Welcome to the DATAGROUP SE conference call on preliminary full year figures for the financial year 2021, 2022. At the moment, all participants are on mute. The floor will be open for questions after the presentation. If you would like to ask a question, please press the hand symbol or type your question into the question box. We will call the questioners according to the order in which they raise their hands. Please unmute yourself to ask your question then mute yourselves again to prevent acoustic disturbances for the other participants. The presentation is also available for a download in the investor relations section on DATAGROUP's website. I would now like to welcome Mr. Andreas Baresel, CEO, and Mr. Oliver Thome, CFO of DATAGROUP.
Okay. Good morning, everybody in the call. A warm welcome to the presentation of our full year figures. With me, Oliver Thome, CFO, and you see us smiling this morning here in Pliezhausen, as we are really happy to present the figures today, because we are talking about another record year for DATAGROUP. I'm really happy to show you in the next minutes the details what we reached the last 12 months. As I said, we have reached really record results in revenue margins and earnings this year. First of all, we finally managed to reach the EUR 500 million in revenues.
I still remember when I joined DATAGROUP, we had something about EUR 150 million, the EUR 500 million was one of the milestones we set for the future. I must say it's really overwhelming to have reached this goal this year now. This means a 12.8% increase in revenues compared to the last year. The same way, the EBITDA raised to EUR 76.5 million. This means an increase of 13.6% compared to last year. With both figures we exceeded our guidance we gave for this year, so are really happy about these numbers.
Of course, this followed also the full consolidation of URANO and dna, which are now named DATAGROUP BIT Oldenburg gmbh, and also the first time consolidation of Hövermann IT-Gruppe. Also in our core business, we had a good growth in the CORBOX business. We will talk about this later on. What's really strong is the development of the EBIT. You see an increase to EUR 41.5 million, which is an increase of more than 44% compared to last year. There you see the strength of our business model really opening now the gap between the growth in revenue and the growth in EBIT. With 8.3% of an EBIT margin, we have nearly reached our goal of 9% now.
This over proportionate increase, of course, is driven by our significant improvement in the CapEx efficiency. With our shared platforms, we manage to need less CapEx compared to the past, and that makes the EBIT rising so much compared to the other figures. As I said, nearly 9% now, so very close to our own goal there. All this is the reason for all this is really the result of the service as a product approach our CORBOX has, where we manage with all these recurring customers we have, which are booking CORBOX services, are using this service portfolio for their own IT and, then we manage to produce this more and more efficient over the last years.
That shows our results now in this good EBIT result. With the EPS, we are not following this much this year. The reason therefore is that we had some efforts for additional restructuring and organizational measures, and that led to an increased tax quote in this year. We are sure that this will change again next year as the tax quote will come down again, and we also will have an nearly same development in the EPS again. Really strong numbers. I would like to explain now a bit more what's in behind with this year's performance.
On the one hand, I said already it was an outstanding performance of the new acquisitions like, URANO, dna, now named DATAGROUP BIT Oldenburg. Besides this, we also had a very, very good performance in our DATAGROUP market units. They performed really well in our CORBOX core business, developing the customers we won in the past, in the last years, as it always takes some time when you're winning a customer, you first have to do the transition, and then you start taking the revenues and you can build the customer with cross and upselling. So we are also seeing here now the results of the good performance of the previous years.
Looking on sales results, we had also for this year, so 2021, 2022, a real strong year. We managed to win 20 additional contracts, and only two customers did not renew their contracts. We are calculating this really, really realistic. There are additional 18 contracts which will become effective in the next years. Like I said, you have to do the transition first, and then you take up the revenues. These 18 additional contracts will bring further growth in our core business in the next years. As we have explained already in the past, a typical CORBOX customer has several contract periods. Winning one new is really important to ensure the future of more and more recurring revenues. Typically, a contract means three to four contract periods.
