Welcome to Trifork's first ever Capital Markets Day. It's three years ago we IPO'd, and we have been looking forward to talking about our business and our strategies and how we work with customers. I just wanted to briefly go through the agenda for today. First, Jørn will talk about our growth journey and reflecting a bit on the organization, our people. Morten, our CRO, Julie, co-CEO of Duckwise, and Nana from Smart Enterprise will go through how we work with customers and how we become a closer tech partner. Preben Thorø will take you through our technological capabilities and how we manage to stay ahead of the curve, and what kind of visions we have for the future of the customers we work with.
Jørn and Karan, who is our CEO of the U.S. business, will take you through the international growth ambitions in Europe and in U.S. Finally, we have Kristian and our CFO, Kristian Wulf-Andersen, and Alexander from Dawn Health and Francesco from Erlang Solutions. One M&A, historical M&A, and another labs company to talk you through M&A and Trifork Labs. After that, Kristian will go through our financials, our performance, and together with Emilie, our ESG manager, present to you our ESG ambitions and the way we work with ESG. Finally, there will be a big Q&A session. During the day, we will have two breaks, and I encourage you to speak to some of the other Trifork colleagues that we have here today.
The ambition with this day is not only for you to speak to the people you see most, which is Jørn and Kristian and sometimes me, but also all the leaders of Trifork. We have business areas heads here. We've also invited some of our Labs companies to be here, so I really encourage you to talk to them and ask them what they're working on and where they see their businesses going. After the presentation track, we will have an hour of social. There will be some drinks, tapas, a coffee, and also you'll be able to try the Apple Vision Pro. We will talk a lot about Apple Vision Pro today, but I think it's more important that you try it yourself.
In the back here, we have, three rooms and three colleagues that will do demos of the Vision Pro. In the breaks, we have time for maybe one demo per person, and afterwards we can try and get the rest through. Please go and see for yourself what is spatial computing and see what kind of technology we're working with here. With that, I will give the word to Jørn Larsen, our CEO.
Thank you so much, Frederik. Thank you so much for coming. I'm reading a lot of books. I tell everyone I read a book every week, and so if any of you are presenters later, are a little bit nervous, it always helps to take a little sip from a water. I'm very happy to see the analysts, the investors, colleagues, and other friends of the house, board members, et cetera. I hope we will have an intense day with a lot of good questions and where we can all learn, because Trifork is all about learning. I started the company together with Kim in 1996. It's a long time ago. We started in a little farmhouse in the countryside of Jutland. Although people thought we lived in a little farmhouse.
We lived there because it was the way we could live for the least amount of money. Just surviving while building the foundation for Trifork. Later on, we took in a business partner, Kristian. He used to work for Apple and Steve Jobs, or actually Next. We have always been very much about identifying the technology of tomorrow. On the first row here, Francesco, one of the leading persons in the Erlang Technology, the core of the Ericsson company. Once, Ericsson was 10% of the Swedish economy, right? All phone calls, mostly in Spain, is still Ericsson. Maybe people don't think about it. I actually fell in love with a boat that Ericsson built in Stockholm. I think they spent EUR 150 million building two boats and sailing around the world and winning the Volvo Ocean Race.
They were so passionate about winning because they lost the time before. When you lose, you actually get very motivated to come back and win. This is the intro to this very popular page. It was not like a Hollywood set up that we would invite you for a Capital Market Day just for the day before to announce some really bad news. That was not in the game plan. I did tell Frank, "This is not the best timing." But here it is.
Basically we decided, based on the short conversation I had with Kristian, he called me. He said, "I think we need to do a profit warning of around 5% on revenue." I said, "Okay, let's do that." Because we have seen over the past year that first the private sector has been a little bit reluctant to sign the contract, and once they sign, they delay things. They wanna be sure that they're ready to start. Waiting for them to start is actually losing money for us. The public sector's starting doing the same thing, not only with one set of public customers, but also in healthcare. They wanna be sure. We already won the work. We should start in June. Could you wait until September? Would that be a problem for you? Yeah.
We don't say that. We say, "Okay, we look forward to start." It has never been more difficult to plan what we do. You could almost imagine like a bucket where you fill in water, but there's a hole in the bottom. That hole represents either delayed work or work the customer cancel. I'd like to ask you, because I need an advice, what can you do? What would you do if you have this bucket and you try to fill it up, but there's a hole in the bottom? We like to learn from the audience. What can we do?
Well, you either cut your cost and to protect your margin, you keep investing like you're doing now, or...
The solution we have chosen is there's no way we can fix the hole in the bottom because that's the market conditions. We cannot change the market conditions. You probably have a better chance changing the market conditions than we have. The only thing we can do is, yes, to be very conservative with cost, as when we lived in this little yellow house in the countryside that costed EUR 500 a month or something like that. double down on business development because we need more in. We need more water coming in. We accept that there's a hole in the bucket, but we just need to pour more in. That's what we've been saying the last quarters. Does that hurt the margin a little bit? Yes, it does. Morten is sitting here.
How long have you been here? Maybe stand up so everyone can see you. He is our Messiah. We never needed a chief revenue officer before last year. Why would we do that? Because the customers ask us to: "Can you come and fix this for us?" I said, "Okay, I think the winds are changing. You better come and help." You've been how long?
Exactly a year.
One year. It takes a little bit of time to react from being used to things just came by itself to now we need to hunt hard for the business. I kind of like the hunt, so I don't mind. I hope you will be patient with us to, for it to happen for sure. That is basically what this says. I know Kristian can explain it much better, and he will have to because he wrote it. Also, we did not actually plan for this either, but we did announce this morning a very important milestone in our expansion in the U.S. Cedric, you are in the room? Maybe stand up. Cedric is the founder of Spantree. It's a wonderful company in, based in Chicago.
We already decided a long time ago that our home base in U.S. is Chicago because it's not the usual place to go if you're a tech vendor. You go to New York or you go Boston or you go to California. It was a very clever guy from Canada that told me years ago, "If you ever wanna do business in U.S., start in Chicago. Don't go to one of the coast. You'll thank me one day." I tried to invest in Cedric's business years ago, but he said no. Yesterday he said yes. I'm looking forward for the marriage. Also, Morten, now we are at it. Let's just mention Marstrand. Just one second.
Yeah, we can do that.
Okay.
Hold on. The mic.
Oh, for the video.
Okay, it's on. Yeah.
Okay.
MPI, Marstrand Planning Intelligence, is a product that we acquired that is basically for any type of planning of resources. It's a platform that's very easily configured without any type of code.
It's about planning, Morten.
It's about planning.
Once we had a conference in Denmark, I don't know if you heard that story. We had Charles Simonyi coming and visit us. Do you know who Charles Simonyi is? Some of you. He was number four at Microsoft. If you ever get that opportunity in your life, just say yes. He wrote Excel. He came with his superyacht to Aarhus, the biggest ship ever, arrived in the harbor of Aarhus. That was the only time the press wanted to write about us. I have nothing against the press. But I can also reveal that I don't read the news. Morten, how many companies plan in Excel? Do you think Charles Simonyi made Excel because people should plan in it?
No.
No.
You could ask the audience a very interesting question: do you know any company on the globe that uses Excel for planning of any type of resource, whether it's money, people, capabilities, lack, bottlenecks, resources? You can ask any company, the amount of use cases they will pull out of the closet is insane.
The main problem with that is you don't have a transaction lock, and if somebody fiddles with the formula, it can have really bad consequences for the business by mistake. There's no traceability. It's the worst tool for that, and if you ask Charles Simonyi, he would say, "Don't use it for that. I made it for something else, adding numbers, you know, not for planning activities." Okay, we're already behind on the schedule here. Let's carry on. When we started Trifork, we were a Java company. We more or less discovered Java in Denmark. We were only in Denmark back then. The main partner was Sun Microsystems, then it was IBM, then it was Oracle. We became very close partners with these companies because their organizations in Denmark had no clue about Java.
That was the first ride, the first wave we rode on. We have always been about making systems where the customer is in the center, where the customer's customers are the ones we really want to help, or the people who work for our customers to de-stress their day. The past two days, I was driving a long trip around Europe in my electrical car. Don't know how many of you have done that, not on a vacation, but on a business trip. That's pretty stressful because those system don't work really well, nor the software in the car, nor the chargers. You rarely get what you expect. It's not like putting gas in your fuel, in your car. It normally works. The car normally works. Electrical rides across Europe, 3,000 km, and you're in a hurry, not so much. Okay.
There is a lot to fix. Yesterday, I got a letter from my bank, if I could sign this form. I have no problem with signing a form. I sign a lot of forms, but the form was empty. The information, they already had all the information, my name, when I was born, my nationality. Now they wanted me to fill it out one more time for the 1,000th time and sign it and send it back. I got on my little phone when I was charging the car, I did it. It was very important for them. There are lots of problems in the world we wanna tackle and this is what we're here for, and here we identified some of them. We have misjudged the situation a little bit because one of them is increasing cybersecurity threats.
When the, when the war broke out between Ukraine and Russia, or how we call it, companies were really interested in being protected for cyber. There was a little recession coming, and then it didn't really matter anymore. Did the criminals and the North Korea and the Russians stop hacking? No. There will be legislation, compliance demands that just because you don't have the money to buy your cyber protection right now, you still need to do it. It's one of the things we help our companies or our customers with, is to be compliant. There are a lot of other things we will talk about today. This is an illustration that shows that Trifork is all about identifying what's coming around the corner or having really good friends that tells us what comes around the corner.
The best friends to tell us what's around the corner are the friends that invent the things that are around the corner, so they will tell us before everyone else. We like that. When we identified Java, we were a little bit behind, a few months. When the iPhone came to Denmark, I'm looking at Jesper, head of our health, digital health, he didn't like the iPhone in the beginning. He said it doesn't work. Jesper, he's an engineer, he likes things that work, and he said, "I don't like it. We don't use it. I use Nokia." Steve Jobs, he had another idea. He became the driver for the smartphone, so Android and the iPhone. We were probably 12 months behind because it was not launched in Denmark in the beginning. It was launched in the U.S.
Steve Jobs, although he knew my business partner, he did not give us a call. "I'm launching the iPhone, and even if Jesper is not liking it's going to be a success." He did not say that. When the Vision Pro launched, we already knew about it because Apple had called us, and Karan will talk about it. We have a few leading tech companies in the world that are a lot bigger than us, that likes to work with small companies like us, and they tell us things before they happen. That's how we have grown, and I think that's the most important message today for you to understand, is that we will maintain and we will build a stronger position in knowing things before most other. We also need to know how this curve look like.
Just because a technology is mature is not the same as it should not be used. Not everything new is the best. Francesco would probably say that. We need a balance. We need rock steady technologies that has been around for a long time, but is still very fit. Erlang is one, Elixir, Java still is rock solid. One of my best friends is the head of Java worldwide. 28 years ago, he was a little hacker, and I was a little entrepreneur. We were working together, and we have stayed in touch ever since. You all know this, so I will not drill down into this. We have great people that will talk about each of some of these, our verticals and our horizontals. We changed the house a bit.
This used to be like a Victorian house with four pillars and a foundation. Now with some pale colors and rounded corners, it's still the same. Most important for us is to perfect the Trifork way. There's a lot about that. It is to be able to identify what's coming. It's to put the customer in focus and focus on the customer's customers or the customer's employees to make their life better. To suggest the new technologies in the right time, but also use the old technologies when that is the best solution. That's basically what it says here. Okay. Had it not been for that second slide, the disaster slide, this would probably have looked better. As Frederik said, here we are just looking for the three years, what actually happened the three years after the IPO.
When I hired Morten a year ago, I told him there would be no bonus if Trifork do not grow 40% on the top line. Morten said, "No problem. I take that deal." Our numbers just showed that the year before. You remember? Maybe you already forgot. We also calculate. We used Excel for that to calculate averages and stuff. So you can actually see those numbers. You can read better than I can, that we have been within the range and the midterm targets, and we have the only place where we think we have really disappointed ourself, maybe also you, is the margin improvements. We've been saying this a long time. I like to see that more than you, trust me. We will. We will work very hard on it, and it will happen.
This, this was not a bad start for the three year after the IPO. We just need to figure out how the next 10 years will look like. We will talk some of, some of that today. We'll talk about that today. Here it comes. This we already know. We always show you since 2007, so you don't forget. Some people have short memory. It's not, it's not the year the company started, but it's the year where we started reporting IFRS. Back then, I actually thought we had a big company. I think we have a small company, but it's bigger than when it was big.
Here we have illustrated our ambitions and our target, and then we will build close strategic partnerships with entrepreneurs because it's very important that we get new ideas into the company, such as Francesco, such as Cedric, such as others in the room, Jakob. These new ideas are just important to enter a new market or just to get somebody to shake us up and teach us something new. Here's what we expect for the 24 inorganic. The orange is the inorganic. You can see that it's not like we are just hiding and... No, we always have negotiations and talks with companies that could lead to an M&A or an investment of some sort.
We have also looked at how does the EBIT, EBITDA margin, how does that look for the near future, and where do we wanna be in three years from now, so in 2026? We have probably a better idea how to get here than how to get for the first three years after our IPO. We have learned a lot. We have also learned a lot from you because you keep the analysts and the investors keep telling us how the competition is doing. That's probably the best thing about being listed, is that we get a lot of inside information. I call it inside information. It's probably not inside information, but we get a lot of insights from our competition and the market. That's really valuable. Thank you for that.
Remember, if you know a potential customer or you could be a potential customer, raise your hand. We are ready. We have fintech knowledge. And here for the EBIT margin. And for the gearing. The most of the cash we spent the past year was actually to buy the minority shares. There are a few people in this room that are very rich. If you need support for something, go to them. I will not point them out. It'll be too direct. They are here. That loaded, the leverage a little bit. We will talk a little bit about our DNA, but I'd love to show you my socks because I put them on this morning. These... Anyone recognize them? Journalists? No. It's the Chainalysis socks. It's my favorite socks.
Why is it that? It's also my worst nightmare in many, in more than one way. It's not on the slide, but I'll just show it anyway. This is a book, is one of the books I've read. I read a book a week. Tracers in the Dark. How many read it? It's a must for all Trifork people. Morten, thank you. This is a highly interesting book. It's about crime fighting, bad people, heroes, excitement. We built a company. We were co-founder of Chainalysis. It's one of the leading companies that fights crime and make crypto a legal currency in the world. I think the world needs digital currencies and blockchain, and I think it will come sooner than you know to every one of us, not just as something you speculate in, but something we trade with, a real currency.
This is read by Andy Greenberg. I think he's one of the people next to Isaacson that has done the most research writing a book. It's comprehensive, and it's exciting. This company was valued at its peak more than $8 billion. In the beginning, we had 33% of it. Somehow, Kristian and me, we didn't really see that. Because it could probably have been $1 billion for us. We still got a really good deal, and we sold the shares when we thought they were peaking, but they actually grow another 100 x. We also have Geeta as a new board member. Morten, he came from Humio. Just to mention that Humio was another big success. We created the company, and five years later, we sold it for $400 million.
It was not EUR 8 billion, still better than nothing, as we say. Here we'll talk about ESG, the environment. Some of the things that also pull down in our numbers is that we have to invest more and more in building our ESG report, also to change our behavior. We have committed ourselves to the science-based emission targets, which means that even if we grow, we have to pollute less. That's why I was driving the electrical car through Europe. Takes longer, it's part of the mission. Social. We have more than 50 nationalities. When I started the company, we had one. It was me and my partner. You can be as open-minded as you want, that's not very diverse to be two guys sitting in a little farmhouse coding. 50 nationalities today. Francesco, I don't know your nationality.
Swedish, Italian, British?
Me Swedish and Italian, yeah.
Yeah.
with Netic A/S Solutions, I counted we're 25 nationalities.
