the decrease in the U.K. started. Now, when we look into Q2 in 2025, we still saw a decrease of the U.K. business. We believe that now both the organization is to, you could say, a point from where we can scale up again. That is also in the, you could say, in the low of revenue overall.

Continuing in Q2 is upwards from where we are right now, being at a low point in Q2 2025.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Yes.

Kristian Wulf-Andersen
CFO, Trifork Group AG

Overall, then, when looking into Inspire, Build, Run, as you see here, Inspire was - 40% year-over-year. That is a direct effect of, you could say, the decrease in activities that we've been doing. As Jørn also talked into, the second half of the year is really back-end loaded. We expect a significant increase in the revenue part from Inspire in the second part and also contributing positively to an additional growth in the second part of the year. In relation to Build and Run, I'll go more in detail a little later in relation to how that is divided, actually, in between. Overall, 5.1% growth in Q2, - 3.6% when taking into account the hardware and third-party license part. I'll also talk more into that a little later. Just to follow up on the cost savings program, we are still on track in relation to that.

If we do a like-for-like comparison with H1 and H2 in 2025, we do see, at least I would say, EUR 4 million in incremental savings in Q2, coming from where one is the Inspire, where we expect a break even in the second half compared to a minus of EUR 1 million in the first half. We have the organization adjustment that Jørn also talked into with the fewer FTEs, the higher utilization, which then also in the organization saves cost. This is roughly in between EUR 2 and EUR 3 million. The savings in relation to lease agreements, office facilities, where we get out of the last commitments to terminate lease agreements in July. Now there will be at least EUR 1 million coming in from that as well in the second half of the year.

That's, you could say, anything equal comparison improvements that will be underlying in the second half of the year in relation to the financial performance. Overall, Jørn also talked into the product-based approach and us building products and converting repeat revenue with the customers and bespoke solutions into actually being products that we launch to our customers, either as a perpetual. All moving into Run because it's in order to do that initially. We do have some additional cost in relation to this. This can be back-end loaded in relation to when the profitability picks up again. What we want to do is to report more in relation to how actually the products are performing and how we do. We are just in the process of collecting data on that and teaching the organization to give us all the information so that we can share that with our investors.

The Trifork segment performance in relation to adjusted EBITDA, as you see here, then for the second quarter, we are below the second quarter Q2 last year. Part of that was related to, as I just explained, about the UK business. Part of it has been related to us actually being quite active in the pre-sales activities, especially within eHealth in public tenders. We just announced a new public tender here last week. We believe that we have a high win rate on those, I think one 13 out of 15. The track here in growing in the public area is especially for digital health, a very nice performance, you could say, on that work. We expect that to pay off in the second half with higher productivity in relation to especially the Build-based area.

We also, in the first half of the year, especially in Q1, had high cost to reorganization, you could say, as we talked about. You saw the higher churn rates that we've been having. This was also in Q2. Maybe a little more than we initially expected in Q2. It was dragged out a little more with one-off costs in Q2. Now we are done. In the second half, we don't expect any major adjustments to the same extent. We believe that the size of the organization now fits a lot better to the current activity level and are ready to grow from there as the activity level grows further on. In relation to EBIT, that follows more or less, you could say, what we showed in adjusted EBITDA. We have some slight adjustments based on the newest acquisitions.

In relation to depreciations and mortgages, coming from those, it's a slight, you could say, slight higher amount to depreciate. Otherwise, it's primarily, you could say, an effect of the results that we explained in relation to the adjusted EBITDA. Overall, that said, overall, it's a 17.4% increase compared to the six months in 2024. Inspire segment, as you see here, decline in revenue as expected. You can say the reorganization costs here really is what took the majority here in the second quarter for us to go to a - 1.1% overall. As said, we expect it to be break even in the second half. 1.1 million more or less better in the second half than what we showed here for the first half. I'm not going into details.

