Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Trifork Group Second Quarter Results Presentation. My name is Dan Dysli. I'm in charge of group IR, head of group IR. I would like to introduce the speakers of today. It's Jørn Larsen, founder and CEO. He has founded the company 15 years ago, and he's a board member and founder of multiple startups in the European technology space. We have Kristian Wulf-Andersen, CFO. He has joined the company in 2007. He was the co-founder and CFO of an IT infrastructure company that was acquired by Trifork in 2007. We'd like to talk to you about the technicalities of the conference. We have a presentation lasting about 30 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. The first part is on listen-only mode to the audience. If you would like to ask a question, you can raise your hand.
You find this hand on your screen anytime during the presentation and also during the Q&A. By clicking this again, you can lower your hand. Alternatively, you can also type the question on your screen, which will be responded to at the end during the Q&A session. The presentation is being recorded, and the web stream can be accessed on our website after the presentation. I would like to ask you to have a look at this disclaimer. I'll pause for 30 seconds before handing it over to Jørn. Thank you. Jørn, go ahead, please.
Thank you, Dan. Thank you everyone for joining this session. I'm very pleased and honored that you are here, and we are also looking forward to the next 1 hour with you. We believe we have some good news. We sent out our announcements this morning, and here we will give you a short summary. First of all, we have seen good growth in Q2 and in H1. If we look at this picture down to the left, we see the Q2 performance. We are actually up 55% in revenue in Q2, of which 25% is organic growth, and the rest is the integration, you can say, revenue from Nine. If we look at the whole 6 months period, we actually also see a strong growth of 46%, of which 18% is organic.
It indicates we have an acceleration in growth in over the 2 quarters of first 6 months. If you look at the key numbers, we have around EUR 40 million in Q2 revenue, EUR 7 million EBITDA, Trifork segment adjusted EBITDA, and also a margin of 18.4%, which is also up and which is the Q2 margin. Our leverage at this point in time is -1, so net debt over adjusted EBITDA. As we have announced earlier, we are comfortable with a +1.5 leverage. We are on also still on an M&A track with the company. If we look at the H1 numbers, we are EUR 79 million. We are EUR 15 million on the Trifork segment adjusted EBITDA, at a margin of just short of 19% of EBITDA Trifork segment adjusted, and net liquidity, EUR 24 million.
If we look at some key statistics, the number of business units, which is our main growth mechanism, it is really to create new business units and grow them and split them and add new ones. We are now up to 57 business units, 19 active Trifork Lab startups. We just passed 900 employees worldwide. Also the thing that actually leads the growth is our crystal ball on YouTube. If you look here in this graph, you can see the development over the past quarters in number of views on our YouTube channel. We are very committed to post what we believe is a relevant content, and then the community will then judge if it is relevant. We can see that we have a really fast growth, and actually it grew more than 60% over the past 12 months.
Kristian, please move on to the next page. We have a few highlights here. We will now say that we have had a successful integration of Nine A/S, and they also have good continued organic growth. We did acquire Vilea, which is also fully integrated and showing good traction in Switzerland. We also completed the divestment of Humio, but we still have a good collaboration with both Humio but also CrowdStrike, where we are now resellers of also new products from CrowdStrike in our Trifork security. We have a few updates on sustainability at the end, but here we can say we made two investments into sustainable companies in the smart building sector, and we are also a good halfway with building our first own smart building office in Aarhus in Denmark.
We're also pleased that we were a part of making the Corona Passport, which enables a lot of people to be able to travel and go to restaurants, et cetera, much more smoothly. This has mainly been a really good experience, and the collaboration with that company has gone very well and of course, with the customer. We are very pleased about that. Also, after 18 months, we actually did have our first physical conference in Aarhus, the GOTO conference. Actually a little bit earlier than that, we also had the pleasure of helping to host the Alliance of Democracies conference here in Copenhagen. Kristian, maybe move on. Here you have the picture. You probably know that the Trifork Group consists of two main segments, the Trifork segment and the Trifork Labs segment.