Yes. Governance. We have a little picture of something we did with Young Money. The Children's Hospital in Copenhagen. I sit at the advisory board of the Kantonsspital, Luzerner Kinderspital. My German is not very good, but I still sit there. This is a picture of a robot. It collects plastic. I wear like a little thing here that is made from waste plastic pellets, the raw material of all plastic. If you ever bought something from plastic, you are responsible for polluting the oceans with these small pearls, whether you want it or not. Just buying a product from plastic, we are part of the problem. We have five minutes left. Fundamental for Trifork is Inspire, build, run. We put our customers in the center. We even put them orange, so we don't miss them.
We have another orange thing. It's the guy here or the person here, man, woman, or anything in between. Who is that? Jakob. Yes.
A technology expert.
Yes, a technology expert. Yes. Could be from a little innovative startup in India, in Australia, in Silicon Valley. It could be Charles Simonyi from Microsoft. He's not with Microsoft anymore, but it could be him. It could be someone from Google or Apple. We listen to these people. We probably listen more than anyone else when they are on our stages. We are approaching 100 million views on our YouTube channel. I tell you this number every time we meet, and you probably say, "Why he's keeping showing that number?" It's important that when we invite people that we can track: How is the adoption of this content? We are approaching 1 million subscribers. We're not a YouTuber with a Lamborghini and golden chains yet, but we have an ambition that it will also drive revenue one day.
That's why we keep it, keep reporting on it, so the day we do make it into a business that you will not say, "Oh, you never told us about that," because we did it every quarter. With that inspiration, we work on proof of concepts and early software for our customers. We improve it. We call it customer product development. We've done many systems, many pioneering systems. We like to operate and cyber protected as well. You have seen this before. This is in our core of our DNA and our go-to-market model. These numbers about our people. We try to be as diverse as we can. I already mentioned the 50 nationalities, the gender equality, at least at the board of directors. Men are a minority, I don't sit at the board. Age.
When you look at the average age, in Trifork there are countries where we cannot ask the age. Probably know. It's sometimes hard for the regulators say, "Tell us your average age." We're not allowed, but somehow we did it. It's rather high compared to young tech companies. We like to have some experience when we go and advise in implementing mission-critical software. At the end here, a little bit about our team model. Many people they say, "What is that? Why are you doing that?" It's a model that keeps innovation high, and innovation is what we sell, so we need to protect that culture. It's really about being a small unit where nobody is afraid to share their ideas. We work a lot with introverted people, and I'm halfway through the book, Francesco, the book called Unmasked.
It's about Asperger's, ADHD or whatever it's called, all these diagnoses, because we are mostly that kind of people at our company. We don't act and think like most people. They thrive in smaller groups. Once a group gets too big, because we do have a growth ambition for everything at Trifork, it will cell divide into two, like cells in our body or on a tree outside the door here. Where there are some benefits, there are also some disadvantages of being teal. We count on the business units to figure it out, and sometimes they don't figure it out, and then we have our governance model that help the business units from figuring the things out they cannot figure out themselves.
Right now it's to bring in more business that is harder to figure out because they were not used to that, because business came more easy earlier than it does now. We have our compliance. It's not just a bunch of cowboys running around. It's quite organized, actually. First of all, we have a bull board. The idea is to meet every month. It's your board. You report to the board as a business unit lead. A business unit leader team can be one, two, or three people. It doesn't have to be one. The board can typically be two, more experienced from other business units. Then they talk about strategy and tracking and where we are going, products, et cetera. We have the bull workshops that I enjoy a lot to do.
I probably spend 25% of my total time with the management of Trifork. I really enjoy it. The teal, we talked a little bit about the benefits and the cons. I already talk about the benefits. Let's just highlight one con. Reporting. We have different tools. We have a BI tool on an iPad. When I was at Apple in April, I made a naive promise because I had a meeting with a very high-level person at Apple. you know, I said, "I remember in a book it said, 'Make sure they remember you.' You can do this in many ways, good ways, bad ways." I was thinking, "How will he remember me?" I said, "By the way, we are building a new business intelligence tool in the Vision Pro.
Would you like to see it?" He was like, "Oh, yes. When can you show it?" I was thinking how fast we could build it. We are building this with rocket speed, and very soon we will show it to the Apple management, how they can use their product to see business data the way business data has never been seen before. Our business units, they don't always think it's fun to report to Morten or me when we are reporting to you every quarter, so that's some of the disadvantages. That doesn't come by itself. Hopefully, eventually, it will. We are almost at the end here. Thank you so much. Frederik, you will set the scene for the next-
Allow us to say next up is Morten. Please go ahead.
I'll take it off from here. Thank you , Jørn.
Thank you.
I'm gonna be talking a little bit about our thinking about the market, how we wanna go to market, and a bit about our business model. To help me out, I have Julie, who's our CEO of Duckwise. She's gonna be talking a bit about our Inspire part of the business. I have Nana, our SVP and CEO of Smart Enterprise to come and talk a little bit about our Build and Run part of the business. First off, I just wanna say that for me and from I think from a Trifork perspective, it's really all about the customer. Everything we do, the customer is in the center. Whether the customer is an end user within the organization or whether it's the customer's customers, everything we do has to be around the customer.
Everything we do has to have an impact. It has to have a positive impact, whether it's more revenue generating or whether it's cost optimizations, it has to have an impact. I don't see us, and I'm trying to tell our organization that because we're not a kind of a traditional sales organization, that what we really wanna do is help these companies. We're not in the world to sell or convince people. We need to help. To help them, we need to make sure that everything we do has an impact on our end customer. If we look in the market, even though things are slowing down a little bit, there is plenty of opportunities.
We're lucky to be in a business where technologies move so fast, the innovation is moving at a speed of light. Enterprises have a really hard time keeping up. On the other hand, if they don't keep up, they might not be there tomorrow. They need our help, and I think that's the positive thing. The other thing is, when you talk to companies and you think about how they have been implementing technologies over the last 20, 25 years where I've been in the industry, it's always been with the technology as the starting point and then figuring out how the business could adapt to that technology. I think the generations that are coming out into the market now will not accept that.
Why should we accept that we have to do things or have processes that are compromised because we had to fit into some kind of box that the vendor kind of provided us with? This is what Trifork is about. It's really about having that end user in mind and making their life better. Looking at our model and where we see a lot of these opportunities is really the model that Jørn went through. I think the important thing here is really how do we inspire the customers? How are we the thought leaders? How are we on the forefront of the technologies? Enterprises today cannot keep up with what's possible with technologies. I talk regularly to customers that tell me, "This cannot be done." Then we challenge them back because I think that's our task, is changing their perception.
We challenge them back and say, "We do believe it can be done." Why is there this difference? It's because they might have looked at a technology six months ago. Guess what? It might actually be doable today. They don't have the people that follow that technology that tight because they have so many projects. Once something has been tested, if it doesn't work, it might take years before they come back. Is that the right timing? Not necessarily. We need to be there. We need to be able to be inspiring. We need to be the thought leaders that knows what's possible, when it's possible, and when the timing is right. We build the solutions. I can tell you what we have built over the last 30 years, what we have now, the products, the concepts, that box is huge.
Why am I mentioning this? Because that's a huge opportunity that I'll show you in a second. We have the Run part. We can run what we've built. We can take the responsibility. We can be that strategic partner that basically looks at the full life cycle of a customer's applications. We could do it in a scalable way and in a secure way and a compliant way. I really do believe we have a very strong foundation for growth. I think it's very diversified because it's across geography, it's across multiple services, it's across multiple industries, but it's also across a huge customer base. With this huge loyal customer base that we have, we might have sold a few of our services.
You're gonna see today that we actually have a lot of services, not only just the Inspire, Build, Run, but within every bucket, there's multiple things that we could be selling. I personally believe when , Jørn said about the crazy numbers last year, I believe we can do this. We can keep that growth going just by actually selling more to our existing customers. How are we gonna do that? I'll come back to that. Focus on cloud contracts, infrastructure contracts, hosting managed services is good in two ways. There are longer commitments, but they're also a very valid foundation for our business going forward. Then I'm proud of actually seeing that we win 74% of all tenders that we attend. That is a pretty impressive number. Why is that important?
A lot of this, where we have this team involved, is something we do out of Denmark. We should do the same around the globe, 'cause if we keep that one, right, it's great. Looking at the customer base, as you can see, we're not in one vertical. We're all over the place. We have so much industry knowledge. Combining that with the technology knowledge we have, I believe we're in a very unique situation. We don't have the most aggressive sales organization, we need to be more or become more aggressive. The people we have that are out there talking to the customers actually know what they're talking about, both from an industry perspective but also from a technology perspective, probably more from a technology than industry. We have the experience.
The interesting thing, if you look at some of the stuff that we're working with right now, it's vision AI, it's spatial computing, it's huge data platforms, and they're spread around the board. At Kamstrup we've done data platform. We've done some really interesting things on the spatial computing together with MHP and Porsche. We've done vision AI wit h DSB, Flytech, Trodd, and LAUFEN and others. These are new things where companies are trying to pick up. Enterprises wanna use these things. Our customer base, as I said, is really diversified. As we grow, that becomes even more, but it also really shows we have loyal customers. Most of the customers we did business with in 2021 are still customers with us today. The opportunity of actually selling in and cross-selling into these are really, really big.
The loyalty is high. Just looking at two services, Run and Build, it's only 50% of our customer, of our top 20 customers that are actually using two services. My point is, going one step below that, the amount of services we could sell within Build and within Run is way more. Of course, it's interesting to have, you know, focus on the Run business. There's a good traction on that side of the business, but getting recurring revenue from managed services and stuff like that is a great foundation for the company. As I said, we need to become more aggressive in the way we go to the market. We need to make sure that everything that we do has an impact.
If everything we do is around helping the customer, generating value for the business, and having that general interest in how that business is developing, that will bring us higher into the organization. We want to get into C-level. We are at C-level with a lot of our customers, but we need to be there even more, and we need to leverage that access to start cross-selling a lot of these services and products that we have. With our geographical hubs, everything that we have built in different areas, we need to start exporting that to other areas because that will be a good foundation for growing locally in each of these markets. Lastly, I wanna talk a little bit about our outbound efforts because that's really what Jørn also mentioned, the hunting part of the business.
That's, I think, is where we're a bit challenged. That might require that we continue to build out our organization, we also have some really good things that we could actually leverage, right? Hunting for us is really around how do we get these new customers. One area is thought leadership, so being able to leverage our events and building out our networks through that. The other one is really around the strong partnerships. Now you think about it, Trifork globally on the global stage is still a fairly small company. We have the attention globally from Apple, from NVIDIA, from Lenovo.
When you hear like NVIDIA saying, "You know, there's a lot of people talking about AI and vision AI, you guys are actually doing it." When we're top three of some of these vendors globally as their preferred partner, that is a huge thing for a company like Trifork. I mention this because if you take the partnership of SAP, Apple, together with NVIDIA, what type of solutions could you make? Well, if you think about predictive maintenance, you could kinda start combining spatial computing with vision AI, with the integrations back to SAP. Yeah, for predictive maintenance, it could be quality and other things. When you start combining it across three global players, what do you think is gonna happen?
They're gonna wanna endorse you because all these vendors are actually looking for companies that can make them look innovative and ensure that their customers start adapting their new technologies. We have a very good situation, and we've done this. This is one of the ways that we're doing in the U.S. right now and getting the traction, is actually by leveraging these relationships, and Karan is gonna talk a bit about that later as well. The other thing that when we talk about getting new customers is an extremely simple concept that we have, but we call it ride-alongs. It's really just being out in companies observing.
This might sound very simple or simplistic, but the reaction we're getting by just being in a company, walking around, spending two, three, four, five hours, maybe even a day, just observing how that end user is doing their business today. The reactions we're getting are like, "Oh, nobody has ever been interested in how I work. IT only just comes with a product," or, "We haven't seen a vendor that actually is curious and wants to understand our business. The interesting thing about this, every time we do it, all these small lightnings are potential opportunities. I would say every ride-along we've done so far pinpoints five to 10 opportunities. The whole idea is really for us to observe and help that customer identify where new technologies can benefit their business.
Every ride-along ends up being the customer wanting to look at one or two initiatives. Where we have closed deals, we really have no competition. Here's just a few examples of types of solution that comes out of these ride-alongs and the outcome that we see with the customer. The really important thing is we always have to look at the outcome and make that impact on the customer. Julie, you're on stage.
Thanks, Morten. I have the honor of presenting Inspire, our first part of the go-to-market model. Over the next 10 minutes, I'll cover what Inspire means to us, why it matters through a case example, and share just a little bit about our future direction. Inspire is about changing the world by making a real impact through solid insights, strategic direction, and design thinking. Inspire is a promise to our customers, but also to our employees. We wanna make sure that we always inspire, but also are inspired, and that we stay thought leaders. We're not here just to build products or ship features or create ideas or visions that only work on paper, on slides. We are here to help our customers make a real impact in their businesses, in their companies, and in the world.
Insights help us to discover new opportunities within the companies to define problem spaces to pursue and to shape impactful portfolios and road maps and backlogs. To do this, we bring inspiration to our customers through insights about what's possible with technology today. What are the unmet needs of their users? What are the key opportunities for innovation and for optimization? What are the technologies and the trends that our customers should care about and that they should leverage? We have several platforms for sharing and generating these insights, being the ride-alongs we've just heard about, but also our conferences, our workshops, our events, and research projects. Building on a solid foundation of insights, strategic is a strategic direction is about outlining a desired future and communicating clearly how to get there. A great vision is inspiring.
It's suffused with imagination, but it also helps our customer focus on the right choices and to make them with confidence. We inspire our customers to think differently, to do things differently that they're doing today, and to be bold and be visionary, think long term, but also focus on making an impact today. Because with the rapid technological development, it's not about what we do in 10 years, it's about what we do today and what we do tomorrow. The third element I'll talk about here is design thinking at the intersection of technology, design, and strategy. Design thinking is a user-centered approach to problem-solving. It involves really understanding the user's needs. It involves brainstorming creative solutions and iteratively testing and refining these solutions. At Trifork, we use design thinking to make sure that we address the right challenges with innovative and with practical solutions.
By working hand in glove across technology, design, and strategy, we make sure that the outcomes we deliver and the solutions we build are desirable, valuable for the users, but are also viable for the businesses and feasible to implement. We use workshops, we use prototyping, continuous user testing to work closely with our customers and their users, making sure that we are building something that makes a real difference. Inspire is more than a methodology and more than a tool. It is a culture that we have established across Trifork, fostering creativity and innovation and defining us as a thought leader in this pioneering technology partner. Let's look at a concrete example of Inspire's impact in diabetes care. I reckon that most people in the room here know someone with diabetes.
More than 350,000 people in Denmark have diabetes, and on a global scale, it's much more. It is today treated by following very standardized guidelines. If you have Type 1 diabetes, it means you'll have to go physically to the hospital and to your diabetes clinic minimum three to 4x a year, regardless of your individual health condition or your individual preferences. This one-size-fits-all approach isn't very sustainable. It isn't very ideal for the patients, for the healthcare providers, and for our society as a whole. The Steno Diabetes Centers in Denmark have set out to create a more sustainable and more individualized and a more needs-driven approach. We have partnered with Steno Diabetes Center in Aarhus to help inspire and define the future way of treating diabetes in Denmark.
By following our Inspire approach, utilizing solid insights, strategic direction and design thinking, we are making a real impact. This approach is shifting diabetes care from standardized to individualized, enabling and fostering real improved patient health outcomes and optimized healthcare resources. In the process we have done ride-alongs, interviews, run several workshops. We have conducted extensive user testing, extensive prototyping and lots of iterations. This has enabled us to set a clear strategic direction, build a strong roadmap, and also design a future-proof and scalable concept that we are currently building the first version of. By creating a strong strategy and a strong roadmap, we are helping our customers to think strategically about what we are building and also to understand the investment that it is required long-term, not only for the MVP or for the first iteration.
