Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CANCOM SE Earnings Call for the Results of the Fourth Quarter of 2023 and the Full Year. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to Lars Dannenberg. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Also welcome from my side. I'm Lars. I'm heading the IR department here at CANCOM, and I'm sitting here with our CEO, Rüdiger Rath, and our CFO, Thomas Stark. We would like to start the earnings call right now with Rüdiger.
Thank you, Lars. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our earnings call for the fiscal year 2023 of CANCOM SE. I'm very pleased about your interest. With me is our CFO, Thomas Stark. I'd like to start my presentation that for CANCOM, the year 2023 was an interesting year, and we are optimistic about the business development in the year 2024. The content of the presentation is structured as used in five main chapters. We start with the significant events, go over to the financial results, give updates about KBC and ESG, go over to the Outlook 2024, and then we have time for Q&A. Let's go straight to the main events of the year 2023. In the past financial year, we were particularly successful in implementing our acquisition strategy. Obviously, the main event was the acquisition of KBC.
Now, with over 5,600 employees and EUR 1.5 billion of revenues in total, the CANCOM Group has transformed significantly in the last year. The acquisition creates a now truly European full-service IT player with a strong base in the DACH region and strengthens existing markets, especially Austria and Switzerland. Also, lots of expertise in development and strong security expertise from CANCOM Austria for CANCOM Germany, workplace expertise from CANCOM Germany for CANCOM Austria. Lastly, we got new expertise on the board. Our new colleague, Jochen, adds the Austrian perspective and brings a new focus on the sales organization. Quickly on the main developments. The market was tough in Germany in 2023. Discussions about federal budget allocations, especially in the second half of the year, had an effect on SMB customers also, the small and medium-sized.
The EBITDA grew by 10.4%, driven by both our acquisitions, yeah, we did in the fiscal year 2023. Our operating cash flow improved significantly. Inventories are down, and our operating working capital is declining. But more on the latter from Tom. For the full year, we saw revenue growth through M&A and a decline organically. Frankly, we are not worried about the organic decline in revenue because it is only on the hardware that is driven by the development we saw in 2023. For services, the trend is still very much intact. Services at Cancom are growing for the full year organically and inorganically. To make it more clear, if you look at the split of hardware versus services, we see hardware down 7.3% in the segment Germany for the full year.
Revenue from services is up 6.2%, which is above the market growth for IT services in Germany in the last year, which was roughly 5.1%. That means that in our strategically important service businesses, we have seen good growth in a tough environment. Hardware is more volatile, and our client base reacts quicker to weak economic development than the base of some of our peers, where customers tend to be larger enterprises and big public contracts.
That's why you also see such a significant increase of our gross profit. It is the services. Organically, we grew 2% at the gross profit level. After our significant acquisition of the KBC Group, we formed the segments Germany and International. Okay. Let's touch briefly on our segment Germany. I already commented on a lot of the main drivers. Clearly, the market development was below our expectations for the full year.
The discussions and uncertainty about federal budget hurt mostly small and medium-sized public customers, districts, councils, administrations below federal and state level, smaller educations, and health clients. Weak economic development continued, as well as uncertainty also hurt SMB, the so-called Mittelstand. They are pushing their renewal cycles and delay investments. However, the weak infrastructure businesses is clearly a temporary development, which was worst in Q3 of 2023.
Q4 showed some improvement on the infrastructure side already. H1 2024 will still be somewhat slow. We expect momentum to pick up in the second half of the year. The demand in 2024 will be driven by the increasing IT requirements, especially in the client business due to Windows 11 or generative AI. There is also the beginning of the COVID replacement cycles. I commented a lot on hardware where in 2023, a lot of pain came through.
Let's also highlight what was good. The services demand has been strong throughout the full year. Services run on more long-term contracts and provide stability in terms of revenues and earnings. Our portfolio in the cybersecurity, IoT, cloud, modern workplace, and AI areas is strong. Demand for professional services like support has also been good. The segment internationally is clearly dominated by CANCOM Austria. For the full year, CANCOM Austria contributed the CANCOM Austria Group contributed with an EBITDA margin of 8.1%, which is exceptional.
