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 1 earnings call regarding our half-year report we have published today. Within our release this morning, adesso confirmed the preliminary figures and reports ongoing strong sales with a 16% increase to EUR 631.1 million. EBITDA improved by 10% to EUR 27.7 million, although there was one working day fewer available compared to last year. However, operating earnings in total came in lower than expected. That is why guidance has been adapted within the release of the preliminary figures. Outlook for full year 2024 remains positive, since capacity utilization is improving and the half-year 2 provides five more working days than the first half.
Hence, earnings contribution is expected to be higher in H2 as it was in previous years. I'd now like to welcome as well our CFO, Jörg Schröder, 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 the 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 participating in this year's half-year 1 call for 2024. As usual, I will start out with the development in the top line sales. Growth we see here, as Martin pointed out, a total sales volume in the first half year of EUR 631 million, which is a 16% increase. The good news here is that basically all of that comes from organic growth. So we didn't do a lot of M&A transactions. So basically, this growth is provided by just organic developing the company further, and is also in line with the headcount growth on average, which is around 15% as well. So if we look down at how is the split between the industries we work for, we see basically a good picture.
There's no industry that we work for which is not growing, so all industries are growing. After the first quarter, we had two industries that stagnated a little bit or actually decreased a little bit by volume. But this is now not anymore the case. Insurance grew by 6% and manufacturing by plus 5%, and all other industries we work for grew double digits. Also, the public sector, which is our largest one, had a difficult time in the first quarter when we saw difficulties in the German budgets, which had to be resolved. But they got resolved, and from Q2 onwards, we see a good development there again, and our public is also back to double-digit growth rates.
The sectors where we are particularly strong growing this year are the utility sector, which is number one, that is also catalyzed by SAP S/4 transformations that we do a lot in this sector, and the healthcare sector is growing also very nicely. If we look at the sales split by region, we see that Germany, which is our largest contributor here, is actually growing disproportionately high with 17%, even higher than the whole group. So the overall volume what Germany does is now at 83%, and another 10% for Switzerland, 2% Austria, makes the German-speaking area, the DACH area, roughly 95% of the overall volume. Anyhow, also other countries are growing, in particular for us, more developed ones where we are a little bit bigger.
You see them listed here, Switzerland, +7%. Austria is developing very nice with +20%. Netherlands is +13%, Italy +19%, and also the domestic revenues in Turkey is growing. Only the smaller ones where we are active have a little bit difficulties to find the grip. But overall, we are quite satisfied with this picture, and think this will also continue in the future. Now, one view on the earnings because it's a mixed picture, and one where we are not so satisfied at this point in time. EBITDA grew, that's correct, +10%, from EUR 25.2 in the first half year of last year to EUR 27.7 this year, and we had one less working day.
So far, the story looks good, but we still have capacity utilization issues in the first half year. It was actually one of the worst years in terms of utilization. It's still below average, but it is growing from month to month. So we expect further growth here also in the second half. But the first half year here, utilization was not that good. And what we also see is... We later come to the segment report, all our investments or it's not all CapEx, but even the OpEx investments, that is how we call them, into the solution business, is ongoing. But the solution businesses this year have a very bad year, actually, the worst year in history. We have much less license sales than the previous years.
It's a tough market environment for the solution businesses. And so this is an additional drag down for the overall business that still struggles with low utilization. In that regard, if we go further, we see an EBITDA margin of 4.4%, which is far from satisfying. If we look at the key figures, we see that most things are in line, so sales growth was 16%, employee growth is in line with that. The personnel cost is a little bit higher, but not too high. We had periods in the past where personnel costs grew much higher than the overall sales growth. This is not the case.
We have 2% plus for personal costs per FTE, but it's still something because most of our costs are consisting of personal costs, obviously, as a professional service company. So, also other operating expenses are growing a little bit disproportionately high. Utilization is bad, as mentioned. Daily rates still grow, but not as fast in, as in the last years, the last two years, but it's growing. We have initiatives to grow them even further. But in that regard, it's actually quite a rough market environment at this point in time. License sales, I already mentioned that, are not looking very good right now. So in|sure and also the other IT solutions business are investment cases for us at this point in time. And so overall, that is the picture that we see here.
Also, if we go down further on the P&L statement, it doesn't get better. So we start with the EBITDA of EUR 27.7, and depreciation is pretty much a little bit disproportionately high. That is because we had new office locations, in particular, a new headquarters building, not a new one, but an additional one, and other locations that we added. We also have the brakes on that now, so, it's probably not continuing in that speed. But still, here, for this period, depreciation was higher, and also the financial result is higher, even though it's a low figure. The interest rate rise and additional need for leverage put the financial result here higher than last year.