Average contract period is something between three and five years. You can imagine, as I said, winning one new customer means 15, 20 years for business with these customers if you are delivering good services. Starting with a customer also means, and that's what the other numbers are showing, that you can expand these customers more and more. We will show later with some examples, you start with two or three services, and you can sell or upsell to these customers, other CORBOX services on the one hand, but also additional solutions on the other hand. We managed to do this with 20 customer contracts this year. We really expanded them, and that's then part of the revenue growth in the core business we had already in the numbers of this year.
For 34 contracts, we did this year the renewal, so another contract period, as I said, for an average period from three to five years. That means we ensured these customers and their recurring revenues also for the next years, and also ensured that we can build further business on top for these customers. Like for example, additional cloud services, which are really, we have a big demand for public cloud services at all our CORBOX customers at the moment. On the other hand, we are quite happy that we had no impact from the war in Ukraine in our business, as we have not any type of or this much. Of course, there's a few of the trading business, the supply chain issues really didn't touch DATAGROUP very much.
Of course, also, delivery times for hardware we use for our own platforms are longer than before. That means we have to order earlier, plan our capacities a bit earlier than in former times. There's not a real impact compared to other IT business where you depend on really the supply chain performance. Of course, energy prices are an issue, but as we are using shared platforms which have a high density of customers, that are really using the shared platforms in common, energy is only a small part of the costs, and these impacts are not this strong.
We are in a quite stable situation in a not, or in an economic environment, which is definitely challenging for the whole economy. The DATAGROUP model there shows its strength, working with this long-term recurring business on the one hand and using a shared service approach on the other hand. If you compare these numbers to our total CORBOX customer base, we have in average something like 250 CORBOX customers. You see these at 18 additional contracts are something like a 8% growth in this core business. Of course, if we consider also transforming other revenue we get in by acquiring new companies, you can't always see this growth on the top line.
In the core of our business, we have really this 8% growth. If we calculate how many additional CORBOX customers we have compared to this 250, that's what we are looking on and what's very important for the future. Losing only two customers means a very low churn rate. As this year, that's a really good basis for further growth. If you look on the, on, the euro perspective of this additional contract, we have an average of something like EUR 1 million-EUR 1.5 million average size of the CORBOX contract on an annual base. These 18 additional contracts will mean as soon as we have boarded these customers, another EUR 20 million growth only on an annual base.
In addition, there will come all this up and cross-selling potential I've just spoken about. I would like to show you some of these new customers now and explain a bit more how they are working. You see here at the first glance, it's really good spread over the industry. We have no cluster risks there that we are depending on one or other special industry. We have an exhibition company, financial industry, service companies, also industrial companies and retail. The CORBOX business is working all over the industries and the sectors. This gives us a real stable base that we are not depending on, I mean, development or one or the other industry. For example, this exhibition company, they signed a full outsourcing with us.
You see it's a really big deal, EUR 3.5 million per year. Of course, that will bring a good CORBOX growth in the next year as soon as we have boarded this company. Of course, if you sign full outsourcing at once, you don't have this much upselling potential anymore. On the other end, we can now start getting this revenues for the next years at once. On the other hand, you see some other customers like besides this, a financial industry customer. He signed a smaller contract with EUR 0.8 million per year for end user services, Service Desk, and communication collaboration services. He signed this contract for five years, but focused on only these CORBOX services.
That's why that's a good example for further up and cross-selling potential in the, in the future. You know, the CORBOX is existing of nine service families with something like 40 detailed CORBOX services. This customer definitely has a upselling potential for much more other services in the, in the future as we start just started with end user services, Service Desk, and so on. The same example is, for example, the retail company on the lower left. We started there with Service Desk only. It was a quite good deal concerning that it's only Service Desk with EUR 1.4 million per year. Although this customer has a very good upselling potential in the next years besides Service Desk, typically, you can do end user support and so on.
We are, of course, starting to talk with these customers about further services they might, they might need here. The last one I would like to name is the toy manufacturer on the lower right. That's a customer where we implemented the CORBOX services fully on a public cloud stack. You might remember in the last year, we enhanced the CORBOX with a complete public cloud capability. More or less all services, all CORBOX services you can now buy in a public cloud version. That's what several or some customers like at the moment. They say we have a cloud, public cloud first strategy, that's also the situation for this customer. We implemented all the services on a full public cloud stack. We are using own service designs here, own tools.
