Good morning, everybody. This is Martin Möllmann of adesso SE speaking. First of all, I'd like to thank you for joining our Q1 earnings call regarding our quarterly statement we have published today. Within our release this morning, you found adesso keeping up its fast organic growth pace with 13% in sales to EUR 398.1 million. The operating result boosted significantly by 58% to EUR 27 million. This is EUR 9.9 million more than last year's EBITDA contribution. Since the second half of the year in Germany provides a significantly larger number of working days than the first half, a larger portion of EBITDA contribution is expected to be earned later in the year.
I'd now like to welcome as well our CFO, Michael Knoop, who will give us a deeper insight into the figures of the first quarter 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. Michael, please go ahead.
Thank you, Martin . Good morning, everybody. I will guide you now through our Q1 2026 financials. As always, I will start with our revenues. Revenues came in with EUR 398.1 million. This is an increase of 13%, coming from EUR 351.2 million. It's important to mention that this, the whole growth, is purely organic, so there's no M&A impact in there. At this point of the presentation, it makes always sense to look a little bit at the economic environment. 2023, 2024 was a difficult time in Germany. Germany, we generate more than 80% of our revenues. Last year we already have seen little improvement. Gross domestic product came in slightly positive.
This year, this improvement continued, despite the fact that it's probably less than what at the beginning of the year was expected due to the war, the impact of the war in Middle East. Economic environment is challenging. That's not surprising for us. That's what we expected. Important for us is that the market for IT services, IT solutions is still stable. That it shows continued growth and actually that's the case. If we look at our headcount, in average compared to Q1 2025 has grown by 10%, and also the year-over-year increase is exactly 10%. Currently, we employ 11,497 employees. It's an increase of 1,036 employees coming from 10,461.
60% of this growth is generated in Germany, which is a year-over-year increase of 7%, and 40% of this growth is generated abroad. This is an increase of 21% year-over-year. Similar to the last few quarters, this growth is mainly driven abroad by our shoring activities in Romania, Bulgaria, and especially in India. If we look at the sales split, certain things are pretty similar to what you are used to. Certain things have a little bit changed. The overall perspective actually is the same. We are very much diversified. Similar to the last few quarters, the top 10 customers contributed around about 22% of our revenues. The top customers so far this year contributed in terms of revenues, 2.9% of our revenue.
We are very much diversified. That's pretty important. We benefit from the fact that we are very strong in the right sectors. At the moment, it's insurance, it's banking, it's health, public utilities. They are not impacted by all these tariff hiccups and also, they are not directly impacted by the energy crisis, this increasing energy crisis. Sooner or later, probably we'll feel it, we'll feel it there as well, our customers will feel it, but at the moment, these are exactly the right sectors. If you look a little bit more in detail into this, the strong growth in insurance has continued 30% year-over-year. This is mainly driven by the order entry, which we have seen in Q3 and especially, Q4.
This was very, very strong, and it continued also in Q1 this year. Banking, also a double-digit growth rate, 14%. Health, a little bit less dynamic than what we have seen in the past, but still double digit. Public, yeah, only 5%. This is somewhat disappointing, but not really surprising because the order entry in Q3 and Q4 was comparatively weak, only showing a little increase compared to the prior periods. This is actually caused, the order entry last year by the election in Germany, which after this election, it took some time until public activity started again. The impact from these two additional budgets for the armed forces infrastructure has not shown up last year. However, this year in Q1, we see much more activity there.
Order entry in public sector has improved significantly, this is nice. We expect revenue to improve in the next quarters. Automotive. So far we were able to, let's say, show only little impact from the difficulties in this industry. Last year, only a revenue decrease of 4%. This year, Q1, we were highly impacted from that 20% decrease in sales. However, it's fortunate for us, it's our by far smallest sector. Manufacturing also double-digit growth rate. Here it's worth to mention that we have done some reallocation. So far, life science was part of health. It's now relocated to manufacturing.
We have done that because life science at adesso is revenues with the pharmaceutical industry, with biotech, and actually that's more close to manufacturing than to health insurance or statutory insurances. Therefore we have reallocated that. Retail, also strong growth rate. Utilities, again, 31% revenue increase. As we have seen this in the past, driven by our SAP activities. We are very strong in this sector with our SAP services. If we look at the sales split, as usual, Germany has shown a strong growth, this time 13%. What's very nice that we have seen the turnaround in Switzerland continuing. If you remember last year, we started with -7% in revenues, improved this over the year to -3% for the whole year.