The business performed really strong due to catch-up effects in the second half of 2023. Just quickly on the organic development, we are running against very strong comps from 2022. We had one major EU project in the segment, the eu-LISA project, in 2022. All right. Let's dive into the financial KPIs. For this, I hand over to Tom.
Thank you, Rüdiger. My name is Thomas Stark, CFO of CANCOM, and I'm happy to share the next minutes with you, providing you with some more insights in the financial KPIs. The first slide to show you is nice to show, actually. A nice headline, "Operating Cash Flow Improvement Materializes," and it shows the development that we have seen in the last, well, 12 quarters. We ended up the fiscal year 2023 with a positive cash flow of EUR 94.6 million compared to a negative cash flow last year of minus EUR 553.5 million. So a very significant improvement. Where did it come from, actually?
Accounts receivable contributed more than EUR 60 million to the development. The reduction of inventories contributed with about EUR 10 million to the development, whereas account payables decreased and, well, had a negative impact this year. In total, we ended up with the set EUR 94.6 million.
If you look at the fourth quarter and compare with what we forecasted in our third quarter's earnings call, we provided you with a bandwidth of EUR 70-EUR 110. As we can see, EUR 104.6 is at the upper end of the bandwidth that we have provided. Nevertheless, let's take a look at the three-year development on this slide. We can easily see that we have three outstanding years on this slide or exceptional years on this slide, meaning that in 2022, we were for the first time affected by supply chain issues.
We had to handle them for a number of quarters, and we are still to come back with some upside potential regarding the operating cash flow. Finally, taking a look at the net cash position that's just corresponding to the operating cash flow, we ended up the year with EUR 224.5 million of cash and cash equivalents.
Well, in the definition on this page, deducting current liabilities to credit institutions of about EUR 9 million net cash flows, EUR 213.1 million. Operating working capital improved. However, that's the reason why we are talking about tailwinds for the year to come. We have ended up the working capital ratio compared to the revenues of the last 12 months with 11.3%. And as you can see on this slide, this is not what we intend to end up. We have a bandwidth in the corridor of 0%-2%, where we used to be for several years in a row. And we have already taken a look at the development in the last years in the cash flow statement. We can see that we have still or that we are still suffering from the situation.
So the clear goal is to end up with a low single-digit number by the end of the year and to have further improvements on the operating working capital side. For the cash flow and for your models, the operating cash flow, we expect to be better than the cash flow that we have seen this year. So it should exceed by all means this year's results, and it should exceed a triple-digit number, so more than EUR 100 million of operating cash flow. Going on with CapEx, we ended up the year quite on target for the full year 2023.
The final number, again, in relation to the last 12 months' revenues, ended up with a 1.7% number. You can see the development, third quarter of 2023 and fourth quarter of 2023, have been affected by about EUR 2 million per quarter of CapEx contributed from the KBC.
Given that, our total number of 25.8 for the fiscal year 2023 is well in range and well in what we have as an expectation for the organization. The good news, further good news are we think we have overcome the major investments of the past. We all know that we have talked about spendings and CapEx on the migration of our IT systems, the platforms, and then the renewal of our data centers. I think we think that we have overcome this, and that's why we are happy to disclose a new target range for CapEx revenue, which is a 1.0%- 1.4% going forward. We also, as the last comment on this slide, assume and are sure that this is a sustainable number going forward for all your models. PPA-based amortizations and EPS effects.
If you compare this with the recent slide, there's a significant change. Clearly, the driver for the change is the PPA or other PPAs of KBC and DextraData. The PPA effect on amortization in 2024 will be EUR 11.8. What has changed and what is the split in between? Changed has a contribution of KBC of about EUR 6.6 per year in fiscal year 2024 and about EUR 3.5 per year of the acquisition of DextraData. The customer base in the segment Germany will be written off for about five years, and the customer base for the KBC will be amortized for about 10 years. That means their segments are affected differently. To just give you the split of the EUR 11.8, the segment Germany will be EUR 5.6, whereas the segment Austria will be EUR 6.2.
Effect on EPS, we can see on this slide as well, but that just leads me straight to, well, what are the effects on earnings per share and to our share buyback status slide. You can see on this slide the latest interim notification status as of March 25th, 2024. We have our share buyback program still ongoing. We have already bought about 9.63% of the shares. We are entitled in this given share buyback program to buy about 9.9% of shares. And that means that at current pace, the share buyback program will end in calendar week 14. What does it mean? In total, we have used a volume totaling EUR 98 million that has to be assigned to this share buyback program.