We still have also with the public cloud, the stickiness of the customer, even if he's using public cloud services, he's really stick to DATAGROUP service design there as we combine the service on a smart way. That's also important as we can mix the services in a hybrid scenario, public and private cloud services for the future. It depends how the next years the technologies will develop. We can use what the customers are demanding for. These are examples for the CORBOX core growth in the actual years. That, as I said, we are actually boarding these customers. Typically transition takes something like six to nine months, and the full revenue we will collect this in the next year.
Of course, our target is also to win same kind of numbers of CORBOX customers also in the new fiscal year now. Year by year, adding new CORBOX customers and building up and cross-selling on them, that's the idea behind the CORBOX model. I hope I gave you a bit of an idea on an operational level what happened this year, and hand over to Oliver for more detailed figures which show the strength of the business model.
Thank you very much, Andreas. Also from my side, I welcome you on the presentation of the annual figures of DATAGROUP. Maybe one short sentences to the previous year figures. They have changed in some positions by making the finalized purchase price allocation of companies we bought in 2021. Let us start. Like Andreas just said in the beginning, we have extraordinary good figures in the actual year. We rised our revenue side and we exceeded our guidance and reached a revenue stream of more than EUR 500 million.
What you can see, this is what Andreas just explained, is that the proportion of the services remains still over 80%, this shows that our core business, in which we make our margin, in which we earn our money, is just in a good mood. On the other hand, this is very important for us too, is that when you have a look at the material expenses, they are stable on the same percentage like in the past year. Much more important, this is where we can look in our business model, is how we develop the personnel costs.
This is very important to see that in percentage, we reduced the personnel costs with about 1.3% to a total of EUR 233 million. We reached with a nice sales mix, record EBITDA of about EUR 76.5 million. The depreciation, and this is important to understand a little bit the actual situation, has two main pillars. The one is exceeding, and exceeding is the depreciation on the purchase price allocation. This is more or less a result of the rising multiples of the past years instead of 10 years ago.
On the other hand, this is what our business model is showing, that we were able to overcompensate these depreciations and to decline the other depreciations, that we reached an extraordinary good development in our EBIT with more than 45%, nearly 45% to the previous year, up to EUR 41.5 million . Important to know is what Andreas just explained is that in the past quarter four in this year, we just make some reserves for restructuring measures. I would suggest within an amount between EUR 2 million and EUR 3 million . What's to see at all is that the financial results have changed too to the previous year.
There we have one-time effect, extraordinary effect, mainly driven by the purchase price allocation of about EUR 2.2 million we do not expect for the future. As Andreas just explained as well, is that our tax rate is higher than in the past. Especially the past year has been a very good result in cost of activating deferred taxes. In this year, we have made some non deferred tax positioned recrudes, so that the tax situation for this year is reducing a little bit our estimation. Overall, we are very happy and we are on a good way for the future. Let us have a short view on the balance sheet.
In the balance sheet, you can see that we overall have exceeded the goodwill. The goodwill is exceeded in cost of the investments we just made in the fiscal year 2022. Important to see is that the situation of our non-current liabilities and current liabilities in total are comparable to the past year. Very important to see is that you can see our business, and we will see in the cash flow statement is very cash generating. This is very important for us. You can see that we made a reduction in the net debt, and that's despite EUR 35 million investments in acquisitions.
With a quotation from net debt to EBITDA, with about 1.4%, we are to every moment able to get more liquidity and financing for going forward with our organic and inorganic growth. Important to see is as well that our equity ratio rised enormously from 20.3% to 26.4%. There we have two pillars, two main pillars that have driven this result. The first, and this is very important, is our profit, our earnings.