However, we have seen a very nice order entry in Q4 and also Q1 this year, and therefore Switzerland is back on the growth rate 15%, and Switzerland contributes around about 50% of our revenues overall. This is a very important change and improvement. Austria and Italy, again, double-digit growth rates. Netherlands, somewhat disappointing, little decrease in revenues. Turkey also impacted by the very challenging economic environment in Turkey. If you look at Turkey, it's important to know that a pretty similar amount, what is shown on this slide, again, around about EUR 4 million, is earned with shoring. This does not show up in the line revenue in Turkey because this is revenues done with customers in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and so on. If we look at EBITDA, it's a very nice improvement.
58% increase, EUR 27 million. It's in total EUR 9.9 million plus compared to last year. How did we achieve that? Actually, main contributor was the increased revenue and this despite the weaker capacity utilization. We had a very slow start this year, and so far for all 3 months this year, capacity utilization is below prior year's level. On the other side, personal costs and especially other operating expenses grew disproportionately lower than sales. This was the other contributor to this improvement. What's also worth to mention, increase of material costs continued, so this was slightly disproportionately higher as we rely more on external partner, third parties. This is also caused why we have more bigger projects where we are a general contractor.
If we look at the key figures, sales came in 13% higher. Same gross profit. This is, as pointed out on the last slide, one of the key drivers of our EBITDA growth. Increased sales, same margin, and therefore, a very nice contribution to the EBITDA. On the other hand, personal costs and especially other operating expenses, a lower growth rate. This also contributed to our EBITDA development and therefore, margins improved to 6.8%. This is still below our goal, which is in this, between 11%-13%. However, it's a significant improvement compared to Q1 last year. As always, we look at our main profit drivers. Utilization is lower at adesso SE. This is probably a little bit disappointing development.
For the whole year, we have budgeted a similar level than what we have seen, last year. Q1 was below prior year and also our expectation for this year. We see some light on the end at the end of the tunnel now at the end of March. April already looks better. We are moving in the right direction. Daily rates have improved. Last year we have started an initiative to improve our daily rates and some of these improvements which we have negotiated started at the 1st of January. Therefore, we see some positive development there. License and maintenance of our in|sure product line. Last year we have seen no license revenue, this year as well. It's not a very surprising development.
Quite often, we do the license sales at the end of the year and therefore, especially in Q1, we don't see a significant number there. If we look at the personal costs per FTE, this is always a mixture. Personal cost per FTE increased by 1%. On the one hand side, we have hired a higher percentage of more senior people, so therefore the average cost per employee has increased. We have seen the normal increase in salaries, which you always have to for with your employees also because of inflation.
On the other hand, we have hired more people abroad in the countries where we do shoring, where we have a lower salary level and therefore, this has a negative positive impact on salaries because it brings the personal cost per FTE down. If we look at some other figures . Below the EBITDA, we have our depreciation. Depreciation of plant and equipment has increased slightly. This is mainly due to an increase in the right-of-use assets of EUR 1.2 million. On the other hand, in depreciation of fixed assets has a little bit decreased.
Same applies to depreciation related to purchase price allocation as we have not done any M&A activities for the last few quarters. This line, this number is going step by step a little bit down. Income from investment activities, that's what we show line at equity. A little bit more negative than in, you know, Q1 last year. Financial results, that's the interest we pay, slightly higher because we have some more leasing. We have also the loans, the what we have drawn from our syndicated loans and the amount was slightly higher. On the other hand, the interest rates are a little bit lower than what we have seen last year, but overall there is a little increase.
Income taxes, a little bit less than what we have seen last year, but still a pretty high tax quarter of 55%. Normally, you would expect here something between 30%-35%. This is due to the fact that we have certain expenses which are not tax deductible. On the other hand, we have certain subsidiaries which have brought in a loss and these net operating losses carried forward cannot be put as a deferred tax asset on the balance sheet. Therefore, they go directly through the expense line and have a negative impact on our consolidated earnings.