The Trifork segment is our three verticals and our three horizontals, and the labs is where we do investments for various purposes. One is to explore new technology. A second reason can be to drive business and to be a front runner for our business. Also, we actually build components and products that we need for developing software and solutions for our customers. We actually have a case story on this today. Yeah, Kristian? This is also probably familiar to you. Our Inspire-Build-Run is our sub-segment. We see here growth in build and in run and considerable growth. We actually see a growth of just short of 37% organic in run. That we believe is very strong. Also, then we have seen a very strong growth in build.
52% is quite high for us, and it's also more than we expected going into this year. Inspire is still influenced by COVID in regards to revenue, but as you can see with the 25 million views, we have put all sails up for growing that, and we believe that's the major KPI for measuring Inspire impact. If you move on, Kristian. First, a little bit on the verticals, where the verticals is that where we have deep domain knowledge about what we do. We see FinTech growing in Q2, and it was growing less in Q1. As you can see, the combined growth for the half year was just 3%, but actually in Q2, 32%, and we have some really interesting engagement in FinTech going on at the moment. It is today 12% of the total revenue.
On digital health, which is 11% of the total revenue, we have seen growth of 15% in Q2, 10% for the whole period. We are also happy to see that it's this way and not the other way, that Q2 is stronger than Q1. In smart building, it's still our new business area in regards to the version 2 of it. 10 years ago, we started doing components or making components smarter for companies like Grundfos and Danfoss and those. Now the second version of our smart building business area is to cover the complete building, and this is something that will take time, so we need to have more patience before business will come. Kristian, maybe move on. The big winner of this period has been Smart Enterprise with a growth of 51%, and in Q2 with record-breaking 131.7%, and for the whole period, 101%.
The 51% is the part of the total revenue, and I think I said growth. Growth is even stronger. Between 100% and 131% for the Q2 and the half year. Cyber protection is also a very good story here. We see for the Q2, a strong growth of 50%, but for the whole period, 80%. This was actually a baby business area like smart building, so it's a rather new business area to Trifork, but it shows really strong momentum. In cloud operation, where we have a lot of run revenue, we also see growth, and for the Q2, 8%, and for the H1 just short of 16%. Kristian, maybe move on. Here I'd like to give you an example of what we do. We are very happy when customers actually are interested in putting their name forward of something new have done for them.
This one is even more interesting, because it's in the smart enterprise area where we had the growth of the period of 102% and total revenue of EUR 40 million. There is a lot of business here. Maybe if you move on, Kristian. For a few years, we have been working to make the life of organizations easier and also for the frontline workers. This case story is a follow-up on our Vestas case story that probably you have recalled, and also Apple has a featured video on. The rail owners here will now experience the same degree of usability and speediness. This case story is all about all the Orange people who works day and night to make the rails in Denmark safe.
That means that they go out and check the rails, and we distribute more than 60,000 work orders to more than 650 workers in the field and manage more than 750,000 assets. For instance, if a track needs to be welded because the welding needs to be redone, then during the night, the team will go out, and then they will repair the rail on a specific place, and then quality assure this and report it back. Also, when they need spare parts, they can also see this in the app, so they have the shortest distance to the spare part they need. This is something that really optimizes the business of rail owners. This is all on the back of SAP, and they are actually, most of the rail owners in Europe, they use SAP.
We are, and have been in contact with these rail owners across Europe. It's really good that now we have a case story to lean on and to show other rail owners. Kristian. The update on lab activities, we just will highlight a few. First of all, in FinTech, we are very pleased that we have entered a 25% ownership of the company &Money. The three other owners are mid-size banks, and the first product was already developed two years ago and is now being used not only by these bank partners, but also other banks outside this joint venture. We are now working on new products that will be innovative in the FinTech space. Kashet is another example. It's a consumer bank. It's a challenger bank.
On my phone, I actually have a prototype of this bank, and I wish I could actually use it live. Hopefully in a short time, I will actually be able to use this bank. It has some really cool next-gen features for everyone and people like you and me. We have in smart building. As I said, it is still in the making, the whole smart building business area. Right now, we are making the right partnerships with the parties we need to build this, both on the supplier side, but also on the customer side. We spent a lot of time building these right partnerships. With Arkyn, I already mentioned that we created this company, co-founded Arkyn, and we now already very short into the life have a reference case story.