The second one is that we made a renewal of the calculation of our pension provisions, which were directly seen in the equity, not in the profit and loss statement. That is very important for a CFO to see where do we get our money from and what did we have done with this. This is quite a very, very good sign to see that the cash flow from operating activities with more than EUR 70 million shows the financial strength of the company. This, for us, is very important, what I've just said, to have the possibility to grow further organic and inorganic, and to finance it with our very strong result. What did we have done with this? In the first line, we made the cash flow investing activities.
We invested it in a new company or in new companies with nearly EUR 36 million. There you can see that the CapEx in the fiscal year 2021, 2022 declines from the previous year, from EUR 11 million to EUR 8.8 million. The financing activities are mostly driven by the dividend payment we did in the past year in March 2022, as well as the outroll for finance leases as a lessee, with an amount of about EUR 12.8 million. In total, we were able to invest in companies without changing in our cash and cash equivalents. We are looking very positive and optimistic in the future growth of DATAGROUP. Maybe now let's have a look.
Andreas just said when he started at DATAGROUP, you can see it on the left side, with about EUR 157 million. With a KGA of 13%, we are now reaching our goals, exceeding our guidance with more than EUR 500 million, EUR 500 million, I think it's more impressive. To see how does they, what's the revenue streams? The revenue streams we just exceed is mostly in recurring CORBOX and cloud services. This is where we earn our money, and this brings us approximate 80% of our gross margin are realized by recurring revenues, recurring CORBOX revenues we can plan and where we can earn high margins.
In the EBITDA as well, you can see the total change from nearly EUR 11 million now up to EUR 76.5 million. This is very impressive. When you see the CAGR in this, we just realized with more than 20, nearly 22% by year in the past 10 years. Very important is to see what we just explained as well, that we changed in our value chain into the CORBOX the profitability, so that we are in a stable mood of more than 15% in EBITDA in the past four years. This is more important when we see that in the past, we just realized with a kind of tailwind, extraordinary purchase price for gains.
This means that we were able to buy companies in special situations where we made a lucky buy, and these lucky buy effects doesn't have mattered in the past two years, so that the development from EUR 4.3 10 years ago, up to EUR 41.5 million in the EBIT margin is really impressive. So that we can see that we are on a good way. When we now make a summarize, we can say, we have a resilient business model. We have really strong financial figures. We get extraordinary good feedback from our financial partners. Let us go full speed ahead. Our plan is to continue, of course, our growth strategy. As we have explained earlier, we have adjusted it a little bit. We have now a 50/50 approach between inorganic and organic growth.
The organic growth is split like I explained earlier, between from new customers and on the second quarter from upselling on these customers. Like I've explained with the examples of our new customers, we are winning a customer in one year, then doing the transition, first of all, starting with the revenues that the main contract is giving us, and then starting up and cross-selling with additional CORBOX services and additional solutions. That's the reason we can now aim for 50% organic growth beside 50%. The thing we have to keep in mind is that when acquiring companies, we are also buying special situations where certain transformation of revenues is necessary.
This growth in the core, you can't always see on the top line, but our focus is really on the core of CORBOX business, and that's what we are measuring, of course, besides the top line, growth. We are aiming there for a EUR 10 million increase on with new customers and something like EUR 10 million per year with cross and upselling. On the other side, the inorganic growth means two to three acquisitions per year. Of course, I'm following this for many years now, we are also using the actual situations on the markets and how the deal flow is and how prices are at the moment. This changes from years to years, but on a more or several-year perspective, that means two to three acquisitions per year. This number of inorganic growth.
We will follow this strategy also for the next year and especially, with the growth in our CORBOX core business, I see a very good future there if we continue winning new CORBOX customers, also in the actual year like we did in the last fiscal year. That brings us to our midterm ambition. We are aiming as a next, our next milestone for EUR 750 million in 2025, 2026. You see here how we like to build it up and looking on the actual figures in the last year, 2018, 2019, up to the last year, we really managed to have a good development year by year growing.