It's more for you to see those in relation to when you want to compare quarter by quarter and see this as analogy historically. More or less here you see really that Q2 this year was a lot lower, as expected, than Q2 in the same period last year. In relation to the Build-based segment, looking at a first glance, you could say, - 4.4% in growth. A decline potentially is not always good to see on the half year in relation to revenue. As Jørn also talked into, this is also because of our focus in the sales process. Something that we in the past potentially would have done as a repeat revenue or bespoke development, we are now trying to really turn into being the new products so that we pitch the products to our customers.

You can say we fix our deliveries to the products, and then what we do on top is the bespoke part, and that is the Build-based. There is a little switch in how we actually operate towards our customers in that sense. Overall, of course, if you do the quarter-to-quarter comparison to last year, there's a small impact of the working days. Two working days out of 60 is 2%. That, of course, is also something. It's primarily what I talked about before, being the cost to pre-sales activities that had the highest impact here. You could say using resources in that sense, which in the second quarter is going more to create the revenue in Build as well. That is a direct impact also when you look into the 9.1% EBITDA margin on the Build-based segment.

In relation to Run, what we see here is overall a very high growth of 59.9%. That is also impacted, as Jørn talked into, that we have had hardware deliveries just as in Q1. We also had a hardware delivery included in part of the solutions that we're building for one of our customers, which then had a higher impact than, you could say, usual. That said, as we also announced in the company announcement in relation to the FMK framework agreement that we just won in Denmark, it's really that some of our public customers especially, but also others, are focusing on this security on running the systems and having, you could say, the full control of the systems, meaning that would be more in private clouds and on-prem installations.

Maybe this is a trend that we will see also in the future, that actually it will be part of our deliveries as well because it's not that we sell hardware standalone. It's always integrated into us providing solutions on top of that, meaning that we use our Contain cloud platform on top of the operating systems, etc., and building on top of that and creating services, recurring revenue as we go along. That's really the takeaway here. If we take out the hardware part, we had still a growth of 18.9%. Overall, very satisfying in this area. Profitability-wise as well, we had a nice growth there. That said, there is a, when we're having larger hardware deals in, that is diluting the margins to some extent, simply because there's not very high margins on hardware agreements.

This actually means that the increase in our own services had a very nice growth in profitability. Looking into the Run-based revenue here, you see the details, as we show always, quarter by quarter. You see the hosting security below having a nice development. Of course, deconsolidation of Trifork Security could lead you to believe that, okay, now a lot of security-related services will now disappear here. As Jørn also talked into, this is really a collaboration with Wingmen and Trifork Security. We still use the services and want to provide the services to the same security platforms, but as a partner. Trifork owns 41.5% still of the company and having a partnership agreement with Trifork Security still to use the services also in the deliveries that Trifork is making.

Part of that delivery will actually still go through Trifork to the end customer, but still be provided by Trifork Security. Yes. If looking into the Lab segment and the performance in the Lab segment, as you see here, then the accumulated realized gains increased by $1 million. That's primarily related to dividends from existing investments in this period. Overall, we actually saw a decline in many of our companies, but that was related to the companies or investments which have U.S. dollar as a primary driver, where we end of Q2 had a - 6% decrease in USD versus Euro, which of course then impacts the valuation that we take into our books. That said, we had a very nice development in performance from some of our more expensive or valuable companies, which more than made up for that.

Overall, what you see here is an EBITDA of -$0.6 million, taking into account that we from a half year approximately used $1 million on EBITDA level to run the business. Overall, a small plus on the fair value adjustment and the realized gains. In relation to cash flow, financial position, then currently we are tracking a 1.6x on leverage and is in a positive development in relation to decreasing the leverage, even if the leverage is not including the share buybacks and the amount of Trifork shares we have. Currently, we hold Trifork shares for roughly EUR 4.6 million. This was the end of the financial presentation. Now we will move on to questions.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Thank you, Kristian. Okay, now I would like to ask you to limit yourself to two questions initially and then get back in the queue. That way, hopefully, we can give everyone a chance to ask their questions. Just to reiterate what it also says on the slide, to ask a question, please raise your hand. I will then announce your name, then you can unmute yourself and ask your question. Let's start with the Mads Quistgaard from Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

Thank you for taking my questions. First, a lot of moving parts in the quarter. I wanted to ask about market uncertainty in general. If you look today compared to Q2 and Q1, would you say that the market uncertainty is higher or is it more or less in line with what you have seen over the last two quarters? That would be my first question.

