Welcome to Trifork's Q1 conference call. We are just waiting for the last participants to dial in, please hold on for 1 minute. Dear audience, welcome to the presentation of Trifork's first quarter results for 2026. My name is Frederik Svanholm, Group Investment Director at Trifork. Today, our CEO Jørn Larsen, CFO Kristian Wulf-Andersen, and COO Charmaine Carmichael will be providing a presentation of approximately 30 minutes, followed by Q&A. We have 1 hour in total. Before we start, we have 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, 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. Before we get started, we have to present this disclaimer. Okay, let's jump to the presentation. I hand it over to Jørn Larsen, Group CEO.
Thank you so much, Frederik. Thank you all for participating in this call. I'm actually very thrilled to sit here today. Having started the year 2026 on a good foot is a relief because in this world that is very insecure and full of turbulence, it's always good when you have a good quarter and also the beginning of a year where we can see things have started in the right direction with the right trends. Also we will talk about how we see some growth drivers for Trifork going forward. First, what you should take away from this page is that we have an organic growth of 8%. Kristian will tell you exactly how we get to this number.
We see a considerable growth in profit, a 27% growth in EBITDA compared to last year, Q1. Now I will talk about 4 main topics that has been driving this quarter. First of all, 2 years ago we decided to double down on our product business. Since the very inception of the company 30 years ago, we did have product in our strategy. We made product from day one. I was sitting and coding products from day one. We were selling products. It was always in our DNA to do products. As you know, the main part of our acquisitions has been service companies, and therefore we saw for many years that our product business was around 25%. We have now broken that mark of having it at 25.
We have always seen better organic growth in our product business than in our service business. After we kind of double down on this, we see that growth accelerating. We have seen a 28% growth in revenue for products compared to H1 last year. That's a very positive indication for where I'm sitting. We see some really positive market drivers, one is sovereign data solutions and managed service. I'll talk in a moment about our partnership agreement with OVHcloud. Products like Corax Data and AI that we launched not many quarters ago. We see good traction for that product. This is a product we are growing as it was a product startup, but in the Trifork organization.
This could have been something we would have spun out five years ago and were seeking venture capital to. It is a product that requires constant attention, investment, focus, product management. All of this is now happening inside Trifork, and it is not the only product we are growing, but I have just mentioned this as an example. We are also looking for products to acquire. We will talk about that later. We actually announced a product acquisition the last few days. With public customers, we can also see that we have a good traction for public sector business, not only in Denmark, but also in other countries. We announced new business in Germany and Canada within the public sector. I also see a large growth potential for Trifork in Denmark. There are many reasons for that.
If we compare Q1 this year to Q1 last year, we can see that now it's 45% of total revenue. Last year was 40%. We are constantly winning good contracts. We have a high win rate as well. If we should do anything, then it would be to bid on more public tenders. We see significant earnings improvements from products, and we are constantly monitoring our cost. I think everyone can do more cost control. We can also. By the use of AI, it is a remarkable tool at our hands and we can use it to optimize processes and internal work and automate stuff for us.
I expect more cost control, more cost cutting from use of AI, and we wanna be the first to show our customers how to do this in all processes of the company. We were allocating capital in various ways. We did do in period until now and small M&A. We did a share buyback program. We will continue that. We are around a quarter through that, which is also following the plan. You know, we have a DKK 10 million buyback plan, and now we're 1 quarter in, and we spent DKK 2.4 million. That's going accordingly to plan. Let's move on to the next page. Here you see the overall picture.
It's not like it used to be from 2007, but we now start at 2017, and we start to see a curve that looks good to me. We would like to see an increased growth in revenue, so we can go into solid double-digit numbers. At least it's good to see that we expect to be ending the year with an organic growth of 7%-11%, and we are tracking towards that as we see it. Also, for profit, finally now we expect to break the record of profit for Trifork again. There is more to harvest. There are more optimizations in Trifork. Also, when we see the product business taking a larger portion of the revenue, we also see better margins, as we will see later. Let's move on.