If you don't want to take it from me alone, I have a quote from the managing director of Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus highlighting the significance of what we are doing, both in terms of the solution we are building, but also in terms of Trifork as a strategic partner. As this testimonial states, we are enabling and inspiring our customers to drive transformative innovation and to make a real impact, a real change in the world. Looking a bit ahead, we wanna make more impact. We wanna make deeper impact with our existing customers, but also attract new customers by generating more insights, identifying more opportunities through ride-alongs, increasing our Inspire-led and our design-led conversations at a C-level, and also increase and share more insights and experience across our disciplines, across our services, and across our industries.
We also aim to expand our Inspire business abroad, leveraging a lot of the Inspire expertise and experience that we have today and forge new strategic partnerships and utilize our networks. Inspire sets the vision and the strategy for the projects we are working on and making sure that we are making an impact from the very beginning. Now we're going to hear about how we translate the strategies and the insights into tangible solutions, and I'll hand it over to Nana, my colleague, and hoping for some continued conversations about how we continue to Inspire our customers together later.
Thank you, Julie. Now let's move on to the build and the run of our operations and how we work with the strategic business development. Recent studies, they actually show that only 13% of enterprise tech buyers, they have no regrets. In this way, also leaving some room for improvements and for doing better in businesses and in tech collaborations. Along those lines, also from way back when pioneering and transforming the early days of the car industry, we also believe that to build what our customers need, we have to nurture a culture where we stay curious, igniting imagination around people, the actual real-life problems, and to allow for daring and challenging realities to be able to show them what they need.
When developing and maintaining, we also will grow our business development. We need to build on our strategic roadmaps together with our customers and partners. We therefore build on our foundation, on a mutual trust and also gaining two-way loyalty in strong business relationships. Spanning from discovering opportunities and challenges, but, yeah. When building and running user-centric solutions and platforms. Continuing with the operations, the life cycle after launch, when maintaining, we will also position ourselves for building roadmaps together. We empower our customers in being pioneers of their own fields, and we encourage our customers even to strive further.
Customers, they are specialists in in their own areas, they know about their own problems, they know about their own customers, and we bring the technology and the mindset of being curious, of understanding why, and also challenging the realities to solve the right problems. With an increased focus on customer and business centricity, we will strengthen our position in Inspire and build and run. When working with strategic customers, and partners. Actually when pioneering with customers, we create even more opportunities for growth together. When building long-term relationships with our customers, we do, it year on year. A lot of these customers that you heard before, and also these, have chosen Trifork year on year, often three years, five years, even 10 years. We make life easier for our customers when they are doing their daily businesses.
To just shed a little light on a couple of examples, DSB operating the trains and also a commercial company, approximately 195 millions of passengers passing through DSB annually, and where we together with DSB have been building the commercial application and supporting landscape for customers, and also actually optimized solutions for employees operating and driving the actual trains. Kamstrup in the middle here, a world-leading manufacturer of solutions of smart energy and water metering. Together with Kamstrup, we build a transformational data platform for employee adoption and for enterprise business. This is also a solution that we actually are building, running and maintaining on a daily basis. The last one, Energinet, among the world's leading energy system operators. They own, operate and develop the transmission systems for electricity and gas in Denmark.
Together with Energinet, we have built an innovative foundation for the future success and for continued engagement in driving a thorough discovery, continuous delivery and actually with zero downtime in these mission-critical systems. Our framework for expanding and our current engagements with across of services and across our customers' businesses throughout their supply chain will lead to an increased value of our customers. We often start out in one end and perhaps we will be building solutions for employees and for their customers, like we do with Arkin or with the MPI, as we heard of, building fast assets, fast field work, fast time or planning intelligent solutions.
Other places we run and operate the IT solutions, hosting, hybrid cloud and cybersecurity, and we can take some of the spearheading technologies from AI, from computer vision, and to actually inspire them other places in their supply chain. Yes. We stand on a good foundation for mid and long-term growth. As a full service provider in Trifork, we inspire, we build and we run. With a very loyal and a strong customer base across of countries and also nurturing partnerships with global leaders in several of our areas. We have great opportunities to cross-sell even more solutions and concepts and services, and to actually use our thought leadership and being at the forefront of technologies to generate new opportunities. We can challenge and inspire to ensure the technology is used to create an impact. Yes.
Now we are actually done for the first part. I'm not sure, Frederik, if you will continue. I think we have the Q&A in the end of the session, at the end of the day, but not now. 15 minutes break.
I think the sound level here indicates that everyone is back now. Welcome back. I hope you had some coffee and sugar because you're going to need it. There will be a lot of information now, and I have 20 minutes to deliver it. Please fasten your seat belts. My name is Preben Thorø. I'm the CTO at Trifork. I'm responsible for the program work at our conferences. This is our mission statement as taken from the webpage, our homepage. We specialize in IT and AI, focusing on solving complex problems with a strong commitment to sustainability from start to finish. Our mission is to continuously push boundaries in everything we do. We work alongside our customers to create and apply cutting-edge digital solutions that tackle tough challenges and help make the world a better place.
Another way to put this is that we want to have an impact with what we're doing. We want to improve some situation for someone out there. What that means is we have to build the right user experience. This is how I like to see user experience. Where a carpenter builds his solutions with wood and tools, we build our solutions with data and software. What I like, how I like to think about it is having meaningful data, presenting it in a meaningful way, doing meaningful things with it, and just everything meaningful adding up. When this is in balance, data functionality, the way it looks, the way it behaves, when this is in balance, that is when we have good user experience. Another way to put it, what does the end user need? How should it work?
What data can support it, and how should it look? There's one thing I would like to add here, because when this is in balance, we have good user experience. There's one thing we're missing here. The sugar on top of this. If we add passion to this, we can lift the user experience from good enough to another level. If we could only predict what's coming, we would know how to build the solutions and the perfect user experience for the time to come. Unfortunately, history has shown that predicting the future is very difficult, and that's actually material for a presentation I would like to do one day, just talking about failed prophecies. I couldn't help.
I think this is in the crossfield somewhere between hilarious and funny and scary and frightening that someone seriously in the 1990s meant that vacuum cleaners would be nuclear powered within 10 years. Predicting the future is difficult, but we would still like to know what comes, what is to come. What can we do instead? One thing we can do is we can look at the trends out there. Anything we do, the current context we have is at any time given by larger and smaller wheels interacting out there. By looking at that, especially the larger wheels, we can have an idea about where we're going.
Before we dive into this, you could ask, "Okay, so Trifork, if we see this as a consultancy company, why do we care about R&D at all?" Well, I think our mission statement defines that very well. We want to stay ahead. We want to push boundaries always at any time. The way we do this, our R&D within Trifork, I usually say we have decentralized this 'cause the way we have organized ourselves, we have our +70 business units, we have our +20 lab companies, all in their individual markets, all with a huge surface to the world. A lot of creativity and innovation going on in these units. There's a lot of R&D happening on a daily basis, which adds up to the combined R&D pool within Trifork. Add on top of that our Inspire segment, what we do.
Add that on top of that. Let's dive in to something. Think about Microsoft Word, how it was 15 years ago. It was like a mess of tabs adding on. Someone rearranged it, and suddenly we had context-sensitive menus, toolbars, and everything. All of that is an attempt to squeeze in information on a limited 2D screen space. It's always a struggle in anything we do. What is the right information given that we have limited space? When navigating, we have our mouse, which is actually a poor excuse for navigation. We're navigating with the mouse on a flat surface, and the movements are being reflected onto the screen. Maybe you can select things, and things are happening on the screen, or you can drag and drop things.
What you really want to do drag and drop is actually you want to take something and put it somewhere else. Just like everything we do, we are limited by, well, obviously by the technology we have. We're limited by the 2D screen and the world around that. Here's a term you have heard a couple of times already, and you will be hearing that again and again in the years to come, spatial computing. As human beings, actually we are spatial by nature. Of course, we are because we live in a 3D world, and we live in the surroundings around us. The way that has evolved our brains and our senses is that they are meant to work together. They work together. The pictures we create inside our minds are actually built up by input of all senses.
We are meant to work, to act in a spatial world. Spatial computing is how to interact in the real world around us, physical environment. You're going to hear that again and again because suddenly this has become realistic now. To do true spatial computing, what we will have to do is to meld our senses and the perception of the world around us together with the way I move here, with the way I use my hands. You can see in my eyes where I have my focus. All of that needs to meld together, audio too, and in a way that doesn't even exclude the world around us with the solutions we do. Imagine if we have something here.
I have to come with the first disclaimer of the day, because I've just been talking about how limited we are with 2D screens, and now I'm going to show a 3D world on a 2D screen here. Please, I will encourage you to visit us in one of the demo rooms and try this on by yourself, because it's really hard to describe with words how the true experience actually is. Imagine if you are working with data you're using to seeing it on a coordinate system on a flat screen. What if you could actually be inside that data, look at it from the inside, how it really relates. This is a use case from a drug discovery world, and what is important here is to find the true distance measured on certain properties between some of these drug candidates.
By moving that into a 3D space, we have completely new ways of seeing the true distances and measurements inside of data here. We were so lucky. We were invited as one of the very early insiders. We were invited to work closely together with Apple before the Apple Vision Pro was even launched to the market. I'm more than proud to say that we have been able to impress Apple, and I mean Apple at all levels in the organization. We have been able to impress Apple with our ways of thinking user experience, and with that sugar on top I mentioned before. Here's a snippet from a presentation Mr. Cook did only a couple of weeks ago.
Now that it's out in the world and people are experiencing its phenomenal capabilities, we're seeing some amazing things being done with Apple Vision Pro. Porsche is building brand new spatial experiences across the company, from reimagining track experiences to training service technicians to creating their showroom of the future.
This is something we built, and I encourage you to come and experience it for yourself in one of the demo rooms. Here's another thing. This is very easy to think into any context in any industry, actually. This might be from a motorsport context, but what I really want to show here is how we can work with different ways of perceiving data, projecting it onto different models, interpreting it real-time, and presenting it in a world where screen space is not a limitation anymore. It could look like this. Imagine if you didn't have to close the entire production line to train new staff. If you could just build a copy of the production line and do your training, do your safety certifications and whatever on a digital copy of that production line. Here's an example of an industrial robot in our office in my office in Switzerland.
In your right hand on the right side of the cross.
On. It's a longer training session. Actually, I feel having been part of developing this and having tested this again and again and again, I actually feel that I would be able to operate that robot at the production line. Imagine we are going to hear the word spatial computing again and again, as I said, over the coming years. This is the first version we have. Think 15 years back to the first iPhone and where we are now, and then try to imagine where we will be with the next generation of this hardware and when competing products will start to come. In a not too distant future, we will not just think about our solutions should they be on an iPad or on a webpage. There's a new device, the solution.
What is the right media for the solution we are going to build for the customer? We need to put the word spatial computing into the equation too. Here's another term you have heard already, and you will be hearing again and again in the coming years. That is vision AI. Just as we have been able to impress Apple with, and dare I say, the number one UX company in the world, Apple, we have been able to impress them with what we do. The same way we have been able to impress the number one AI model in the company, NVIDIA, with some of our solutions. What recently required special sensors and human intervention, human eyes, has become possible with simple camera technologies now. Here's an example we made just as a demo for today. Imagine an airfield.
Imagine everything that has to take place, that has to happen from the minute the plane enters at the gate until it leaves again. Imagine all the procedures, all the checkings, all the safety things. Here's how this could look if we had a camera analyzing it. I wish my flight had been that efficient when I came here. Here's another one. This is a real-life example. Using cameras to detect defects or scratches or damages or doubtful art on wagons like this with a camera being able to identify this. I'm going to leave this as a cliffhanger here for my colleague Karan to pick it up later. Now let's think, what if we could melt spatial computing and vision AI together? That would be a whole new world opening for us, which I'm going to leave to Karan too.
Karan, I hope you're ready for the challenge. I'd like to show you something. What I have here is a full-blown computer complete with CPU, memory, flash disk, and a camera. This thing is able to run advanced AI models just on the board here with the camera. This is a vision AI device I have here. Why is that important? If you think back on the video we have of the plane, what we were trying to achieve is to see if someone forgot the pipe, from tanking the plane, or someone forgot something, or if that everything went okay, the operations around the plane. What is important here is actually the event itself. Someone is mounting the pipe, someone is releasing it again. That is the important thing, not the picture itself.
If we can keep data on the device here, we don't have to send it anywhere to analyze it. We can analyze it on the device. We free ourselves for a lot of privacy issues. Data stays on the edge. Edge has indeed been reborn. Add to that the upcoming EU AI Act, and if we are talking privacy here, we're just one step away from talking security. Talking security, this is material for a, for a complete day in itself, obviously, quantum computing. Let's just reduce it to mathematician Peter Shor showed in 1994 how easily a quantum computer, if we could build it, how easily it would be able to break public key encryption. Which basically means that if we manage to realize the quantum computer, encryption as we know today will fall apart.
Here's the scary part, this is the only prophecy that I can guarantee you will become true. All history, all experience has shown that all encryption will be broken at some point, it doesn't matter if we manage to do the quantum computer or not. All encryption will be broken. We are being exposed on a daily basis with media stories about cyber attacks and cyber this and that. Add to that if someone could steal your data today and decrypt it tomorrow, I think it pretty much tells us, gives us good arguments for being serious about security. I'm slowly wrapping up here because we're running out of time. We may not realize we may not get to a point where we realize the quantum computer. It's yet to be, well, revealed, decided, figured out.
Just the research we are doing, the way we are working with quantum principles, the research we are doing teaches us so much about the real world, and it teaches us so many way to improve things we already do, new ways of doing algorithms for things we already do, new ways of realizing hardware. It ties perfectly into a sustainability agenda. Everything we get as a positive spin-off from the quantum computing research. I will not dive into this, but sustainability is very, very high on our radar, as has been mentioned a couple of times already. Please catch us during the breaks to hear about some of the initiatives we do.
Our ideas of rethinking how we built buildings, our cooperation with the lab company N-Drip about how to actually accumulate water, waste water, rain water, until the grid is able to receive it. In all of these wheels spinning out there, I think Trifork has a sweet spot in the middle of everything. What characterizes us, well, we have our decentralized R&D through the way we have organized ourselves. We're working with cutting-edge partners defining these trends. It lies deep down in our DNA that understanding the user needs is key to what we do. User experience is key to everything we do. We have our strong global network through our Inspire segment. I think we are well-positioned. Now, what characterizes our customers? Well, our customers are typically not software companies. They have the competencies somewhere else.
They don't have this R&D software set up as we do. They don't have the same innovation power in software as Trifork does. We see that implementing GDPR is still an issue out there, and just around the corner, we will have the NIS2 coming up. We will have the EU AI Act coming. Security is a permanent issue which everyone should take seriously. As Jørn mentioned, it's always the balance between is it important and is it urgent, and is something more urgent? Security should be taken seriously out there. All the solutions we do, it's always about optimizing for sustainability or for economics. That is what we do with the technology, with what we get the spin-offs by those wheels out there.
Here comes disclaimer number two, 'cause if I was to release you now, which I am actually, but if you left the room now, you would leave the room with the understanding that Trifork is a company that does vision AI and spatial computing and security, and that is true. I also need to say that we do so much more because of this surface we have to the outer world through our business units and our labs company. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Preben. We're all confused at a higher level. A lot of opportunity, and what we're going to talk about now is execution. I learned something this morning. You probably all heard this phrase that culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? I read something else, that culture is being eaten for dinner by leadership. I think I was reflecting on that until now because I just saw it this morning. I saw it because I was booked for a meeting with someone who wrote a book about this, Back to the Books, and he canceled the meeting on me. It still helped me because I reflected on this idea. Now we're going to talk about execution, Karan. You are one of the new kids on the block.
Literally.
I will not be talking anything about your background and culture, but I'm very happy that Geeta is on our board. She's from India. You are from India?
Mm-hmm.
