Good morning, everybody. This is Martin Möllmann of adesso IR speaking. First of all, I'd like to thank you for joining our Q4 and full year earnings call. Regarding our annual report we have published today, within our release this morning, you found adesso confirming the preliminary figures published by the end of February. Adesso showed another year of extraordinary growth. Sales reached over EUR 1.1 billion and was up by 26%. EBITDA of EUR 80 million hit the middle of the guided range, which had, which had been lowered after Q3. Although profitability improved significantly in the second half of the year, with an EBITDA margin of 9.3%, the full year result was not satisfactory. With regard to 2024, the executive board is confident that ongoing high demand will allow the company to improve earnings in 2024.
I'd now like to welcome as well our CFO, Jörg Schroeder, who will give us a deeper insight into last year's figures, the dividend proposal, and the guidance for the current year. As always, I'd like you to mute yourself during his presentation. Feel free to open up the channels for the Q&A session afterwards. Participants on phones may want to mute or unmute their microphones via the star key, followed by the number six of their phones. Thank you so far, and Jörg, please go ahead.
Thank you, Martin, and thank you, everybody, for joining today's presentation. As Martin pointed out, I will give you a brief update on the fiscal year 2023. And we start, as always, with top line, and as Martin already mentioned, we see a 26% growth to a total sales volume of EUR 1.136 billion. So it's the first time for us to be over EUR 1 billion in revenues. And from this 26%, 24 percentage points actually came by organic growth. So we are still very strong in a kind of a rough market environment to grow organically by high double digits, and 2 percentage points came by acquisitions that we made over the year.
You see that pretty well reflected in the headcount, which grew on average, FTE numbers, by 28% in the year 2023. So going further to the sales split by industry, we see that basically in all industries where we are active in, we see growth rates, and all but one industries, we see double-digit growth rates. Only automotive is lagging a little bit behind with only +4%. It's growing, but it's growing slower than the other industries. And we see two industries, the newest one for us, which are retail and utilities, with very high growth figures of +61% and +74.4% respectively, which are extraordinarily high. And we still are pretty much diversified. The biggest sector for us is the public sector now for, I think, the second year in a row.
But the public sector overall makes around 16% of the overall sales volume. So we are well diversified. All industries grew, and basically, also the outlook is that there is a strong market demand, therefore, all the verticals where we are active in. If we look at the sales split by region, we also see that there is growth basically everywhere. In Germany, we grew by 28%, and for us, that's the by far biggest market, with 82% of overall sales, that we do. On average, the other countries grew a little bit slower, but everywhere is growth. You see that reflected. Switzerland, Austria, only 9% and 8%, but even outside the German-speaking area, we have double-digit growth rates. Italy came new by acquisition last year, and all the other countries are growing nicely.
So we become, on absolute terms, more and more international. Although, since we grow 28% in Germany, the structure of our sales by region doesn't change so much. So we are still a very German company, but on absolute terms, it's more and more also outside of Germany. Now, to the earnings side of 2023, which wasn't so great, as Martin already pointed out. We see EBITDA coming down. Just to give you perspective here, for the ones who are not following us for a longer time, we see here the last five years, and it looks like we have a decline since two years, but that actually just gives you half of the picture, because in 2021, we had a one-off effect included, because we had a divestment of a subgroup of adesso.
And if you would exclude that in an adjusted figure, then the EBITDA there would actually be at around 84%. So the earnings, EBITDA here would look like a perfect staircase, actually, till 2022. But 2023 was really bad in terms of profitability. We grew very fast, but earnings went down, and there are reasons to that. Some of them, and the biggest ones are highlighted here. We had lower utilization, pretty much in the first half year of 2023. That came due to hard hiring pace. So we really overhired people, recruited a lot of people, and were not able to get everybody into a project on time, so that led utilization to come down. We took countermeasures...
Pretty early in the year, I think around February, but the effects of that were only seen in June 2023, last year. So the second half of the year was already better, as Martin pointed out. If you look at the EBITDA margin for the whole year, it's 7%, and for the second half of the year, it was 9.3%. So utilization was already on average levels for us in the second half of the year, but the first half really was not that good. Then we had other things like some project impairments of larger fixed price projects and weaker license sales. 2022 for us was a record-breaking year in terms of license sales, and 2023 was much, much weaker.