These systems are not easy to build and not easy to integrate. I'm very pleased with the speed of the value here. Kristian. Yeah. Very quickly here. We have been adding 8 additional business units. We are doing intensive business unit leader training workshops. For the European growth, we have acquired Vilea, and we have seen a total growth of 46%, and this is across countries. We have seen significant growth in RUN of short of 37%, and we have added in Switzerland a Tier IV Swiss operation center, and that's the highest level of certification of a hosting center you can have. We're very pleased with this cooperation, and we are building a new op center in the northern part of Denmark as well.
We have successfully added a new security platform and actually also added a Trifork security brand, so focusing and doubling down even more on security. Strategic collaborations with &Money and Dropp, as already mentioned. We have also done collaborations with water utility companies and the Kashet I already mentioned. We have added two partnerships, or we have added one more partnership with NVIDIA, which is an AI hardware vendor. Also we got a second award from IBM, and I think the only one in Europe that was given in the security area. Very pleased with that as well. Kristian, maybe move on. Here is a short ESG update. The 25 million views on YouTube, very high growth. We have total in the whole company, 19.3% females, and in our management group, 24%. That's the latest update here.
We are in more than 25 nationalities in the group. Sick leave still below 2%, which we are very pleased with. We have started and halfway through the first Trifork Smart Building lab investments in the ESG area and in smart building. We are still committed to invest EUR 1 million in forestation so we can get the materials for our future buildings, but we are still surveying this area. Also we have been improving on our reporting standards in the IPO and post the IPO. Christian, the word to you.
Okay. My name is Kristian Wulf-Andersen. I'm CFO in Trifork. Now I will deep dive a little more into the financial performance. Starting here with the Trifork Group performance. Trifork Group revenue, looking into here, as Jørn just mentioned, that we saw both organic and inorganic growth and was just short of a 55% growth all in the second quarter, and just short of a 25% in organic growth. The growth is coming from build and run division. We'll deep dive a little more into the sub-segment a little later. Especially the Danish public sector was part of this with the high activity level in digital health and smart enterprise, and also the cyber protection area really grew, as Jørn mentioned, in relation to the business areas. Then U.K. FinTech grew as well in the second quarter.
We still have not or only completed one GOTO conference, so the Inspire revenue is still low compared to what is in the normalized business. Here, a deep dive into the performance for the Trifork Group. Since we guide on adjusted EBITDA and EBIT, we here focus on these numbers on a Group basis. Here you also see that we have continued growth and grew even more in the results compared to last year, Q2 versus Q2. That said, of course, we also saw a small impact of the COVID-19 situation in the second quarter last year. This year we have not seen the same kind of impact. Still we have achieved a nice growth and now have a 17.1% adjusted EBITDA margin in the Group and a 17.6% when looking at the first half year.
On EBIT, this is a non-adjusted EBIT looking into here, meaning that all the IPO-related cost, et cetera, is included in this EBIT results showing here. Still here we saw an increase compared to Q2 last year of 164% to an EBIT margin of 9.7% in the second quarter. Diving into the Trifork segment. The Trifork segment, the operational segment in this Trifork Group. Here we guide on adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBIT, and here you see the results here. Primarily, the increase in the overall margins came from the run-based business where we saw improvement in margins. I'll deep dive into that a little later. Also the build-based segment overall for the second half or the first half really improved compared to last year.
Overall here, you see the adjusted EBITDA improving by 91.8% to a margin of 18.4% for the second quarter, and keeping up with 18.9% in the first half overall. Adjusted EBIT, meaning adjusted for the IPO-related cost and the cost of running the Trifork Labs business, is here what you see in the Q2, EUR 4.4 million in 2021 equal to 11.1% margin and 165% growth. In Q2, we only had EUR 0.1 cost related to IPO because we also got reimbursed by the selling shareholders for some of the cost. Overall, in the second or in the first half of 2021, we had a total cost of EUR 1.9 million. That is what adjusted for in relation to the adjusted EBIT. Moving on one step deeper into the Trifork segment performance. The sub-segments Inspire, Build and Run. In those sub-segments, you see the results here.