Half of the people in Google are from India. There's something about you and I'm happy that you are now a part of Trifork U.S. I have been a part of the journey from two white guys in a little farmhouse to now 2,000 across our labs and the Trifork segment, the more or less the 100 businesses we're talking about, and I just want you to take it to the next 1,000x. Okay? How are we going to do that? Starting from basic, we need to take everything we learned, and then we need to bring it out into the world. This picture here shows that the journey started here, but there is one interesting thing that in... Where is it, Frederik?
At some point after 2009, because I moved to Switzerland in 2009. Why did I move to Switzerland? To avoid tax or to ski or to build international market. Well, it was Preben actually, that you just heard. Him and I, we had a ski cabin on the Swiss mountain. When I asked my kids, "Dad has to go somewhere to develop Trifork," because we just listed the company in 2007, and the day after, we were hit by the financial crisis. Also back then, there were analysts, Paul, and investors that were looking at us and say, "What's your three-year plan? How does that look like?" The world just crashed.
I thought to myself, "I have to build markets where we haven't been before." Two years ago, when I could see this show coming that is now, I thought we have to do the same one more time. I met Karan. Yeah, I already met you. I mean, I already knew you from Apple. You were our partner, representative from Apple. You came to me and said, "Why don't I get a job at Trifork, and then we really execute." I said, "Will it not make Apple upset?" That was my main concern. You said, "No, we'll help them." "Okay, then we do it." A short period after I moved to Switzerland, by some magic, most of the market, the revenue came from outside Denmark.
We did do a lot of M&As in Denmark, now Denmark is the biggest again. We have to do the same one more time. In not too distant the future, the U.S. market for Trifork should be bigger than the rest of Trifork, right?
100%.
Good. so that's fast-forwarding, and it stands with Spantree and you and a few customers, and we're going to talk about them now, and I think you can start coming in here in the picture.
Yeah. It's been a wonderful ride and I'll kind of go through some of my slides later on. I think everybody knows the promised land of United States, right? It's the biggest technology market out there. We think we are at a very unique sweet spot of really creating an opportunity just not for Trifork, but for our customers as well. The way we do things, and I hope that kind of what you've shared so far gives you a perspective on that, is being really received well by the customers that we are speaking with and we are just getting started.
I finished two year, one year at the company in two days. Literally Morten I joined within weeks of each other. We are just taking our first initial steps of delivering huge transformation outcomes for our customers, embarking on these massive technology transitions that we've seen with spatial computing and with vision AI. We'll talk about why these two. Specifically. Couldn't be more excited about what we have in front of us.
This is what you have. This is what we give you. Here's our capabilities. Go talk to some Americans. Here are so our products and components, and with the blues and the greens, you have your play field, and it is just, connect with someone on LinkedIn, and go do it.
It's just like a customer. Lego blocks, right?
Yeah. Here was how it looked in Europe. Now we're doing a teaching session here, you know. You can do the same in the U.S. Here is a very complicated map on how, you know, we did the invasion of different countries and there's arrows and Francesco is here. By Francesco coming into the crew, we were all of a sudden in U.K. , in Stockholm, in Budapest, in Kraków. We love these business units. They give diversity, they give new ideas, they give new capabilities. Spain, one of my favorite countries, Mallorca, might not be the most obvious place to have an office, but I invite you everyone to come and visit.
It's a wonderful office. We actually have some of our best minds there for not only vision AI, but also vision Pro. You might not think that, but they are not all just at the beach. Actually, people who are born and raised on Mallorca, they actually don't wanna leave. Typically, their hobby and their work is the same thing. It's computer science, and as you know, a good Spaniard stays home until they are more than 30. Why? Why get your own place if mom is cooking?
So many of them have been trained at university around the world, California, many other places, but also Barcelona. They come, they go back. I figured out that we are probably the most interesting workplace if you are a computer scientist on Mallorca, because the rest are travel agencies, big companies, hotel groups, et cetera. How are you going to draw the arrows here?
All right. Let me give it a shot.
Okay.
All right. Jørn is always a hard act to follow because you don't know what's coming. I had no idea he's gonna call me on that slide, so like what is he doing? I guess I have my talk track from the slides on. Why am I here? I think one theory is I could not go to a bigger company. There was no bigger company after Apple, so I had to come down to a smaller company. There is a theme here. I've worked in enterprise technology all my life. Started with the most complex SAP, right?
Then kind of when you understand the guts of how the enterprises work and how the workflows operate, and then you work for a company that delivers the most unbelievable experience, and you focus on how that might work in an enterprise world, you have a good understanding of the entire stack, if you will. In my conversations with lots of partners, and I dealt with hundreds of partners in my time at Apple, Trifork stood out as a company that was a perfect last mile partner for its customers. That was my kind of belief in the company, that if there is a company that does this well, exceedingly well, not just in Europe, but globally, it was Trifork. That was my kind of easy decision of actually joining Trifork.
I think I already covered this slide, but it's not just What I saw from an Apple as I was talking to Trifork was just the Apple and the experience side of things, but I think there's a lot more to it. It's an absolutely unbelievable talent pool. It's the leadership and innovation. Preben talked about spatial computing. We have heard from Apple at all levels that we are probably one of the top two or three spatial computing partners that they have right now. This kind of gives us a lot of confidence that not only are we building for today, but we are also getting set up to scale for tomorrow. What is our U.S. strategy?
My belief is that if you're all things to all people or if you're all technologies to all customer, you probably do not have a message. We at Trifork do a lot of things, and for us to actually break into a new market, you have to be hyper-focused into what that marketing, what that message is. We know it's AI and spatial computing at the core. We actually love the fact that the analyst community doesn't like the Apple Vision Pro, because that gives us a headstart and an advantage of building enterprise solutions that nobody else can build. When we hear negative stories about spatial computing, we are just delighted because that allows us more room and kind of reduces the competition that we potentially have.
AI is gonna be all around us, right? you know, you hear a lot about generative AI. There is a lot of hype cycle around generative AI. There's a reason we have not specifically spoken about gen AI, because again, we think it's all about focus. If you just look at the world within AI itself, I think vision AI will be massively important for all customers, especially industrial customers. Imagine a world where you haven't converted what you're looking at into data, and the moment you convert that into data, you can make unbelievable things possible. We'll run you through an example of how vision AI, when combined with spatial computing, can actually fundamentally change how things work. All right. This is not a guidance. This is not my forecast. Just to be clear.
It would need to be higher, right? Yeah.
We've been, you know, starting off a low base in the U.S. and we've kind of steadily kind of gotten ourselves to a point where we have some form of foundation. With Cedric and Spantree coming on board, we have some really unbelievable talent that can build and create platforms for our customers in the most complex of scenarios. We believe that in the next couple of years, we can be the second largest market for Trifork, just purely from a revenue perspective, right? If we are being conservative.
We also believe that if we look at our trends of how we've gone into other markets over the last, you know, decade or so, we think we can easily, over the next 10 years, we can be a 5x to 10x revenue in the, in the United States. That's, that's what gets us super excited. This is not actually counting the fact that we are in the perfect intersection of the new S-curve forming from a technology perspective. It was probably 2008 when all these technologies were coming together, the mobile and the cloud piece, and 15 years later, we are at a place where AI, spatial computing are really coming together in a way that's going to really change the landscape for technology might look like, and we are in a perfect spot there.
Preben gave you a quick insight into this particular customer, GATX. I still remember we had a conversation with them on a rainy day in August of last year, Jørn and I, and we proposed. We said, "We want to be a partner. We don't expect anything right now, but we want to earn our stripes and our credibility, and we want to do a ride-along with you. We really want to understand how your users work and operate, and we want to come back with solutions and ideas that might impress you." Would you give us the opportunity to actually go at your maintenance yards and understand how you do your work and perhaps come up with ideas that might impress you? We did that.
Well, we spent couple of days at their maintenance facility in the middle of Texas, really understood what they how they do work and came up with some ideas. Essentially what we are now creating is a digital. We're doing many things, but one of the core things we are doing, we are creating a digital twin of their car. Imagine this company that has 150,000 rail cars that they lease to their customers. Every car is a certain number of dollars per day of revenue, and these cars have to come in for maintenance. Every time the car comes in for maintenance, it's not generating revenue.
Maybe can I also just wanna break in here because you probably, those of you who actually read the news, the Ohio incident was not just a small one. It's probably going to cost not only people's health, the companies involved way more than $1 billion. These kind of companies are scared about these things because they need to document how they maintain. Because in that case, it was one of the wheel bearings that was not properly maintained-
Yeah
... and derailed and caused a catastrophe.
Yeah. We still remember, one of our customers said this, and this is actually perfect. They said, "We are information rich, knowledge poor." That is probably true of almost all our customers, or of all the enterprise companies all over the world, because they could always do more with, better with knowledge. That's probably this, the scenario that we're laying out here in terms of how exactly this digital car might play out. You saw this, so I'll skip through this. But imagine that you've created a digital twin of the car using vision AI. Then the next question we asked was: How would we render that digital twin in a 3D format on the, on the Apple Vision Pro? Please, when you go through our demo, please see this demo as well.
We showed this to the COO and he says, "Just give me this. I don't need anything else. If I can reduce information asymmetry between my engineer in Chicago and my inspector in Texas, you had me. This solves 90% of my problems." I said, "Well, we haven't talked AI yet. We haven't really annotated this with dents and defects and other things." Just to give you an idea, when we started this project, we had no idea we could even do this. Spatial computing, Apple Vision Pro was still not there. We were of course doing this. We kind of kept you know, thinking through what this might look like, and we came up with an idea that has, you know, customers super impressed and we have, we hopefully have a customer for life.
What does this mean for us, right? If you think about our world, if you think about any technology, you can easily kind of slice that into three layers, right? At the core is your foundational platform work, the platform engineering work. When you have built these strong core systems and, you know, scalable systems, you actually can write applications on top of it. Of course, the, you know, whatever you write, someone has to use it, and hopefully you're delivering a better experience for that end user. As we go through these slices of platform application and experience, we think we are uniquely situated between our partnerships with NVIDIA, with SAP, with Apple, and a lot more technology that comes along in the platform world that gets us to a point where we have a very strong standing.
Just changing gears a little bit, you might be asking as an analyst, "Okay, why are these guys so interested in spatial computing? We have never heard about it. It's a term that was coined six months ago or maybe nine months ago." We might have heard of the term VR, AR, VR, XR, right? Unfortunately, those term don't do justice to what we think spatial computing really is because that came from the realm of gaming, right? But if you take gaming out for that particular world and just focus on the software part of it, this is a massively growing market.
Imagine growing from a low base right here that actually could take you, that take, you know, with the growth of 30%, and with the positioning we have with Apple at this time, we think we could take fair bit of share, at least in European and North American markets. Hopefully larger segments and geographies over the course of the years. That's what gets us excited, right? Not only our belief as technologists that it's relevant, but as what we hear from analysts as well, makes it absolutely the ideal one. Again, we've already spoken about Spantree. We could not be more excited about Cedric joining us. If you haven't met him, you know, just say hello and get to know more about him and his team.
Absolutely unbelievable, engineers and you know, team members who focus on customer outcomes, and I think we are just getting started. This is just the beginning for us. I think that's the last slide. Yeah. No questions, right, Frederik? No questions. We'll take Q&A later, but let's take a break, get you on the Vision Pro and get some coffee in your system as well.
Okay. I think we're ready to go once again. My name is Kristian. I'm CFO in Trifork. Now I'll take you through the last couple of years, since the IPO and how things has developed. Jørn already revealed some of the information that I will also go through, and then I will go a little bit more in details. I will also look into the future, in relation to our investments and how we have our strategy of investments and how to allocate capital. First part here is really how we see the growth, the inorganic part of growth in the company, plus that we're looking into our investments into Trifork Labs. Overall, if we're looking into capital allocation, we have five main areas. We have organic growth, we have M&A, net debt management, Trifork Labs, and shareholder distribution.
I'll walk through more details in each of these areas, but what we have talked about until now is primarily related to organic growth. Organic growth being the first priority in relation to our business development, meaning we invest in talent, we invest in workforce, we invest in locations, we invest also in components, product development that we use when we build the solutions to our customers. M&A, I'll dive into that a little later. Net debt management is also, you know, part of the top three priorities in the way we allocate capital. Looking over the three last years, in total, we have invested EUR 44 million in M&A. We have partly financed through debt financing, of EUR 23 million, and we have invested EUR 21 million in Trifork Labs.
Just for you to get the picture of how big are the different investments in relation to M&A versus Labs, et cetera. I'll come back to the larger and smaller components in each one of them. Also we paid out EUR 24 million in dividend to our shareholders, so we hope they're happy for that. Looking into M&A, as Jørn showed you on one of the first slides, we have M&A as a natural part of our business development. If we look back historically, just about one-third of revenue growth has been inorganically, so coming from M&A, where we found new partners to be part of the Trifork ecosystem.
The way M&A plays into the overall growth and the target for growth midterm, the 15%-25%, is that we guide on or we have the target of 10%-15% organic growth and remaining part being inorganic. As you see here, one-third, as I said before. What we've seen is that and what we've talked into in the many last quarterly presentations throughout 2021-2022 and also 2023, especially 2022, 2023, is that it's been a hard environment to invest in, to get new partners into the Trifork ecosystem.
The valuations of companies in 2021, 2022 was extremely high, and we only did a few investments in relation to new companies to join the Trifork Group when we found the right match in between the companies and the valuations. What we see right now is an environment where there's more consent in between the company valuations of new companies and the price that we think is the right price as well to invest in the companies. We do see an improved environment for doing more M&As in the future compared to 2021, 2022. The companies that we have invested in in the last three years, account in all to 28% of the growth in the Trifork Group. The number of transactions we have made is 11. That's including also NCI acquisition.
That is also a natural part of the Trifork Group. Since you could say new companies and discussing relations and of new companies and agreeing to that has been a little harder in the period that we're talking about here, it made more sense to us actually to also acquire NCIs in existing companies, meaning it doesn't bring in additional growth, inorganic growth, but it does consolidate when looking into the profits belonging to the shareholders in Trifork. In the period, the key numbers in relation to the new acquisitions is what you see here with multiples on revenue, EBITDA and EBIT. That's the range that we have acquired new companies into the Trifork Group. When we do investments, we have what you see here different ways to finance the acquisitions.
It's a free cash flow in the Trifork Group. I'll come back to that. It's treasury shares as part of payment, because when we acquire, it's not only to, you know, get a new company in, but it's just as much that we also embrace the founders coming from those companies to be part of the Trifork Group. This we can do by also adding them as shareholders in the group. We have been financing through proceeds from Labs exits as well. I'll also go through that in a little later. At the IPO, we did a capital increase of 5%, so part of the financing also came from that part. Bank financing is the last part.
When we're looking into companies, new companies to join the Trifork Group, we look into this from a, you could say, an ideal target. When looking into this, what we would like to join into the Trifork Group is really when we see a company that leans out, creates mission-critical solutions, that is a front runner within a niche area. Then we believe that they would have, they will have knowledge, they will have deliveries that companies need even if we are in a downturn period. We also look into the strategic match with the existing business areas in the Trifork Group.
We are looking to the capabilities that they have in the company, meaning that either it could be to extend capabilities that we already have in the group, but maybe in a different geographical region, or it could be that it's new competencies that we don't have but we need because we can see what the customers are asking from us in relation to the solutions that we need to develop. It's something new. We can add those capabilities into the Trifork Group. It's very important that we have a cultural match, that the DNA, the way that we operate in Trifork is also met in those new companies adding to the group.
One part of that is that what Jørn talked into earlier is really related also to the size of companies and how they operate, because the business units that we have in order to create, to keep the creativity and the innovation in our business units, we believe they have to be small. If we do any larger acquisitions, then it would always be when we have identified that the business actually can be divided into smaller business units. 100 people, most likely that will fit into three different business units when we do M&A. When we identify the targets and say, "Okay, I mean, here we really believe we have something, really see a match here," what do we then do?