All this comes down to worse pre-tax earnings and also worse consolidated results, which are actually negative in the first half-year. That comes, in the end, down to an earnings per share of -1.51 EUR. This is the segment report I already mentioned. You also find that in the full half-year report with additional text to it. The general view here is that the underperformance of the solution business, of course, drags down the IT service business or the overall business. You can see here in the second column that IT solutions alone has an EBIT of -EUR 10 million. It's unconsolidated and without reconciliation, so you cannot take these standalone figures to come up with group numbers, of course.
But you see that the service sector is doing much better than the solution sector, and actually better than one might expect if you just look at the overall figures, which are worse, and they get dragged down by the investments in the solution business. Okay, now we come to the balance sheet, financial KPIs, and cash flow. For the balance sheet items, we see that net leverage is a little bit better, so net debt has improved by EUR 28 million. Also, net working capital is improved by roughly EUR 40 million, although our return on capital figures are still super low and bad, and that is, of course, because our profitability is too low. It's not because of the capital structure itself. Yeah, and if we look at the cash flows, we see a positive development here.
The cash flow from operating activities is much less worse than last year. It's also a lot dependent on the working capital situation, which has improved, and it's actually also supported by factoring, which we have. We also had that last year, but with a lower figure. The figure for the first half year here at the end was roughly EUR 54 million. So yeah. If we look at the free cash flow then, so subtracting CapEx and the lease payments, we see that the free cash flow is actually better than previous year. Also, if you look at LTM figures here, the free cash flow number is the best ever, if you include factoring, and the best in years, if you exclude factoring. In that regard, we are improving.
So that brings us to the guidance for 2024. Unfortunately, last week, in the beginning of last week, we had to announce an ad hoc news to say that our expected guidance for EBITDA will be lower than expected. Our initial guidance was for sales, EUR 1.25 billion, and EBITDA in the range of EUR 110 million-EUR 130 million. After this half year of roughly EUR 28 million in EBITDA, even though we know that the second half will be much, much better, we know that in advance, we don't expect that we can make it to that initial EBITDA range. So we still think that the sales guidance of EUR 1.25 billion in revenues is manageable. We are at 50%.
Second half will be a little bit stronger, so we are pretty much in line here to reach that target. EBITDA, we went down to an EBITDA range of EUR 80 million-EUR 110 million, so lowering the earnings. Last year, we had a total EBITDA of EUR 80 million, so the full range is, at least on absolute terms, better than last year. We hope that we also have a better margin than last year. Of course, the margin last year with 7% was also not very good, and this year, hopefully it will be a little bit better, but not as initially expected, and that is why we released the ad hoc news last week.
If we look at the points and try to give some context to that, we still see, on generally speaking, an ongoing strong market demand for IT services, at least. Not so much for IT solutions. At this point in time, IT solutions will have, or a better outlook in the second half of 2025, is when we expect that. This year, it's not that we lose a lot of competition, it's just that there is not a lot of competition, and particularly in the insurance world, insurance companies, are reluctant to invest at this point in time. So also our competitors are, not selling a lot, and so this is why 2024 is a particularly bad year for the solution sector.
In this IT services, there is a demand, and so that is why we think the sales guidance is absolutely reachable. Yeah, and on this behalf, investments are maintained, but with reduced hiring speed. Investments here means basically OpEx investments, so in the solution business, but also in hiring very qualified talent. So we still have portfolio elements of senior software engineering roles that are in high demand in the market still, where we have a very high utilization rate, and this is—these are the areas where we're looking to recruit the most, and still do recruiting in that area. In terms of utilization, we expect the improvements to continue. So this year, we improved from month to month to month, but only on a small scale.
So we hope that the second half will have an additional booster in that regard also, because we have the lower hiring speed, which now comes through. And also, in the second half of the year, we will have five more working days than in the first half. That is, of course, a lot of booster element. And even on a relative terms, if we compare the second half year of 2024 to the second half year of 2023, we will have two more working days, just in comparison. So, for that, with the overall growth, we are quite certain that we can reach the new guidance. Although, I can also state that we are definitely not happy that we had to release the ad hoc last week.