This, of course, also had an impact, and although the second half of the year was stronger, it was not able to fully compensate the losses that we made in the first half year, and so that led us to our earnings go astray and really see profitability plummeting here, which we are definitely not happy about. Okay, so here you see the EBITDA margin. As said, the 2021 figure is inflated due to the one-off effect. But 7% EBITDA margin is definitely not what we are looking to go for. It's well below our own expectations and aspirations. It should be much higher. If you look at some key figures here, we see the employee growth of 28% is over the sales growth, and that actually already gives you part of the picture.
So we recruited more people than we were able to utilize in projects, and that is why this figure is higher than the sales growth, and which also leads, if you look at the cost side, that our personnel cost is increasing higher than sales. Another aspect that comes to that is that also personnel cost per FTE is rising. You see that reflected down here in the slide in the last item, +3%. And that combined means, 70% of our overall cost structure is personnel cost, and if that grows faster than the sales revenue that we make, you have a profitability problem, and that is basically what happened in 2023.
So as mentioned, we coped with that in the second half of the year and changed that a little bit, but it was not enough to come out really good here. If we look at the profit drivers down here, you see that utilization really wasn't that good, and particularly in Germany. The daily rates, though, increased around 5 percentage points. We and we still see opportunities in increasing daily rates, now for 2 years in a row and probably continuing from there. License sales was down, as mentioned, and personal cost per FTE was up, and all that combined led to a lower profitability. Yeah, and coming from a lower EBITDA, the rest doesn't get any better.
Depreciation and the other items are pretty much in line with growth, but this means that coming from a lower figure, that the EBT, the pre-tax earnings, is already much, much lower, only at 12.2%. Last year, we were at EUR 42 million, sorry, EUR 12.2 million. The income taxes seem extraordinarily high, even for a German company. 72%, it's the tax quota, and that is due to, since the earnings is such a low figure and there are non-deductible items included there, that are not tax-deductible, and that means that the income taxes, although they are lower, they are still very high, and this means that consolidated earnings is only EUR 3.4 million, and earnings per share, only EUR 0.49, positive.
Yeah, and coming now to balance sheet items, we see that the year-end numbers are much better than what we saw within the year. We have a cyclical development of cash positions within the year because we have a normal cyclicality of net working capital. But another thing was last year, we had to go live of our new S/4HANA SAP system, which led net working capital even to increase higher than it usually would have been. But the year-end figures show that we have resolved pretty much all of the issues that we had within the year. Our cash position is fine, financial debt is higher, but the net debt position came down compared to the Q3 balance sheet, for example. Operating cash flow is good. We will have a look later on that.
Goodwill increased due to the acquisitions that we made. Equity ratio came down a little bit. And if you look at return on capital, what we think is appropriate for our kind of business model would probably be a number like return on net working capital, which is at 12.6%, which isn't good. I would say an appropriate figure for us should be beyond 25%. And return on equity, of course, 1.6% is very bad, should be beyond 15%, and we have done that in the past, and that is where we should come back to.
Now, there is a new slide that we included, also looking at the cash flow statement, and on the left-hand side here, you see a picture from our cash flow statement from the annual report that we published today. The basic story behind that is starting with pre-tax earnings, which are EUR 30 million lower than last year, we still have an increase of operating cash flow. Of course, depreciation increased, and so on, but the really big issue is that the change of net operating assets that we see reflected here. Net working capital was much better and also other current assets. And this means that although we had lower earnings before taxes in 2023, we have a higher cash flow from operating activities.
If you make to look at what is the free cash flow that we really generated, on the right-hand side, you see starting from EBT, and then, of course, depreciation, amortization going up. The change of net operating assets is the biggest issue here. Then we deduct from operating cash flow, CapEx, and we deduct lease repayments according to IFRS 16, which is seen in the cash flow statement on the financing activities. And then the IFRS Foundation calls that free cash flow, too. That is their definition, and we think that's an appropriate definition for our type of business to look at free cash flows. And we see that we actually had a positive free cash flow of EUR 14.2 million, largely driven by the changes of net working capital, not because we were so profitable.
So that is the next thing we wanna work on, becoming more profitable and then generating more free cash flows in the future. So coming to the guidance for 2024, for the current year, we are still growth-oriented, and we know it's a tough market environment, but in general, we still see a strong market demand. Companies are contemplating whether they invest and where to invest, but in terms of looking, digitalization projects, information systems, and everything related around artificial intelligence, usage of data, and that is really true for all industries. It's not just the next big thing, it's just continuing. We see that, and so market demand is not stalling. It's still strong, and that is why we have a positive outlook for 2024 and also the years ahead.