Here are just four things I want to mention. Already mentioned that we have data serenity as a main topic. Europe are in a situation where we need to stand on our own legs, and Europe can only do that by working with European companies, and we are a European company. Therefore, we see a lot of inbound interest, and we talk to a lot of companies and organizations who wants to secure data on European soil. Actually now I'm presenting a little bit later today at a conference, so I had to study this quite a lot. The study says that more than 70% of all European data actually is located in U.S. territory. Over the past decades, we have sent all our data out of Europe.
We have consumed technology from U.S., produced hardware produced in China. There is a lot to do better in Europe with AI and with robotic production systems, et cetera, et cetera. By making sure that data and data management and compute will be more and more in Europe. We're very happy to announce a partnership with OVHcloud. OVHcloud is the biggest European cloud provider. They have the home base in France is now a lighthouse to look to if you wanna see how things can be sovereign and independent of other countries. There's no country in Europe that can show us better than what has happened in France over the past decades. With OVHcloud, we have some technologies that they are very interested in, such as Contain and some of our other cloud products.
Also, they have a lot of experience in really scaling up the building of server centers. Together with them, we expect to be able to grow in the coming years and help Europe with the data sovereignty. Also, I'm very happy that we adopted the XR product from Apple, the Vision Pro, very early on. We have a special partnership with Apple, and we see that the products we're building for our customers are getting deeper and deeper into the core business. It has a lot to do with training and simulating to make sure that when people act in the real world, it will happen with bigger security, less accidents, and less stress. If you can reduce stress on people's life, that's a good thing for the world, and it's in our mission.
We also see the adoption of AI in enterprises growing. It's still at a low base, but it's accelerating at a quite high pace. We are in a lot of this work with many customers, and it's just the beginning. When we are talking about our very advanced AI assistance in meetings, advisory AI, et cetera, et cetera, there is so much potential to optimize any business. I already talked about the win rate in public tenders, 78%. I think we should bid on more, so we are ramping up on the bidding machine. Let's move on to the next page. AI is a really big topic. AI is like a gas almost that will penetrate everything in a company.
I feel this very deep in Trifork, that there is not a corner of Trifork, not a process that are not being influenced by AI. It's still early days in many of these processes, but where it really has taken off for, of course, with us, is generating software. Developers at Trifork are having superpowers now to generate code a lot faster, and this is something we have fully adopted and utilized already. There is still more to come, and it means that when we go to a customer the first time, we can show a lot of the product we wanna sell them upfront, even if it's a new area for us. It's a really strong tool for us.
What protects it from being, for us to be, you can say, disrupted by AI, is that Trifork is a company that takes responsibility. We are used to work in highly compliant environments where security and private data is at key. You have to remember that AI, with all its capabilities, hasn't really seen a lot of data. Most of the data in the world is private, and many companies want to make sure that the data stays private. What we help organizations with is to use the most advanced AI, but not expose private data and know-how and IP. I think this is what I want to say about AI today. Also, we are not changing our direction or markets or industries. We are doubling down on where we already are.
Digital health, financial service, public, aviation, energy are the industries and business areas we wanna do a lot more in. We just hired a new manager for financial services, Bjorn. He started Friday, and he's bringing all the different business units around the globe we have that are doing business in Fintech. We are uniting and doubling down on that. We're distilling our business, and we are focusing on financial services under the leadership of Bjorn. Of course, we have other types, other persons, other people like Bjorn to run some of the other areas. This is a way forward for us to be able to scale faster.
You can say to isolate these sectors a little bit from the other ones and to distill our business and doubling down on the markets we are already in and making sure we land more logos and help our customers further. We use the technologies and the capabilities that are mentioned on the left side, and many of them are the same. I would say AI is a, is a bigger and bigger tool by the day. But also, sovereign cloud is now a big growth driver. The good thing here is that there are not that many companies in Europe that can actually help Europe with this because we have internationalized the world over decades.