Okay, these are the remarks and the brief overview of the first half year of 2024, and now I'm free and happy to hear your questions. Great, thank you. So you can use the hand icon to go for the Q&A sessions if you have questions. Or let me remind the participants on phones that they can unmute their microphones via the star key, followed by six, with the number six of their phones. So do you have questions already? Mr. Sauer from Kepler Cheuvreux.
Yes, hello. Thank you. I have one question on the IT solutions business. You showed the one slide also in the presentation with the segment split, but it's actually... yeah, it's about the, the revenue. So we can see that the IT solutions generated EUR 62 million in revenues, and it grew by 20% year-over-year. So I'm wondering, what is it in this segment that is growing despite the lack of the license sales?
Yeah, thank you for that question. So the IT solution business, or the segmenting that we do here, is basically looking at what is the nature of the business, of actually the legal entity that is doing that business. So we have legal entities included in the IT solution business, which have product-based businesses, so they own IPs and sell it to the market. The by far biggest one is adesso Insurance Solutions, so our core system for the insurance world. We have other ones, like adesso Health Solutions, which has product for the healthcare industry, and material.one is a platform for the automotive and manufacturing industry, and so on and so on. So the nature of the business is around products, but not all the business is just selling on-premise licenses. First, even in|sure, it's-...
It becomes more and more common to contract SaaS deals, so subscription-based license models, where you have the total contract value of a license sale, a project, and maintenance fees included in one contract and just get paid over time. That becomes more common. And also, we not only have license sales, we have maintenance fees that we collect there. We also have project-based business around implementing the products with the client and so on. And so overall this grew. You're right about that. Nevertheless, it was not enough to compensate for the CapEx investments that we did there. So we still think that midterm, the prospects of that business will come back. 2024 will be a bad year for the IT solutions.
We discussed that quite intensely, but we think that, and right now we think about the second half of 2025, the market demand will come back much stronger, and so then we want to be prepared, and that is why we invest there. Invest usually means into people now, because that is also how you develop products, you need computer scientists for that and and domain experts.
Thank you.
You're welcome. So then we have, Suez Mariya?
Yes, thank you for taking my question. So, are there any plans in the near future for expansion, outside of Germany and maybe Europe, especially that growth in this region is a bit sluggish, and maybe capitalize on some opportunities in emerging markets, and maybe that could improve also the utilization rate? Thank you.
Absolutely. Very good question, and you're right that we didn't have a particular slide on that, just the slide on the regional sales split. So, we think of ourselves as somewhat international company. Of course, we are still very, very German. If you do over 80% of your business in Germany, you are still a very German company, but we are active in over 15 countries. So, we actually have international locations, and we do international businesses in other countries. It's still much smaller. It's also growing, as I've shown you, but it's still much smaller. And in terms of development in that regard, we have two sides. One is countries where we wanna do business within the country.
So, for example, Switzerland, Austria, we are doing very long now. Netherlands, pretty new. Italy, it's pretty new. Scandinavia, we're in Sweden and Finland and other European countries. We have shoring countries, namely Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, for what we call nearshore. We have one offshore location in India already, where we can the general thinking about that is that we can get cheaper staff and so get an additional margin booster out of that and utilize these shoring capacities in Western European projects. We already do that. It's a small percentage point of what we do, but we think that we can scale it up further. In Turkey, it went really nicely. So in Turkey, we have already over 600 people.
Only half of that is really doing shoring work, but you see there is a market for that. In India, at this point in time, I think we are around 70. So super small for Indian, for Indian terms, if you compare that to competitors who have much, much more people there. But we think we can scale that up. So for the future, it might be beneficial. Then one additional factor maybe, we are also active or will be active in the Middle East. So we have adesso Arabia in Saudi Arabia. Actually, we have a location because we also see market opportunities in the Middle East, which also is a mixture actually right now from shoring.
But in the future, we wanna also grab more market share there and provide local services, but we just started that out. So India is pretty new, and also Middle East is super new. In the future, you will probably see more internationalization for us. But I also have to say that we won't stop in Germany. So sometimes we get asked, "When will the international business be bigger?" I don't have any clue. As long as there is enough digitalization initiatives in Germany, and it looks like that is pretty much the case, we won't stop there. So we have a very good market position in Germany, and we will continue what we can do good there. So you saw that...
Maybe I jump back to the slide for international sales split. You see the year-over-year growth rate for Germany was +17%, and the overall growth rate for the group was just 16%. So there's still a lot of opportunity in Germany, and as long as that is the case, the overall structure won't change too much. Although in absolute terms, we already have, like, 2,000 people not working in Germany anymore, and a lot of them don't speak German. So we become more and more international, but it takes time.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
... Thank you for your question. Now with, Mr. Wolf from Warburg Research.