We expect double-digit sales growth also in 2024. Although the general environment for IT service companies predict a market increase of roughly 5%, we still think that we can at least double that. We also expect that our margin should be better than 2023. Again, probably to a large degree in the second half of the year, which is usually our better year, what was also the case in 2023. But we don't wanna relive another 2023. We wanna come back to normalized margin levels already in 2024. One good thing about 2024 is that, at least in Germany, we have one more working day, which is just one more day that we can work and that we can bill and charge for our services.
That comes down to a sales guidance of over EUR 1.25 billion and an EBITDA of EUR 110 million-EUR 130 million. That is what we expect. You can calculate the margin. It is somewhere between, I think, 8%-10.5%, somewhere in that region. Should be so already better than in 2023. Not our midterm goal of 11%-13% that we wanna reach, but, it's, it's on the right way, so to say. So what is 2024 looking like, and what are initiatives and, things that we look at? Of course, we have and we, we see continued growth. We wanna see double-digit sales growth. We ramp up our offshore location and business in India, which we utilize in Western European projects.
We wanna implement stronger facilitate new portfolio element that we call managed services, so really doing managed services in terms of IT-related business services for our clients. And, of course, the big thing is coming back to profitability. 2023 was really not good. We need to improve utilization in our core business. We need to further increase the daily rates, and of course, we also need to reinforce the focus on cash flows. We did some steps in the right direction already in the second half of 2023, but we still can improve on that. So that is what we are looking to do in 2024. And now to our proposal of dividends. We propose a dividend increase for the 11th time now to EUR 0.70 a share. That is an increase of 7.7%.
You see here, the last years, 2019 to 2023 now with EUR 0.70. One might ask: Why you're doing that? Because it's higher than the earnings per share. That is true, but the free cash flow per share actually is at EUR 2.18, and that we think is a more appropriate number in terms of do we have enough cash to pay out the dividend? We do, and that is why our proposal is like that. That will then be done on the annual meeting, which will be in the beginning of June this year. So with that, I would like to conclude. Thank you for listening, and open up for questions and answers.
Yeah, great. Thank you. And we already have some questions from Mr. Sauer from Kepler Cheuvreux.
Hello, good morning, Mr. Schroeder. Hello, Mr. Möllmann. I have two questions. The first one is on personnel growth. So the personnel growth in the first half of the year was 32%, and in the full year, 28%. So taking the arithmetic mean, it would be 24% in the second half of the year. Is, is this required? I mean, could you not have lowered it even a bit more in the second half of the year? And the second question is, what, what would be necessary to reach the 11%-13% EBITDA margin target? And why, do you think it's not possible in 2024? What, what's the, the issue here? Yeah. Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Sauer. So, starting with the first question of personnel growth, you're absolutely right. We slowed down on recruiting. That was a necessity in order to get to higher numbers in terms of profitability in the second half of the year. But there's always a delay, so why was it not much lower? Because a lot of the contracts, it's not that people start the next month, sometimes it's three months, sometimes six, sometimes a year. There's always transition periods between changing jobs. So that is one thing. And of course, we wanted to slow down recruiting, but what we didn't want to do was slow down recruiting to zero or to actually to a decline.
Because adesso pretty much lives on the strong market demand and delivering on that strong market demand. And in order to do that, for organic growth, we need new talent on board. So we wouldn't stop recruiting. We just slow down the pace of recruiting, and that is what you see pretty well reflected last year. Actually, in late 2023, we already discussed to open recruiting doors again, because otherwise you might face the issue that growth might slow down too much, which also wouldn't be what, what we are looking for. We still think that we can gain market share, and for that, we need strong growth.
And although we know that we sacrifice a little bit of margin there, we think for the long-term perspective, that's the better approach and also what we are much better at than margin optimizing. So also for this year, we still recruit, and we wanna grow, probably not 30-ish%, because we see that we then have problems and issues with profitability, which we don't like. But, we still need growth for, for the overall business model. And coming to your second question of EBITDA margin, what is necessary to reach that 11%-13%, and why are we not able to deliver on that in 2024? So what is necessary is... well, that, that's a tough question.
