Good morning, everybody. This is Martin Möllmann of adesso IR speaking. First of all, I'd like to thank you for joining our Q2 and Half Year One Earnings Call regarding our half year report we've published today. Within our release this morning, you found adesso pretty much confirming the outlook for the remainder of the year, given with the Q1 figures. adesso reports ongoing strong sales with extraordinary 33% compared to previous year. As expected, Q2 was weaker earnings-wise, since capacity utilization was still below average and the fewest number of working days. However, adesso sees capacity utilization measures starting to take effect and will help with earnings contribution in the second half of the year. Hence, outlook for the full year 2023 remains positive and guidance has been confirmed.
I now like to welcome as well our CFO, Jörg Schroeder, who will give us a deeper insight into the figures of the first half of the year and the outlook for the remainder of 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. Jörg, please go ahead.
Thank you, Martin, for the introduction. Welcome also from my side to everybody who's listening right now. I will start the half year report with, as usual, the sales numbers. As you see here, the top line growth, and Martin already pointed that out, is 33% compared to the first half year of 2022. The total number now is EUR 546 million, and of course, we are very happy with that. That shows that our kind of services are still in demand in the current market environment, and also the outlook for that is pretty much on, on, on that line here. What is or what has not worked out in the first half year, and Martin briefly mentioned that, too, is the earnings you see here on the right-hand side, the EBITDA, going down to only EUR 25 million.
That's a decline by 34% compared to the first half year of 2022. It is impacted by the really high pace of recruiting that we had, already started, actually, in 2022. Concerning low utilization, capacity utilization went down due to the high pace of recruiting. We really have a lot of new staff and not everybody into projects, soon enough and, and early enough. That is basically the problem that we had, pretty much through the whole H1 year, at least for the first five months. We'll later come to what has changed now or what we've seen change, and that was actually in change, change in June already. Until June, the capital, capacity utilization was really bad compared to previous years also and to average figures.
That is why the earnings didn't match the good sales growth that, that we saw. Okay, first, let's dive deeper into the sales numbers. Here we see the sales split by industry as usual, pointed out, and as usual, we see that basically all industries work out just fine. Only automotive is still lacking a little bit behind with just pretty much the previous year number, only +1% growth. All other sectors grow by double-digit numbers, and we see banking by +16%, and all the other sectors are actually beyond 20%. This is really, really good. We see also the new or, or, yeah, new kids on the block, the newer sectors that we started, pretty much last year with retail and utilities, with really good growth figures here in the high 60s and high 70s.
This is really a very good development, and we hope that we continue that also in the future. It's still that the public sector is our biggest sector now. The first time happening, that was last year, and now public alone makes EUR 90 million revenues in the first half-year, which is even more than the EUR 80 million that we do in insurance. The growth figures, however, they are pretty much in line now with the more mature verticals that we see here. Public sector now is still growing and good growing, but not with the outrageous growth figures that we see, for example, in utilities and retail. Yeah, this is a really good development.
We are happy that we can continue this, and also I can say it on this page already, the outlook for the rest of the year is also pretty good in all the verticals, pretty much. Now the sales split by region. We have added a couple of countries here because we get more and more international. Now we are active in 15 countries. Of course, still, as you see here, 82% of the sales is done in Germany, so we are still a very German company, and the sales growth in Germany is 31%. That also means that the international growth rate is actually on average 40%. Higher than in Germany, and that is why the average overall for the group is then 33%.
We see here that the more mature countries like Switzerland, Austria, are growing good with double digits. Switzerland, 31%, Austria, 26%. We added new countries here with Netherlands and Italy, because they now have domestic revenues over EUR 5 million, and they are also growing in the terms of Netherlands. Italy is pretty new. We started last year, but it basically became a bigger country for us with the acquisition of Web Science that we just closed in January of this year. Italy is a pretty new story. We have Turkey, here only showing the domestic revenue. Turkey also have a large part in the shoring capacity, in the near and offshore capacity. Even in the domestic revenues, we see high growth rates and also for all the other countries.
In total, it's 15 countries now, 14 outside of Germany. Most of them, or a lot of them are doing really good. Of course, they are much smaller than the German-speaking area, but we think their development is, is on a good track. Coming to the bad side of the numbers, which is the earnings, we see that the EBITDA margin declined 4.6% for EBITDA, is actually pretty bad. This is largely driven by the low utilization, and as what you see here in the key figures is the high rise in personal cost. We see FTE on average, and this is now comparing first half year 2023 to H1 year of 2022, is 32%.