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

I can chip into that. Thank you for the question, Mads. I think that there are probably more uncertainty now than ever before. That's also why we have increased our go-to-market effort by a lot. You saw it from the example of the aviation slide that we are targeting 100+ aviations. We know we have really good products for them, and we would say for most of them, we have a good offer for them. We, of course, need to make them listen, and they need to be familiar with what we have and how many and when they will land as actual customers for Trifork is yet to be seen. The only way you can fight uncertainty is to have a much bigger pipeline, if that makes sense. There is more uncertainty than ever, but also, I would say, more opportunity than ever. It's just moving around a lot.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

Thank you for that answer, Jørn. My final question is on the public sector in general, especially in Denmark also. It seems that you've improved the performance a lot. What is driving this improvement? What have you improved internally to increase the win ratio?

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

Yeah, of course. I mean, when you are bidding on public tenders, first, there have to be public tenders you can bid on, and that we are not in control of. That's the governments who decide that. For sure, we are filtering every and every one of them to see, do we think we have a fair chance to win? Do we have a license to win? Do we have a good chance? We need to select where we fight, it's expensive to make a bid. That's also what you can see in our numbers, that it costs a lot to win and the reward comes over the next 10 years. You know, FMK being a good example. We started working on that more than 20 years ago. Now we won for another eight years the operation of FMK for the Danish government.

You still need to make a huge effort to win, and you are in tough competition. Actually, if you already have the operation of a system, it's more likely that you lose than that you win because the new ones who don't know how complex it is to operate, they might come in with an offer that is very attractive because they don't know the complexity. They think, how hard can it be? We who know how hard it is, and also there will always be increased requirements. You know, when there is a new tender, there is more effort on compliance, safety, anti-hacking, and all that. It's not just doing the same thing. You need to provide more. Of course, we have every quarter, we get better and better at it. Also, we have more chances to win internationally.

For instance, I would mention the driver license system where we are doing the driver license theory test in the Netherlands. We're doing it in Denmark. We have a really strong product. Now other countries are coming out with tenders for digitalizing or just renewing the digital driver license test. We can also export this. As you've seen with digital health, where it took us 20 years to get it outside Denmark, now it's in two other countries and we are tracking more. We see with, for instance, driver license software.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

Great. Thank you for all the details. I will jump back to the queue.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Thank you, Mads. The next question will come from Poul Jessen from Danske Bank. Poul, please go ahead.

Poul Jessen
Analyst, Danske Bank

Yes, thank you for taking the question. First, to follow up on Mads' question, where you answered that the uncertainty is higher than ever before. Is that macro or geopolitical driven, or is the technology driven, let's say AI, coming in and changing the environment you work in? What's the drivers here?

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

I think the short answer is the U.S. administration. It makes a lot of business owners and management teams reluctant to do anything because they don't know how the world looks tomorrow. We can see that they need to think longer and, you know, approach the decision making with more careful reflections. For instance, where we see a lot of opportunities is in the energy sector, which is macro trending up. AI is pulling so much energy and will pull a lot more energy in the future. To provide all energy, we basically need every energy source we have on the planet. I hope that we will soon find a more abundant energy form because else we are going to have some serious challenges. Nevertheless, when you develop energy, you also implement and build a lot of infrastructure.

When there's infrastructure, we have products to support the implementation and maintenance and service of that infrastructure. Nevertheless, the decision making is still longer.

Poul Jessen
Analyst, Danske Bank

It’s not AI itself or technology risk?