Hi, thank you for taking my question. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Great. I have mainly a question on the incentive system at adesso, Mr. Schröder. So profitable growth is what adesso is aiming for. That is, as we've seen over the last couple of quarters, also accompanied by some margin pressure or let's say in an environment like this, where the economic conditions are tough, maybe the heads of the individual lines are looking more at EBITDA rather than profitability.
I'm just curious how you can make sure internally within Adesso that the business line managers also take care of profitability and return on capital employed. Or at least that's my impression, the working capital that is also associated with growth and EBITDA margin is not the key priority of business line managers. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Wolf. A couple of good points in there. So we'll start off with the general setup of the incentive system. You're absolutely right. Our incentive scheme works in a way where we incentivize for profitable growth, and this, of course, in each hierarchy level, works a little bit different. You see that pretty good reflected, I would say, in the compensation report also for 2023, where you also only see the compensation for executive board members. But you see that the bonus compensation was as low as it gets, basically, because we had super low profitability last year, and I think it's the right way to do that. Yeah, so you shouldn't compensate managers if they're not doing a good job in terms of profitability. So the compensation system, I would say, works somehow.
And, for all the next levels in the hierarchy, we have different kind of measures to come up with profitable growth. For the next level, we call that business area managers. These business area managers also have group EBITDA as part of their compensation. And then they have for their particular business area, contribution margins, so what they can contribute overall in terms of certain earnings. So it's a mixture. And also what we changed this year is including into that formula how to come up with the incentive number, a bonus and a malus kicker in terms of how profitable are you per FTE. So not just looking about absolute growth of earnings or earnings figure, but also about how efficient you got there. And so this is the first year we have just implemented that.
Was not there last year, but we tweaked that a little bit to get a more or a deeper focus on really incentivizing everybody, really looking at more profitability in the future. In terms of the second part, where you thought about return on capital figures, you're absolutely right. Of course, we are very bad at this point in time, and this is due to a low profitability. It just came up last year, when we discussed how we wanna go in the future. adesso was always a company with fast growth pace, and I still think that's the right approach, but when you have this fast growth pace, you still need a certain type of sustainable profitability that you can take into the future. That we lacked in 2023, and obviously also in 2024.
What we wanna come back there to a sustainable margin level that is at least okay, will not be best in class, but is okay, and still be able to grow as fast as we did in the past. That is the goal. Of course, for that, we took into account more KPIs on the group level. One is cash flow related, so looking really at free cash flow so that we have the order to cash process, and a deeper focus for the project that we do and return on capital. So really looking about how capital efficient are we? Do we good capital allocation? And really thinking in these terms and not just about absolute EBITDA growth.
These KPIs, although, have not made it yet into any incentive system, so it probably should start at the board level, but it's not there yet, but might be in the future.
Thank you. And the EBITDA per FTE figure, does it include also a margin component, or is it just in absolute terms? So would an EBITDA of, let's say, EUR 100 per day in Germany be the same as EUR 100 per day in, let's say, Turkey, for example?
Ah, yeah. So the countries work a little bit different. So that is right. We also have a little bit localized or the incentive system a little bit localized for local, local things. And of course, all legal entities also work a little bit different. But generally speaking, it's not the profitability figure itself that is used in the incentive system, but absolute growth in the earnings figure for a particular hierarchy level with a kicker or malus incentive if you are less efficient, so just that per FTE figure.
... Okay, that's helpful. And I've learned from other IT service companies that clients are already starting budget discussions for next year around this time of the year. Is it also something that is the case at adesso and if yes, do you already have indications for next year, how the business might proceed in general? Do you have the impression that clients are still hesitant, or will they start the project that were postponed this year? Thank you.
Yeah. So that is the case. Of course, we always talk to customers, and a lot of customers are within their budgeting processes. That is correct. For us, it's too early to say what will happen next year. We don't know that. In general speaking, I would say we probably expect further growth. We didn't had a year where that was not the case, and we are still bullish on the general outlook of market demand. Even this year, I mean, a lot of other companies are having a hard time to even grow their business organically. We still manage to do so. We lose on the profitability side, which is also not very good, but we are able to grow, and I expect basically the same for next year.