As Jørn already mentioned earlier, we now have Run contributing with a 21.8% of total revenue, and this is the EUR 17.3 million here you see for the first half. All on Run-based segment see a profitability and adjusted EBITDA margin of 20%. I'll deep dive into the second quarter in a minute. The largest sub-segment is still the Build-based revenue. Due to the high growth, also inorganic, we got to 61.2% or 77% of all revenue in Trifork Group, and an EBITDA margin of 22.1%. All here you see adjusted EBIT accounting up to EUR 15 million. In the Build sub-segment, we also here account for how things are divided into organic and inorganic growth. Here in revenue, you see the division. In Q2, we had 24% growth organic and overall growth of 65.8%.
In the adjusted EBITDA for the build sub-segment, you see here a margin of 17.9% in Q2, compared to 19% in Q2 2020. This margin decrease is not something we see as stable, but it's more into fluctuations in when the new engagements are starting, ending, et cetera. Something we'll see level out throughout the year. Looking into the run sub-segment performance, we also see here revenue growth. What you see here is also what Jørn Larsen told initially, that all growth here almost has been organic. Only a very small part of this has been inorganic. This is really the area that grows the most organic in the Trifork Group. What you also see here is that we achieved a margin improvement compared to Q2 2020. Now in Q2, we had 23.5% in adjusted EBITDA margin.
Overall, as I mentioned before, we have EUR 3.5 million in the run-based sub-segment in adjusted EBITDA, equal to a margin of 20%. We go to the Trifork Labs segment, and see how things develop. Jørn already talked about Humio deconsolidation or sale of asset. This is where you see the large difference from the end of 2020 to the first half of 2021, from accumulated unrealized gains to accumulated realized gains. We did the exit in Q2, finalized. This is the basis for this adjustment. You see that we now have EUR 22.6 million on our balance sheet on the investments, and this is divided into EUR 14.9 million being accumulated unrealized gains and EUR 7.7 million in the investments that we have done in the period. You see also the increase of EUR 2.2 million in new investments done in the first half of 2021.
I just want to point out into the cash flow and financial position. Jørn Larsen already mentioned that we now have a leverage ratio of net debt to adjusted EBITDA of -1.0. This is based on a cash position of DKK 24.4 million net cash. The development we saw was we had operational cash flow in the first half of 2021 of DKK 8.4 million. We also saw the proceeds from the exit of Humio. We paid our dividend before the IPO of 12.7%, both shareholders of Trifork Holding and non-controlling interest. We have proceeds from the IPO of DKK 17.4 million. We did reorganize our financial position in relation to loans, et cetera. We did the investments I just talked about, both in investments in Trifork Labs, but also investments in purchasing NCIs to lower this for the future.
Based on all these numbers, we have an update to our guidance. Here you have the initial guidance that was published at our IPO and the updated guidance to show what changed. What you see here is that we narrowed the guidance, still within the same range, but narrowed into EUR 145 million-EUR 150 million in revenue. Also in relation to the organic growth, we have this to be between 12.5%-15%. In the Trifork segment, adjusted EBITDA, we also narrowed in from EUR 23.7 million-EUR 28.5 million to EUR 26 million-EUR 28.5 million. In the upper range of the existing guidance. On Trifork EBIT, we still guide on the same range. IPO-related cost was in the high end and also the cost to our Trifork Labs segment, the things that we adjust for, was in the high end.
This is the reason for keeping the guidance here on the same range. When talking about guidance, we have also published that we're looking into a potential opportunity to deconsolidate one of our smaller, fast-growing companies, subsidiaries currently, Dawn Health, where we see an opportunity to actually accelerate growth even more in this company, to be more a product-based company. This is in our business model, something that we would like to do in our Trifork Labs. If we succeed with that and bringing in new external investors into the company, then we will see a potential deconsolidation in the second half of 2020. These were the words into the guidance. Now we'll move on to a Q&A session.
Let me remind you quickly, if you want to ask a question, just push the hand button on your screen. To lower your hand, you can push it again. We have a first question here from Poul Jessen.
Actually, there was a question before from Jacob, and I think it was a question for me, because it was a question about: what is your patience with smart building? The psychology and culture at Trifork is that on day-to-day business, we are not very patient. We want things to be done today if possible. On the strategic level, we are very patient. I've been doing this for soon 26 years, and I'm not planning to stop. There are other people at Trifork who really believes in the Trifork mission to improve the world. If you think back of how cars was 50 years ago, and if you wasn't born back then look it up in the history books, because that's probably the point where electronic devices start entering the car industry.