If we look at the share buyback programs in total, we have spent in the years 2022 and 2023 in the first quarter of 2024, EUR 216 million on share buybacks. The thing important to know is that we have already canceled 5.2% of the shares in December 2024. That means that our number of shares has already taken into account the cancellation of 2.185 million shares and equity at the end of the year is 36.686. Compared to the net profit, by the way, the payout ratio or the net profit of the organization is 36.9.
That means the payout ratio will be about 100%. We have not changed the dividend as we are clearly following the goal to have a sustainable and straightforward dividend ratio or dividend development. The final number will just be given at the end of the general meeting.
We will talk about this later. And depends on the actual number of shares. Also, it's highly likely that all of the shares will be or that the share buyback program will be finished by the end of calendar week 14. Equity is EUR 724.5 million. It's 46.8% compared to 53% in the previous year. Finally, the financial calendar 2024. What's next to come? We will talk about the non-financial group report on April 30th. You can find the data for the interim statements of the year 2024 as well as for the half-year report. And some more in detail insights in the development of 2023 will be provided on the Annual General Meeting in Munich on June 5th as an analyst conference. We have only listed one that is mandatory. That's the analyst conference of the German Equity Forum.
We would be happy to meet you there in person. Please feel free to take a look at our website, where we have disclosed more venues where we are in presence with you. With that said, I would like to hand over back to Rüdiger. Thanks for your interest.
Many thanks. As we did in the previous years' calls, we will now give you a quick update on the KBC acquisition and ESG. The integration of CANCOM Austria. We already said that the annual report was one important step for both companies. We would like to show you briefly what we are working on this year. We have defined three focus areas: purchasing, finance, and IT/digitalization. In each of these areas, we have either already made meaningful progress. But there are still things we are working on. As our general strategy is always fully integrate our businesses and our acquisitions, we will work hard this year on the next chapter to unify and standardize across both companies and use new position to negotiate with our suppliers.
There are additional work streams in which we already have aligned significant parts of our portfolio, and we are looking at the infrastructure alignment by country prices. Of course, our people. Our people and processes is one major area we are working on. It is important to me personally that all employees feel welcome and that we share the CANCOM values. We focus on a growth culture in which we enable the success of our customers through the success of our employees at CANCOM. On the ESG ratings, we have had a stable year. At the moment, we are observing closely what happens in the regulatory environment and preparing for our first ESRS report in 2025. We are also working on integrating our new colleagues of CANCOM Austria and our non-financial reporting structures.
The results, you will be able to see in the non-financial report which we publish on April the 30th. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to come to the Outlook 2024. We announced that this morning, and we decided to give a balanced forecast that reflects that H1 2024 could be another slow six months for infrastructure. The snapshot of the organic development of the year 2023 is not a statement about the future of the IT market and CANCOM. Digitalization will continue to be a key driver for the development and economic success of our customers. With the general breakthrough of generative AI applications, a new market-moving topic has been added to the trend topics of recent years in which we can provide our customers with the best possible support with our holistic expertise and the AI Orchestrator.
CANCOM is already very well positioned in the field of AI and has developed a broad portfolio from analyzing business processes and AI solutions for specific customer requirements to consulting on AI architecture and the necessary high-performance infrastructure. While generative AI applications are already part of everyday life and are increasingly gaining a foothold in companies thanks to CANCOM's offering, the threat situation in the area of cybersecurity is also changing. The use of artificial intelligence in the course of cyberattacks means that securing existing IT infrastructures will continue to be of paramount importance in the future.
We already have a strong offering in the field of IT security, including our CANCOM Cyber Defense Center, and will continue to grow in this market. As you can see, the CANCOM Group is active with innovative offering in a highly dynamic market that continues to offer outstanding growth opportunities.
For 2024, the signs continue to point to growth for CANCOM Group. Our confidence for the future is based on the unbroken trends toward digitization, the potential of new technologies, and our customers' increasing need to invest to drive their digitization in order to keep their existing IT infrastructures up to date, secure, and efficient. The forecast we feel comfortable with, with the full year in which we think, presents a fair and balanced outlook on how the year is going to look like. Many thanks.