I'm really confident that we continue can continue that that for the next years until reaching this next milestone of EUR 750 million based on this growth strategy, inorganic and organic growth and growth organic growth in in our CORBOX core business and based on a yearly growth of CORBOX customer base. I'm really confident that we can manage this also in the next years. Our target in in profitability is more than 15% EBITDA, like we did also in the past years, and we still keep to the goal of 9% EBIT which was 8.3% this year. We're already right very close to this. That's our strategy and targets for the next years.
I think we have a very good basis. Even if the economic environment has some challenges, I think this also will help the CORBOX idea to further grow as companies have also on their side, more and more challenges to handle their digitization demands and needs and are looking for providers which can help them with this. The CORBOX approach with shared services, running the IT for the companies, being their digitization partner, I think is a good approach also under the actual and the future environment we will have there. I'm really looking forward to this future, and I think we will see in the next years how the CORBOX model will then aim for EUR 750 million. Thank you for listening up to here, and I think we then can start with the questions.
Yes. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the hand symbol. You will then be called and be able to ask your question. Alternatively, you can type your question into the question box. We can start with Mr. Woller. Mr. Woller, do you have a question? Otherwise, we can jump over to Mr. Fry and Mr. Woller, you can try to unmute yourself later on or type your question into the question box. Mr. Fry?
The participants are unmuted, or they can unmute.
Yes, actually they're, they are unmuted. They have to unmute themselves.
Okay. You have to act yourself before questioning.
Hi. Now the unmuting works. Knut from Baader Helvea.
Hello.
Thank you. Yeah, just a couple of questions. The first one on the restructuring you mentioned, with the EUR 2 million-EUR 3 million, is that what we found in the other OpEx line in the fourth quarter? Secondly, on the organic revenue growth. I know we discussed it a couple of times that you're downscaling revenues of the acquired entities, and you made this point again. What was the organic growth still in the last fiscal year? When we look at the high margin service line and maintenance line, it was sequentially down. What were the reasons for that in the fourth quarter?
When do you expect that to pick up again? When we look at the expanded contracts, can you give us some ideas about the multiplier, how much more revenues you generate when you're cross and upselling compared to the initial sale? Thank you.
Okay. Maybe you start with the first question.
Yes. The first question. Hello, Mr. Woller. Nice to hear and see you again. The question, the first question was the restructuring costs, the OpEx, we find them in the OpEx and the personnel costs. That this effect is quite right. The organic growth?
The organic growth, yes. If we calculate it on the top line, I think we are very have not much organic growth. Oliver, I think it's something like 0.2%.
Yes.
As we explained already, and that's why we are mentioning this, as we are transforming the business, you said it yourself. If we are calculating this on our CORBOX core, we really have a growth of something like at least EUR 20 million on an annual base. As I said, if you compare it with CORBOX core, yes, we have something 5%-10%. It depends if you calculate all CORBOX revenues or only the contract-based part. That means in some years we are transforming more other revenues and that's of course showing a top line another result for growth than really in the core business.
We are working on an idea to explain maybe this a bit better in the future, but we have not finalized this. That's the message behind. The core business, we are growing something like 7%-8%, I would say. In the top line, there was not much growth as we are transforming revenues from former acquisitions.
Another question you had was the margin situation in the past quarter. What we have done is we have some projects with outrolling business. You can see it on the balance sheet in our goods which increased in the past quarter in course of some projects now starting in October, November with the rollout. The good thing is the material cost and on the other hand, the balance sheet, you have the goods. In %, it's a little bit dividing the margin, but this is a stable situation we expect in the next year. This is no running business. It's a one-time effect in the past quarter.
Okay. I think your next question was on the leverage of cross and upselling on a new customer. The way we are calculating is that we say we have a customer base of something like 250 customers, on one-third of them, we can do the same growth as with new customers. Every year we are expecting something like EUR 20 million additional growth from this basis. Why we are calculating about one-third only, because over several contract periods, you can't grow every contract period in the same time. As you're starting with a customer new, he has a more potential for additional services, of course, than he has after three or four contract periods. That's our way we are calculating.