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

The AI impact. I mean, we utilize AI all we can, and we need to do it even more. That's why we run conferences. We need to figure out how to really do this in the right way. We are of the opinion that AI is a very powerful technology. We need to see how we can use it for the best of us on the planet, the humans, because we might not be the most intelligent species on the planet very soon. The same goes with humanoids, robotics, and all that. When I had Steve Wozniak at a conference just before COVID in Copenhagen, he said self-driving cars will never drive on man-made roads. There's a lot of hidden thinking behind that. Last time I was in California, I saw a lot of self-driving cars on the roads that were man-made.

Whether the robots will come and make the roads and then they will explode, I don't know. For sure, AI is a really powerful tool. The first consequence we are hit by, Paul, is that companies think that AI will do all the work. They are reluctant to hire software people and tech people. There is more competition because now there's unemployment. That hits the service business, you know. That's how we were hit in the last quarters. It's harder to do bespoke software. That's why we are, it's not even a choice. We had to go to a product-led because this is the only way. Our products need to be built with more and more AI and more and more AI capabilities as well for our customers. That was a long answer, but hope it's what you're looking for.

Poul Jessen
Analyst, Danske Bank

Yeah, it's also a complex issue. It's the biggest concern among investors into your sector that they are considering the price volume performance here or the efficiency improvement you can do. Will that lead to you improving margins or your customers purchasing cheaper? Will they do it themselves by just prompting solutions?

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

That's your job to analyze that. Our bet is that we believe we can provide products faster to our customers, and our products will be better, and we can compete with our customers. This we are proving every day. When we have a very scalable product for an industry or domain, I don't see our customers saying, oh, we just build this ourselves. Sometimes they do, but that's actually what we replace because they say, wow, why are we doing this? We don't want to have these software developers. What then? We need to buy products. Across the board, our customers are asking for finished products. Their patience is less, even though they're thinking a lot. Before they actually buy a product, they know they don't want a custom solution, and they don't want to have software developers themselves. That's more the trend.

Poul Jessen
Analyst, Danske Bank

Okay, I think I'll step back for now.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Thank you, Poul. Next question will come from Wei from SAB. Please go ahead.

Hi, Wei from SAB. Thank you for taking my question. Firstly, a question on the EBITDA guidance. When looking at your first half resource, you need to do a lot better in the second half to reach the guidance. Apart from the EUR 4 million incremental cost savings you mentioned, anything else needs to happen for you to reach the guidance? Especially for you to reach the higher end of the EBITDA guidance, what is the assumption apart from the EUR 4 million you mentioned?

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

I think while Kristian reflects over your question, I will say something that we haven't talked about. The good thing about license business is that it actually kicks in early, smaller, but early, but also on the longer perspective. You can actually land deals later in the year and it still has a good effect on profit. If you imagine how product companies traditionally are built in the tech business, then you know the term a J-curve. A J-curve is what venture capital is investing in. It's a lot of invested money before you read black numbers. If you look at the U.S. Nasdaq stock exchange, you will see a lot of listed companies that don't have any profit, but they have revenue growth. What we are attempting here is to see, okay, how can we implement a product-led strategy, a product strategy without needing $500 million?

I think with the product portfolio, a traditional way of thinking would be, oh, we need $500 million to do this. We're doing that without using that. Of course, we then have the opportunity to balance the investments and the investment into sales team. A way for us to manage EBITDA in the future will be how much we invest in product development, how much we invest in go-to-market and sales development, if that makes sense. We are so fortunate that we already have customers in this space. We still have our service business that can fund the product-led journey. You should probably reflect on how is that even possible when a lot of other companies don't make it possible.

Kristian Wulf-Andersen
CFO, Trifork Group AG

Just then to continue here, as you say, I mean, what does it take to go to the upper level of the guidance? That would take us to, you could say, to get the deals in that are in the pipeline, especially in relation to like the Arkyn products, the product suite that we have and have been promoting a lot in the U.S.. It is that now in the first half, we invested a lot in, you could say, creating the portfolio of aviation products. Now it's really time to cash in in the second half. Depending on the speed of, you could say, new sales there, it's really to start accelerating the deliveries on the public tenders that we already won and where we used a lot of energy in the first half of the year.