What we see here or what we saw in the last couple of quarters, is that this figure was, was inflated. It was much higher than the sales growth, and now it's coming pretty much in line. We have stopped now the really overpaced growth of hiring people. But we started that in February, basically, and you always have a delay. Contract asset or contracts with employees are already signed. So if you say we don't hire that much in February, until you see the first effects, it, it lasts like three months on average, I would say, because the rest is already, already done in that period. Now we see that employees rise with 32% is pretty much in line.
We see the sales growth of 33%, we see that other operating expenses are even disproportionately low. What we see is disproportionately high is the personal costs. Here we see that is a phase of the high recruiting pace and a phase of rising personal cost per FTE, which you see down here at the slide, is now at +6%, which is quite a lot. It's the, by far, biggest position, the biggest cost position for us, the personal costs, and that increased by 6%. It's of course, an issue. We don't expect it necessarily to increase further than from here, right now we have to, we have to deal with that.
We hope that we can get more in line in terms of sales growth and personal cost now in the remainder of the year to reach our numbers. If we look at the profit drivers, we see, of course, the most important one is utilization, and that was pretty bad in the first half year. The daily rates have increased. Still, we are at around 5% in terms of daily rates. This is basically good news. We still see room for improvement here in the future because the demand is so strong and so we still see a lot of projects happening. We don't see any bad signs in terms of recession or business going down, so that is definitely not the case.
If we look at our license fees that we had this year, the first half year was weaker than the first half year of 2022. 2022 was a record year. We also have to mention that, we still have a pipeline there for in|sure for the second half of the year. Probably most of the deals that we have in the near future outlook will come only in Q4. That's just because the decision-making processes at the insurance companies are designed in a way that they usually do it pretty late in the year. Still, we are looking for more license sales this year, not to reach the same level as last year. That doesn't look very likely. Yeah, personal cost per FTE, I already mentioned that.
I would say from this slide, this is probably the main takeaway that we are really, at this point in time, have a high increase. Because it's the biggest cost figure, the EBITDA looks as bad as it does here, and the margin went, went so much down. Yeah, then it doesn't get any better if EBITDA is so much weaker and pretty much everything else is more or less in line with the proportions of our growth pace. But the absolute figures are, of course, then, in a range where EBT, earnings before taxes, are positive, but no, it's actually, it should be negative, EUR-5.4 million . The consolidated earnings then is EUR -6.3 million .
We are actually in the negatives and also for EPS in the H1 -year, we have lost money. That is not very common for us, and we are not very happy about that, and we want that to turn around. As good as all that sales growth is, we have to watch out that we stay profitable, of course, and not growing so fast that our costs run us away. I will come to that. We are confident that we can shift and make the turnaround to profitability again, and we also can do that this year. First, some numbers of the balance sheet and financial KPIs.
I have to mention one thing, because they are largely impacted by an SAP S/4HANA transformation that we made, and the go-live for our new SAP system was in April, start of April, and we faced some issues with that. First, of course, we do these kind of transformations to SAP, at a ton of our customers, so we are quite used to what does that mean to have a new ERP system in place. And we did it with our own concerns, also some external help. In this case, we are the customer, and yeah, pretty much like, like all the projects, you always face some hiccups after the go-live. We are no exception here, unfortunately.
We had some difficulties to get invoices out in time to book all the billable hours, and, and to have the receivables management in place. We had a couple of weeks where we really had to work hard to get everything done, and we see that reflected pretty well here in, in the balance sheet. Our cash position is as it is, but we see a high increase in financial debt, and this is largely driven by short-term debt because we use that additional debt leverage to finance the working capital issues that we see here within the year. We see that the net cash flow or net debt position has increased by pretty much the same amount.
Operating cash flow is on really bad levels, and this is driven by the high increase of working capital you see here by 48%. At the end of the quarter, we were able again to write all the invoices, or a lot of invoices. You see an increase of accounts receivable, but what we even see more is a large increase of contract assets that, that increased. This is not only driven by a fixed price project, that's also the case, but also by a large part of billable hours that are chargeable, but where we haven't written the invoices yet. This is booked in the balance sheet under contract assets, and so this drives really the working capital.