However, it's very nice that we for the first time since four years, that we are able to show a positive earnings per share figure in the first quarter and it's also a significant improvement compared to last year's Q1. Let's have a look at cash, at net working capital. If we look at the lines financial debt, net debt, you see an increase of EUR 34.9 million. Net debt is also higher, EUR 30.5 million. Why? Because net working capital increased by 28%. This is compared to the increased revenues are comparatively high, disproportional increase. If you dig a little bit more in detail into this, you will see that this happened in Q4 last year. So far, we were not able to bring it down again.
In Q1 itself, that's what we will see on the next slide, the development was that we kept the level. It's not become worse, but we were on the other side, we were not able to improve it. Investment cash flow, pretty similar compared to last year, which will change its cost mainly by currency fluctuations. What's also important, equity ratio improved slightly to 22%. Here we see the operating cash flow in Q1 itself, and you can see, as always, it's negative. That's what we always see in Q1 and Q2. However, it's only 6% more negative and compared to a 13% revenue increase. That's what I pointed out on the last slide.
Q1 itself was okay. On the other side, we were not able to get our working capital a little bit reduced. CapEx in line compared to last year. These repayments, that's what we show as CapEx. CapEx, due to the interpretation of the IFRS Foundation, which means in this line we show the lease for our offices and also for our company cars. Let's have a look at our guidance. At the beginning of the year, we expected an ongoing demand for IT service, a slight growth there despite the weak macroeconomic environment, especially in Germany. We expected some positive impact, some more dynamic coming from the AI demand from our customers and AI support development processes.
We expected to keep the capacity utilization on a similar level than what we have seen in 2025, and continue to reduce hiring speed. If you just look at Q1 and the development since the beginning of the years, you can see that we already reduced it a little bit more because the increase since, sorry, close of December is only 1.7%, which is comparably low for adesso. We expect an improved profitability and especially also the benefit from these two additional working days in Q4 this year. The start into this year was in most areas a little bit slower than expected. Despite that, we were able to improve our EBITDA and our revenues in the first quarter.
If we now compare our achievements this year so far with our guidance for sales is EUR 1.6 billion- EUR 1.7 billion. This is an increase of 9%-16%. We have achieved so far EUR 400 million. That's between 23% and 25% of that what we need. If you look at the revenue figure of EUR 400 million, if you just multiply it with four, you have already this EUR 1.6 billion. If you consider that we will continue to grow that, especially the second half of the year will have nine additional working days compared to the first half of the year, it's fair to assume that we will be well within our guidance.
EBITDA, it's always a little bit more challenging to predict that and to see it, because the guidance is EUR 130 million- EUR 150 million. We have so far only achieved 18%-21% of that. This is pretty similar and this range actually is better than what we have seen last year at this time. Please keep in mind that last year, for example, 70% of our EBITDA was generated in the second half of the year, especially because in the second half of the year, we have some more working days. In addition, we also expect some license revenues for this year. These license revenues are expected in the second half of the year, similar to the, that what we have seen last year. Yeah. That's all from my side at this stage.
Now I will hand over to Martin again.
Thank you, Michael. That was very helpful. We're heading for the Q&A session. Now please, we are grateful to take your questions. The first one will come from [ Mr. Ziering from Warburg Research].
Yeah, great. Thanks for taking my question. I will have three for the start. The first one on daily rates. You made some comments, is it also possible for you to quantify this a little bit? We have seen with the full year a decline in fixed price of 2%. Maybe you could just provide some color if these trends have reversed or what you're seeing. The second one on utilization. That's also helpful that you mentioned this has improved towards the end of the quarter. Do you already expect a reversal here in Q2, or is this rather a topic for the second half? The last one on the tax rate.
Yeah, you mentioned the moving parts, and you also mentioned what we should usually see. Probably that's not what we see for the full year. Maybe some sort of guidance, if possible, if this will be remarkably above 40%, or what you're seeing here. Thank you very much.
Okay. Daily rates, we are not talking about very significant improvements. We are not talking about 5% or 10%. This sometimes applies to a single customer, but if we talk about improved daily rates, it's very low, a single-digit growth rate. Let's say it in these words. For us, it's our goal to keep this in line with inflation and this is already very, very challenging because the competition is pretty tense at the moment. There are a lot of consulting IT services companies coming, for example, from the automotive sector, which now try to get into the other sectors.