That would be, you could say, what it would take to go to the high end.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

May I also add to that, Kristian? Wei, when you look at the implicit second half margin guidance, you adjust for, let's say, $4 million that we have discussed today as incremental earnings in the second half. To reach the high end of the guidance, we would need to make an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 18%, a little bit less, in the second half. Historically, that is not, you know, outside of what we have done in the past. From that point of view, it's definitely not unachievable.

Okay, great. I just want to be clear that Jørn, you mentioned those sort of, I guess you indicate that you actually expect some of the pipeline project will start to convert in the second half, which will sort of drive also the top line growth, also the margin improvement. I guess that you mainly refer to your Build segment.

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

Yes.

Great. Very, very clear. Thank you. My last question also is for a Q2 specific, the 11% decline in the Build revenue decline. If you exclude the last working day and also tough comparison in the U.K., and if you could also exclude the move of the revenue to run, what was the underlying growth here in the quarter?

Kristian Wulf-Andersen
CFO, Trifork Group AG

We haven't disclosed this because it's always very hard to say if then a deal would have been in Build and now instead is in Run. We have not disclosed anything about that. You have to look overall on Build and Run together in that sense.

All right, fair enough. Thank you. I'll jump back to the queue.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Thank you, Wei. We will go back to Mads from Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

Thank you. I just have a follow-up question on the agreement you landed with the Danish Health Authority a few weeks ago. Just to understand, it seems you have a competitive advantage in the market with your data business. I'm just thinking, what is sort of the capacity utilization today? Are you able to take in more large customers with the scale as the one you got recently?

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

Yes, it's a very good question. As I explained before, we do see a trend in the popularity of European-based service centers. Fortunately or unfortunately, we mainly do this in Denmark. We have a number of hosting centers, but we can actually build new hosting centers quicker than most others. We are going to leverage that capability into meeting the demand because we do see demand for us doing more operation and hosting, but also, you know, the GPU hosting could come in play. We clearly see that, but for that we need to, you can say, get by building infrastructure, server centers, or build it from scratch. That is how we're going to meet that demand.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Can I just add to that, Mads, we are not at 100% utilization in our data centers now. We are ready for business, and we can do more than what we have also right now. I think Jørn's comment was more on the medium term.

Jørn Larsen
Co-founder and CEO, Trifork Group AG

Yeah, it does take, you know, 12+ months to build new capabilities. For sure, we cannot be sold out now, but we need to anticipate further growth. Where five years ago it was a slower growth rate, now we see a higher growth rate.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

Great. Yeah, perfect. Maybe just a question. I don't know if you're able to comment on it, but on the divestment share for the Trifork Security, should we expect anything to be booked in other operating income in the P&L, or should we expect a loss or anything like that?

Kristian Wulf-Andersen
CFO, Trifork Group AG

Depending on, you can say, the consolidation date, there will be an active impact to some extent in relation to the revenue. In relation to, as I said before, when talking about that, some of the revenue we will actually still keep, but with the Trifork Security as a subcontractor to some agreements. It will not be, you could say, a full impact. On the other hand, in relation to EBITDA, there will also be, you could say, from the consolidation period, an impact from the business depending on how that is doing. We will see a positive impact in relation to converting, you could say, this from being a subsidiary to be a labs investment when we own 41.5%. That will be a positive adjustment on EBITDA.

We cannot say more about, you could say, the actual impact because we have to do the closing at first before we can comment on that.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

All right, fair enough. Thank you.

Frederik Svanholm
Group Investment Director, Trifork Group AG

Thank you, Mads. Currently, there are no more people in the queue. I'll just see if anyone else wants to raise their hand. That's a no. Let's conclude it there. Thank you very much, everyone, for dialing in to this call today. You can find the full report on our IR webpage. Have a great day. Thank you.

Mads Quistgaard
Analyst, Carnegie

Thank you.

Powered by