If you look at a car today, the major part of a car is actually software. It will take quite a while before buildings are at the same level, and we believe they will be. I see a lot of interest from building owners and also people who maintain buildings, and also people who live in buildings, that they really look forward to buildings be more clever and will give us a better indoor environment. This is something we have to be patient about, and it takes five to seven years from an idea of building something new until it's actually ready to move in. These things do not move very quickly, and you have to move in. You have to move the whole culture in the building industry. I think there's no return.
This is only going one way, and that's more software into buildings, and we want to be a part of that, but we also need to be patient.
Thank you, Jørn. I suggest that Poul Jessen.
Okay. Thank you. I hope you can hear me. Question number 1 on guidance. You mentioned during the presentation that you were pleased with the acceleration of revenue growth from Q1 to Q2. If I look at the guidance 1st half versus implicit 2nd half, then you're sequentially down actually quite a decent amount. Can you say something on what you see when looking into the 2nd half that you sequentially should have lower revenue in the 2nd half?
Yes, I can talk into that. Actually, the last thing I talked about in the potential deconsolidation, of course, that will also have an impact. We don't know exactly when and if we succeed on that. Based on that, we do see the opportunity or chance that we will not have the same growth or have the revenue from that business unit. Secondly, you say we did see a slow growth in Q2 last year. Also the margins or improvement this year is based on we have a lower base in 2020.
In Q2?
Yeah, in Q2. We had more stronger growth came back in Q3, Q4 last year.
The deconsolidation of Dawn Health is part of the guidance already?
Expected deconsolidation is part of the guidance, yes.
Yeah. Can you help us by indicating how much Dawn Health provide in annual revenue to the numbers in case that you are not consolidating so that we know how much to potentially pick up?
Unfortunately, we cannot do that right now, but we will do so when we can publish more information about this.
I guess, Kristian, we can say that Dawn Health is a separate legal entity. It does report separate financial reports. At this point in time, there's no disclosure of revenue.
Exactly
We can't do it. You can probably figure a lot out by just studying the company, because now we have identified the company and the business unit we are talking about.
Okay. Thank you. Second question is about attrition rates and how you look at the market for hiring people. I can see that your wages are up 14% on average. That's a simple average by number and wage cost. How is attrition performing, and can you get the resources you need?
The short answer, attrition, we're very happy with attrition. We're not happy with the market. Basically, there is simply not enough people on the market. I think any tech company you will ask will say the same. It's an unhappy situation if tech companies just start to recruit from each other, then everyone will actually lose. The best thing that can happen is simply to figure out how to train and educate more people, because they are high in demand, and this is also why you can see a pressure on salaries. The thinking hat is on how to come through this. Also, I would say the COVID-19 stimulus from the governments around the world has not helped at all. It's just putting even more pressure on inflation, and this is what we start to see here also in the workforce.
I think the world has been over-stimulated, and this is what you see in the tech sector.
you can get the people you need to grow, let's say, 15% organic?
Yes, this we have. Now we see more opportunities that we can say yes to because we cannot get the people. Also, we have had 23% in average growth since 2007, and this is also what we guide midterm on. The first six months shows that we are above that. We also have some challenges. There's never just a happy year where everything is easy. The challenge is it's getting people and keeping salaries in a controlled way.
Coming back to the guidance and about it, I think you mentioned in the report that you can potentially do some acquisitions in the second half as well. I thought that is not included in the guidance if you're doing that, in the inorganic guidance growth. Inorganic guidance growth this year is 9% only, I guess.
Inorganic growth in 2021 is nine up till September, and then it's the Vilea acquisition we did in Switzerland from May and the remaining part of the year. You're right, we have not included any new acquisitions in the guidance.
Okay, thank you. I will step back for now to see if there are others who want to ask questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Poul. Mads is the next one with a question, if you could introduce yourself quickly.