We look into the track record of the companies and match that with our future ambitions, match that with our synergies, potential synergies that we see from this new company joining into the group. We typically will not look into companies where we have a founder that actually wanna exit, they wanna leave the company, because this is really not in our DNA. What we would like to do is join founders, just like Cedric. Super happy for him to be here today. I don't know where he is, but. Oh, over there. Yeah. Super happy for him to be here today because that's exactly what we would like to do. We would like to form new partnerships with new companies that bring in more energy, more new learning into the group.
It's really about for Trifork that we create a home for the founders to be in a larger ecosystem and to exploit what we already have in the Trifork Group and to feel at home, you could say. We'd like the energy from the founders to be released in the Trifork Group, so to say. What we do is actually that we initially most often only acquire 60%-70%. Because we still want everybody to have kind of like blood in the game in initial phase, but then when we get to know each other a little more, then maybe it's not so important anymore, because maybe a founder will find a replacement for himself and move on to do something else in the Trifork Group.
That's the time where we then acquire more minorities typically in those investments, and that's the way we think and the way we act in relation to this. Overall, we believe that both founders, sellers of the companies, when joining into Trifork Group will have an opportunity actually to gain value as well as Trifork has an opportunity to gain value being a larger company and a listed company. Now I will introduce you to one of the very early companies that joined the Trifork Group back in 2011. We have Francesco here. I said 2011 is a long time ago. Francesco was the founder of the company. He is still around, and we're super happy for that. Maybe Francesco, if you can take the word from here.
Yeah, thanks.
Here.
Right. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Francesco, the founder and technical director of Erlang Solutions. I can't say I founded the company in a farmhouse because there were no farmhouses in central London. I didn't found it in a garage either because I didn't have a driver's license at the time. I ended up founding it in my bedroom because, yeah, room space is so expensive in London. And, you know, the year was 99. I slowly kind of then, you know, brought on a business partner, and in, you know, 2008, we saw the financial crisis arrive, and we decided to sail the ship straight into the storm, literally.
We ran an event in Palo Alto, in California, where, you know, we found a lot of new customers. We did so by maxing out our private credit cards because the banks wouldn't give us any credit, and really came out of it strong. It was, I think, 2011 when my former business partner decided that it was time for him to move on and find new challenges. He decided to sell and, you know, Trifork was the perfect partner to come in and acquire us. In fact, you know, I think there was a slide where there was a little orange person standing on a stage. That's how we came in contact with Trifork.
I was one of the subject matter experts speaking at conferences organized by Trifork, and that's how we got to know each other. You know, there was a perfect match, and, you know, and a perfect DNA, and we complemented each other, very, very well. Today, I think, you know, we're a total of six business units. They're spread across Europe and in the Americas. Five are running under the Erlang Solutions brand, plus, you know, we've got a sixth business unit called Seventh State, which I'm gonna talk about a little bit later. You know, I think a lot has to be said about the pandemic, but the pandemic was really good to us. It forced us to become a remote first company and, well, a remote company.
I think it forced everyone who had that ability, you know, to start working remotely. In our particular case, you know, we took the decision early on to keep on being remote even after the pandemic. I think we took this decision in the management team in August of, you know, 2020. I remember I'd fled London from Italy, who was taking, you know, COVID a bit more seriously. Obviously, we had no childcare. We'd, I was taking, you know, the management call by the Trasimeno Lake, in Umbria, where we were working from.
The CEO at the time asked, "Should we remain remote even after the pandemic?" Pretty much everyone said, "Yes, absolutely." Being remote has really helped us because our biggest challenge was staff acquisition and staff retention. By becoming remote, all of a sudden the world basically was, you know, became possible to hire people anywhere. In fact, if we look at it today, we're 134 permanent employees plus, you know, give or take, you know, we've got a large pool of subcontractors which we take on board. We've got 23 nationalities living in 25 countries. We have even people working in Japan, you know, cut out of the map here.
Not only that, our staff attrition rate as a result of it is now down to 6%, which is something I'd never experienced. By being able to recruit people during the pandemic, you know, it had taken us, you know, 20 years to reach the state where we were. In 18 months, we were able to double in size, you know, we were able to increase our margins because we didn't have a lot of the overheads. Staff attrition, yeah, really went, you know, took a nosedive, which in this particular case is a good thing, to 6%. You know, it was an incredibly rapid expansion when becoming remote. It also helped that the fact or the fact that we work with backend infrastructure.
What we do is, you know, Preben, you know, was talking about the visual surface. Julie was talking about the user experience. What we do is everything which doesn't have to do with the user experience or the visual surface. We do. Basically, what they're talking about is the tip of the iceberg. We work with the software which is under. It's the software which feeds, you know, the Apple Vision Pro all of the data. It's a software which, you know, gets all of the telemetry or all of the data from the diabetics and pushes it to a database, which is then used to serve the data, you know, to, you know, good-looking applications on the iPad. We're almost a kind of the unsung heroes. No one knows that the software we've written is there until it fails.
At that point, yes, that's when everyone starts pointing fingers. The good thing is, you know, we've taken inspiration from, you know, the good old telecom world. We're using a programming language which was developed to build telephony switches. What's a telephony switch? Well, you pick up a phone, you'll always hear the two on the other end. You know, think New Year's Eve in the 1980s and 1990s, at midnight, millions of people picked up the phone and called each other at the same time to wish each other Happy New Year. Your phone call got switched, it got through, even though there's a huge surge. This was the 1980s and the 1990s. Using those ideas and using those concepts, you know, pretty much, you know, any system connected to the internet today has to display those characteristics.
We take those ideas and concepts and apply them to kind of fintech, to blockchain, digital health, IoT, e-commerce, messaging, and many, many other solutions. As an example, you know, when WhatsApp When it was still a small company, they still didn't even have an office, but they were expanding incredibly rapidly. They called us because they were having downtime issues. Mastercard, you know, Vocalink, we helped them implement a faster payment switch, which switches, which allow you to make instant payments from one bank to another. You know, remember the days where it took, you know, three, four days to do. Klarna, you know, pay me later service, which is now a bank. Again, a lot of checks, you know, going in, you know, is this fraud? Wat's the credit rating?
Off they go. T-Mobile, we, you know, built their whole SMS gateway, which, you know, got in massive of SMSs in very short periods of time when you had TV shows. take, you know, Grindr, we did their whole, their whole messaging solution. There were millions of messages being sent every day. I think what all of these systems have in common is that you're switching phone calls, you're switching SMSs, you're switching video streams, you're switching, stocks, you're switching money. The business logic is still the same, and it's exactly the same concepts and ideas. You know, what changes are the requirements of speed. If you're switching stocks, you need to be very, very fast. You're switching money, you need to be fast, but not as fast as a stock.
You're switching, you know, a WhatsApp message. Yeah, it's okay if there's a few seconds lag. You know, so that's what we do. If we look at, you know, where we are with the future, I think our largest expansion, you know, post-COVID, has been in the U.S. We've got an amazing Americas team, you know, spread across Canada, the U.S, Mexico, and all of Central and South America. You know, they've mainly been working with digital health and e-commerce. We've been building, you know, massive e-commerce sites for our customers. Looking at the future right there, what we're doing is we're building kind of the convergence of IoT and machine learning. How do we pair the two together to start building, I think, many of the systems we've heard about today?
We, you know, as a company, we also are spinning off brands and products. I mentioned Seventh State. What they do is they're a messaging bus. They're a glue between systems which allow you to integrate systems which are not necessarily compatible with each other. They basically are at the core of these systems. We've spun it out. We're telling them, "Grow up, leave home. It's time for you, yeah, to get your own life." You know, we believe that this expansion will help them grow much faster. We've got a lot of internal products as well, which, you know, security scans of codes, monitoring tools. We've got our own messaging server.
You know, all of these products here we've built for our customers, but we've retained IPR, so we're able to go in and reuse it where possible. Again, you know, when the opportunity arises, you know, we'll be asking them to move away from home. You know, just like the rest of the Trifork Group, we're expanding organically and, you know, through mergers and acquisitions. You know, one of my, for example, primary tasks right now is to try to get a business unit off the ground now in the DACH region, so Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. You know, focusing again on what we do. Yeah, so this is us. You know, just to wrap up with events. Events are also here at the core of what we do, just like Trifork, just like we heard Jørn earlier today.
It's basically what drives innovation, you know, kind of market intelligence, but it's also a way for us to showcase to our customers, I think, all of the work we do. Yeah, that's us. Yeah, I think 21 years... No, sorry, 30 years on after having founded the company After, yeah, 12 years within the Trifork Group, I think, yeah, I think we're still seeing ahead because, you know, there's so much more work which needs to be done. Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks.
We hope that you stay on for many more years to come.
We've g ot work to do.
So know you've heard the story from one of the companies joining Trifork. I hope that Cedric, maybe next time you can tell your story, how it was to join the Trifork family and be part of what we do and maybe you will, you know, be somewhere else in the organization. I don't know. Let's see. Okay. Now we kind of like looked into the first thing in relation to M&A, and of course, I'm the financial guy, so I have to talk into numbers as well. I will do that. Now, I'll focus a little bit in relation to Trifork Labs. As you know already, we have the two segments in Trifork, the Trifork segment and the Trifork Labs segment
As we talked about until now in the Trifork segment, we really focus on have a stable growth, solid margins, and have control of the business to minimize risk. Organic growth focus primarily, but also some inorganic as we just talked about. In relation to Trifork Labs, what are we focusing on there is what Preben talked into. It's R&D. It's this combination in between the Inspire that we have in Trifork, plus the R&D in Trifork Labs, R&D coming inside of Trifork as well. This part of our R&D is not only financed by Trifork, but it's also financed by other external investors.
This is where we see, you know, opportunities to create companies, products that actually has a potential of high growth, that can scale up fast, but maybe don't earn as much money in the beginning, so you have to invest. This is why we from Trifork don't wanna do that investment internally in the Trifork segment, but actually want other investors to join us in increasing the valuation of those companies. I'll talk into if this is a good idea or not. One thing, of course, is the all what we get in relation to the R&D part, and this I can say for sure, that's a good idea. We talked a lot into this until now, but I'll also look into, of course, the financials of this. Is this a cost center? Is this actually good?
When you look into the financial reporting from Trifork, then you see us reporting in many different ways. We try because, I mean, this is a hard material to grasp. It really takes a lot of explanation. We always talk a lot about this, and today, I think I will give it a little more flavor so that maybe you see more the idea we have around this a little more today. We present this in many different ways. I'll walk through three or four ways to look at this, and then you can make your own considerations into this and see if you think it's a good idea as well. We group our investments into whether it's strategic collaborations, if it's product innovation, if it's digital sustainability or technology inspiration.
We focus on these four areas when we're looking into different Labs investment, or it's all related to Trifork being at the forefront of innovation. Another way we show this is that we also focus on the synergies of the investments that we do in Trifork Labs into the rest of the Trifork core segment. This is why we here map Inspire, build, run our go-to-market model with the business areas that we have in Trifork. We already talked into these and see how does those companies that we're invested in, how do they match into this map. What we also explained when talking about these companies, these investments, is where are they in the growth journey? How mature are they as companies? When did we invest? When did we start the investment?
What is the status right now in the companies? Some companies, you know, of course, you can see self-funded. That might not tell you a lot because then it could be anything from just started to a company that is actually, you know, a bigger company. With these different dimensions that we try to give you, and place the investments into those dimensions, it could give you a more clear picture on what kind of company is one or the other. We also disclose here the 10 largest companies in relation to book value. When we report about top 10 investments, then it's not related to how interesting they are necessarily, but it's the book value that we have in the Trifork Group.
As what we see here is that the top five is actually 73% of all book value, meaning that if you have limited resource of time, what you should do is then look into the top five companies. They are not prioritized in value here, but are alphabetical. If you have even more time, then you can deep dive a little more into six to 10 to investigate a little more into those companies. All, you only have 7.7% left, and maybe it's not so important to focus on that unless there's, you know, a particular new investment that you think this one is, you know, hitting a technology that will be the one for the future. Of course, then you should look into that. We provide some additional information with the color coding here.
You see by all the different investments. The ones with the dark orange, that's companies that are profitable, been profitable for more than two years and pays out dividend to Trifork. That's the more mature companies, solid companies, with a good profitability. We have the yellow ones. They are companies with a, with a solid investor base where we have the funding for new investment rounds if needed already within the existing, investors in the companies. We have, others, which has funding for at least 12 months or where we need to do a new investment round, funding round for the companies, within the next 12 months.
That's in order to give you an idea how solid are those companies that we report on and what kind of, how do we see those companies in relation to risk, if you look into that as well, and to see if there could be a potential capital increase in companies, et cetera. Here, just to show you, we are working with a lot of international investment funds when you could say at the later stages in the companies that we invested in. We have a solid network of investors that we tend to work together with for more than one investment. We always go back when we have a success and then try it again one more time. Looking into the different top 10 customers, sorry, investments.
I mean, we cannot disclose information related to individual investments, but what we can disclose is the total revenue from all the different investments that we invested in. In the top 10 here, you see that in 2023, all revenue was EUR 72 million in the top, in total in the top 10 companies. Of course, we don't own 100% of this, so none of that revenue is consolidated into Trifork Group. This is just for your information to have a look, say, "Okay, I mean, how solid is this portfolio of, of investments in these companies?" We also see here is that actually the revenue grew 46% last year from 2022 to 2023 in the same 10 companies.
That's why we say, "Okay, these investments are high growth and focus on high growth and not necessarily in relation to profit margins." If we take our ratio of ownership to the companies and say, "Okay, but how much, if we consolidate that, would actually then be part of Trifork?" We have some small numbers, of course, because we don't own everything, and we see that the average increase is 33%. Still a very nice increase in size of business. Looking into profitability, and this is maybe even more interesting because, as I said, I would not necessarily expect this to be a profit. Maybe it will still be cost and burning money.
What we have worked with the companies on for the last two or two and a half years, is really, you know, there was a frozen zone in relation to investment from capital funds into early-stage companies. We advised all the co-companies and worked with them in relation to find a way to have, you know, have a high growth target budget forecast, but also a more sustainable forecast. We actually advised them to maybe hold back a little bit but then have a way to get profitable. All what we saw then here is the development from 2022 to 2023 is actually from having a minus of EUR 1.2 million, it actually came to a profit of EUR 9.9 million in 2023 in those companies.
Said once again, unfortunately, we don't own all of the companies 100%, when looking into our ratio of ownership in the different companies, we came from a -1.5 to a +0.2 in the companies. From my point of view, I mean, I'm happy with that development in the companies showing that actually they were able to leverage or to level out and, be able to support themselves for a longer run rate. Here's really a busy table, what this table show is actually all what I just explained. It has all the information on the 3 different slides, just in one table here. This we use in our financial reporting, you can always go in there, and you can see why did Trifork invest.
Was that because of a strategic collaboration, technology inspiration, product innovation or digital sustainability? What business areas is this supporting? When did we enter into the company? How much do we own? What stage is the company at? Also here, when talking about valuations and the book value, when was that changed the last time? You gotta get a lot of information in this table. As you also see here, I will talk into the method that we use in the book value valuation in our financials. You have a link to the different companies' own webpages where you can get even more information. It's just all about deep diving into this table and then look into top five, potentially top ten, then you get a lot more information.
The way that we approach valuations is two ways. We're looking into the companies if they are profitable or not. As said, if they're profitable and have been profitable for more than two years, they start paying out dividend, then we switch to a DCF model valuation of the companies based on the latest forecast, the actual results, et cetera. Then together with our auditors, we approve a valuation for the individual companies. The companies where they are not yet profitable, then we do reassessments. If the value is to go up in our books, then there has to be an external financing round where a new lead investor or lead investor which is external from Trifork is taking the majority part and is putting the price tag on the company.