I can give you a general view of what we think might be levers to get there for the business that we do and for the way we do it. One thing is that the shoring activities that we started, nearshoring and now also offshoring in India, has additional margin potential. So when we recruit on a faster scale in India, for example, and utilize that in well done and well-managed projects in Western Europe, largely or mainly in Germany, also Switzerland and U.K., then there is additional margin potential for what we do. Another thing is increasing daily rates, and that is, of course, possible, especially in new portfolio elements, like what I said, managed services. So really doing complete business services for clients, not just developing an information system.
Or with new portfolio elements, everything around data and analytics and AI. Generative AI is now everywhere, and there is actually no customer discussion or talk that we have without at least touching some kind of generative AI issues, and the question how that can be of benefit for the business of the customer. And of course, if you sell data scientists and people from that sphere, you have much higher daily rates than for a junior Java developer, for example, which is more like a commodity. So these are just two things that we see have additional margin potential. And why are we not there yet? We are coming from a very bad year, 2023, in terms of profitability, and we had to resolve things about working capital.
It now looks good at year-end balance sheet figures, but it didn't within the year. So, we really had some some tough times and, and a lot of things that we needed to resolve in 2023. And we are still on our way. 2024 is not an easy year. It has one more working days, but we are still in a recessionary environment. We see a strong market demand. I mean, otherwise we wouldn't grow or not grow as fast. But still, there are companies who are contemplating whether and when to invest in further projects. So, it's not like the perfect environment for us. We still think in that kind of tough environment, we can gain our shares, but it will not be enough to come to very good profitability levels.
Great. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. We got more questions in line. Next one will be Lukas Spang from Tigris Capital.
Yes, good morning, Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Möllmann. My first question is related to, let's say, regarding new KPIs. You already touched net working capital or return on net working capital and also return on equity. If I remember our last talk, you also already pointed out that you want to make a more focus on free cash flow. So is there anything you can share with us in terms of your free cash flow generation ambition? And also in this relation, what is your net working capital target?
Yeah. Thank you. Very good questions, Mr. Spang. I like that. Yeah, so we discussed that in senior management because these are new, newish KPIs for the internal adesso world. Usually, we are very growth driven and gain market share, go out and win projects, and deliver software excellence in the market. That is what adesso is about, and that is what we are really good at. Of course, we always had profitability and margin goals, but I think really thinking about the long term and how we allocate capital in an efficient way in order to now we are much bigger size and gain more market share and more profits and cash flow in the future, we maybe not need, but they might be useful. Additional KPIs might be useful for that.
Capital efficiency, or we looked at return on capital, you can define it whatever you like. So I think, or a very good way for our kind of business, since we are an asset-light company, might be to look at net working capital and what return we generate on that, and return on equity. Maybe some might argue against that and say equity is inflated due to all the intangibles on the balance sheet. Might be true, but it's still a largely used metric, and that is why we think both of these metrics, with what I already pointed out, I think a return on net working capital should be beyond 25% for us, and return on equity beyond 15%. And I think this will give us an additional picture of what we do.
For the time being, we will track that, we will report that, and we will try to get in the corridors just mentioned, just to be more efficient on the returns that we do. And free cash flow is another thing. We had an initiative internally that we called improving cash flow, because it's not just about order entries or making sales, of course. In the end, it's not even about earnings. The question is: how much cash do we generate? And for that, we use free cash flow as defined, as I've shown you. We are here in line with the IFRS foundation, including IFRS 16, since 2019.
Even within the year, we look at that on a LTM, last twelve-month basis, in order to see where we are at, where we are generating cash flow, and of course, it should be more in the future. So coming back to your question, we'll probably see some cyclicality, some ups and downs there. I don't have... So we don't have a target or guidance for there yet. I think also for the time being, for the adesso culture, it's good that it's new and implemented in our decision-making processes, that there is a return on capital thing that we have to look at, and there is a free cash flow thing that we have to look at, and we need to include that in our decision-making process, whether that's a good approach for both of these figures or not.
I would say we make a step in order to reach a next maturity level for adesso in terms of growth and now a larger corporation, but it's not that we already include it in the guidance. Might be sometime in the future. So for now, I cannot give you exact figures, how much free cash flow do we try to generate. It should be more, of course, in the future, and we will work on that.
Okay. In terms of Net Working Capital ratio, what is there, your target?