That means that all companies are a little bit a blur with the ownership, and we wanna make sure that we become more and more European when we act in Europe because that gives us the right to acquire more business going forward. With this, I'd like to hand over the word to Charmaine.
Thank you, Jørn. We completed the acquisition of VION AI this quarter. This is a focused bolt-on acquisition within aviation, which remains a core product area within Trifork. VION AI captures real-time operational data around aircraft turnaround. This we will integrate into our existing iFly4 platform. The focus here is integration and product alignment. Given that, we believe there will be no material P&L impact expected in 2026. The rationale is really straightforward. It strengthens our product capabilities and our position in aviation. The team from VION AI also brings deep sector expertise. That will support both product development, customer engagement, and we believe relevance in this area. We are building a product-led position in aviation centered on operational software, real-time data, and with solutions already deployed. We are expanding those across our customers.
We also see the same in how we are delivering with our other customers. Next slide, please. At Jyske Bank, the focus here has been on building a scalable AI foundation rather than just isolated proofs of concepts or test use cases as we see elsewhere. We partnered with them to establish a center of excellence around across AI, cloud, and data, combining both roadmap and implementation of the technology. Operationally, this enables customers to move from experimentation, which is important, to production with clear governance and structure in place. At Trifork, we really are seeing a shift from experimentation to structured deployment. Customers are increasingly focused on governance, integration, and scaling, and that plays directly to our strengths in regulated industries. We also see this reflected in our partner work.
For example, we have continued to develop and expand our work with partners, strategic partners such as Apple, particularly in spatial computing. They joined us on a visit to our data centers in Aalborg recently, and we also joined them in a keynote presentation focused on our expertise in spatial computing. We already have solutions deployed in production across customers, and we are increasingly seeing traction across this exciting technology space. This you'll also see reflected in the development of the business. Next slide, please. Here we continue to make progress in the transition towards a more product-led business. Products represent 31% of revenue in Q1 and 46% of adjusted EBITDA. The mix reflects both software licensing and the increasing use of our own platforms across customer engagements. The shift here is how these services are delivered.
We are increasingly attaching services to our own platforms rather than just standalone bespoke engagements. This supports scalability, it improves margin quality, and will strengthen our customer retention. The transition remains disciplined across Trifork with a clear direction as we move towards 50% product revenue. Over to you, Kristian.
Thank you, Charmaine. Now I'll go a little bit more into the details of the first quarter. In order to understand the growth numbers and the growth in the underlying business, it's important to understand the details in relation to deconsolidations and operational phasing of our hardware revenue. Overall, we saw a small decline of 2%, as you all saw in the numbers that Jørn showed earlier. Accounting for the Trifork Security consolidation, then the organic growth was 0. In relation to the phasing of the hardware sales, we only saw half a million DKK in hardware sales in the first quarter, where we had DKK 4.5 million in the comparative quarter.
Overall, it was a 8% organic growth, which is in the range of the expectations to the overall growth for the year. Overall, a good baseline in the operational business. We also overall improved the profit margins to 15.5%, which was a 3.6 percentage point increase year-over-year. That was distributed in between products and services, I'll come back to that. Still LTM have a strong cash generation. That said, in Q1, we saw a little slower cash operation cash conversion as we had 1 large deal where payment was delayed. We received that in April.
We also have in the buildup of some of those sovereign data center solutions, we build up also CapEx, which later is converted into lease agreements. In Q1, we saw this buildup of just about EUR 3.5 million, which also impacting the cash conversion in the core isolated. We still have a robust balance sheet, and are still keen on doing more bolt-on acquisitions as the one Charmaine talked about. We have a good position in net debt to EBITDA. Looking into the operational sub-segments, products and services, we see the same development here. Once again, in revenue, taking the deconsolidation and the operational phasing of the hardware into account, we saw an underlying growth in products of 28%.