We don't have figures yet, that will be released probably when we release the annual report in the beginning of next year. But generally speaking, I would say 2025 for the general outlook would look the same as this year. Probably, if we just have to say what changes, at least it doesn't get worse. So what we see in the insurance business, for example, I briefly mentioned that, the market this year is super tough because nobody sells anything, in terms of licenses, that is. But we still have opportunities. So we talk to customers, and the sales cycles in this business is super long, sometimes three years or even longer. And we see things coming up.
So this might make the turnaround in the second half of 2025 for the solution business. But up to that point in time, it's probably a difficult time. In terms of the general industries that we work for, we see growth in all the industries this year, and I would expect basically the same thing looking forward. So the public market is back, even automotive. We had some difficult times in the Corona situation. Automotive is growing double-digit for us. So it looks like in the industries we work for, with the basically blue chip customers that we work for, we still have very good relationships.
Even though the assumption is right, a lot of project get postponed or rejected at this point in time, they might come back, so there might be additional opportunity, but we don't know for sure yet. It's too early for us to really take a deep dive picture for 2025.
That's helpful. Thank you.
You're welcome.
I think next in line is Mr. Specht from Berenberg.
Yes, hello. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yep.
Okay. Yeah, good morning. Three additional ones from my side. First, I was maybe a little bit late to the presentation. Did you name the factoring impact in the half year one results? That would be helpful because I cannot find it when scanning the full year, the half year.
Yeah
-report. Second point is on working capital. We saw significant improvement in the first half, 70%, 17%. You already told us last year that, let's say, the new SAP field will be helpful and that there's room for improvement, but is this now largely done, or do you see still, let's say, sizable room here? Finally, a potential sale of the product business is completely off the table. Is that right?
Okay. Yeah, thanks for the questions, Mr. Specht. I will take them one by one, starting with factoring. I think I mentioned it, it is EUR 54 million, about that. It's also included in the half-year report. We find that beneficial if you look at it, because it's an off-balance item. So we think it's just fair to disclose that. For us, it's the cheapest way for financing at this point in time. It's beneficial for working capital financing as an instrument. The number, of course, helps in terms of improving working capital and improving free cash flows, and you can also make the task and try to put it back into, but even then, we are improving. Yeah, so overall, working capital gets better.
The number is in the half-year report, also compared to previous year, and I think also the balance sheet on thirty-first of December. I don't have it at the top of my head, but it increased a little bit. Basically, increased to last year and is pretty much on level with the year-end position, I would say. Then on working capital in general and the S4 transformation, you are absolutely right. Last year, we had the go live of our own S4 system. We did that in April and had very difficult time in the second quarter of last year in terms of managing working capital issues that came with that. We had resolved really fierce issues in 2023 already. So at year-end, you see our working capital in much better shape than before.
And we still think that we have room for improvement, but from now on, it will be more dominion, so more an evolutionary type to get better, in terms of having more focus on the Order to Cash process, in order to keep up with the fast pace of growth. But overall, Working Capital situation improved quite a lot compared to last year, definitely. We still see room for improvement, but more on a evolutionary scale and not so much disruptive as maybe happened in Q4 last year. And, yeah, your last question about the IT solution business and whether we would go for a sale there. For us, at this point in time, we have discussed that intensely.
We think that we will invest further in that segment, because we see more opportunities than risks in the future. Of course, you never know whether that's true, but we have looked at all the angles and all the upside potential and downside potential, and came to the conclusion that it's best to have a couple of quarters where it's dragging us down, but we are confident that it can come back.
Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Mr. Wolf again?
Yes, thank you. A quick follow-up, if I may. It's also related to Wolfgang Specht's question. If you look at the costs or investments that are associated with the solutions business, for how long will we stay at these levels? So as you are developing new modules and solution parts for the insurance software, when will this be completed in the main parts? Of course, there will always be add-ons, but the main part of the incremental investments, when will they be completed? Thank you.
Yeah, that's a tough one because it's probably never fully completed. But to give you an overview how we look at that, yeah. So, at this point in time, we are not making any license sales of Insure. The market is just not there in 2024. We do have a small pipeline which will or might help in Q4 this year, so there might come some deals. But this will not be large even if it happens. So for 2024, we see that development as it is right now. We think that roughly in the second half of 2025, we see the first bigger chances for going on with higher sales again in the license world.
Also, what we see is that we have a lot of projects, ongoing, implementation projects, for in|sure that we started a couple of years ago. And a lot of these projects will finish in the next quarters. And so maintenance fees will rise significantly after that because the usual on-premise license structure is we sell an on-premise license, then we have an implementation project. When that is finished, we collect maintenance fees for a couple of years, usually. And you only have to do a little bit of work, so the margin booster of this maintenance fees is then higher, usually. So this will also help.