That was another question. So we also don't disclose a hard target. Maybe since I talked about Return on Net Working Capital should be beyond 25%, I think that is something that we should reach. And what you also see, Net Working Capital is also very volatile within a year for us, because there are fixed price projects that get largely charged at the end of the year. We have other things within the year that change Net Working Capital. So it always depends on what time you're looking at. You're looking at last twelve months, of course, but so we don't have a specific target for that other than Return on Net Working Capital so far.
... Mm-hmm. Okay. Then in terms of utilization, could you hold the, the positive momentum from Q4 in the beginning of the year? So, can you say something about the utilization in January, February, and March so far?
Yeah, and not for the whole quarter, of course, but for the start. January is usually not a great month for utilization, but that is true in every year. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that most new employees start in January, which usually lowers utilization. Another thing is that even though new projects start, sometimes they are not in the processes of our systems or the customer systems, where we have to yeah, charge the hours that we bill there. So we sometimes see later reflected in the next month what was the real utilization rate. So January was pretty much like last year, so not very good. February, we know, that it's also not super great.
And March will have not very much working days, so even if utilization rate is great, it won't be spectacular. But overall, I think the guidance that we put out there is reasonable, taking into account all chances and risks. And so we are still very confident that we reach that guidance, and particularly because if you look at the structure of the calendar structure of 2024, you will see that I don't have the exact figure on the top of my head, but I think the second half of the year has, like, five more working days than the first half of the year, which has a huge impact on the earnings side.
Then, in terms of in|sure, it's always the same question: What is your current pipe, and what is your expectation for this year?
Yeah, in|sure is a, yeah, so not very successful story. 2023 was really bad for in|sure. It was tough after the record-breaking year, 2022, to do that again in 2023, so we knew in advance that it would be tough, but it was even below our expectations. 2024 should be better, although we still have issues there. So, we still have invested probably too much into the products. We still have a pipeline, but you still have to win the deals. In 2023, we saw that here and there, we lost a deal, and the market demand changed a little bit. So in life insurance, there was not so much to do.
Health insurance looked better, and the general insurance world for us was pretty new and has a tougher competitive environment for us. This whole environment still holds true for 2024. Nevertheless, we think 2024 will be better than 2023 for in|sure. How much better? It's too early to say that.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Thank you. Now we have, Andreas Wolf from Warburg Research .
Yes. Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I have a question on the general IT services environment. If you look at players like Accenture, they appear to be somewhat pessimistic regarding 2024. So I'm curious to know how adesso manages to secure its high growth. Obviously, you are distinguishing yourself quite well compared to or from competition. Is it mainly due to the sectors that you're in, or is it the clients that show strong demand? I'm just trying to better understand what is very special about adesso. And then the 24% organic growth, how much of that was related to price increases?
And then, in general, on in|sure, has the competitive environment in general changed, or is it just individual cases that basically have led to the subdued development in this segment? And then the fourth question is on capital returns and new KPIs. I guess the answer to my question will be no, but the question is, are those KPIs already included in management compensation? Thank you.
A very good question. Thank you, Mr. Wolf. Starting with the IT service environment, and we know that it's not only Accenture. Well, I think a lot of competitors have not such a bright outlook, talking about double-digit growth figures. First, one has to say that Accenture is much larger than we are, so that is probably tougher on the side to grow as fast as we do. On the other side, we are basically doing some kind of the same business, that's true. What distinguishes us or what is our distinguishing approach to the market is basically two things. We try to stay very attractive for employees.
That is also one reason why we invest maybe a little bit too much there, but to retain and attract the best talent that is there, because it's a people business, and you win the market with having the best people around. So and we are very good at that. We are perceived as a very attractive employer. We have an attrition rate, which is at 7.5%, so the turnover rate, I mean. So, so overall, that works out very nice, and that helps us get new talent on board. And if you get good people, you can get them into projects. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but it will eventually happen, because there's such a strong demand.
And another thing is talking about the customers is probably our approach in terms of how we do the projects and how we sell the projects, which is a very industry-specific approach. We do have bankers for our banking industry. We do have engineers for the manufacturing industry. We do have medical doctors and really, people coming from the industries know the industry by heart and deeply rooted about the business process in a certain industry. And we also try to have a really strong customer relationship, not just talking, okay, I know my customer, but it's really deeply rooted. We don't have a lot of recurring revenue, as you know, but we have what we call repeating revenue, with...