That means you have something like 20%, 25% on an average as upselling potential. Of course, the customer situations are quite different there. Our annual goal is to have the same growth from new customers on an annual base as from upselling. This upselling is coming from maybe a third of our customer base, as we are typically addressing there the new customers with more upselling potential.
Maybe, a further advice, this is important to understand our fourth quarter is that we have the first time consolidation of the Cloudeteer, which is reflected in the balance sheet as well. You must know that the most sales they make outside DATAGROUP is made by the market units. Cloudeteer is mostly like an internal specialist for the market units for public cloud services. This effect is reflected in the fourth quarter as well.
Mm-hmm. Right. Thank you. Just a quick follow-up on the service and maintenance revenues that have been down, I think around EUR 2.5 million sequentially in Q4. What were the reasons for that?
In...
In the fourth quarter, you mean?
Yeah. I think, if my model is not wrong, we have been at EUR 102.1 million service and maintenance in Q3, and we are now at EUR 99.4 million in Q4. There's a slight decline also year-over-year. I'm trying to understand why this is the case.
This reflects that we in the fourth quarter have to challenge which kind of sales which have to clarify as finance lease. That doesn't mean that we lose the sales part in service revenues. You will find it in the past quarter of the fiscal year 2021 as well. This is only the requalification and that, in the work in progress in the annual closing, we have to clarify. normally, this is a normalization we do in the typically in the fourth quarter.
Fourth quarter.
Got it. Thanks very much.
Okay. I guess the question from Mr. Fry has been answered already, so I would go ahead with [Mr. Searing.
Great. Thank you. Is it working? Can you hear me?
Yes. Fine.
Perfect. Thanks. Good morning. Good morning. I would have two or three questions left. First one would be also following up on the share of service revenues that declined year-over-year. Where would you see that moving forward? Also follow up on the tax rate. Could you maybe clarify what the main driver was here for the higher tax rate? On cost inflation, we talked about this in the past. Maybe you could just provide some color, what measures you're taking and how relevant wage inflation is or is not for you. Yeah, this would be it for now. Thank you.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe. The first question, just to be sure to understand you right, you are asking for the decline of service revenues?
A lower share of service revenues of total revenues. That was something like 84% last year h as now gone down.
This of course also depends because in related to, on the one side, CORBOX business and also other business still is connected some trading business with hardware and these things. Especially during the last two years, there was a bigger part of additional hardware needed for some customers following Corona crisis and home office equipment and also for digitization of schools. These things picked up very much in the last two years, and that led to a different shares. What we are looking at on is the overall part. I think in the next years, this will come down again, this other business in trading business as of course, one day everything is equipped and we are more on a steady state mode.
Our focus is, are the absolute numbers in the service business. This result more came from an additional trading business instead of an declining service portion. Maybe to the tax rate, just what we have explained is that we in the actual year had non-taxable costs or amounts which we had in total, and I would suggest with about EUR 5 million there, especially in the past quarter with EUR 2 million-EUR 3 million additional restructuring costs. We are optimistic that we can reduce these tax rates in the future as well. You have the question in the wage inflation. Maybe I can answer this one.
Of course, wage inflation is like in all other German industries, is an issue on the one hand, but on the other hand, our personal staff is working in a shared basis. We don't have this relation one to one on the customer contract. We can spread wage, rising wages, all of our total customer base, and the increasing part of optimization in our services, and we have done a lot of things in the past years there. You also see it in the total decline of the personnel cost ratio, brings us into a situation that just the personnel cost part is getting less important, and we can compensate wage inflation in a good way there.
Besides this, I'm always saying the IT industry also had rising wages for the past 10 years on a really high level compare to other industries. We, with our approach, getting more and more optimization to our services, we are quite used to this development. Inflation there is not this new to us, and we are just continuing this optimization approach, where we are reducing the number of staff needed to run our services. Scaling up the part of personnel costs will be lower and lower as you can run from a good automized or semi-automized technology. You can run more and more customers with the same number of people.