One thing that shifts the industry a little bit in the future is, I think I briefly mentioned that, a change in thinking of our insurance customers. In the past, it was always on-premise licenses, and now more and more discussions we have with customers who would like to have a subscription-based model, so a SaaS license model, where they don't pay a high initial license fee, but rather we take the total contract value of license, implementation, and maintenance fees together and split that over a period of time, usually a couple of years. The total contract value is the same or sometimes even a little bit higher, and you have, of course, recurring revenues, which is also nice. It's easier to plan with that, and so on.
But you don't have this booster of the initial license fees that we had in the past. And we had years where that was terrific, and it was a booster for the overall earnings of the company. And if you don't have these license deals, you have a year like this one or last one, basically. So this is a little bit shift in the industry that we also have to take into account. And looking at all that, the general market demand, we have a very good software product. That is usually what we get back from our customers. We are very strongly positioned in that market. It's just that the market right now is not doing a lot.
If it comes back, we wanna be prepared, and we wanna be there to get new customers on board, to upsell existing customers, and so on. We wanna finish the projects we are active in and then collect the maintenance fees. All these chances, if you take that together, we think there's a good chance to have a turnaround of that solution business. Hope that makes it a little bit more clear.
That's helpful. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Do we have more questions at this point in time? ... Yes, Mr. Jakubowski from SMC Research, SMC Research.
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah, great. I have just one additional question regarding the solution business, the insurer business. Maybe you could elaborate somehow on your product roadmap, or what are you developing at the moment, which causes the high developing costs? Is this just one bigger model? Are there several modules or completely new products in other sectors? It would be very helpful. Thank you.
Yes, of course. Thank you, Mr. Jakubowski. So, it's a mixture. So it's not that we have something completely new out of the box, where we think now we put in EUR millions and develop something new. That is not the case. So it's existing modules that we have, and we usually tell we have the three big ones, just for life insurance, health insurance, and the general insurances. Of course, within these, you have also a couple of sub-modules. So overall, I think we have a product landscape of around 18 products. If you look from an insurance point of view, for certain types of models that you could use. And we also try to find out which of these products are profitable, which are not, where do we invest, and how much.
And so we did the analysis and, for each of these products, we have a business plan for the next 10 years. Of course, nobody knows what is in 10 years, but we try to come down with, what is the market looking like, what is going on in the insurance world, what might be beneficial from a customer point of view in the future? So we have outmapped this 10-year period for each of these 18 modules. And then we have another... It's not the insurer world directly, but we have another platform. We call that Afida, for which is a run-off entity for life insurance portfolios, and we have one large customer there, and it's the project. So we basically build a platform for this run-off business.
So this will also come into place in the coming, not, not months, but years. And then we have a very long-term view for this portfolio business. So, it's not completely new. We work for that already since two years, I think. So basically saying, we don't come up with totally new ideas where we invest heavy millions in a thing that we don't know. But we have existing products and modules where there is a market already or we see a strong market in the future. And there is where we think it's good to invest in that point in time and not just save the next quarter. That's not how we think for, for adesso.
Okay, thank you.
You're welcome.
We have a couple of minutes left. Are there any more questions? So do again.
Yes, I might have missed this information, but could you elaborate a bit on your clients? So is it concentrated in few clients, or it's more like distributed on many? Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. A very good question. So we'll jump back to our sales split by industry. There you see that we don't have a focus, one industry or two, so we are active in a lot of industries. Our biggest one is the public sector, and there we do 16% of the overall business. Only cross industries is bigger, but that is generally everything else, which is not a sector where we have sector-specific domain knowledge. And in each sector, we have oftentimes hundreds of customers. So overall, we have a couple of thousand customers, usually blue-chip customers, so it might be medium-sized entities. Also, the big corporations are our customers. For the public sector, of course, it's the public entities in Germany, but also Switzerland, Austria, we do a little bit.
If you look at the top 10 customers, just the top 10, they are diversified within the industries already, and the top 10, I think, make between 23%-24% of overall revenues. We don't have a risk there to just have or being dependent on too few customers.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
Do we have more questions? So feel free. Just to remind the participants on phones, they can mute or unmute their microphones via star and followed by the number 6. So, but it doesn't seem to be the case. So, thank you very much for your interest in adesso today and your participation. We wish you all the best and hope to see you in person soon. For now, goodbye.
Goodbye.