We hardly ever lose a customer, and we have customers with us for over two decades, where we just continue doing business, and that just works out if you have a very deeply funded, deeply rooted connection to the customer. And I think we do that much better than maybe not all, but most competitors. So both of these things, on the recruiting, retention side and on the customer relation side, in terms of project delivery and, and sales, is what distinguishes us. Your second question about the, how much is the price increase? As mentioned, the price increased roughly by, I think it's also in the annual report, around 5%, was the price increases last year. And for in|sure, you asked about the general environment, yeah, and, and, or is it individual cases? It's actually both.
So the general environment, as said, is. I briefly mentioned that. So life insurances is now not a good time to sell modules because it's pretty well set for the time being. Health insurances, there are still opportunities, and on the properties and casualties market, which is a whole new field, there are chances, but there's a lot to say about really individual cases. Insurance companies are not looking that bad in terms of their environment, but they have very long decision-making process for themselves. The same cycles there sometimes take years, or actually, usually all the times take years. So it's a very hard-fought business and also a business where we have new competition that we don't have in life insurance or health insurance.
Yeah, yeah, for your first part, last part about Return on Capital, I would actually like to have that in management compensation, but that is up to the Supervisory Board, and it's not yet the case.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Yeah, thank you. We got more questions and, roughly 20 minutes left in the call. So next one will be, Stefan Winterling, and after that, Mr. Specht from Berenberg.
Good morning. Can you please comment on your international approach, both on the customer and on the recruiting side? Given the relatively tough macroeconomic environment, does it mean that you would rather retrench to your strongholds in Germany? Does it mean that you would rather expand to other geographies to further balance any macroeconomic problems we have in Germany? Just how do you... And how are the other markets doing? So what's your approach there? And then you mentioned India. You've made the acquisition, you're doing nearshoring. What's your approach for this year and also maybe for the coming years on recruiting nearshore and maybe even offshore? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Winterling. Very good topic, because I think in order to have the next step, next level of further growth, adesso now became a company with over EUR 1 billion in revenues, and we are already discussing how we get to EUR 2 billion. It took us 27 years to get that EUR 1 billion in sales, and probably it will take much less time to reach two billion. Internationalization is one part of the story, either in terms of of sourcing, so where do we get additional human capital, if you want so? The shoring locations are one part of that. So, we already grew in Turkey quite fast, also Bulgaria and now Romania for the nearshore locations. And we will continue to do that.
Shoring should be a larger part of the overall portfolio, not meaning that we double it just like that, because we always have to see how can we integrate that in our delivery model. Because our customers, for the German customers and Switzerland alike, they like to have people talking their languages or knowing regulatory stuff of their environment and so on. So we always need to have people, we call them bridge heads, so local people who are used to and know how to manage a shoring team, but still hold close contact with the customer and the issues related about the project and the customer itself. So what we don't do is have a pure offshore resources and purely do our shoring business without any intermediate who manages the customer relationships and the project delivery.
The same thing holds true for India, which is, for us, pretty new. I mean, we started that in April last year, so it's not even one year there. But we will, we actually have, done an investment there for new office locations, so we will recruit there. So we will see, yeah, already... I don't know how many employees. I wanted to say a number, but I won't. But it will be much more, employees than last year, because it works out quite good, actually. So we see opportunities in there. And so, so that's for both of the ways we are looking for. So overall, it's for profitable growth. It's a good growth opportunity, and it's an opportunity to, to have a margin booster.
Because if we do it right, then we have additional margin that we can get out of an offshoring business than just doing it on-site. But also to mention, we do it step by step and not just putting everything on one card. It's a large part of our strategy to get to EUR 2 billion in sales.
If I may, one more question on product business in general. We discussed in|sure Tech. What are your plans with regards to, obviously, we talked about banking, but also other sectors which are growing rapidly, where you have a very good, strong hold. What are your product plans?
Yeah. Yeah, so the product business, we have a segment where we include that. We call that IT solutions. It had a very bad year in 2023. If you look at the segment report, the IT services part actually didn't do so bad. It wasn't super great, but it wasn't so bad at all. What really put us down was the IT solutions. We will continue that, so you can also discuss whether that's a good business for us or not. We still think there's a lot of cross and upselling potential. We still also see potential for the product itself, although they weren't super successful for us, particularly in 2023, and 2024 will probably also be not the greatest year for the solution part.
