Good afternoon and welcome to this Q3 presentation and Q&A with Wirtek. With us today, we have the CEO, Michael Aaen. First, there will be a presentation and afterwards a Q&A where the management team will be participating. There have already been pre-submitted questions on Stokk.io, and the Q&A is still open so that you can submit questions live as well. I will now hand over the mic to Michael to start the presentation. Michael, your line is now open.
Thank you, Anders. So Q3 this year has been quite busy for Wirtek. We closed two acquisitions during the quarter within two weeks of each other, and we are already starting to see the effects from those acquisitions from our August numbers. If we look a little bit at the operational highlights for the quarter, well, again, we are seeing great progress in our energy segment. We actually doubled the revenue in energy compared to the same quarter last year, or more precisely, 98% growth in the revenue. And if we look back since we started tracking revenue on energy from Q1 last year, we've actually seen a tripling of the revenue from energy in the past seven quarters.
Our energy business unit actually has grown from being the smallest business unit beginning of last year to now being the vastly biggest business unit in Wirtek, accounting for 39% of our total revenue. We also did two acquisitions, as I just mentioned before, one in the middle of July and the other one beginning of August. And we are already starting to see some very, very nice spinoffs from these acquisitions there. And if we look at the Seluxit acquisition, where we actually purchased some IPR, and we have some new capabilities both in IoT hardware as well as gaining access to a platform called Wappsto. And we already have signed three contracts within the last two months utilizing these new great opportunities there. And these contracts are expected to impact 2025 positively with more than DKK 5 million in revenue.
Now, this is part of a shift of the business away from being a pure service provider, where our business is scaling one-to-one because every time we need to deliver an hour, we need a person behind. Now we are moving more into becoming a more comprehensive solution provider, where we are actually able to scale the business in a much better way for Wirtek. We now have a possibility to augment our energy service offerings with IoT products and platforms as well. And we actually do expect that this is going to help us drive growth as well as higher margins in the medium to long term. If we look at the financial highlights for the third quarter, we generated DKK 18.8 million in revenue, which is a growth of 8%.
That's actually really, really great for us since we came from a first half of the year with a negative growth of 2%. Now we are back on the growth track of the business. We also saw an EBITDA of DKK 2.3 million. Now, this is an adjusted EBITDA here because we have adjusted the EBITDA with the one-off special costs related to the two acquisitions we did. We actually had costs of a little more than DKK 1 million related to those acquisitions, which is not part of the daily operations of the company. That gives us an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 12.7%. If we look at key ratios for the first nine months of the year, our earnings per share is DKK 0.18 per share. Now, that is a reduction of 54% compared to the same period last year.
But in those numbers, we have not adjusted the profits, of course, with the adjusted EBITDA. So this actually reflects that we have spent 1 million DKK on acquisitions instead of putting them on the bottom line. If we adjusted for those, we would actually increase our earnings per share by 13 Danish øre, which adjusts to like 0.31 DKK per share. Our equity ratio is 42%. Now, that is down by 22% compared to last year. But of course, we just did the acquisitions of two companies, which of course is increasing our balance sheet in the short run since we still do have earnings that we need to pay there. And already at the end of next quarter, that number is going to be improving since we already did some of the payments for these acquisitions in the meantime.
We also have a very healthy liquidity ratio of 149%, very comparable to the same period last year, although we just did some significant payments towards the acquisitions. These were the operational financial highlights there. I guess we can go to the questions and answer session now, Anders.
Perfect. Thank you for the presentation, Michael. Let's take the first question here. So the first question is from Thomas. Do you view overcapacity as a risk with AI implementation and IT consulting industry?
So I actually filled out the slides also here so people have a chance to actually follow this. So if we look at overcapacity, that is always a risk we are very focused on mitigating when we have uncertain times. And for sure, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world right now. And of course, artificial intelligence, of course, is going to impact a lot of industries, including our industry. But this impact does not necessarily have to be negative. So we are already using AI, actually, both internally in Wirtek as well as towards our clients in order for actually being able to increase the productivity for our clients there. And we have to remember also the demand for qualified IT talent is actually far higher than the supply. This has been the picture for years.
So maybe AI is going to balance this a little bit better so that this gap actually becomes reduced over time. And if we look at the recent acquisitions we did with Seluxit and Pragmasoft, now we are actually also able to provide solutions based on our own IoT products and software platform here. And this actually adds a lot of value for our clients. But we actually here more see AI as an opportunity for us in order to bring value into those products. So AI for us, I see just as much as an opportunity as a potential threat.
Yeah, and with the new political landscape, do you see more risk opportunities in the U.S. in 2025?