In relation to services, we saw a 1% year-over-year all organic growth, which was also satisfying. That said, when looking into services, you see a small decline in the margins. That is really related to that we are still delivering more and more, also using AI, but we haven't yet converted the full same pricing model to customers to also account for the cost of AI. This is on the way, so we expect that to move margins up again later in the year. The margins on products, we saw a nice 27% margin for the quarter. This is also something that we see being in the higher end and also be on the long run higher.
We are also investing, as Jørn mentioned, into product development. Over a period of time we will also see margins potentially decline when new products are launched until they have until the product cycle is matured in the market. Overall, a 27% increase for the quarter to EUR 8.7 million and a 15.5% margin. The margin trend lines you see here, and the comparative figures in all the quarters in relation to where our profit is generated. We see we have right now a 25% four-quarters margin in the trend line. As said before, this could be impacted also by new products development until we have a higher scale of all the new products.
The services margin, I just talked into that, it's now stabilized, and we expect it to further grow from here. Overall, all this leads to having a quite solid Q1, aligned with the plans and where we wanna go. We maintain all the guidance for 2026, as already published here. Looking into the labs portfolio, then, as we have communicated, we are in the middle of a strategic review. We are now in concrete dialogues, but nothing completed yet. Overall for the quarter, you see a flat development in the net realized gains. It's a combination of a small decline and small increases, but overall a net zero.
We did see a new findings around in one of our bigger lab companies, Dawn Health. That was very positive, and then they now have a good run rate for future development. This is all for now. Now we go to the questions.
Thank you, Kristian. I would like to ask everyone to limit themselves to two questions initially, and then get back in the queue. In that way, hopefully everyone gets a chance to ask their questions. To ask a question, please follow the instructions shown here on the slide. Let's start with Mads Kvisgaard Johansen from DNB Carnegie. Mads, please go ahead. Mads, we cannot hear you.
Can you hear me now?
Now we can hear you, yes.
Perfect. Sorry about that. First question is on the timing on the hardware sales this year, and also on timing on the potential outcome in Trifork Labs, whether you can put some more color on these two aspects.
Yes, we can. Can or cannot, you could say. Hardware is always, you could say, as we talked about before, the starting point for the new operation engagements. It's always hard for us to predict exactly when hardware is coming in, but overall it's always a good story when hardware revenue is coming in. It will be balanced throughout the year, and we cannot say exactly when, how large portions will come in. It's not a clear answer, but it's still, you could say, we see a trend line in the market. We see sovereign data is picking up and very high interest. This is how we see the world develop. Your second question was?
It was on Labs.
Labs, we are in concrete dialogues. We cannot say exactly how it completes, and if those dialogues will be, you could say, completed as we expect them to be, but or if we will move on to new opportunities. Overall, we expect to see the conclusion within the first half year.
Okay, fair enough. My second question is on whether you can elaborate on how much cost reduction you expect from the use of AI internally, and also whether this is reflected in your full year guidance.
You could say, cost reduction or increased cost. Initially when you start using AI, you also add an additional cost. Looking into, you could say, U.S., where we see the maybe the highest use of AI or most extreme part, then suddenly the use of AI actually becomes a very significant cost element in the total delivery model. That said, of course, we do see, as Jørn said, a very high productivity gain. We can see that we can save or we can produce a lot more with the same people.
So right now it's hard to say because we need to have, you could say, the pricing model that I talked into in place, so there is a good balance in between also the cost of AI and the deliveries that we can actually make. For now, I think it's a combination of those parameters right now in relation to when it will kick in. Definitely already right now in our product development, then we save maybe, I mean, maybe we can develop a 3, 4, 5x now in relation to what we could have a year ago.
Maybe I can talk a little bit more. What I meant before was, of course, most of what we do is to work either on a product or we work directly for a customer. Of course, there we use AI, but you can say those 2 places do not really have any positive consequence of, you can say, cost cutting. What I meant then was all the other processes in any company, and also within ourself, we're looking very hard on how we can either clearly save cost, I mean, because some things we just need to do, and if we can do it more effectively with AI, and we can, we will be able to cut direct cost.
