Okay, let's start. Dear audience, we would like to welcome you to the presentation of Trifork's f irst quarter results. My name is Kristian Dollerup from Trifork Investor Relations, I'm hosting this call with my colleagues Frederik Svanholm and Preben Thorö . Today our CEO Jørn Larsen and Kristian Wulf-Andersen will, as usual, provide a circa 20-minute presentation of t he results, thereafter offer you a Q&A session. Before we start, we have a few housekeeping points that we would like to run through. First and foremost, I would like to inform you that this presentation is recorded, it will, in its full length, be made available on the investor web later today. Second, I would like to inform you that if you want to download the presentation, it has just been released on the investor web under the tab Events.
Last but not least, we would like to invite you to ask questions and engage with management after the presentation. It works the following way: You raise the hand on the tab in the top of your Zoom screen, and then we will unmute you and announce you, and then you should be free to ask your questions. When you're done, we mute you again, and we will pass on to the next question. We'll do our best to make sure that everyone gets a good chance to ask their questions with the allocated time we have available. Before we get ready, let me quickly show you the disclaimer. Here we go. I think that's fine. We're set to go. Jørn, please start your presentation.
Thank you, Kristian. Maybe we can just go to the world map. I have a few words to say to that. Dear audience, thank you so much for taking your time. Q1 is an interesting quarter to talk about to you. On the surface of it, there might not be so many interesting things to say. During this presentation, we will take you through some interesting trends. If we look back one year, the situation was that it was very hard to find qualified people to work in our company. All companies had it like this, big tech, our customers, us, IT talent was very hard to get to. Today, that situation has changed. It's a lot easier to get good people on the market.
The situation is also that a lot of startups around the world, they have a very hard time. They are, most of them, forced to reduce cost, there have been big layoffs in industry, and primarily for tech people, it has been, it is dramatic times. One year ago, we could land business. It would be hard for us to staff the engagements and to fulfill the contracts. Today, we see a world that has changed. As I said, it's easier to get talent, which is a good thing, we also see that it's harder to land business. Decision processes with our customers to have a look at the offers and the work we can do for them is a longer decision process for them.
We need to double down on our business development sales effort because we truly believe that there are still a lot of opportunities out there in the market, but it's a little bit harder to get to it. Therefore, we also expand our map to now include Europe and U.S. Europe and U.S. will be the markets we will go and work hard to get work from. Especially two, you can say, new markets for Trifork, at least where we will put a lot of effort into growing our position, and that is the Germany and the U.S. market. Two very big markets for Trifork. We have evidence that we can do a lot better, specifically in these two markets. Of course, in the markets we already are in, we will double down our business development efforts.
Let's dive into it with this introduction, Kristian. First of all, the management of Trifork has chosen to maintain our guidance for the year. We guide EUR 205 million-EUR 215 million for the full year. Q1 was just short of EUR 50 million. That times four is close to EUR 200 million. There are a few things that makes us able to reach, in our view, the guidance. Normally, Q1 is not the strongest quarter. We are a company that always grows. Therefore, the general trend quarter by quarter is that they need in average to grow, and of course, adjusted for vacations and downtime during the year. Nevertheless, the other big thing is that we don't have any conferences normally in Q1. The same has been the situation for Q1 this year.
We are okay with the revenue of Q1. It's not a great quarter, but it's not a bad quarter either. We value it as an okay quarter. Let's move on. Also, in regards to profitability, it's an okay quarter. If we take the EUR 8.6 million times four , we're not far from our guidance, and the same remark that we will see is our view. Some things that will come on top of the EUR 8.6 million during the future quarters. Let's move on, Kristian. Just to conclude, that we maintain our guidance. Nothing changed. We keep the guidance of EUR 205 million-EUR 215 million in total revenue. Our EBIT are EUR 34 million-EUR 37 million, and EBIT, EUR 20 million-EUR 23 million. Let's look into the details.