We have booked the numbers, but we haven't written the invoice, so the customer doesn't even know yet that he has to. Of course, he does know that he has to pay, but he doesn't have a formal document for that, and that means working capital really went through the roof. I'm still confident that we can turn this around and in the second half of the year can get this working capital issues to at least normal figures, because actually, we did this SAP transformation to get better with these kind of numbers. In the Q1, we actually got much worse. This should not be the long-term future, but at this point in time, it is driven by the transformation and the go-live hiccups that we faced, the first few weeks after the go-live.
That, of course, also means that the equity ratio goes down, because of on, on the active side of the balance sheet, we see the high increase of contract assets, and on the right-hand side, we see the higher leverage figures. This drives equity proportionally down, and we see equity ratio going down. Hopefully, we can solve these kind of financial KPIs things, to the end of the year. In Q4 latest, I hope that we have turned this around and, and are at least on track with usual figures, what we know for adesso. For the guidance, as you probably also have seen that, we are in line and think that our guidance is, is still in reachable grounds.
Sales-wise, it's probably more easy because we already have EUR 546 million of revenues booked, and we wanna be over EUR 1 billion. We are at 55% of the guidance reach, and we have the second half of the year, so this looks pretty good. We don't know yet how much better than the EUR 1 billion we really get, so that is why we haven't changed there anything. Of course, we will look in the next couple of months how this turns out. In EBITDA, we are lacking a little bit behind with just EUR 25 million of EBITDA after the first half year, so that is around 23%-25% of the guidance level, and we wanna be above EUR 100 million. This is still, this is still manageable.
When you look at the bullet points that we have on this slide here, we see still a strong market demand for our-... in particular, the IT service business. We don't see any industry where this is actually going down. What we rather see is that our order entries are on a record level. Of course, this has to do with the growth, but order entries are still good. Salesforce is working, all industries are looking for digitalization projects, software engineering, and invest in modern technology. We have our fair share of, of wins in that. That is why order entries are also looking pretty good. Sales is not our problem.
What we also did, and that is what I briefly mentioned with what I think is kind of a turnaround, is that we reduced our, our hirings in the Q2, to slower the growth pace. If you have too much growth, it's really tough to handle, because we are highly dependent on this, on this, direct growth, that we hire people and utilize them in projects, and that's too much. It's hard for us to get the utilizations numbers in place. The last point here, utilization jumped in the end of Q2.
I will mention what we mean by that is because on, on average, in the first five months, we had a utilization figure as we define it for ourselves of roughly 80%, and that is like working four days out of five, so that is really not enough. It's not anywhere near of, of average figures. Also to say is that every small change in that figure has a huge impact. For example, in June, and that was the first month in 2023, where we had that figure, the utilization number was 83.4%. That doesn't sound like much, just a three percentage point increase, but it's actually it changes the world for us. So much are these numbers are of importance for our earnings.
Because, yeah, that's actually, for the whole year, mean a lot of millions in change if we would have just this 83% on utilization. We could even do a little bit more. What we also see is that into the start of Q3, we can continue with that kind of utilization number that we had in June, and it's largely driven by slowing the growth pace. Our growth pace is going down a little bit. We are doing much more in terms of increasing utilization in the projects and have a much deeper focus on that. It has a delay. We started with all these measurements and initiatives around that in February, actually, we see the first fruits only in June. That is how this happens.
Because it actually happened in June, we are quite confident that the guidance level, also to EBITDA, is reachable this year. That is why we still stand EUR 1 billion in sales, over EUR 1 billion in sales and over EUR 100 million in EBITDA, is possible with a good second half of the year. I will close this with, with two updates that actually happened at the beginning of Q3, because we have executive board updates here with two new members. Kristina is joining the board. She's actually a longtime adesso employee and was heading the HR department beforehand, and now has joined the board. Yeah, and is now, now a part of the executive board team, as well as Mark.
Mark is also, or has been a long-time adesso employee for, I think, over 10 years, something like 12, 13 years, and then left adesso roughly two years ago, to become CEO of a banking software company, CoCoNet AG, and now has rejoined adesso as member of the Executive Board. Two new colleagues, very nice people. I think it is a very good team. I'm very happy about that, and looking forward to conquer the world with these colleagues. Yeah, and this pretty much concludes my slides. I'm happy to take your questions.