When we use it, for instance, in marketing and sales, we might want to not cut cost. We might want to just get more marketing and more sales for the same money. You always have this, do you wanna do less of something with less cost, or you wanna do more for the same cost? We are, you know, of course, already a rather lean company. I'm challenging all the teams that for any internal process, and it can be generating offers, tenders, contract review, source code review, all these things where we could not pass it on to a customer, that we should do, we should automate with AI or optimize with AI.
Please ask next quarter again, and then I'll do my best to give you some concrete data on cases where we have used AI to optimize, also direct cost.
Great. Thank you. I will ask again next quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mads. Next question from Yiwei Xu from SEB. Wei, please go ahead.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes, we can hear you.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions. Firstly, on the Service segment, it was I realized this is the first quarter you delivered positive organic growth, and after sort of seven quarters decline, if I count correctly. How should we read into this? What is sort of underlying driver here? Do you think this is the sort of your product led strategy works out, so generate more implementation service for you? Or are you also seeing that of market somehow rebounded because of the AI interest?
Yeah. I can start, and then maybe Charmaine. I think for the change of business, because Charmaine talked about it before that we have redirected the services to be more in conjunction with our products, I also see new type of services appear. When we can help our customers optimize their business by the use of AI, that is service, and it's a service business that I like to go into, and that service business did not really exist, I don't think anywhere 12 months ago. Trifork has always been a company that really acts on opportunities fairly quickly. I would like to see that we have an, you can say a department or a focused area for just helping anyone adopting AI to optimize their processes and businesses.
You can say, "Why do you wanna do that?" Yeah. The obvious answer is we wanna learn together with our customers, as we have seen with the Jyske Bank case. If we can join forces with our customers and learn together, because then we can take that knowledge also in-house and more effectively use AI to optimize ourself. Because it's not straightforward how you optimize in a compliant way always. We need to work together with the market and with our customers to become very good at that. Since the inception of the company, that has always been how we have learned. When you teach something, you learn a lot faster as well, because you have to learn what you need to teach in three, six months. That's a new type of service.
I think we have hit the bottom of what kind of services we want to cut away from a business way, if you can follow that. The decline was, of course, cannibalizing a little bit into product, and, but somewhat similarly also that service business we didn't wanna have more, or we couldn't have more, or the market didn't want it any longer. I think we have seen the bottom in that and then we will see product related services, but we will also see this, new type of services. For instance, the more advisory type of services that actually is behind our public wins in Germany and in Canada, it actually starts with we advising a path forward and building strategies for our customers.
In digital health, for instance, we are being asked more and more to come and help with strategies and tactics on how to digitalize the health market. I hope that answers the question.
Yes. Thank you so much. A second question here, regarding the agentic AI. I mean, you already talked about the benefits and the potential, but the recent development of the agentic AI also raised concern on the software company's long-term value. How do you view this? I mean, you are pushing the product led strategy, but I understand this is also more towards software and platforms. What makes you confident that your product will be long-term competitive, and what is sort of long-term value proposition?
Yeah. I think AI is very powerful, and it will become more powerful. You can say I don't fear it, and I'm not that concerned for our business. I would be more concerned if we had a product that we sold to thousands and thousands, because then More a risk to be that a lot of other companies come and just generate that. Anthropic's, you can see when they do an announcement, then for instance, Figma, is taking a hit because they say, "Oh, we do Figma Oh, we do Anthropic's design or we do Anthropic's." Today it was something about finding fraud in Fintech. There will be coming a time where I think that some of these companies, they don't want to do everything.
We have seen it with Google over the years. Just because you can enter a market, it doesn't mean that you will. Because you can't do 10,000 different things as a big company, because then they will end bad. I think there will be these setbacks where these big companies, they will do showcases and then they will impact. But the way we see it is that there is so much potential in helping real enterprises, NIS2 companies, DORA, and all these regulations. Now we have AI Act. We have a lot of things coming from EU to defend Europe against the world and privacy protection. There is so much work in that.