As mentioned in the beginning, Trifork segment is affected by it's easier to get talent, which is a good thing, also it's harder to land the contracts with our customers than it was a year ago. You know, it works like all things in life. If something is hard to get, people want it. If it's easy to get, people wanna think twice. Also, the situation in the world is very uncertain, so people are more cautious about money they spend. If we look at the Labs, we already talked about that most startups has a really difficult time, and I'm really sorry for all those startups that are in very critical situation.
For many startups, it's a life or death for the company. I believe we will see a record number of startups going bankrupt in this first half year of this year. When it comes to our startups, we always like to be, you know, a little bit against the trends. We have, in our view, a good situation with our top five startups. I will get back to that when we come to the more detailed report on labs. We believe we have a better than average situation in our labs. Actually, a fairly good situation. Let's talk about it a little bit later. Let's move on. Here we have our KPI overview.
The first thing that is worth mentioning here that sticks to our eyes is if compared to Q1 2023, we only had a 6.5% total revenue growth or organic revenue growth and that is not okay. That's the first thing I would say. That's not an okay growth. Kristian will later explain a lot about how... Or maybe you can just do that now actually because you put a little note here.
As you see in the graph to the left, you see 16.1 as total growth, compared to the 8.5% total growth. 16.1 is if we leave out the hardware and the third-party license sales, both in Q1 2022 and in Q1 2023. What you see is that there was, in Q1 2022, a high impact from third-party licenses where a majority of that was to a very low profit margin. It's really something that comes from time to time and not something that we can that we can schedule in a specific quarter.
If the core organic growth, you could say, in the core business has been this 16.1%, whereas part of that has been coming from our acquisition of the company IBE. I will come back to that later.
Nevertheless, I will never be very happy to report a single-digit growth in our company, and I don't hope there will be too many quarters like this, no matter what the excuses or explanations might be. On the other hand, there are also some very positive news here, and one is that we have a net cash position. We are actually very hard looking into M&A opportunities all the time, and maybe it's unusual for you to understand, but the valuations of good tech companies are still extremely high. We have tried to compete in a few M&A scenarios, and we were, you know, opting out before the you can say the auction were closed because we simply believe that the prices of companies are still way too high.
That's of course a fruit for thought in this environment. On the key statistics, we now have 69 business units that are customer-facing. 1,135 headcounts. Stil 24 active startups. We have been quite conservative in not investing a lot the past six months. We will probably see that over the next six months, we could go a little bit against the current trends and maybe do a few investments because we are presented with a lot of startup opportunities like any other investor. Some of them could be a very good fit for our group. More about that in the future.
What you also see is that it looked like the last year, in regards to views on our digital channels like YouTube and Instagram were stagnating a little bit. You actually see a strong performance in the beginning of this year. We are now at 47 million views on GOTO and Instagram. It's important that we constantly increase this number and accelerate also the growth. That's also very positive. Let's move on. Here is probably some more interesting news that you don't read on the face of our reported numbers. As mentioned, Inspire Q1 is always a weak quarter where we mainly have cost of running our machine that execute conferences. We actually hired a new leader, Stephan, to head Inspire at Trifork and primarily focusing on our worldwide conferences.
I have big expectations for what we can take it to, but more about that in the future. Already you can see the number of views are up, and we are constantly developing on our platforms, and we are, you know, getting into the in-person conferences again post-COVID. Of course, the world is not the same as before COVID, but people want to meet, but maybe in a little different ways and in maybe less numbers than before. We already executed in the beginning of Q4 a sold-out conference in Portugal, so at least we had a good start in Q2. What you see here is actually something that is underlying good news, and that is for Build.
We had an EBITDA margin of Q1 of 21.1%, and that is a good margin for us, and also for Run, 21.1%. These are of course the main part of our business. Build and Run together, and also in average, had a margin of 21.1%, which is a solid margin for us because we have been saying that we want to invest in business development and sales, and that will, in the beginning, hurt margin. It's good to have this as a result in Q1. Really what takes the total margin down from 21.1% is the money we invest in Inspire, which is something we do with open eyes. If we had... You know, if we wanted to optimize the business, we could stop investing in Inspire, and the group would have a margin of 21.1%.