Thank you, Jörg. That's great. Let's start with the Q&A, and I see Mr. Spang from Tigris Capital will have a start. Thank you.
Yes. Hi, good morning, gentlemen. Maybe we can start from a general perspective. If we look to other IT service companies, and they also reported today or in the last few days, it seems like a rock solid, from today's perspective, if we look to your organically high growth. So maybe we can jump a little bit more in detail from your perspective, what makes you, in these times of, environmental uncertainties, more resilient? Maybe you can also elaborate a little bit more in, in your point of view, how, maybe from a perspective from the customer side, you are more, more deeper in, in the business of, of the customer. So how can you sustain, compared to other IT services, companies, these, these high growth levels? That would be my first question.
Yes, of course. Thank you, Mr. Spang. I think that's a, a very good start of the discussion point, and you're absolutely right. Of course, we have seen that other IT service companies do look at things a little bit different, and we have asked ourselves whether we are maybe too positive on that, but we can just reflect on what we actually see. We see the order entries on a record level and growing actually even faster than, than our sales growth. Order entries and sales is not the problem. Why that is, we can also only guess. I think a lot has to do with our really deep, long-lasting relationships with customers. We are seldomly doing one-time projects.
Of course, that is one thing that a lot of analysts and investors critic when, when they look at our kind of business, because it's doesn't have a lot of recurring revenue, by definition, yeah. It's not contracts that renew every year and, and for a lot of years. What we have is a lot of repeating revenue with customers for over a decade or even two decades, where we continue the business again and again, sometimes only on quarterly basis with new projects, but these are long-lasting relationships. Customers don't easily change their preferred IT service provider, just, and in particular, not in times of uncertainty. We do have a lot of these good customer relationships, and that helps pretty much. What we also do is, we are not just an IT service provider.
I, I would say the other big ones are probably also not. We're just designing websites or something. We are really in the backbone of the core business processes of our customers, so it's really deeply connected to the success of the customers and how they utilize software for their own business processes. That is why there are still a lot of things going on, because customers say, "Okay, we can invest in software engineering on certain types of use cases, and we actually have benefits of that in our own business." It's not just something you can just discard and say, "It's not important." It's actually very important what we do to our customers. Combined with the deep customer relationships, that's just my, my guess, to be completely honest here, but that is what we see.
Yeah, so no customer lets us down. They all have a lot of things to do, and they're still coming to us.
In terms of utilization, some, some, calls ago, you, explained a little bit more in detail how you measure utilization, and you, showed us these three main KPIs: free people, classic, utilization or, or billable hours, and, booking intensity.
Yeah.
If you look at these three main KPIs, what is currently, or, if you look, back to Q2 and Q1, what is the, still the main issue, from this- from these, three, three main KPIs?
That's, that's the key question here, I would say. We still look at these three main KPIs. We work a lot with them. Just to get everybody on the same page, we have, actually a ton of KPIs around utilization, but the three most important ones are, the first one we call, free, free employees or something like a, a beach side, people who are not working in projects. We pay them, but they don't have a project at this point in time. This number, for us, it's good if it's below 11%, and between 11% and something like 15%, 16%, it's normal yellow, and after that, it turns red. We had a couple of departments where it was red.
These departments are, now there's no, at least, big department where we or big team where we see that kind of figure. We are pretty much not in the green with everything, but on the low yellow side here. We turned that around a little bit. We get more and more people into projects. We have a second KPI, which is probably the most important one. That is what we actually call utilization. We take all possible billable hours, we just take all operating workforce and the possible hours they can work in a particular period, usually a month, and then look at how many hours were chargeable in that period and compare that against each other.
We normalize that, so we subtract holidays and illness because that just happens, and we take it out from the general basis. After that, we get a utilization figure of how many hours from the chargeable number have really been charged. This number is good if it's really good, if it's above 85%. That is really would be fantastic, actually. Between 80 and 85, it's, yeah, in the middle, and below 80 is really, really, really bad. We are pretty close at the low 80s, and pretty much 80.3, 80.4 was the average for the first five months of this year. This is really what we see reflected here in the numbers. We don't earn any money with that kind of numbers.