Okay. We have, hand rise by Mr. Froberg.
Yes. Morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay as well?
Yes. Hello, Mr. Froberg. Hello.
Hi. Morning. Morning. Just a few for me, please. First, apologies for this, it's a clarification question. Could you just clarify again the one-off effects you saw on the cost side, impacting margin in Q4, and maybe also quantify the effects, please? I'll start there and then take the other questions after.
Okay. Let us have a look. The EBIT effect is what I've just explained. This is restructuring effects between EUR 2 million and EUR 3 million. We have one time or first time consolidation effects by Cloudeteer, and we have non-EBIT relevant special effects with about EUR 2.2 million in the financial results, especially by non-allocat-able amounts for the purchase price allocation, which is shown in the financial results.
Okay, that's great. Am I right to understand that you're anticipating a 9% EBIT margin next year, up from 8.3% this year? Could you help us understand how you will get there and what the drivers are? Is this more centralization of services, more automation, or are there any other drivers that will help you get to that 9% level in the next fiscal year?
I think it's a mixture of measures. As we are more and more consolidating workload on shared platforms and dedicated customer platforms are running out of usage and of course with them their depreciation. That means that you have more additional effects that we have less depreciation for the revenue we are running, for example with platform services. That's one part. The other part is like we said, more consolidated service delivery, but not really by centralization. Of course, the central delivery is also part of our production model.
By, for the whole delivery, or production, part of the company, which is also a decentralized approach, they are using the same tools and methods and also optimization technologies, even if they are producing in a decentralized approach. One example I can show you is, for example, in the Service Desk. Service Desk, of course, we have a central unit for Service Desk, but also several decentralized Service Desks, and we have developed for them all a KI based approach to help the Service Desk agent be more efficient. With, Not KI. AI is the English word, sorry. AI based approach to help the Service Desk agent to be more efficient, to answer the tickets much quicker than before.
This technology is used as well in the central unit as in the decentral units. That helps us to bring efficiency up. Yes, hopefully that will bring us to the 9% in the next year, what we set as a goal for ourselves.
An additional point is, when you look for the profitability, we said that we want to reach an EBITDA margin from more than 15%, EBIT from more than 9%. When you look in the past of our company, you have seen that the investments were much higher. When you look in the past year, we have depreciation for other, for others, not purchase price allocation has been at EUR 32 million. Now we have about EUR 27 million-EUR 28 million. We expect with the lower CapEx investments we just did in the fiscal year, that the depreciation will go down. It will give us a little bit tailwind in the EBIT margin as well.
What you are saying, Oliver, also what we of course have to keep in mind is that the depreciation on.
Purchase prices.
Purchase prices is coming up a bit with higher purchase prices. Of course, that's not a real operational effect. Hopefully, we can compensate this with operational effects of the real operational depreciations. Yeah.
That's great. Thank you very much.
Now we can hand over to Mr. Wolf.
Hi, it's Andreas Wolf, Warburg Research. Thank you for taking my question. I would have a couple regarding the clients and how DATAGROUP is winning clients, et cetera. You could elaborate a bit on what services within the CORBOX product portfolio are growing the fastest, i.e. which services are attracting clients most. I guess initially it might be the Service Desk. Which services are then usually used in upselling situations? That would be my first question. On new client wins also, where do clients currently come from? Are those second generation outsourcing clients, or are you winning outsourcing clients or out-tasking clients maybe, which used to run their internal IT before that? That's my second question.
Mm-hmm.
The third would be on why clients might be changing the provider. You mentioned two, which is a low number, but maybe you could also shed some light on what the reasons are typically here. That was question number three. Question number four would be what are currently your three biggest verticals when you look at your customer base? Thank you.
Okay, thank you. Thank you. Let's start with the typical CORBOX upselling customer journey. I would say there are Maybe typical ways these customers are developing. You named one already, Service Desk as a start service or starting service is a typical way for several years now. Customers are giving out Service Desk as a first step, and then they are seeing they could do more. They are hopefully happy with the service quality and you get into things like end user services, data center services and things in that way. Going deeper in the IT landscape of the customer with additional services.