We still believe that what we do in Inspire will have a return over time. Let's move in. The main events in Q1, and also just post Q1, the number of FTEs has been growing. We are a company that wants to be always growing. The churn rate is down by 1.1 percentage point, and sick leave also trending down, which are two good things. We have some business units at Trifork that still has a too high churn, but we also have a large number of business units that has a very low churn, and so the situation is better and better.
Trifork Labs, not so much to report. We did a small value adjustment, the total book value is EUR 59.3, and around the same as Q4. Because we didn't do any major investment rounds, so there has not been a lot of news in this regards. Also, we announced recently that Morten Gram is our new Chief Revenue Officer. He's a part of the group management, and he joined just this week, May 1st. Again, as I mentioned with the leadership from Stephan in Inspire, we also have high expectations for Morten Gram's impact on our revenue growth in the future. Also, we did a dividend payout to shareholders after the quarter. Kristian, let's move on.
Here we have a case story. I always want to talk a little bit about what we actually do for our customers, and this one is a really nice and interesting one. It's in Digital Health, and it's a system called Telma, and it's a Danish case story. The good news here is that it's expected to be rolled out to all the five regions in Denmark, all the 98 municipalities, and it's about telemedicine. It's a good story in many ways. First of all, the most critical thing for the healthcare sector specifically in Denmark, but also in other countries in the world, is the lack of skilled people and doctors and experts. This system is able to do more with less, and it's also less stressful for patients.
It's good for the environment because telemedicine means that the patient stays at home, and the doctor stays in the hospital or at home. It's good for the environment, and it optimizes productivity and it reduces stress. The situation when patients arrive at a hospital or at a clinic, they already start becoming more stressed, and actually you don't really measure the right results when people are in a stressful situation because the body reacts on stress. What this is all about is about offering people in their home a package of technology where they can measure KPIs or like blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, all these kind of things, oxygen absorption in the blood, et cetera, et cetera.
A long range of possibilities for the patient to monitor and measure things that normally are done in a hospital. Everything being monitored by a doctor that sits and do this together with a patient. This is in the first go, it will be around lung diseases and heart diseases. Anyone who are long-term have an illness or condition with these two disease areas will be offered this solution by the end of 2024. It's a very nice story, and we believe it's a good thing for the world. Let's move on. Let's just dive into the verticals first. In the three verticals, there are not big movements.
FinTech lost a little bit of track, Digital Health went up quite a bit compared to the Q1 last year. Digital Health is pointing up, and FinTech is losing a little bit of ground towards the other six areas, but still had a growth of 20%. Smart Building is more or less the same. Let's move into the horizontals. Here we see again Smart Enterprise at a steady 48%, which is where we have been for a while. That means that it grows with the growth of the company. Also in Cloud Operations have seen a nice growth. Where we have been seeing a decline, and actually a radical one, is our promising Cyber Protection business area.
Here, since it's a -66%, I would let Kristian explain what's going on.
Yeah. This is actually something related to the explanation I gave before in the overall revenue, because in the first quarter of 2022, there was a high level of revenue coming from third-party software licenses. We did not have the same license sale in the first quarter of 2023. These license sales came in the past when we were entering into new deliveries to customers, where the software licenses then were sold to the customers. During the last year and a half, we have tried a lot to actually bring that revenue to be more software as a service revenue. Instead of selling the licenses upfront when delivering a solution, we actually sell the solution to the customers.
It's more repeat revenue or recurring revenue, and for longer contract periods. This is a change that we also expect to see in the future that the growth will come on the service business more than in the license business. We actually in the financial report, we have added some additional information in the notes, so you can actually see what is third-party licenses and what is hardware sales as well, because this is sort of fluctuating from time to time. All through the year, we expect that the total license sales maybe go to the same level as in 2022, or all in 2023.