Yeah, so it's just not enough. Another point was that April and May have the least working days this year, but combined with a really bad utilization rate, this doesn't come out very good. In June, we actually see a big jump in utilization to over 83%, so three percentage points higher. If we would have seen that in the for the first half of the year, it, we would look at much, much different numbers. What gives us confidence now is that we think that we can maintain or hopefully even increase these 83 point something % in the second half of the year. We actually pretty much have the same number in July already, so that's the start of Q3, and hopefully we can continue that.
With a 83.4% or 83.5%, we are in good money. Then we have a third KPI. You also mentioned that booking intensity, that is looking at the population of only employees who are working in projects, so only really in-project working people. And we look at how many of their hours is designated to the project and what goes away for administrative staff and other things. So this number should be in the high 90s, something above 97%. If it's okay, between roughly 90% and 97% and below 90, it's, it's definitely not enough, then we should focus more on the project. And there was also an issue. We were in the low 90s in the H1 year, and have to look to get this number up.
I would say the most important factor, and that is what we see in end of Q2, is to get utilization really up and get more hours really booked against what we, what we could do there.
Yeah. Did you say 80.3%, yeah, utilization rate for first half of the year?
For the first five-
What were all the system number?
Yeah, for, for the first five months, was 80, 80.3 or 80.4, something in that neighborhood. Yeah.
Okay. Can you, roughly, quantify what is, one percentage point, in terms of EBITDA?
Yeah.
More or less.
That's, Yeah, that's the hard part, but I can give you the assumptions, what, what we use, and then let you do the rest. You take the number of operating workforce. We usually look at the big German entity, the adesso SE. It's the mother company of the group, but it's also by far the largest operating entity. From the 8,800 FTE that we have, roughly 6,000 are already in, in the SE. Roughly 2/3 or 3/4 of that is operating workforce, so people who can charge billable hours. Of course, we also have a lot of, yeah, shared services in the mother company, so that we don't need to do that in countries or in sub-entities.
We have a large operating workforce, or roughly, yeah, let's say 4,200 people. Then you have to, of course, subtract illness and holidays. That changes every month, of course. You have to subtract that to get our utilization figure. Then you look at eight hours a day for the number of days in a given month, times, an average daily or, or hourly rate, which we don't disclose, but, you, you get the ballpark there. We are probably pretty much in, in, on average, in the sector average. Then you get a feeling, for what 3% means, and it's a big figure. If you look at that for a month, it can be, already millions. In a year, it can be a really big number.
Yeah. Last question on this topic. If you take your guidance for the full year, so the gap between the first six months and your guidance, what is the necessary utilization rate for the second half of the year to achieve this?
I would say if we continue with that utilization rate that we started with in Q3, we are probably pretty much in line to get where we are. Ceteris paribus, meaning, of course, our fixed price project would need to work, and all other assumptions would, would need to work. With a normal utilization rate, normal good utilization rate, we will be able to achieve the guidance goals.
Okay, that's from my side.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, okay. Thank you. Next in line is Mr. Wolf from Warburg Research.
Yes. Hi, thank you for taking my question. Congratulations on the strong top-line expansion in Q2 as well. My question is on the price increases. To what proportion of your clients have you already spoken about price increases, and which proportion is still ahead, and what revenue volume would this address, basically? That would be my first question, and the second will follow after.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Wolf. Welcome. From our customers where we work already together, I think we have talked to probably pretty much everyone, because we started this price initiatives already last year. You always have time to negotiate new contracts and to get it into writing and then sign it, and then to have the new contract start. I would say we were in contact with pretty much every client. Of course, not new clients that come to us, that would not be a price increase, just a new customer, where we usually already start with increased daily rates. Why I said we are not done yet, is that we, again and again, have renewals of contracts. We have new quarters, new years, and new things happening.
Also within the contracts, we now have clauses for inflation. We have clauses where we state that, for example, if a consultant increases in skill and maturity, then we can charge higher prices for the consultant. All these new clauses are happening and renegotiating taking place still, and we also have a focus on daily rates. This is why I say it's an ongoing process now, but it's not finished. I wouldn't say for the next two years, nothing will happen in terms of daily rates. How much we can increase it further, Well, I, I couldn't give you a really hard figure here.