That said, we still would like to say that we are conservative, meaning that if we have a company that did not have a financing round in a period but do not follow the expectations that we have in relation to the budget forecast or development, then we would assess and make a risk assessment of that company and see if we need to write down some of the value even if we haven't had any new investment round. This we would then do and do some impairment if we believe that they are not following the track that we expect them to follow. Here's some more information, more in relation to... You can see it's not that we just, you know, have one pile of money that we put into every investment.
It's actually, it's quite different compared to what kind of investment that we go into. As you can imagine, then if you go in very early in a company and invest in a technology, then maybe the ticket size is not so high. If you go in later, then the ticket size might be higher. For some reasons, we could say we would also like sometimes to go in higher ticket sizes when it's potentially strategic partnerships, where Trifork not only is investing into a technology but also see the value of that technology of bringing into Trifork could be a collaboration with a customer of Trifork, where we together build technology that the customer would use himself, but also would be sold to other companies.
What you see here is that it ranges from almost EUR 5 million and down to almost nothing when you start a new company. Average is EUR 0.9 million, but as said, average in this case is very, very different from investment to investment. As I said before, we have seen in an investor or a venture capital environment for the last two years where it's been more or less frozen in relation to get interest into new companies. If we're looking back in time and if we look at the technologies that we invest in, then we believe there is a time for every technology, and it's also important that you maybe leave some of the technologies behind when we are going on to the next step.
Based on that, it's very natural for Trifork at some point to move out of a investment and continue with something else. It's a natural process for us actually to have exits. Sometimes it could be exit whole investment in one go, or it can be a, you could say, partly exit over a period of time. Of course, as Jørn is always teasing me with the analysis, so I need to have those socks, Jørn. Of course, I mean, that's because we decided we didn't wanna continue in this space. It was a little too much sunglasses and beard, but now I'm always there, almost there. It's...
Of course, we need to exit when we find that this is the right thing to do. Yeah. What is going on in the future? I mean, what we see right now is more appetite in the, in the, in the investment environment of venture capital. We do see opportunities. The last two years didn't see a lot of external financing round, so that's also what you have to have in mind when looking into the book value of course. But, but we see more interest inbound. Are looking into some of the companies that we are invested in, et cetera. And we do believe that, within the next two to three years, most likely we'll see an exit or two or partly exits in this space.
Now back to the financial part of this, because I promised you to look a little bit deeper into this. Looking at the book value, the EUR 71.2 million, that's up to here. That's the book value in Trifork. This is orchestrated by cash investments. That's the EUR 17.8. It's the investment from unrealized gains from deconsolidation. One of those investments is coming up here and presenting about the company very shortly. That's when we grow a business unit inside of Trifork, which is consolidated. We find out together with the co-founders that actually maybe by adding additional capital to this business unit, they could grow even faster. They can go even grow even more value.
We will support that, and then we deconsolidate it. Of course, in the Trifork core business, then so-suddenly we take some revenue out of the core, and then it makes, you know, our life harder in order to meet the revenue targets and the growth targets. We believe in these cases, and the reason because we do it, is that we believe we can generate even more value in this accelerated growth path. That's why we do it. Overall, you could say we're thinking about the shareholder of Trifork and say, "Okay, but how do we grow the biggest value possible here?" If we kept to analysis, then maybe I would not have to explain too much. But, unfortunately, we didn't.
What you also see here is then the light blue here is then the increase in valuations based on the current investments that we have, which is unrealized still. That's how you should read this graph here. We do this update in all our financial reportings so that you always can follow up on, okay, but actually, how did we do? Did we do any exits, receive dividends, et cetera? How is that going on? I just learned a new word, value to paid-in capital.
I mean, we didn't focus so much about that, since you're a lot of analysts here today, we also wanted to see or show this and say, "Okay, but actually, are we doing good or bad, or how we're doing?" I mean, we are primarily focused on the R&D that we create and the synergies, et cetera. Of course, we also wanna do value creation as much as possible for the capital that we invest. If we look back from 2017, I would say this two-segment strategy of Trifork started back in 2016. That's why we don't go back any further. If we look back there, on average, we invested EUR 3.7 million a year.
Net gain in average is then from the business units deconsolidated here is from the unrealized gains, and then it's for the realized gains. Looking back in average over this period, we actually 4.1x the investment that we did when looking into value to paid-in capital, TVPI. I asked Frederik, I mean, is that a good or bad number? Where are we? Then he looked into a lot of different sources and said, "Well, actually, this is in top 5% when looking into U.S. and European VC funds." I mean, I'm happy to have that number. Now I can share it with you. Of course, these are all numbers in this way.
If you have another way of doing your math, then maybe you'll come up with another number. This is when we compare things in this way. Not only it's the, you could say, the realized gains, because realized gains in our lab business means that it's cash that we get in hand. Cash that we can reconvert back into M&A or to pay out as dividend to our investors or to bring into new lab investment. It's also, you could say, the net profits every year, which is impacted by what we do in our lab segment. All it costs roughly about EUR 2 million for us to run the organization behind all of this and to orchestrate all the investments and coach and be part of the investments, et cetera, roughly EUR 2 million a year.
That is reported on EBITDA minus you see on our Trifork Labs reporting. In average year, the profits from those investments, they come in on EBT, meaning that if you look into EBT, then you see these results over the years. An average of close to EUR 10 million over the same period on EBT. Now I will hand over the word to Alexander. Alexander is from Dawn Health, which initially was a business unit created inside of Trifork. Some years back, we then decided that we needed to do an even more accelerated growth journey together. Other investors came in, now I'm very excited to hear where you are right now and how things are.
Thank you, Kristian. Okay. My name is Alexander. I'm co-CEO of Dawn Health. If you look through the window, you can see our office is right on the other side of the dock. We have blocked our view a little bit by Bjarke Ingels, but otherwise we are very close, also physically to Trifork, now with the latest move they made here. I will speak a little bit about what we are as a company today, also how we have worked together with Trifork and give some showcases as to some of the technology that we built. If we look at the company from a helicopter perspective, you can see that as Kristian also alluded to, we were founded in 2016.
Actually, we were founded together with Trifork as the majority owner back then. We work in digital health, which I will dive a little bit more into exactly what it is because it's different from the digital health solutions that Trifork do in the core of their business. We have a mission statement which is "Code to save lives." We do this by having a focus on patients globally. We work primarily with private life science companies, being the larger pharma companies of the world and the larger med techs.
In the large market of digital health, you can say that if we divide it into two overall functions, being what is digital solutions, that could be consumer products that are unregulated, all the way to the very, very heavy DTX and software as a medical device solutions, we can span end to end in this market. This is what make us unique in Dawn Health. I will get a lot more into that. Over the years, we have launched products in over 20 therapeutic areas. We have launched in over 50 different markets. Our ambition to impact patients on a global scale has so far held true.
The reason why we work with global pharma is that when we make solutions for patients or for HCPs over the world, it's really important to us that when we solve the problems, we solve them on a global scale because a diabetic in Denmark will have the same kind of problems as a diabetic in Germany. We want to make the solutions work on a global scale, and this is why we work with global pharma. They have the innovation drive, and they have the global reach to make the products span globally. In 2021, we agreed with Trifork that we wanted to move out of being a consultancy business and wanting to be more of a platform and you can say an enterprise or software provider to our pharma companies.
The reason why we did this is because, as some of you may know, a lot of the digital health products that are born within pharma companies, they fail, at least within the private, life science industry. We wanted to help in a much bigger way than just building the code, bespoke. This is the reason why we initiated a funding round where we raised a little over EUR 23 million. What we want to do with this money is build out our platform. We want to increase our capability in the regulated space. When we work with SaMD, maybe just to double down on what that actually is when we have software that take part of the doctor's, you can say role towards the patient.
Some of you may already know this, sorry, to repeat the message then, when we look at software as a medical device, either under MDR in Europe or under FDA in the U.S. or other regulations that we may have, we look at software that can either be triaging the patient's drug dependent on, you can say, information you get out of a connected device. It could be diagnostics, data collection and so on, that are critical to identifying the disease of the patient. What we want to do with the software that we build is drive behavior change in the real world.
For patients and also for the pharma companies to utilize the values of the drugs they build because it's no secret that a lot of the drugs that are being built today or, sorry, developed today by the pharma companies, they never really seize the same potential in the real world as they do in the clinical trial because the clinical trial is a closed setting, you can say. We want to empower the patient to take control of their disease, to get more information, and also to empower both the HCPs and the caregivers around them. To do all of this, you need a long list of certifications because when you do software that can tell a patient how to take their medication, it can go very wrong.
We have spent the last couple of years and part of the funding that we received in 2021 in building out our internal capabilities to be state-of-the-art within our industry in terms of quality standards. This is something that we are extremely proud of today. This means that we can, together with our pharma partners, take a digital solution and scale it all over the world, which is in itself something that is very complex because you have different regulations in different markets, everything from data to compliance.
Moving on, I will not spend too much time on this because, knowing that Trifork is also within digital health, this is probably already known information. The expectations to the digital health growth over the next couple of years is a very high, not only in the U.S., you also see markets as EU and APAC, growing in this scale. This is digital solutions by and large, which we also do in Dawn Health. What we are more excited about is the increase that we expect to see within the software as a medical device industry.
It is something where the market dynamic is still finding its feet, and pharma, you can say innovating products, for patients is still something that is regulated and complex, but we see legislation also moving in the direction to empower both the patients and the pharma companies. You see in the graph that the compound annual growth rate expected over the next five years, or the five-year period indicated here, is close to the one for digital health, overall. Also there's a very, you can say high agreement in the industry that this is something that will have a bigger impact in the future. The reasons, why is, listed here in the bottom.
It can be anything from market access, it can be price, you know, how you defend your price in the market in patent run outs, in terms of the data that you collect, and so on and so on. There are a number of these use cases. I will dive into the ones we work with the most. On the screen here, you will see some of the solutions that we have already built and are very proud of today. Everything from remote patient monitoring, which is the case that I will dive a little bit more into, but also connected health, so connecting with a physical device to give data live to the patient or through the HCP.
You can say patient companion apps that really provide understanding for the patient on how to live with their disease and take their medication, follow the prescription of the drug, and so on. We have worked with digital therapeutics, in vitro diagnostics, and also algorithms. What enables us to do this is that we build the platform for the technologies to get in the hands of patients, which is where the regulation comes in. It's also one of the reasons why the barriers to entry within our industry is very high, and we see very few competitors in the market because the regulation that is actually required to put the product in the hands of the patient is before any innovation out there.
For clients wanting to work with biomarkers, with AI, any kind of new technology that we see in the market, really it starts with following the compliance of the standards that we must uphold. This is where we come in. We are the baseline platform for our clients to engage. The way that we operate is that our revenue model is split into different categories. We have, you can say a baseline infrastructure, which is a quality management system. I will not go too much into detail with that because then, there will be some nodding heads, I'm sure.
Also the IT infrastructure, which is extremely important in working with data, allowing us to share data with pharma or other parties, in a, you can say orderly manner following the legislation. On top of this, we have built our own platform for innovation, which is composed of a number of different software modules that in essence build out the basic application for the pharma companies that we see them use the most. This means that with us, there's a very high guarantee that the products will actually go into market. Some of the products we have been working on before making this investment could take four or five years before they actually reach the market. Last year, we launched products within five to six months.
The reliability that our partners can have in us to actually bring the products to market, the way that we can work with them in a way that they see transparency over their portfolio is something that we know they value a lot. Obviously, we operate and maintain the products once they're in the market, and on top of this, we then scale the licenses. Moving into becoming a licensing business, we work with a foundation, which is the, you can say the enterprise structure for our clients, and really, they add on top of that in terms of data reporting or market rollouts and so on.
If you look at the most common use cases that we work with, you can see that we worked primarily in three overall buckets or cases that we work with our clients in solving. This could be improved drug performance, as I mentioned before. It can be retention of patients, or it could be market expansion. When we look at a drug going into the market, what we call phase IV or the real world after the product is in market, we often see that the product will not perform up to the standards that it did during the clinical trial.
What can we then do to either uphold the pricing that the pharma company have negotiated with the payers or just to deliver, you can say the consumption of the drug as expected, is that we can educate the patient, by doing, patient support programs. It could be, symptom tracking and so on and so on, which is the case that I will dive into. We also see retention of patients, so not understanding how to take your medication, not understanding your disease, not having access to the specialist that maybe need to treat the disease that you have is something that can make you drop off the medication.
Having side effects is also something that normally makes you, how can you say, drop off the medication, especially when we work in rare disease, we see that it can oftentimes be invasive treatments. Finally looking into the market expansion cases, we see that a lot of times we see public data that there is a treatment inertia with the HCPs. An average HCP in Denmark, for example, will have around 10 to 15 minutes with a patient treating up to 800 diseases a year and will not be an expert in all of the diseases that they treat.
Digitalizing these guidelines can really help empower the HCP to have the right conversation with the patient, and especially when it comes to diagnosing invasive medications, it can help more medication co-actually go into the market. These are some of the areas where we work the most. If we then look at our case with Novartis, where we are working with them on a global scale and across a lot of their treatment areas, what we did originally was help them embark on our platform and working specifically with the case around MS or multiple sclerosis. The case for multiple sclerosis is actually twofold.
It is both in terms of market expansion, but also getting the patient to actually adhere to the medication that they take and putting them in contact with the HCP. If a patient today is diagnosed with MS, normally they will be put under surveillance for a period of up to a year. In this period, they are asked to monitor their own symptoms and doing so in their own home. When they monitor their own symptoms, a lot of times they will either write on a piece of paper what they have experienced through the year, or they will maybe have a caregiver go with the doctor or go to the doctor with them to explain.
What we have tried to do with Novartis is using the smartphone for the patient to actively and passively get data collection that they can then leverage together with the HCP, so that the HCP knows exactly when they need to act to get the patient on a higher treatment dose. This same platform we have scaled across a number of treatment areas within Novartis. Leveraging the same software and the same platform, they are able to roll out across all of their disease areas in a very effortless way, increasing our license with them and our stickiness, but at the same time also getting them to market with a lot more digital solutions.
On a graph, you can see here in a very simplified way that normally when we engage with a new client, we go in in the first year, focus on one disease area. Then we scale across a lot of different disease areas. There's very long stickiness to our licenses. Normally, we see them being tied to the lifetime of the drug or a minimum of six to eight years. We have a very high cross-selling opportunity. We have a very high upselling opportunity because there are very few partners who have done this well with pharma today. Being able to get in there and actually get the products in the market is itself a unique trait. I think I will conclude here and pass the torch to to Jørn, and thank you so much for listening to Dawn Health.
Thank you, Alexander. Just a few questions for you.
Yeah.
and comments. This is just one lab company, and I hope you can see that it goes deep with a lot of capabilities, with a lot of know-how. When we met Daniel and you, we did not know a lot about regulated software. What you also showed, but you didn't say it, but I will say it, is that there is another lab company, Exceed Health, that actually is a spin-off from Dawn Health. Not only do we have a really good lab company here that taught us about regulated software, but it also spun out a company that actually taught you about regulated software.
Exactly.
They were the first product, the Exceed. This is how the ecosystem works, and all this ties into our digital health strategy because when we are at a customer, maybe a government, we can say we have access to these capabilities as well. When we then meet a life science company like Novo or another one, we can say that we know how it is to work in life science, even if we want to fix your SAP system. That's another synergy we have here. Finally about the U.S. expansion, we also align on this. We coordinate very closely how we get into the U.S. because it's not just about technology. It's about tax laws, labor laws, the whole thing. When you move into a territory like U.S., it's really complex.
We help each other with that expansion. And you sit just over here.
Yes.
You have half of the second floor over here, and I sit at the board. I'm very happy to sit there. It's a really interesting journey, and I think it's underestimated what this can become. It's always hard to grow a business. You will probably sign that.
Yeah.
it can be very rewarding, and I'm sure it will. Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you.
Okay. I know now maybe you have a lot of information in your head, and now we get to the financial review. This time it's not like a quality reporting, but it's more focusing on, once again, a period since the IPO, in relation to performance and targets. I will go through some of those numbers.