But here for Q1, it was a very low, so this is close to EUR 3 million, explaining a lot of this decline. That said, we also had a very large delivery to a customer, one of our larger customers in the end of Q4, which was more time material-based in relation to delivery of a solution. And there we were now entering in Q1 into the planning phase for reorganizing for the next delivery, and this was then started in April, meaning that we had a lower activity level in the Cyber Protection area in Q1.
Also here is. Cyber is still a big topic in the industry, but as you can imagine, to protect yourself against cyber attacks is not something that will give you more revenue. It's just something that reduces risk. Even though it's high on the agenda, we can clearly see that companies are more hesitant in actually mitigating those risks. They take on more risk themselves, which is, of course, in the long run, not a very good strategy. What will happen over the next years, and already taking effect now and next year, is new directives from EU.
In the future it would actually be a breach of law. That if you don't do enough to protect data, and also if you are categorized as a company that holds mission-critical or nationwide critical software, and that could be any kind of utility companies, food, and et cetera. Actually a lot, a big amount of companies. There will be like with the GDPR directives and the laws affecting from that, there will be the same thing for cyber. There is a burning platform for most companies, including Trifork, to level up and to either obtain certifications that you actually protect yourself enough. So we still have a strong belief in this business area. Kristian explained why we see this dip now.
If we look at the Promon, our lab investment, it's going well. It's a cyber protection for protecting apps. The ones of you who sit here who are using mission-critical apps, you should have a look at Promon. We're happy to help you. Also XCI, which is our other lab startup, and it's also going very well. We have multiple indications also within our own Group that cyber is trending up. This quarterly result is not indicating what the trend are in our view. Let's move on. Here we have a look at our top five, and I will just focus on the top five, representing 69% of our book value, the book value steady.
As you can see, these companies, the top five, has been growing since last quarter. There hasn't been any major capital event or capital raises. That's why we have not adjusted the valuations. XCI and C4Media, we adjust the valuations once a year based on the trending results from these companies. Both C4Media and XCI are upward trending in revenue and result. The remaining three others, AxonIQ, Dawn Health, and Promon, are in a good position. Where the only one I want to highlight is Dawn Health, and that company is in a regulated software for big pharma, and that is the one to observe the performance of in the future.
Dawn Health just closed a major deal with Novartis that has been announced in the media, and we have a very good collaboration with Novartis. Still, Dawn Health is a large part of the value here, so it's the one to observe the development of, whereas the other four are performing as planned. Let's move on. Kristian, maybe you would like to walk through the ESG update.
Yes, sure. I mean, in Q1, not a lot of things has happened. I would like to emphasize a few things here. Clean oceans, we are partnering with The Ocean Race, sponsoring the Stopover event in Aarhus. Of course, there's been a lot of activities around that, really to put focus on the pollution of the oceans and what you can actually do and sustainability around the oceans. There's a lot of activity on the harbor in Aarhus going on and it will be going on until the beginning of June.
We really hope that this could put a leaving impact to people that they think more about the pollution in the oceans and what to do in order to help in this case. We're very proud to be Stopover sponsor in Aarhus here in May and June.
Yeah, maybe Kristian, I can add to that, there will be this sustainability village where Trifork will exhibit, and we expect 200,000-300,000 people to be exposed to our brand as being a main partner. Also in Q1, I was lucky to be invited to the opening of Aarhus Vand, the company that provides water and that recycles wastewater from the whole area of Aarhus. Also, the opening of Water Valley or the Spring, which is going to be a nationwide development center for water technology, where companies like Grundfos and Kamstrup and others, and of course Trifork will have its presence and R&D and development centers.
We will build the Trifork Smart Building 3 as hopefully one of the first places where these companies that wants to show their technologies in this park, they will be able to have that home.
Yeah.