My name is Mads. I work as an equity analyst at Carnegie, and I cover Trifork. My first question is on your guidance again, because I think I'm missing a bit here because if you look at your high-end range, it only requires you to grow 16% this year compared to H2 last year. For me, I would say that quarter four 2020 stands out as a very easy comparison. Is this fact that you're not able to change your high end of the guidance range is only due to this potential deconsolidation of Dawn Health? That'll be my first question.
I would say in the last quarter, second half of 2020, was actually not that much impacted by COVID. Q2, we were, as mentioned here before. We actually did see normal growth in Q2 2020. Yes, the guidance we have for now is impacted by this deconsolidation. Also, as Jørn said, we do have challenges in relation to recruiting, et cetera, so we might not keep up the speed in this form of organic growth.
Okay. Can you confirm that the organic growth in quarter 4 last year was, let's say, down with around 20%?
Pardon me, once more.
Can you confirm that the organic growth in quarter four last year was around -20%?
This I would have to look into.
Okay, perfect. Thanks. I have one question on the Inspire segment, because I guess the results in Q2 was possibly impacted by this physical conference in Aarhus, and I can see that you state in the report that you do not expect to host any physical conferences in the remaining part of the year. First of all, are the conferences in Berlin and Amsterdam both expected to be held in quarter four? What will be the potential upside if you're able to host one or two physical conferences this year?
Okay. We already announced on our webpages that there will be a GOTO Copenhagen. However, having said that, the physical conferences that we will see this year and probably next year are mini versions of when we had a lot of revenue doing conferences. First of all, we have reduced the organization to adjust cost, you can say, and also the world is in a different place. People's willingness to travel is less. The mobility within speakers are less. We have actually made the decision that we don't want to do big conferences again. We'd rather do smaller conferences, but focus on delivering high-quality content for our YouTube channel. I don't see this year or next year that we will get back to a revenue of DKK 8 million in doing conferences.
This is not even in our plans anymore because the reason why we do conferences is to make sure that we, technology-wise, are on the right track, and we found a very strong tool for figuring this out, and that is our YouTube channel. However, our YouTube channel is not a huge revenue generator, not now at least, but you can imagine if it's 10x or 100x bigger, then it will be, but we are still quite away from that.
All right. That makes sense. My last question, I will jump back to queue. Have you increased the use of freelancers or subcontractors in the quarter?
Compared to last year? It's a little reduced, so about 15%, 20% reduced, compared to the same period last year.
Okay. What about quarter-on-quarter? Quarter 1 compared to Quarter 2?
It's more or less the same.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
We have no questions in the queue right now. Just as a reminder, press the hand button to raise your hand.
There are two raised hands, three now. Dan?
Mads. Mads, would you like to come back? No. Mads, you're on again.
Yeah. Can you hear me now?
Yes.
Perfect. One question on acquisitions. What is your M&A appetite at the moment since you have plenty of financial room to do acquisitions?
That's the short answer. We have a high appetite for M&A, you can also imagine that the M&A market is fairly hot, we really prefer to meet companies before some broker has already been engaged, we see that if companies go into an auction, they become too expensive for us typically. We'd like to meet people before that. If one of you have an idea for an acquisition for us, don't be shy. Please let us know. We have all ears and eyes open for M&A targets.
All right. Noted. Thank you.
Okay. We have another question from Serge Marlin. Please go ahead.
Yes. Morten, can you hear me now?
Yes.
Okay. Sorry, because I have some technical issues. Okay. Good morning, everybody. I have a follow-up question here on growth. As you're targeting 10%-15% organic growth, you should achieve at least next year about DKK 160 million. How big is the visibility today to reach sales of DKK 160 by next year? I know there's a story about the lead times, you're quick, you have a high velocity. Can you explain us a little bit about that with the first one?
If I understood the question correctly, it's related to the growth for the second half, right?
No, for next year. I think the second half, it's more or less in, I would expect, because we have only four months or five months to go. The question is for next year. For the orders you got already, the contracts you got already, how much of the sales of at least DKK 106 you have to reach by next year on organic growth? How much do you have already in your books?
We don't disclose that information in any of the financial reports, it's a little hard to comment on. We still maintain our midterm guidance. This is the only thing we have guided on in next year currently. Of course, we will later this year come up with a very close guidance on next year as well.