In the end, after this presentation, we have a Q&A session, and then if you have any additional questions, then we'll come back to that. As said here, we'll look back into the last three years and then also put a little more words into the targets that we put for the future. Jørn already talked into this, so I'll not use a lot time, a lot more time here other than saying that this more or less was on purpose, and especially within 2023. Already in 2023, we saw that the business environment was getting tougher and tougher, and we decided early on that we start to invest into the future growth and starting in 2023.
I think Jørn talked a lot into that and say, well, it does take some time, and it does take the right people. We believe with Morten and with Karan, it's really a good solid combination. Of course, it's not them who has to do the work, it's all the people throughout the organization that actually have to succeed with this in the day-to-day business. We did invest more and did see some declining margins on Adjusted EBITDA in 2023.
Overall, Jørn already talked into this, so I will not use a lot more time other than saying that in the current guidance we have for 2024, you do see that we are a little hesitant in relation to the growth, organic growth as well, so we only guide the 5%-10% growth organically in 2024 with the reason that I just talked about before. In relation to acquisitions, then it's still the midterm target for us that we grow the 15%-25%, including acquisitions. Of course, that's always hard to translate directly into one specific year. I mean, how much would that then be in one or the other year?
As we talked about before, what we saw the environment in 2021, 2022, it was really hard to do acquisitions where we thought there was the right combination in between profitability, growth, and pricing, et cetera. This is something where we see that the match is there now, and we believe that we have even more opportunities in the future. It's not because we didn't work on doing anything and didn't work on that for two years. That's not the case at all. We had to say no in a lot of the discussions that we were in.
Overall, if you break down, you could say, or make a bridge in relation to where's the growth coming from overall, Run is the growth driver in relation to the organic growth. All here have a CAGR of 25% in Run over the period of three years, which for me and for us is a good thing to see. It, when we're looking into EventQ. I will come back to that. It's good for us actually to grow that part of the business. Still we also have a solid organic growth in relation to our build-based revenue. Inspire is this separate talk, you could say.
We do Inspire primarily for all the reasons that Jørn talked about into finding the right areas to be in, to be on the edge of technology, to know what's going on out there, to know when companies are ready to adopt the technology. It's still super important for us. But as you know, it had been struggling during COVID with no conferences, etcetera. Hopefully we'll make this work again soon. Growth in relation to different companies. Jørn briefly talked into it when you saw the world map with all the different areas that we are working into. We saw that in 2009, Jørn moved to Switzerland because we were primarily at that point in time engaged into fintech and fintech customers in the Danish market.
This financial crisis was not... I mean, then we would have wished we were, you know, maybe in DigitalHub at a point in time, that was not possible then. That actually caused us to move out and to focus more internationally, and globally. Looking into this period once again and see the development here is that we did a solid organic growth in Denmark, 19.1%. Actually outside of Denmark, we saw a growth of 28.1%. Of course, you could say the base was lower, meaning that the impact on group revenue wasn't that high. We saw one market declining when we did the IPO. Actually, we had the Netherlands as one of the focus markets, if you remember back then.
This now has been replaced by the U.S., where we see a lot more opportunities. It's more like, where is it's also the easiest to grow markets, and we believe that U.S. is a better market to grow in than in the Netherlands. Growth moving forward. We already talked into it, and, what we showed in the graphs is more or less equal to a 5% average inorganic growth until 2026. I mean, will that happen? That, of course, once again, depends on us being able to close deals with new companies and to bring more engaged entrepreneurs into the Trifork family. We are working on this. We still believe that the run will be growing the fastest organically.
We don't see that we will do a lot of acquisitions within run. It's often very expensive to buy run-based revenue. Most often we will buy into build-based revenue. Once in a while, we can actually make that happen, and I will talk into that as well. In 2026, looking ahead a couple of years, of course, this is a very, very tough slide to build because I cannot predict the future. I don't know if the business environment that we have right now is going on for how long or if it's going to be even worse or if it's going to be better. I know some in the European Central Bank, they're talking about lowering the interest rate. Maybe that will ease up something. I don't know.
There is a lot of uncertainty still in the world. What we have chosen to do is because all our investors are asking, "Now, yeah, but in increased margins, what is that? I mean, where will you do you wanna be? What is your ambition? What is the target?" What we are saying here is that, I mean, now we just, we're out with the new guidance for 2024, and that's the guidance. I mean, that was a downgrade compared to where we saw it initially. What we believe now is that even if in a slow market, if the market stays like it is today, we believe that we can optimize our business, that we can improve margins, even in conditions like today.
Of course, if conditions get even worse, then we will also be challenged. We do believe that we have, yeah, some handles to pull in order to improve the business anyway. If the market recover, we also expect that we will follow the market. As Karan talked into when talking about U.S., I mean, we really do see a lot of opportunities. The hard thing there is really to see when it's really materialized because all what you will experience with Vision Pro today is something that makes you know, see a lot of new potential, see a lot of new ideas, et cetera. Initially, it would be, you know, something that you have to prove, you need to make a showcase.
Afterwards, when you have to combine all the data that you have in the company, and when you really can make it to you could say advanced solutions, that's where the bigger engagements will come in, and this is where it will trigger profitability for us as well. When that is going to happen and within slower or, you know, market recovery conditions, that's too soon to say. What we did in the 2023 and now in 2024 as well, is that we invest in our organization. We invest in business development, we invest in coming up with the new innovation ideas.
We invest in, for example, on Vision Pro, actually to build a platform so that we have our own platform that we can license in future Vision Pro solutions and onboard customers to a core platform where it's so much faster for us actually to deliver the solutions to the customers. That's investments that we take in the organization. When talking about the five pillars, these are investments that goes into organic growth. These investments, of course, initially would impact the build-based business at first. When the products are more like license-ready, then we'll be more into the run-based business. This is funny enough when we also see the highest impact then on the profitability.
We do believe that going forward, we'll see more or less the same picture that run will be able to retain a higher margin than the build-based business. In the last quarterly reporting, we talked into four different areas where we look into strategically in the midterm. Maintain high level of business development. I just talked into that, meaning we still see that going on here in 2024 and that we keep investing in order to maintain growth. This is still a strategy that we go into. Of course, that has a negative impact on the margins. That's also why you see the updated guidance and what we just talked about before. It's really also about opening the U.S. market, as Karan talked into.
We believe in this, and we believe this is the right thing to do, and now is the right timing actually also to do it. Of course, we have an issue that last year we lost EUR 2.7 million in our Inspire business. Of course, part of that loss was due to investment that we did because we thought, "Okay, now the world is moving upwards, and now we're ready to actually engage with the audience again physically at bigger conferences." Part of that loss was really due to what we expected in 2023 in the beginning of the year, because we had a 2022 ending on a high note and really, you know, a lot of activity. We ended up with a loss.
Going forward to 2026, we believe we can make that breakeven. We cannot do that yet in 2024, but we expect to be roughly about minus EUR 1.5 million in 2024, so improving this by EUR 1 million. We are looking into sharpening the business model in cyber protection, and we talked into cyber protection several times today. I mean, we really believe everybody needs cyber protection, and we don't understand, you know, why it's not super urgent on all companies' agenda. It, it's not. It's not like super critical yet, but we expect it will be.
Our challenge right now is that we don't have critical mass, meaning that we need to get critical mass as fast as possible, and we are investigating what opportunities that we actually have in order to get that critical mass. One thing is that we are merging two of our business units together so that we have one larger unit instead. That's one way of doing things and then collaborate internally to do that. We're also investigating if there would be other opportunities to accelerate this even more. At the quality reporting as well, we talked into our own product development and you have heard a lot of product names today. Francesco talked into even a new company founded as part of ESL, but focused on a product that is created and supported.
This is also something we see continuing. When we do that product development, and if it's part of the Trifork core business, which is like the products where we can then, based on the products, make bespoke solutions to our customers, then it's also investment in organic growth that I talked into initially. What we saw here in the first quarter of 2024 was actually a 28% increase on the sales of our own products. As stated before, we believe that the historical development in 2022, we had a dip in relation to the profit margin run, but that was also where we invested heavily in new operation centers, so that caused the majority of the dip in 2021. Q1 2024, we also reported a lower EBITDA margin here.
Overall, we expect I said this to be at the top line in relation to profitability. Looking into the all run sale of own IP, I just mentioned briefly before. Here you see more like the details. You see here Q1 2023, there was a jump compared to the year before, and that was actually an acquisition of a company where we did have run-based revenue. That was IBE in Switzerland. It was a little funny case because we already developed the IP that this company was running on. That was developed by Trifork in Amsterdam. This is actually now what runs the digital exams of the driver licenses here in Denmark. That's the same software now resold once again into the Danish government.
When we picked this up, a large portion of this actually was based on inorganic growth. As you see in the following here is that we've been able to actually accelerate the growth in our own IP of own licenses. All looking then into inflation, into how workforce is constructed, all different countries, et cetera. How did that then pan out in Trifork? If we here compared the number of FTEs to the average wages, I mean, you do see that in 2021 we had the highest increase. 2021, if you recall and go back a little step, that was super hard to, you know, to find any employees to grow any company in the world within IT.
Of course, we were impacted that period by the same parameters as everybody else. Actually, we've been able to level out, you could say, the inflations that then came in after COVID. It hasn't had the biggest impact on Trifork overall. Of course, that's a combination of where we, where we source talent, how we deliver, and as Francesco talked into then now we have in many of our units, we have a very flexible delivery model and are able to work remote. Again, EBIT for us, of course, is more or less like EBITDA, follow the same rules, regulations, I would say.
Of course, when we're looking to the EBIT for the Trifork Group, then you have to take into mind that the EUR 2 million that we annually invest in our lab segment, that gives an average over the same period here, gave a profit of EUR 4 million a year in average. EUR 2 million here is also included in the EBIT here. Then it's up to you when you look into the valuation of the company, if you take it in or not. We just explain how things are. Otherwise, EBIT is more or less following the same pattern as EBITDA for Trifork. That said, of course, when we do new acquisitions with debt, we get a little more depreciations and amortizations to the acquisitions.
If we do more acquisitions, then we also expect a little larger spread from EBITDA to EBIT. Coming back to the first slide here, we of course focus on net debt management as well. As said, in the same period here, we did increase the financing with EUR 23 million. We did pay out EUR 24 million to our investors. Of course, we could tell our investors we should not have paid you out any money, and then we would be at the same level. We still believe, and it's in our policy actually, to pay out dividend to our investors, when it's good for the company. Still we have maintained the growth in the period at the level where we wanna be, you could say.
Right now, end of Q1 2024, we have a debt to Adjusted EBITDA leverage of 1.2, and this is including when we, or not including, any treasury shares that we have. We still focus on the 1.5x in leverage, potentially go higher if we find the right targets. Behind this is what we believe is a solid development in the cash conversion. Of course, if we look into the operational cash flow, then we also have the investments that we do internally in product development, et cetera, that is used to organic growth in the company. It's included there, but not included when we see into the free cash flow from operations.
We believe that we have a healthy development in this area and prioritize to grow organic, but then next to that, the M&A. I said here before, if you look before the IPO, then we had a net debt of EUR 37 million here, so 2.2 x our Adjusted EBITDA. We did an exit of one of our lab companies. We took in some more capital, 5% increase of share capital in the IPO, and then we were net cash positive. Over the years, as explained before, that was actually what happened, and now we are the same debt ratio or debt again with a 1.2 ratio. Now we're going to address some more targets.
The targets here is targets related to ESG and our sustainability work that we do in Trifork. I will hand over the work to Emilie, who is in charge of ESG initiatives in Trifork, but we support you 100%.
Yeah. Yeah. Wow, I think it's amazing to be the ESG manager in a company where so many people are engaged in sustainability. I didn't count how many times sustainability or real impact was mentioned today. I think it kind of support my opening sentence, which is sustainability is at the very core of our business. It is not just something we do on the side. It is not just me doing sustainability in Trifork. We take both financial and non-financial factors into consideration. The non-financial factors is environmental, social, and governance.
To have a holistic approach to how we work with sustainability or ESG in Trifork, we have three strategic pillars, which is finding greener solutions to how we operate, creating an inspiring workplace development and equal opportunities for all, as well as ensuring responsible business information and ethics. Underneath our strategic pillars, we have some focus areas which makes it more tangible for us to work with sustainability. It is reducing our carbon footprint, ensuring a healthy and inclusive work environment, as well as ensuring compliance with CSRD requirements, a huge burden for a company like us. Yeah. To reduce our carbon footprint, it requires real data. That's why we are investigating how to get the data directly.
In our smart buildings, we have implemented devices that makes it possible for us to capture and follow live environmental data metrics. It is a really, really nice device, because it can actually makes it possible for us to see on a very detailed level what is going on in the building. It makes it possible for us to change the behavior, to actually see how we can improve, to a level where we can, after maybe a weekend, we see like or observe, okay, there's been a huge amount of water going on this, on this floor. Why is this happening?
Søren from one of our smart buildings, like he can actually go to the manager or he can go to the room and see, okay, this might be due to a sink or something which is leaking, and then we can stop this process or this behavior, and that's a way for us to reduce our impact. The device also makes it possible to collect all this data to make more comprehensive sustainability reporting. Yeah. Building on this foundation, we are exploring new ways to leverage technology to support and also to enhance our ESG and CSRD reporting. In terms of both quality, transparency, but also time efficiency. I think you might all know that CSRD reporting is not something done overnight.
If we can use our knowledge about AI and other kind of technologies to support this journey, it makes it possible for us to free up our human resources, me for instance, to actually go out and make the real impact. We believe that the real impact is not done through the reporting. Reporting is making the baseline. It's the way we can actually see that we are progressing, but it's not the impact which create the different in the world. That's the thing I need to do. I need to go to the different places. I need to go to our office spaces. I need to speak with our customers and our employees to be the one making the real difference. What did I want to say? Yeah.
I just want to highlight that we are on a journey to make it easier to do our ESG reporting and compliance, focusing on optimizing our ESG reporting processes using modern technology. Moving on to our long-term targets. We are aiming for a 70% carbon reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030. In our Scope 3, we will work together with our value chain to make sure that 70% of our suppliers have set science-based targets before 2026. On the social dimension, we have set a target to achieve a 30% split of the underrepresented gender in our workforce and in leadership positions.
At our board of directors, we have set a target of minimum 40% of the underrepresented gender, which we probably have already reached. I think Jørn already mentioned that. But we will work on maintaining this goal. On the governance side, we are working towards having all our suppliers evaluated based on sustainability principles to ensure overall responsibility in our value chain. Okay. Yeah. We are continuously learning and also proving that digitization enhances our life individually and also collectively. Together with our customers, we tackle everything from critical societal issues within the digital health sector, to enhancing or doing CO2 emission, what do you call it, savings, through our technology as well as enhancing biodiversity with AI technology.
In conclusion, we believe that Trifork's greatest impact comes from the solutions we create together with our customers as well as our partners. I think that's it. Thank you.
I actually have a little commercial then, Emilie. I know you are cleaning the beaches of Portugal.
Yeah
next Monday. The Monday the 10th, in this building at 5:00 P.M., we're going to talk more about our robot. We're going to conclude our collaboration with Race for Oceans, which is an organization in the northern part of Denmark, that they clean speeches on a regular basis. We put some AI and robotics, and I don't know what technology, in this little turtle, and we're going to showcase that. If you have an interest in that, you're very welcome to come and have a look. It's. Yeah. Could be a new startup.
It could be.
Could be. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Okay, Kristian.
Yeah. Now we're done for today. Now you can rest your ears a little, I guess. Before we release you to all the Vision Pro activities, then we just wanna catch up here in relation to what we see as key takeaways from today. One is that we acknowledge that we have a slow market condition right now, but I mean, we are still engaged to the future. We still believe in the future and still super excited for what to do in the future. We still see that we have a role as the pioneering tech partner to our customers, and we take that role very seriously. Not at least what we're doing in the U.S. currently. We really wanna make a real impact, as Emilie stated here.