I don't know if you're aware, but more than 5,000 times a year, the rainburst of Denmark actually has this consequence that we let unclean wastewater into our environment, the fjords and the oceans. That is, in my view, not acceptable. We work close with Aarhus Vand and our startup Drup to reduce the number of these overruns or accidents where we lead untreated wastewater into the nature. That is an initiative. Yeah, let's move on. Kristian, over to you.
Yes. Just a little more details on some of the performance and some of the numbers. Here Jørn was explaining most of this initially. What you see here is also that we had 2.2% of inorganic growth from IBE. IBE was a customer long before, but now integrated as in the group consolidation from the first of January. This came up to 2.2% additional growth in external revenue. Let's move on. In relation to the Trifork segment performance, what you see here is the very close to the same margins, in the first quarter of 2023, but an increase to EUR 8.6 million.
As Jørn explained earlier, it's primarily related to the profit generation in Build and in Run, and this we'll look a little more into afterwards. Let's move on. The Trifork Group performance in relation to EBIT, where we also guide on the annual basis, you see an increase from EUR 4.7 million to EUR 5 million on EBIT. Depreciations and amortization was a little impact, a little increase from the newest acquisition, but otherwise everything was as usual. Let's move on. Here you see the revenue distribution in numbers. Jørn just showed the graph early on in the percentages, and here you see the numbers. Compared to the full year, you see...
Q1 last year, you see the distribution and you see the highest growth in the organic growth is within the Run in relation to. If we take out the impact of this hardware and third-party license sale, what you see here is also the distribution of margins on the different business areas. You see that 21.1 and 21.1 are the margins in both Build and Run, where last year we had Run with a low margin, partly due to this high third-party license sales, which not were all so profitable. This is primarily based on the organic growth and organic deliveries in the Run-based business. Okay, let's move on.
The Inspire performance, Jørn just touched on this as well, you see revenue more or less the same, so always low revenue in Q1. You also see the adjusted EBITDA was somewhat higher cost in the first quarter. This is primarily related to the high activity level where we're planning the conferences, a lot of the cost will actually be booked before we have the conferences, and revenue and profits will not be booked until we have completed the conferences. There we have five of our major conferences coming up in Q2, so we look forward to show the results of that at the end of Q2. Let's move on.
The Build performance here, as you see, all growth organic in Build because the acquisition of IBE was all related to Run-based business. Here you see the 9.3% growth, and you see the margin declined a little bit, but not really a lot here. Let's move on. The Run performance here. You see here we have also done the adjustment to show you the impact in numbers if we take out hardware and the third-party license sale. You see a high growth of 55% if this is taken out. Of course, also the growth from IBE came in here, so that accounts for the 14.something% here.
Organic growth in the existing business was 40.7% if not looking into hardware and third-party license sale. You also see an increase from EUR 1.3 million to EUR 2.3 million in adjusted EBITDA, and I already explained why this came in that way. Let's just move on to next. We also here show the distribution of revenue within the Run-based segment. Hosting, security, license support, hardware in three different areas. As I said initially, we have now introduced also a split of licenses support to what is actually third-party license, so it's easier to see in the future.
We've not been able to yet to show this all over the periods here. We will work on this and then also introduce that in the future, so that we'll follow up on the development in all of these items. You see the details in one of the first notes in the quarterly report. What you see here is that the hosting security, which is for us the most valuable revenue because it's recurring, it's repetitive, and it's where we sell software as a service. It's growing steadily, and this is also how we want to see it in the future. Let's move on.
Overall here, the last performance, as you see here on the left-hand side, you see a minus of EUR 0.9. That comes from overall on EBT. That comes from minus of EUR 400,000 in EBITDA, this is the cost of running the organization to the minus of EUR 0.5 on top. It's coming primarily from a currency exchange adjustment. If we have, for instance, an investment in a Norwegian company, we need to adjust the purchase sum of that investment to EUR. Since there has been some larger exchange rate fluctuations in between EUR and Norwegian NOK, you would see a decline here.