If we look at utilization, it has improved at the end of March, and we already see further improvements in April. We hope and expect that we will be in line somewhere within Q2. I mean, we are not talking, as pointed out at the past, we are not talking about 3, 4, 5 percentage points. Already 1 percentage point less capacity utilization is already pretty significant in terms of profit because it's pure profit. Tax rate, that's something which is pretty difficult to predict. Last year, for the whole year, the tax rate was also slightly above 50%.
I think if you need a tax rate for your calculations, for your thoughts, I would say we should expect it somewhere between 45%-50%, which will still be higher than it should be because we have some subsidiaries which generate losses, and we cannot put these losses as deferred tax assets on the balance sheet because, as you might know, deferred losses carry forward, so you can only put those losses on the balance sheet when you expect to use them within 5 years.
Great. Thanks a lot. That's helpful.
You're welcome.
Just a short reminder, people on phone or participants on phone may want to unmute their microphones via the star key followed by the number six of their phones for our Q&A session. Do we have more questions?
Hello?
Yes.
Hello, this is Wolfgang from Berenberg. I have two additional ones, if possible. First one is on working capital that, let’s say, increased disproportionately against sales. You mentioned you were not able to drive it down in the first quarter, but if I remember the Q4 call right, you, let’s say, started some measures already or you’re working on measures. What can we expect over the next quarters? What are your targets to drive accounts receivable and other items burdening working capital down? That would be interesting.
Actually, we have analyzed this and also defined a goal ourselves. In Q4, the increase of working capital was EUR 20 million higher than what it should be. We're talking about EUR 20 million. That's the amount which we have set internally as a target and to get it reduced. We have, if you look at the key drivers, that's first off, all these what we call contract assets. It's not the line receivables because, in general, we don't have problems with receivables. Customer pay within the payment terms. What we have seen actually in Q4, this has a little bit reversed already in Q1, that customers wait a little bit longer within the agreed range.
The main driver actually are contract assets, which means fixed price projects and other work we have done, but which can be for several reasons not be invoiced yet. That's something where we also need to work a little bit on our processes to turn these assets much faster into billable revenue. It's always a development during the year that Q1, Q2, and also Q3, this line of the balance sheet increases. Last year, that was different to prior years. We were able to reduce this in Q4, but not as much as it should have been reduced, and that's where we are working on.
Okay. Thanks a lot. Then maybe on the pipeline on your hard order book, you mentioned that activity has picked up, for example, in the public sector, but has your hard order book also increased during the quarter?
If we look at this overall order entry for the first 4 months, so until the end of April, it's improved on the level of this year, and actually, that's exactly what is needed, possibly slightly better, to achieve sales targets. So far we are opening everywhere. That is not only, for example, public. I mean, because we have talked so much about this in the past. We also for example see very nice order entry in for our SAP services just to mention, but the overall order entry was really satisfying so far, absolutely in line with our expectations.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Are there any other questions?
Anyone? No, this doesn't seem to be the. There's one. Mr. Ziering again.
Yeah, I would just take a follow-up if you, if you allow. On the public sector, you mentioned the drivers. We know that the Sondervermögen is a little bit slow to turn into actual revenues. I know it's very tough. Do you have any idea about the timeline? Is this rather an H2 topic, or do you think this could go into rather 2027? Any color would be helpful here.
I mean, Q1 was the first quarter where we have seen it in terms of order entry. We have seen some more tenders. We won also more, or we got more orders. We have, in terms of order entry, public sector was already fine in Q1. However, the revenues in Q1, the revenues are still based on the order entry from the past, which means Q3, Q4, and that was pretty disappointing. Yes, we see some impact from these additional budgets, the Sondervermögen for the armed forces and infrastructure. It's probably less than what we 1 year ago would have expected, but there is some impact.
As far what I heard also from peers, it's not only at adesso, it's in general, it seems to move now, and that's I think good news.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you. Do we have more questions? No, it's my turn to thank you all for your participation and your interest in this call. I hope to see you soon in person, maybe tomorrow on the German Spring Conference. For now I have to say goodbye and see you soon.
Thank you.