It's not only what we do ESG, in our own house, so to say, or with the buildings that we construct, but it's more what we can do actually for our customers, in the whole agenda around sustainability.
Yeah. Just one thing to add about this execution part, because we demonstrated that we have the technologies, the services, the offering. We demonstrated those in market and of course, the slower market means that you have to have many more leads, a pipeline that is way bigger. We talk about internally that we need to have a pipeline 4x to 5x of the contracts we wanna work on. That's a big difference to what we saw in 2021, where the pipeline was 0.2 because people, they just came and asked for us to do something.
Now we need to find talent that sees a huge opportunity in helping Trifork to just go and find work everywhere, be really switched on, be a hunter personality, therefore also we have. I say to all the Triforks here, I say it a lot, that whenever you interview someone for a position at Trifork, you might look for a UX person or an Erlang programmer or whatever it can be, but 20% of all those should say yes to be able to wanting to take your job, Francesco. Be the new CEO. Kick you to pension. Or me or someone else.
We need those, young people, experienced people, we need them to come in and challenge us as the organization and want to take over and take the company to the next 1,000x, as I talked to Karan about before.
Yes. Maybe just to elaborate that we still focus on our tier model. Now we, including our lab companies, we are close to 100 units. We still wanna drive that way more, and this is really what we see is working for us, and the way to keep the innovation power in the company and to have that organization model. Okay. I guess now we are open for questions. We have a microphone here to take questions. Yeah, we have a panel here so please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Thank you for a great presentation. The first question goes to the midterm targets, because this year the midpoint of the guidance implies a margin, EBITDA margin of 16% for this Trifork segment. Looking at the long term, you guide for 10%-15% organic growth and a margin in 2026 of 16%-20%. Could be a flattish margin giving 10% organic growth. Should we assume if you only grow 10% over a three-year period, you will not see leverage on the margins?
Well, of course, it's super hard to state anything about the development and when you say this range, of course, we don't know exactly what to expect of the market development in the future until 2026. You could say the range that we have been giving, the 16%-20%, is really slow market conditions. It's the low end, you could say. We still believe that from where we are in 2024, where we believe that we do have hard conditions in the market, that we can increase the margins from there by 1%-1.5%. You could say anything equal, things staying as it is with the same type of conditions, we should be able to increase 1% to roughly 1.5% at least, even in those conditions.
And then of course you could say, okay, but if you accelerate organic growth, would you then expect then the margins to be lower? I guess that's what you're asking, right? This is super hard to say.
Well, what we can say is that we know the distribution of when you add growth and EBITDA margin. We know the distribution from our 100 businesses. All the labs, all the Trifork segment business units, and it spans from being a negative sum, which is not nice, to way + 100. Okay? In fact, Kristian, if he was really brutal, he could actually engineer whatever number you want. Do you get that point?
Mm-hmm.
It comes into how much do we believe in something being zero in if you add growth and profit, and how much. I mean, if we just, we could reduce everything and then we would be more than 100 if we just kept one business unit. We will be a small company, but it would be growing a lot and at high profit. It's that mix. There is some engineering into that and some decision-making. What Kristian said is, what we will use as guardrails in making those decisions, what we keep, what we don't keep, what we deconsolidate, and what we consolidate. It's not like just we are, we are, you know, a leaf in the wind. We have, we have a lot of control.
Yep. A question to Labs and exit policies. Thank you for the extra numbers. If you take an average, simple average, ownership of the top 10, then it's about 24%, 16% of revenue and 2% of earnings. That's one way of looking at it. If you take the exit you had, you've done, at least you mentioned yourself too, where you did it too early, potentially. Humio is a core of CrowdStrike, and they've raised value by EUR 500 billion since you sold it. They say they couldn't run the business without Humio. My point is, if I take Dawn Health and do a valuation, pick a number, let's say EUR 5 billion, and then I put in, say, buy Trifork because they own three or four companies with significant value.
I don't know if you're gonna exit it in three months at a valuation of EUR 600 million if you think the job is done and you want to go on. How should analysts and investors look at how we get... do we get the maximum value out of these companies?
We learned a lot from the exits we did over time. There was also exits before 16 and good ones as well. That's what I live from today. You know, it's because of what happened in the earlier days. We did the first exit in 2004. A really nice one. We do have a lot of experience and it's, and it's never looking the same, but I would say we basically follow the founders and the VCs because that's the essence of a lab company, that we don't have control. We don't have 51% or 66% or whatever you need to have to maintain full control. From now on, our guiding principle will be to follow the founders and the VCs.
Then with the caveat that if it looks too good to be true, then we will probably take the money. More towards follow the VCs and the founders. Okay? Does that make sense?
Of course, you should also look at this as a way for us actually to found, you could say, the organic growth in Trifork. If we believe that we can actually do an exit and then use that in M&A, I mean, then it's a part of the, you could say, the dynamics in Trifork. This is also something that we do. Maybe you would call that an early exit. Maybe I would call it to hedge investments, and then actually use that in the organic growth and then not have a high, as high a leverage as we would have had otherwise. It all comes together in the end, you could say. Of course, we all the time look into how to maximize the profit in the end for the shareholders.
Yes. A question on the U.S., which is obviously very exciting to grow revenues by 5x to 10 x. What is sort of the biggest risk? What can go wrong?
I mean, in the U.S., I think what you have more than anywhere else is the risk of lawsuits and that sort, you know. Mistakes can have a higher consequences in general. That I would say is probably the main difference between Europe and U.S.
I think we had a question here. Hang on.
Yiwei from SEB. Thank you for taking my question. I have three. First question on the EBIT margin guidance. Kristian, could you confirm, is it organic or already reflect the dilution from potential acquisitions?
The guidance we gave here is based on organic, so not including the potential acquisitions since we don't know the price, we don't know the depreciation model for potential acquisitions, et cetera. That's based on that. Just saying my remark was more to that depending how high you could say inorganic growth would be, then potentially there could be an impact here on the difference in between EBIT and Adjusted EBITDA.
Great. Next question, on the Inspire business. You mentioned the basically expected to be break even by 2026. How much revenue do you need to generate to reach that break-even level?
I mean, that's a good question. Maybe it would not need to be a lot more than today, depending on how we organize. We're looking into all parameters as it is right now, in relation to, you could say, minimize the cost of running the operation, you could say, but still get the same benefits out of running that organization. This could also be in relation to actually, you could say, reuse resources in more than one way. Actually that we can do, you know, without accelerating revenue that much. Of course, we do have some fixed cost in relation to, for example, our facility in London where we have a CodeNode as a space in the middle of London.
We are of course also looking into minimize cost, you could say, as the fixed cost in the organization there and make that more dynamic. You could say cost would follow engagements more.
Yeah. There are different things we can do and we could also spin out Inspire as a lab company. That would be one way, because then we can maybe get funding for everything we wanna do because we think there could be more businesses interested in the insights that we gather in Inspire. It could also be that without a lot of investment, we can actually turn those numbers that we have, the views and the subscribers into a revenue driver. There is also an opportunity for us being the matchmaker between communities and product companies. We expect there is around 10,000 product companies. That's a lot.
Preben knows a lot of them, probably more than me. All of those have spending in marketing and sales, and now they spend it on Reddit, on Instagram, on Google, et cetera. It becomes a very blurry place. Whereas if we could create a more pure play for tech people, there is around 200 tech people that we could address. If we could matchmake 200 million tech people with 10,000 product companies, that would be pretty cool. There is a lot of things we can do, but even with the revenues today, we could go into a break even.
In relation to this topic, maybe a question to the board, because I heard there are some people from the board also in the room. I realized that in your remuneration report, a KPI for the management is the number of go to channel, YouTube channel, clicks or reviews. I understand it is important to grow or onboarding your main business and onboarding new customers. In last two years, we also see sort of this has been a main drag on the earnings, on the cash flow, and on the shareholder value. I was wondering, do you still see that as a proper KPI for the management going forward?
I mean, I'm not the board. I'm trying to convince the board what they should measure.
Mm-hmm.
It's not like we are just wasting money to get a bonus from that. I truly, deeply believe that if we don't know what's going on in the tech world, Trifork is not Trifork anymore. We're done. We have done it since the very, very beginning. Since 1997, we have done this. It served us well. We would not have acquired Francesco and Erlang Solutions, nor other companies, Cedric, Spantree. Actually, no one. We would have acquired no one if it hadn't been for our Inspire, because it's the orange people we like to meet. The orange people, meaning that subject matter expert that also happened to be an entrepreneur and a startup founder. Yeah. I don't want the board just to say, "Oh, you lose EUR 2.7 million." Bong.
Next year, "Why don't you do M&A anymore?" "Well, because we don't meet people anymore." You know, that's not a good idea. We do it from, you know, we wanna be rewarded for what we really believe in.
That said, I mean, of course, that number is one number. What we're really talking about here is thought leadership. It's really to, you know, embrace and to get the organization to react and collect information that way. That's the point. We are in discussions to, you could say, change that way of measuring, but then find other ways of measuring thought leadership.
What we could adjust is we wanna be measured on that growth, it cannot cost anything. You know, that, then you would probably be happy. I would also be accepting that. I would probably not get the bonus this year or next year, so be it. That's not so important to me. I wanna keep it, and I don't want it to be a drag on the company.
Makes sense. Thanks.
The one in the back. Yeah.
Yeah, Mikkel from ABG here. I have a question relating to your win rate, which you wrote was around 74%. I guess that's a historical number, right?
Yes.
Yeah. What about 2024 here? Has it been any lower?
Well, Who was presented the number? That was you, Morten, right?
Yeah, yeah. Right here.
Yeah.
Where are you?
Where am I?
That number is actually, pretty much up to date with what we’ve seen. I don’t have the number exactly from January until now. I could find that easily and get back to you on that. The number is from probably September until now.
What about Danish public projects? Has it been any lower there? I'm, you know, the thing I want to get to is, like, if it's any lower, is it because of quality, or is it because of price?
First, I don't think we can answer the question because…
Fair enough.
... that would be pure speculation. Yeah. It's a good question. It's just hard to answer.
Yeah. I guess so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you. Henrik Ramlau-Hansen. You mentioned that you had this ambition of revenue growth of 10%-15%, and you had this, as an example, EBIT margin interval of 10%-14% in 2026, and you also alluded to that you are in control of costs. My question is, what does that lead to, perhaps in terms of interval of earnings per share in 2026?
R- uh, taking a reference-
30% in 2026.
... 2026, referencing, your EUR 0.75, last year.
Yeah. I mean, this...
Perhaps we haven't done an answer. Yeah.
... you could say this is a target, so it's not a specific guidance in 2026, but it's the target. You could say growth and profitability, of course, are two different targets. In the end would then calculate, do the math, and then you would have a span. But this we haven't provided.
Okay. One call on that because it also depends on how many shares we have.
Yeah, that was my second question.
Yeah
... whether you could risk being diluted by acquisitions, so net-net you would still be at EUR 0.75 per share, euro cents.
Anything can happen. I mean, I have probably been the one single person that has not been very eager to dilute my own shares. I held to more or less the same as I've had for many years. You remember in the beginning it was 50/50. I had 50%, and we soon after, in the first two years, took in one more. I had 36. We did some primaries, et cetera. I believe strongly in the company. I'm not huge fan of diluting my share, but I respect investors, analysts if they say, "Now it could be a good time to do some primaries, to do some more aggressive M&A." If you can, you know, gear that, then it can be a really good thing.
That would be number crunchers as Kristian who convince me if I should dilute or if we should advise on all the shareholders to be diluted. It could be a good idea depending on the price and the share price and all that stuff when it, and the price of money now, interest rate are higher. There is a lot of factors into that.
When you're talking about EPS, you also need to take the lab segment into account and, you know, potential exit from that and what would the effect be there. It's a really hard question to answer in that way because you're, you know, if you then take the average from the past years and do that as a prognosis for the next years or to come, or if you think it's even more because now you haven't seen the effect from maybe two years and development in some of those companies that we invested in based on not being any external financing round in that period, right?
I think investors can adjust for that.
Yeah.
Adjust us. Yeah.
Just saying you have a lot of moving targets in order to go that specific on EPS.
I can ask, if we would print 10% more shares and the revenue would grow 50% inorganic, would you say yes or no?
Depending on profitability.
If that was the same. You know, the company we acquire looks like what we already have.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
That, that's the kind of considerations we need to look into.
Overall, as we do when, also evaluating whether we should de-consolidate a business unit and then bring it into a lab company and you could say grow and accelerate, all of that are considerations that we do in relation to maximize the profit for the shareholders in the end. You could say we do what we can, and we hope that we take the right decisions along the way.
Yes.
Yeah. It's already, it's ready.
Oh, right. Yiwei again, from SEB. Question on the potential exit of lab company. Let's say if there's any company like Donghua, so you would exit in the next, within next three years, how do you use the proceeds? Would you prioritize M&A or we should expect a increased shareholder buy payout?
Yeah.
I think I mean, there's an easy answer in the current environment because if we see a nice M&A pipeline.
Mm-hmm.
There are companies that I want for sure. If the valuations are reasonable, being what they have historically been, as Kristian said, they're getting back to that. Then my preference to and advice to everyone would be use the money for that. Don't do share buyback and don't do dividend. Use the money for growing the company. It was kind of the idea with the IPO to 10x the company as soon as possible. We should not delay that if we can use proceeds for that. That's... Now you ask me, it's a personal opinion from my side.
Okay.
Great. well, we have Preben here who has not said much, and so I'll throw a hard question his way.
Thank you.
Yeah, iPhone came about, and many years later, iPhone Pro came. iPads came. A few years later, iPad Pro came. MacBooks came. A few years later, MacBook Pro came. Instead all of a sudden, you know, we get presented with the Vision Pro. You know, why is that? Why have they come out with a Pro as the very first product?
You want to think for a second? Because I have a quick answer. While you think, okay? To give a really good answer. Tim Cook was in the room when we were there in a very small group, and he said seven years ago, Vision Pro was two racks with a huge cable, with a big screen. In seven years, they managed to reduce two big racks with all the computer power you can dream of into something you have here. The Vision Pro is by far the most advanced device that I have ever seen with my eyes. Therefore, also NVIDIA's CEO used it a lot in his presentation. He said, "This is really impressive what they have done.
It should not be possible. Of course, there has been a lot of cost, you know, two racks. It's not just gluing existing components together. There were more than 5,000 patents acquired with developing the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is not just like another device. It is complicated, and the sweet spot is really for enterprise. That's why they start with that. Okay? It's also the first time Apple has done an event that stressed out the whole organization as much as the Vision Pro launch event that we attended, and our apps were shown at. It was stressful for Preben, for our team, for the 50,000 people in California, how many there are, Porsche and others. Everyone was really They wanna perform. You can give the real answer.
I Yeah, I didn't need all of that time because any reply to that would be pure speculation. I see where you're coming from, and there are much speculation about this on the internet, too. There's the developer conference coming up at Apple in two weeks. We might be closer to an answer.
Yeah, the question was more why the Pro first?
Yeah, I mean, does that mean could we see a community edition, a standard edition later on? It's pure speculation. No one knows. Yeah. There might be a hint in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah.
Any more questions or comments? Nope. Okay. I guess we thank you all very much for coming. Now, now I guess, Frederik, we still have some... No? No.
I don't have any mic.
You don't have any mic. Okay.
It's done. Time is up.
Yeah.
Time, time is up. No. Now the ones of you who didn't have the chance to actually try out the Vision Pro yet, I really urge you to try it out, and then afterwards, we need to talk. I have some ideas, especially for analysts and stuff like that. We need to talk, but you have to try it out at first in order to get into your own mind what this can actually do in your own business or maybe businesses that you know. Now we have, I guess, some drinks and some stuff over here. Welcome, enjoy. Thank you very much for coming.
Thank you.