Okay, thank you. Maybe you could provide us some insight regarding your M&A pipeline. That's obviously part of the business. I'm just curious-
Mm-hmm.
regarding the pipeline, what it might add to the business going forward, in terms of technologies and, and revenue size. Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah, I can only say what I usually say here is, we always have a M&A pipeline. We always have running projects. One thing, if we look at the financial KPIs that we have seen, we see that we have a higher leverage figure, now within the year, largely driven by working capital issues. That also means that our headroom for M&A activity is going down. We might be a little bit slower on the inorganic side for this year than we might be in terms where working capital is in normal territory, which I hope we will reach at the end of the year, but we still have something to do there. The firepower for M&A is a little bit less attractive right now.
Okay, thank you. My last question is on the actual coding of your operative people. What proportion of, let's say, overall business, overall work is related to pure coding? The background of my question is basically the LLM, right?
Mm-hmm.
the, the, efficiency increases it can create within this part of, of work. Thank you.
Yeah. From the operating workforce, I would say it's roughly half-half. Half is more consultancy-based and half is more coding-based. There, of course, there's no clear border between that, so some coders also do some kind of requirements engineering, for example, and vice versa. It's no clear boundary, but roughly half-half. In terms of the large language models that you said, I think there are two sides of that. First, of course, it can mean that we have efficiency increases because we can utilize LLMs and, and copilots, what is actually done right now, in order to write code faster and better. Actually, it's not working that easily in praxi-- in practice, but that should be the case sometime in the near future.
There's also the other side of another angle that at some point in time, artificial intelligence might be able to write code itself. How much do you need software engineers in the future? That is what we get asked pretty often. I would say this is a more in the future line scenario than really near term. Of course, nobody can say when it will be done, and eventually might be the case that sometime your software engineering is done by artificial intelligence, but not right now, not in the near-term future. Both these angles have to be looked at. We are pretty much a proponent of everything related around artificial intelligence.
It gives a lot of interesting boosters for use cases in, in the business world, where questions get asked, how you can utilize this kind of engineering software to, yeah, make businesses better or make business processes smarter, better, and more efficient. That is why we have a positive outlook in general for that. Of course, there are different kind of angles that you have to take into account.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Okay, thank you. Before I'll hand the mic to Mr. Winterling from ISA Holding. I'd like to read out a question from the chat, from Emmanuel Cadron from K Store. Does adesso need to sign license deals to reach the EBITDA goal for the full year?
How I interpret that question is whether we do license deals of insure.
Yes.
licensing our own license deals. Yeah, that's pretty much the case. Not the large case, because the majority of the business is an IT service business, so service-related project-based. Of course, we are still looking at a pipeline of insure and hope that we can make one or the other license deal probably later in the year. Q3 looks like it will probably be more or less flat, we have some interesting looking projects going into Q4, and these are part of the guidance, of course, yeah.
Thank you. Mr. Winterling, please go ahead. Just a short reminder, if you're on the phone, you may want to mute or unmute, in this case, unmute your microphone via the star key, followed by the number six.
Apologies. Good morning. Congratulations on a, on a strong half year.
Thank you. Yeah, good morning.
Good morning. Staying on the topic of product business and licensing, your maintenance fees, which normally should be recurring revenues, have gone down from EUR 18 million to EUR 12 million. In your report, page 30, in the half-year report. If you could comment on that drop in what should be a pretty stable recurring revenue, that would be helpful. Housekeeping on your product business, if you could comment on your healthcare activities, DRG. Last time, I think you were still very, very bullish, very positive. Also housekeeping, banking. I see no change, but at what point would you make a final decision on what you will do in the banking field? Below EBITDA, there's actually pretty much all the office rent expenses, because the leasing contracts are capitalized and then depreciated.
If you could comment on what effectively the, the rental expenses are, what-- how much is cash, how much is depreciation, how we should look at it? Given that you deliberately want people to come back to the office, you need more office space. On the other hand, office space should become less expensive. What's the run rate? How do you see the expenses for office developing? My last question on Geographies. You've given us the split on the end customer side. How are your near and even far showing activities developing? You bought a very small unit in, in India. What are your first experiences? What are your plans in, in India and other nearshoring activities, how are they developing? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Winterling. A lot of questions. I will start, get through them one by one. Maintenance, first, I actually would need to look it up because the maintenance fees for in|sure, which is the majority part, is actually or has increased. You're referring to page 30. I would have to look it up and, and see what really changed there. It can be a structural change of some things, because in terms of real business change, I cannot remember anything really big changing there. For in|sure, which is the largest part of that, the maintenance fees are higher than previous year. The software product. DRG, the software is actually now called adesso smile, is running at the first customer.