Overall, the FX was -EUR 0.7 million, and then we had some realized gains and some small adjustments of value in some of the companies. Overall, it goes to this - EUR 0.9 million. On the right-hand side, you see the distribution of how we have invested, what we have of realized gains, you also see realized gains increased by EUR 0.8 million from an additional earner payment for a former exit. This here you see the rest is really not changing a lot as Jørn also explained earlier. You see this small adjustment, downwards adjustment of the unrealized gains. This is explained by the FX and the adjustments I just told you about. Let's move on. Overall cash flow and financial position.
Jørgen already mentioned that we're still cash positive in relation to net borrowing debt. You see we have a leverage of minus 0.1 to adjust the EBITDA and still cash positive in that way. So we are still in the same position as we were end of year with the relation to investing in the new startups and in new acquisitions. Overall, we have a positive cash flow and a good balance in between cash flow and also repaying debt, et cetera, on existing acquisition loans, et cetera. We believe we are in good positions for also doing new acquisitions. Let's move on. This was it. Now we go to questions.
Yes, please raise your hand and, we will let you. I see Poul is asking a question. Can we unmute Poul and let him in?
Can you hear me now?
Poul, yes, we hear you now.
Okay. I have a few questions. First to the introduction comment by Jørn about the market in general, where you say it's harder and takes longer to land contracts, but there's much of business out there. The business out there, is that then also less, or is this just because you are in a large ocean or much of business?
Yeah.
How should we take that?
Yeah. Poul, it's a very good question and remark. We are a tiny little company in a big ocean of tech opportunities. That's why I say that we don't look at so much how the market is growing or shrinking. If we look at the, for instance, just cyber, I explained that for, you know, for compliance reasons, there are an uptrending market, and it's up to companies like Trifork and many others to take these opportunities. Of course, it doesn't come by itself. It's not like you have to sit and wait for people to call you. You have to do something.
To go after that market is a little bit harder now because people, they're trying to save cost wherever they can, and even if it means increase the risk. All companies needs to be compliant with law, and very soon they are not able to save these costs anymore. They have to invest. Trifork takes the role of also, you know, turning what we have to do with our own company in Cyber Protection to also sell that to our customers. We are very ready for this market. We have a security operations center ready to take in 5, 10 times the business we have now.
The our ability to go out and, you can say, harvest this market is in our hands, and we get help from the regulators, which is a good thing. The headwinds of the economy and uncertainty is, of course, against us. We still, as mentioned, we believe there is a big upwards trend. Also you can see in Digital Health, we are able to bring more awareness to also countries outside Denmark. Denmark is in a unique position for Digital Health and a very good showcase. It does not mean that it's a walk in the park to adopt these learnings that we harvested over the past 25 + years to other countries.
There is a big interest, and we have more and more people coming from other countries to go and have a look in visit at hospitals and agencies in Denmark. There is a growing interest. As we also said, we are in business in Switzerland. We are working very hard to be successful there. Digital Health also upward for us despite of the market situations. Also for Smart Enterprise, as I indicated before, it's a huge, huge opportunity. Everything that can be built in optimizing efficiency, being more effective and reducing stress between Apple devices and SAP is for Trifork and a huge, huge market, and it's untapped. Hardly anyone are capitalizing on the possible gains.
Hardly anyone are capitalizing on the possible gains. We have this research from the U.S. market. Somebody needs to go in and make the companies aware of these opportunities and this is why we wanna expand in Germany, and we wanna expand in U.S. because that's the home markets of SAP and Apple. That is how we see it. Still, we need to double down on business development and sales to take that market or take our part of that market.
When you double down on business development.
Yes
... is that more the expansion or market reach to Germany and the U.S., and thereby investing into, let's say, salespeople.
Yes.
Uh...
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah. What I mentioned also earlier is that it might not happen, but of course, when you invest in business development and sales, you have cost, and the cost will come before the revenue and the profit. It is something that can push our margins. As you can see, it didn't really yet, but we will, you know, we will go as far as it takes to have the growth in revenue as we'd like to see. As you can see in Q1, we're not overly happy about the growth. We wanna still continue to increase in business development and sale until we are happy with the growth that are, you know, in our midterm guidance, as you know.