You have to remember that there is so much digitalization that hasn't happened, and I'm just very happy that now the speed at which we can actually do digitalization is higher. It's still not rocket speed, it's just higher speed. Before it was really, really slow to my temper. Now I'm happy that to see we can create more result, more impact quicker. Not very quick, but quicker. I see a lot of market opening, and also as we learn to grasp what is AI actually good at and where is it not that good.
Okay. Thank you. I will jump back to the queue.
Thank you, Wei. I'm waiting to see if anyone else wants to jump back in or jump in. Mads from Carnegie, please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Maybe just a follow-up question. Pretty fantastic win ratio you have in the public sector. You want to bid on more tenders, Jørn Larsen, but I think you know the consensus that there's been a slowdown due to general election here in Denmark. What is your take here?
Yeah, I'm glad you bring it up. Of course, there is a lot of business continuing even when you don't have a new government. As you've seen, in Oman, in Canada, in Germany, in Switzerland, we are also winning these things. It is of course always a concern when there is a pause in leadership in a country. It's not the, I mean, I don't think it's going to be a big issue because there will be a government and there is a lot of things that is obvious that needs to happen. The mega trends are still happening, and I think also that, you know, there are already budget allocated to these major agendas that we have to invest in different countries.
Then there will be new budgets for new things going forward, of course when the Danish government is back. I'm not, I'm not very concerned, but of course, it cannot stay like this for many more months.
Makes sense. Thank you. Just maybe my final question is on acquisitions. In a world with AI, what is your strategic roadmap for doing acquisitions today? What KPIs are you looking for?
I think VION AI is a very good example, and I hope that our M&A team will really take full power of AI to find more of those, because we want to do M&As with less risk and more impact, and buying things we do understand. Things maybe we could have done ourself, it would take more time, and when you do an M&A, you also wanna get access to market and customers. It's a combination of product and access to market. So I think we can probably find more M&A targets quicker, that's still a little bit early days with that. But as you know, we always have a pipeline of potential M&A candidates.
Not all of them will become part of Trifork, of course.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Thank you, Mads. We return to Wei from SEB. Wei, please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks again. One question from my side, and it's follow-up on the AI tools. You already talked about that you are looking into a sort of productivity gain and AI adoption. I was wondering that you are a bit different from some of the international large peers where they have a centralized business model organization structure. We have seen some of them have actually adopted AI in the back office support and have achieved a lot of cost cutting. Your organization is rather decentralized. Do you see this as a constraint going forward or when comes to sort of AI adoptions?
Okay. Maybe, I will start, and Kristian, you take over. I mean, I think the functions we have centralized are not unlike what functions are centralized in other companies. For instance, sales, marketing, you can say HR tools, anything about salary, financial reporting, ERP, and IT, all those functions are fairly centralized at Trifork as well. With that, I will leave the word to Kristian, so he can explain how we will half the cost in no time.
Yeah, sure. I mean, exactly what Jørn is saying, that you could say all the back office parts is fairly centralized, and this is also where we're looking into and in the process of implementing AI internally. Of course, it's a larger process. We go system by system in that relationship. Also you could say centralize maybe more systems than we did in the past. This should also be a path to save cost in the long run.
Okay. Clear. I'm just looking forward to get update from you about your AI benefits. If Mads doesn't ask the question, then now we'll ask in the future.
Thank you.
That's great. Thank you.
We'll be ready.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. We don't have any other hands up right now, so let's just give everyone time. No further hands. Okay. I think we can conclude the Q&A and the presentation for now. Thank you very much for your interest in Trifork. Today at 2:00 P.M. European time, we will be participating in a Danish presentation with HC Andersen Capital, so you can also join there if you want. We will see you somewhere soon, I'm sure. Thank you so much.
Thank you.