We do have license sales there. It's a smaller, much smaller product than in|sure. Also to get everybody on the same page, adesso smile is doing, or is a product where health insurance companies, statutory and private health insurance companies, can use that product to, prove or, or look at what hospitals, are charging to them and whether it's correct or not. Using artificial intelligence and modern algorithms behind that, in a market where at this point in time, there's only one other product, monopoly, if you don't have a standalone solution, which pretty much nobody has a good solution for that. That is why it's an interesting market. That is why we invested into the product. That is why we actually sold the product without having the product finished.
Now we are still looking to do our usual sales work there and looking for more customers in the future, but so far it feels, feels good. Not so good is, as you mentioned, the- on the banking side, meaning that there's really not much news. We are not investing. The, the, you asked whether we have a final decision to make there. We probably don't have to because it really doesn't cost us anything. We still have the joint venture with Asseco, our Polish partners there. We, we still have from time to time, discussions with customers who are thinking about having a new core banking system in place, but really nothing pretty close to decision is made on the customer side.
We don't have to invest at this point in time, so it doesn't cost us a lot. We are still on good terms with our Polish partners. I, I introduced you, Mark Lohweber, my new colleague on the board. He was actually the one who initiated the deal back then, a couple of years ago. He will, he just told me last week that he will go to Asseco next week, I think, and discuss with them further activities. In terms of real business value here, we don't have anything new to report to this point in time. You had the topic of office rent and leasing. You're absolutely right.
I mean, IFRS designs it in a way, after IFRS 16 was introduced in 2019, that we, yeah, report it in a way where we have a Right-of-use asset on the balance sheet for all office space that we rent, and that is appreciated. That is what you see below EBITDA. Of course, there are other depreciation and amortization issues, or positions included there. You ask whether you can get a good feeling of what we really pay in terms of leasing, and you can get that. If you look at the cash flow statement, actually, and on the financing side of the cash flow statement, there is one item listed there, which means what we pay for leasing.
So the number is something like EUR 12.8 million in terms of cash flow. So that is also what came with IFRS 16. So in there you can get a pretty good feeling of what we really have to pay in terms of cash flow. So that. To your other remark, I would also say it's absolutely on spot. We really like a culture and environment where we are able to meet with our colleagues, where we can collaborate together, where we utilize office space more in the future. I would say it should pretty much grow proportionally with our overall growth. Of course, there are times where we have bigger steps, so one new bigger office locations and other times where we are floating a little bit around.
At this point in time, we will have a new office location in our headquarters, starting in September, I think, will be the opening. That will actually mean that we double the size of the headquarters, which is by far the biggest office location that we have in Germany or pretty much everywhere. It's in Dortmund. We will have a lot more office space at headquarters. Of course, there are other locations where we add on from time to time and find more attractive or bigger office locations to attract the local people who are working close by. We will continue that pretty much proportionally in terms of growth. For your last topic about shoring, you are, you are again, on spot there.
We bought a small target in India because we want to try it out. We are usually a little bit hesitant or, yeah, let's say that we first like to try out and not do two big steps. India actually feels quite good. It's a small entity. A small entity means 23 people. For India, that's tiny. For us, it's still an investment. The entity that we bought was actually used to these shoring activities, and not only used to shoring activities, but the company was used to work for a German company in the insurance world. Pretty much what we do, not too much for them changed. We learn new things, how to implement them in our project sphere.
At this point in time, it feels quite good, and we actually think that we can scale this up, by how much and how fast we will see. At this point in time, our first experience with that is, is looking good. Overall, the by far biggest shoring capacity that we have is in Turkey. Turkey is growing domestically, pretty good and even better on the shoring side. We are also having good shoring capacity in Bulgaria and in Romania now. This all feels pretty good, and we are quite used to it because we do it for a couple of years already, and we will probably also continue that in the future.