I am definitely concerned about Trump's focus on implementing sweeping tariffs across the world here because we also know what that means. That means that countries affected by this are going to counter-tariff the U.S.A. as well. So that's not going to be good for anybody in the world in most cases here. So most of our business in the U.S. actually comes from very large U.S. enterprises. And they produce products, electronic products for their clients. And of course, they also depend on importing electronic components from some of those countries that actually could be affected by such tariffs there. So of course, this could also mean that those products have to be increased in prices. And of course, that could reduce their revenue over time. And that could, of course, also have a negative impact on Wirtek as well. We just don't know yet.
Again, if we look back in 2016, when Trump was also talking a lot about putting a lot of tariffs on there, he did put some on there, but it was at a much lower level and more towards certain industries. So let's see what happens here. Now, I also do expect that the new U.S. administration is going to significantly reduce the focus on clean energy. That is kind of part of the narrative that they have there. We've all heard Trump talking about that the windmills are killing the whales and the birds. So I don't expect that they are going to have a lot of focus on this. So I don't see Wirtek focusing a lot on business development in clean energy in the U.S. in the coming four years at least.
But as I see it, Europe is such a big market for energy services there. And I will also say this, it is really still too early to predict the outcome of this Trump term. And he will probably have, it's not quite decided yet, but he probably will have the full Congress behind him. So he kind of can do a lot of stuff that might not be great for the world in general. But let's see. There could also be opportunities. We just don't know yet. But for sure, as we also mentioned in our Q3 report, we are definitely looking at this as a risk that we need to mitigate.
Perfect. Do you expect the same demand for energy solutions in 2025?
With the acquisitions of PragmaSoft and Seluxit this summer, we actually do expect to grow the energy segment also in next year. While our growth historically actually has been within the services segment with us providing IT consultancy primarily, now we are actually also starting to provide solutions based both with hardware as well as a software as a service platform called Wappsto that we acquired through Seluxit there. We're also going to see an element of more recurring and better scalable revenue streams in the future. That definitely is going to be a focus area also inside of energy. Conclusion here is that I expect that the growth in energy is going to continue also next year.
A question from Emil here. How much of the expected revenue for 2025 has already been secured through orders or are under contract?
Well, since we have not announced our expectations yet for next year, I really cannot go into any detail concerning this. But that said, our historical numbers and descriptions of our revenue has also shown that we have quite a large element of continuity in our services business with contracts just continuing year by year. So when we start a new fiscal year, we have quite a nice base of revenue already in place in the services business. And as I also mentioned earlier, well, in the solutions business, this new business area that we are now focusing on developing as well, we actually just signed the last two months, signed three new contracts. Two of them were of a size we actually had to publish into the market there. And those are within solutions area here.
They will contribute, I would expect, in excess of DKK five million in revenue during 2025. Yes, we do have quite a nice base when we start the new year. We don't have to reinvent the wheel every year when we start.
Yeah. And then we have a live question as well here. What was the incentive to buy the Seluxit assets? What do you see the potential to be here?
I see a great potential. We have to remember that this business, if you just go a few years back, that was actually a business that the stock market valued at DKK 250,000. There's a big value here if you are able to grow that business, and yes, they went bankrupt and we purchased the assets from there and took over a lot of those very, very valuable people that they have there with a lot of knowledge there, and I just say in two months, we already signed three contracts based on the Seluxit business there. I believe this is going to be a great business area for us, and it supports our energy focus as well a lot there so we can have a more holistic service offering towards the clients here, as I see it here.
So I expect this is going to be a great, great value for Wirtek in the future. And it brings a scalability more than the one-to-one we are used to. Because whether, let's say we have a solution where we need to deliver IoT hardware, whether we have to produce 1,000 or 10,000, that's not going to require a lot more people from Wirtek to actually do that. So the scalability is great. And again, the solutions we are focusing on here also have our Wappsto cloud platform below that is going to give us this element of recurring revenue as well.
Thomas also has a live question here. Do you see organic employee growth the next quarters?
I do. This year has been quite hard in the services business, as our previous reports have shown, and of course, we've adjusted the business accordingly in order to ensure that we stay a profitable company, but again, we have invested a lot in business development, and what I can say is that our pipeline is looking better and better, so I do expect that we are going to see growth, significant organic growth already from next year. It's difficult to look at that crystal ball, but if I look at the way that our sales pipeline is looking, it looks interesting, and I do expect that we will also need to grow the people as well in order to deliver those services and solutions that we will need to deliver, of course.
Perfect. And that was actually all the questions that we got for this event. So that finalizes the Q&A. But before we end the webcast, I will just hand over the word for you, Michael, if you have some final remarks to end with.
Yeah, I'm really, really happy to be able to come and present for all the investors here. I think that this quarter has been really, really great. Great new things are happening here, and for our existing investors, I say thank you very much for staying loyal with Wirtek during a period of time that has been definitely tough for many IT businesses similar to Wirtek's. And we haven't gone free of those challenges there, but stay tuned.