You're positive for.
I didn't understand the question.
Next question on Inspire. You explained that you will have much longer sales this year, next year, and probably also going forward. What does this mean then for the EBITDA of Inspire?
It means that the COVID situation has made us kind of replan how we see Inspire. As mentioned, the most important thing is to know if we are on the right track. If we have people from our competitors and colleagues in the field attending our session and watching our videos, that is a good sign. That is a sign that if we also follow what is trendy on our YouTube channel, then we are on the right track. This is really important for us. We have to kind of reinvent the whole business into figuring out, okay, do we actually want also this to be a profitable and growing business? How are we going to do that?
The intermediate step has been the decision of doing hybrid events, having conferences between, you can say, 250-500 people, but also broadcasting these conferences online in hybrid events because we believe that there are still people. And also the whole remote workforce. There are simply people who just want to stay on some beach somewhere in the world and do cool stuff. We want to serve them. This is why we are doing this. It's going to be in person and remote at the same time. We then need to figure out, okay, what kind of business model will this then support? The good news is that it's not that expensive to do, so we will continue to do it. Now it's more a question, will we also be able to see a significant revenue from that?
That's the question, and this is something we will report on later on again. When we have completed the year, we can tell you all about how it actually went in Copenhagen, which is a more ambitious GOTO conference over the one we did in August just before summer. I hope it answers the question.
Yeah. Well, I understood that it is difficult to get break even again in the future, so probably it gives sense to move this into sales and marketing. Is this correct?
No. I don't like to see conferences as marketing. This is not at all why we do it. We do it to make sure we're on the right track technology-wise, because we know how to get our customers, so this is not why we do the conferences. It's not marketing. It's actually very important that it's not marketing. You can say it's employee branding for new employees, which is very good, but it's not to attract customers. It's not the same as we never get a customer at a conference, but it's not the goal at all. It's important that it's an independent conference where we are very objective to what we present, and we keep a very high level so people, they don't sneak in sales pitches to a product. That's not our style, because this will dilute the reason for us doing it.
Okay. That was very helpful. Yeah.
We do have an ambition that we don't want to lose money on it. It's not like we use the excuse, "Oh, because we lose money on it's marketing." That's not what we want. We want to be at least break even, because we also believe that people should pay for relevant content.
It was very helpful. Many thanks. Probably last one. I wrote down that you are guided for the Trifork Labs to have costs of between DKK 0.9 million-DKK 1.5 million. Now we are already at DKK 1 million+. You still believe that the Trifork Labs will have a negative impact of up to -DKK 1.5 million, or will this be larger?
This is still the guidance that we have currently. We saw the higher cost due to additional proceeds that we saw from Humio exit, we still expect to be within the guidance for the remaining part of the year.
Okay. That's good. Many thanks, and bon voyage for the rest of the year.
Thank you.
We have a further question of Poul Jessen. Please go ahead.
Yes. I think I'm unmuted now. It's just a few small ones. One is just clarification on the GOTO conferences. You mentioned you're not going back to the last conference. I was just thinking, if you go out to 2023 and onwards, will you get back to EUR 8 million in revenue, or should we keep that number low because you changed the model? That's the first one.
Yeah. I'd like to answer that. We will certainly update you if we change strategy. I would not expect a revenue of DKK 8 million for our GOTO conferences the next two years. If we do, then it's because something lucky happened, and we will explain what happened. Now I don't see that.
As part of your strategy, you position the U.S. as non-core. I think in this report, I counted you three times talk about U.S. contracts and business. I was just wondering if you're putting more focus on the U.S. market, or is this just coincidences?
Well, we are not doing strong business development in the U.S., so it is an opportunistic market for us. What we do is that we are specialized in certain technologies, and we are also world leader in certain technologies, and that gives a kind of an inbound request for our services. We do have a number of good brands in the U.S. that we work for because we are the expert on certain stuff. That's how it is.
Okay. The final one, that's the dual listing in Switzerland. It was called off. Just for interest, what was the reason, and will you come back on that track?