The hiring of a CEO, is this part of the process?
Yes.
Could you put a little more on what his responsibility is? You had a very decentralized sales.
Yeah
to the business units in the past.
Yeah.
Now you take a CEO in and.
Yes
... what is his responsibility is gonna be?
Yeah. You can say before the arrival of Morten, it was my duty to overlook 69 business units' ability to do business development and sales. Even though they are responsible, at the end of the day, I'm the one who is responsible for that trend. With having Morten on board and his ex-long experience in doing business development, we have a lot more power in the organization to monitor, overlook, and to coach. The role will be mainly a coaching role of all business development opportunities within Trifork. Of course, we will not deploy Morten's capabilities into 69 because that would be spreading too thin.
Also, we have a lot of business units who are doing just fine, growing what they should and everything. Where we select some defined missions, and Morten and myself will then focus on these missions where it matters the most and where we want really to expand. It's also the role of employing business developer people. It is a good capability to have someone who has a lot of experience and knowhow about business development to hire new business developers where, you know, I'm an engineer at the end of the day. Now we have someone who has a lot of experience to hire these people. It's not just one man, it's also the effect of hiring the people like Morten.
Okay. Then a final one from me about the, these investments into, to growing the business. Is that both in Build and Run, or is it-?
It's-
... mainly one of them? It's in both.
It's all three. It's Inspire, Build, and Run. Also what I mentioned that Stephan, he is a very experienced business developer and leader. He now takes over for Inspire, and that is to double down on also the business development and treating the whole Inspire and our worldwide conferences as one organism consisting of different conferences and business units. The overall responsibility for that is Stephan. That's also, and you can say a doubling down on business development and organization development, and then Morten for mainly Build and Run.
These investments, were they known when you gave guidance for the full year, or have they been decided later on?
When you hire an individual, it's not like, the final mandate to hire Morten was given at the general assembly, because he is a part of the management, together with me and, or together with Kristian and myself. We had to get a mandate from the general assembly, which we obtained, you know, last month.
I was just wondering, is this something, if you have given a guidance on your earnings, is this something that takes the earnings expectations a little down, or was it already part of it when you gave the guidance for this year?
Well, when Kristian and me gave guidance last year, we were expecting things to get a little tougher. That was the main reason for adjusting the guidance. We had. We knew we had to do something on business development, so it's not a new thing for the management that we saw a tougher market. The only, I mean, the tried and way to battle a tougher market is to double down on business development. We have done that in other crises in the past.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Poul. Anyone else with questions, please chip in. Poul seems to have another question, please unmute, Poul, and ask your question.
Yes. You can hear me?
Yes, we hear you now.
Okay. I have a final follow-up. That's when you spoke about valuation of good tech companies, which remains high. I was just wondering, those cases where you have opt-out, have they been traded any way so that there's been somebody else?
Yes
... being willing
Yes
... to pay higher prices?
Yes. Considerably higher. We believe. We even think we go high. The more, I mean, unto the limit of our comfort level, then others still go way higher, significantly higher. It is. We will continue to be in the game of acquiring companies, we are not willing to buy on multiples that will give a very long time of return of investment and that will increase the risk in the company. We are, you can say, a rather risk-averse company. We need to see a rationale behind acquiring a company. If the price is too high, then it's not for us.
Okay. That was all for me. Thank you to both of you.
Thank you, Poul, for your questions.
Thank you, Poul. Yes. Now's the opportunity for anyone else in the audience to ask questions. It doesn't seem to be the case, then I guess we should conclude the session. First and foremost, we would like to thank you for your participation. As we mentioned, you'll find a video of the presentation on the site later today. Just practical information that we will announce our half-year results on the 17th of August, we hope to see you again there or at one of the coming investor meetings that we participate in in the coming months. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.