But it's counteracted, at least to some degree, by all the cross and upselling potential that we have on the services side. I mean, even if you have a product within a customer that isn't super profitable, but you get all the projects done around that left and right, that's a great opportunity. And so that is what we're still doing. And we still hold onto that business to see whether there is a new window of opportunity in the future. So we still invest into the products, not to a degree where it wouldn't make any sense anymore. But for the future years, we still think there might be a window of opportunity to also sell more and more profitable of the products, but it will probably not be 2024.
Sorry, if I may, in order to get into a new sector, it—I think there's a critical mass, there's a critical investment that you need to make. Otherwise, it almost doesn't make sense. So my question was more rather, not so much in|sure tech, but other sectors.
Mm-hmm.
Are you planning to invest? Because at the end of the day, you have to make an investment of several million, maybe even double-digit million. So do you have any plans, to the extent you can share there ?
Yeah, I see. Now, now I get you. Yeah, of course, that's important, and the answer is no. At least not to a large degree. We will have further investments in in|sure, and we still have some investments in our new healthcare suite, called smile, which is a DRG product, but not anything beyond that, because actually, it... we discussed that, in the executive board. But when we want to come back to profitability, and that is one of the initiatives for 2024, there's not much room for further investments. So we do that, the investments that we already started, but no new ones, not for the time being.
Understood. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Okay, thank you. Now, Mr. Specht from Berenberg. I would like to-
Yeah.
All right. Okay, there you are.
Three quick follow-on from my side. First, your activities or ambitions you mentioned in managed service as a new portfolio element. Can you elaborate a little bit? Because to my understanding, this type of services have already been in your portfolio before? Second question, can you give us an idea about the vertical split? So for example, do you expect also a rather weak 2024 for the automotive section? And then coming to potentially new verticals, your cross-sector vertical is now with about EUR 220 million, quite large. Is there, let's say, the time now to spin off one or two new verticals, for example, with activities you have in the sport area? Thanks a lot.
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Specht. So first touching on the managed services, you are absolutely right. It's not a completely new portfolio element. We did that before. For example, we have our data centers where we run and operate systems for customers, and where we have kind of recurring business. It's more that we look to dive deeper into that and to put it really on the upfront side of the portfolio elements when we discuss it with customers. So really talking about, for example, cloud strategies. We can provide in any of the hyperscalers and also the, I think we call that megascalers, somewhere in between, and manage these services for customers.
What we are also discussing with certain customers is when they have, like, old systems or older IT departments, where they don't have a specific use in terms of... It's not of their critical core business. We're discussing opportunities to buy these teams, these departments, and then still run the business for the customers, which is needed, but they cannot run it very good themselves. They cannot scale it up. They cannot do different kind of things with that. So really looking about more recurring business that is probably also scalable. That is what we are looking to do more in the future in terms of managed services. For your second question regarding the vertical split, it's too soon to say who will be the big winner this year.
The prospects are good for all the industries, including automotive. The OEMs and the suppliers even more have a rough environment, of course, and there is a lot of issues. But they know when they invest, of course, they need new engines maybe, but they also need to invest a lot in digitalization, new software systems, and all that stuff, and that is where we come into place. And so the automotive sector also has good prospects, and who will come out on top in this year? It's hard to say. Probably the newer ones, since they are smaller and still have a lot of opportunity, have better chances for that, but I wouldn't rule out any of the other sectors for now. And in terms of new verticals, you are absolutely right.
Across industries is the biggest one, and there are subsectors included there, that we might turn out. Sports is not that big so far. It's, it's a good business, and it's starting very well, and we started it pretty much on a green field level. So, it's a nice, nice idea, a nice, growth story. There are even other subsectors that might come to mind, but it will not happen in 2024. In 2025, we will look at that, but in 2024, I don't see any new vertical that we outcarve from cross industries.
Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Do we have any more questions at this point? We've got, like, seven minutes left. Mr. Spang again?
Yes, maybe one quick follow-up on in|sure and recurring revenues out of support or yes, support revenues. What is your current in|sure support revenue base?
You mean the maintenance?
Yeah, sorry, maintenance.
Maintenance, yeah. I think it's around EUR 6 million-EUR 7 million, somewhere in that neighborhood, per year.
But increasing?
It's increasing. Slightly, but it's increasing, yeah.
Okay. I think that's all for now. Thank you very much for your interest in our call today and your participation. I wish you all the best and hope to see you in person soon. For now, goodbye.
Goodbye.