Yeah. I can answer that Kristian. We did certainly plan for this. We also announced it, and we also had the will to do it before summer. What happened was that there was a special regulation preventing companies like Nestlé from trading all of their volumes in the share on other stock exchanges. It was kind of protecting the Swiss market and the Swiss stock exchange. We got kind of trapped in that rule, meaning that it would not be compliant if we did the double listing the way we had planned. However, this rule is running out by the end of the year, might be replaced by exactly the same rule, or it might also be changed. There are some politicians, and the authorities are discussing between themselves what to do, and we just sit back and see.
It is our impression, that is our view, that this was not intended for a situation like we had.
All right. We are in ongoing dialogue with the authorities in relation to make sure that they know about the situation, and that they can implement a change in the law so that we can actually list.
Okay. Thank you. That's all.
Another question in the queue from Mads.
Yes. Hey, just one follow-up question from my side. You mentioned inflation a few times in the report. I was wondering what is baked into your current margin guidance in terms of the inflation?
For inflation. Is it Jacob asking now?
This is Mads from Carnegie.
Oh, sorry. Kristian, can you take that?
Yeah. In relation to the guidance we have, it's set to our expectations for salary increases, et cetera. We cannot set a fixed point to exactly how much it will be, but this is including in the ongoing forecast that we have from all our business units in relation to how they expect the future salary cost to be in the remaining part of 2021.
Okay. Just to be clear, the growth and salary increases in, for example, Quarter 2 is also what you expect in Q3 and Q4 this year?
Yes.
Okay, perfect. Thank you.
I have one question in writing here for Jørn Larsen. Can we be more specific about where the upper limits are for us to pay for a company? Maybe a little bit more details about what kind of company we are looking for.
Yeah. We have disclosed in the IPO process that in the past we have acquired companies in the area of EBITDA multiple of 10x, we would be happy if we love a company, we would be happy to buy at that multiple if it's growing and profitable and everything. There is probably a trend that it's a bit higher, but there can also be opportunities where it is that number because if there are synergies between this company and us, then there might be good reason for this seller to sell to us rather than getting a higher price selling to someone else. This we have also seen. We might have to go a little bit up, but not necessarily. What kind of companies? Yes.
We are pursuing end-to-end capabilities because we believe that a software vendor like Trifork should be able to update the software multiple times a day for our customer systems. That means that we need to control the whole build pipeline from ideation to operation and security. In the various countries, we still need to add more capabilities. Right now, we you can say work across borders, but it would be an advantage to have the full stack, the end-to-end capabilities in the markets that are in our core, if that answers your question. That means in some countries it's design, in others, it's running an operation. That's also why we made a big effort to add an ops center in Switzerland because it is the foundation for building systems to our customers.
Jørn Larsen, we have another question from Serge Martindale. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning again. I have a follow-up question on acquisition as well. If I'm right, you acquired Nine A/S last year at beginning September, so it's another 10 days or two weeks, and then this is done. From that point, there is no growth from acquisition. Is this correct? As I expect, Vilea does not generate any material growth. Can you help me there?
Yes. Vilea will still contribute in the second half of 2021. You're right, end of September, Nine acquisitions will not be reported as inorganic growth anymore.
What did you say? How much is the contribution of Vilea?
We have not disclosed that.
Okay, as a conclusion, there is no non-organic sales from September 3rd. Is this correct? Or no material, at least.
Only the one from Vilea, which is not significant compared to the overall revenue.
Okay. Probably a follow-up. How long does it take you to make an acquisition? From this due diligence process again, and where are you currently by spotting companies?
A typical process can be done in less than three months.
Okay. What about your shortlist? Have you companies on the shortlist that you would believe you could do this in 3 months?
This we have not disclosed in the report and cannot concretely talk about. The reason for that is that something can look extremely positive, and we can be very close, but at the end it falls apart because of some detail. I don't think it would be wise for us to have high hopes. It's done when it's done. We'd rather report when these are done.
We fully agree. That's fine. Thank you so much.
There are no further questions in the queue right now. Jørn Larsen, would you like to make some closing remarks?
Yes. Thank you everyone for listening in and asking really good questions. Also, please send us a request if you want us to add and disclose more information in the future. We will certainly consider that. It is our aim to be as transparent as possible. With this, I'd really like to thank you all for coming and joining, and hope to see you next time again.