We think that in terms of really having a global operating model in the future, we need to utilize these shoring capacity even more.... in Western European projects. At this point in time, we are still at the first steps, I would say, to learn and experience how we can do that. We are making good progress there, and the experience is, is beneficial for further expansion on that side. I hope I got all your questions. I'm not, not completely sure.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, great. I'd like to read out another question from the chat, from Tamer Ezzat, from Harold. Has a new SAP installation settled down in terms of invoicing, and do you expect to be able to reduce the working capital balances by Q4, 2023? I think you mentioned it before, maybe you can give us more detail about that.
Yeah. Thank you, Tamer. Yeah, absolutely. Feeling like the customer was new, or at least unknown in, in this kind of project. Now it gives me more feeling how the customer might feel if we do some SAP transformation on their side. And you always have to find some struggles in the beginning, I would say. I would say the worst part is over, so we are able to write invoices, we are able to do our receivables management, and, of course, we still have a backlog. Yeah. And that is what we need to get down to until the end of the year. I would say it's, it's definitely possible to get the working capital figures in a neighborhood of the past years. Actually, for me, that wouldn't be enough.
We, we did this ERP installation so that we can get better in terms of working capital in the future. This will most likely not happen this year. I hope that we have another shot next year. This year the goal is to get at least at the same rates as we had in the past, and then hopefully to continue with that and improve working capital so that we can collect cash earlier and be better in that regard. Hope, hope you got you.
Thank you. Looking at the time, we maybe have room for another question. Is there anybody from the audience? I see, Mr...
Hello.
Hello again.
Yeah, hello. Welcome, Specht Sternberg. Can you hear me?
Yes. Yeah, we can hear you, Mr. Specht. Hello.
Okay, I have two additional ones. First, on your, on your cost side, what you expect for half year two? You explained well, how utilization will take its effect, but are there any additional cost-saving measures planned in the second half of this year? It would be one question. The second question, to the transition of the CEO position, now that less than a half-year of regency of Mr. Kenfenheuer has left, is there any development in this regard?
Yeah. Welcome, Mr. Specht, also. First, on the cost-saving side, yeah, we are looking on that. The benefits of really saving a lot there are smaller than really giving a full throttle on the utilization side, so the effects will be much, much smaller. But nevertheless, we are looking at that, and actually, that is a benefit of the new SAP system. We are now aware that... We defined a new cost structure in the system and with our cost centers and real ownership behind that, and we can track that and report that and look at that.
That is what we do right now, and we'll figure out where some savings can be done in the second half of the year. Just to be crystal clear here, I, I think the benefits will be much smaller than having a couple of even basis points of utilization in the right direction. For the second question about the CEO transition, you're right, Michael Kenfenheuer will leave the board at 65 years old, at the end of the year. The supervisory board has stated that they will say, who is the successor in terms of CEO in Q4 this year. We have to wait a little bit, and then it will be disclosed.
Okay, thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Okay. There was, another question from the chat from, Dr. Jakubowski from SMC Research: Has the IT security issue you reported at earlier this year has been completely solved?
Whatever completely solved means, but in terms of how one probably can define it, there are no outstanding issues there. The forensic search is done and concluded. There is a final report. We are well set up with all customers and partners, so there's nothing more to expect from that. We have actually initiated a lot of things around the cybersecurity, so organization-wise and technical-wise, we get a little bit more safer in terms of restrictions that we now have on the organizational side and also on the technology side for ourselves. Just to improve security, actually.
I would say that now we feel pretty safe, and since we are advising and consulting these things ourselves, I would say that we are in better shape now than in the past. Nevertheless, there's never a full guarantee that nothing can happen anymore in the future. You cannot get that by anybody in the world. We also can't, and, but I would say we are now as safe as, as you can get, pretty much.
Okay, do we have more questions from the audience? Mr. Spang from Tigris Capital again.
Yes, one, one quick follow-up on the intro topic. How much license revenue did you make in the first half of the year? What is the necessary amount to you have planned or factored in for your full year guidance?
Yeah. The H1 -year was worse than last first half-year. I think, Well, I also had to look it up. Now, from the top of my head, it's something of EUR 2.5 million in, in that ballpark, for the H1 -year. The second half-year will most likely be stronger and should be stronger. We still have figured a number in the high single-digit million area.
For the full year?
No.
Okay.
second half of the year.
Okay.
Okay, do we have more questions or are you all good? No further questions, I think. Thank you very much for your interest in our call today and your participation. I wish you all the best. For now, goodbye, and see you soon. Bye-bye.
Thank you.