That's one a typical way as the customer journey is going. Another way in the last, I would say two years, is connected to public cloud services. Customers see that they can't handle managing the public cloud anymore. This comes in parallel with, well, with the challenging handling their own on-premise infrastructure. Another way customers are developing that they are saying, "I'm looking for somebody who can orchestrate public cloud and private cloud workload." That's something a bit more new on the market going this way. I would say there's a third part, which is typically, unfortunately at the moment that are security issues. You might know more and more companies get problems with security.
The security situation and going into these topics, they see they can't handle the challenges managing a secure IT landscape on their own anymore, and think about bringing it onto the market, looking for a provider like DATAGROUP to handle and run the IT for them. That are out of my point of view, three typical scenarios things are running at the moment. The one's on going in deeper, and the other one connected to the public cloud, the increasing public cloud usage, and the other one linked to security situations. Of course, they are also very different other ways. It depends very much on the individual situation of the customer. Your second question was on the type of generation.
Yes.
It's interesting. You could assume that the first generations will end up one day because everybody has or will never, but there are still several first generation outsourcings. They are not done in the way they were done in the past. You take over the whole infrastructure and the people, they are done more as an outtasking. People really say, or our customers say, "We are using our staff for digitizations projects, for example, and I'm giving to a provider this daily running business." I would say we have still one-third to maybe nearly 50% where the services. No, I would say more one-third, where the services are coming from an in-house service scenario, and maybe two-thirds are coming from other providers where, and that are the reasons for changing providers.
Some companies are consolidating provider workload, so taking more and more things together because they don't want to manage these many providers anymore. A second reason is of course also satisfaction with providers. IT services are very business critical sometimes to the business process or very often today to the business processes of the customers. If they are not running smoothly, business then of course says we have to improve there. Our customers are looking for new providers. Another issue is that also the provider landscape is changing. Some bigger providers who are working on the midsize customer segment in the past are not addressing this anymore.
Of course, their service quality and their whole approach is getting down and they are looking for new providers, these customers. As you might know, our focus is really on the German mid-sized companies. That's another way customers are changing because their former providers are not really focused on their market anymore. The third question was? Yeah, that's what I answered. Why are they changing providers? Our biggest verticals, I would say it's a quite good path over several industries. For sure the banking sector, banking and insurance sector, with our latest acquisitions, dna, and before this Portavis has grown very much. We have something like EUR 80 million, I would say in this area now.
That's a big, big part of our business. Of course, a widespread of industrial customers and their all kind of industries. From automotive, over process industry, to FMCG and every industry is included there because running CORBOX services is not-
From a technical point of view, not really industry-specific. Of course, it's very important for us to understand the business of the customer, that we understand what he's doing with our services. but that's more a matter of service quality and customer satisfaction. Out of a technical view, you can run an automotive company the same way as a bakery, for example. the third part I would say is the public sector. We have also, especially after acquiring URANO a very big part also in the public sector, which has a big, yeah, deficit or still a lot of things to do in digitization.
Where we are beside the CORBOX services on the one hand, we're also doing a lot of project business for them, helping beside running their IT, also doing these digitization projects for them. I would say are the three service or industry sectors which are our biggest ones.
Great. Thank you.
Now, just to clarify, Mr. Woller, do you have additional question or is the hand just raised from the questions before?
Follow-up question. Two follow-ups. First, on the vaccination centers, I think some of them are closing, and you had some tailwinds from the vaccination centers during the pandemic. What is the revenue head when you're expecting from the closure of the vaccination centers? Secondly, should we expect the same level of cash generation also next year and in the coming years as you have achieved now this year, just broadly as a range? Thank you.
Maybe at first, the vaccination centers, you know, we do not publish the individual earnings of the company as well as the vaccination centers. We do have in two companies at first it's at URANO as well as in DATAGROUP Stuttgart. We just have our contracts with these vaccination centers and they're still running. It's just since the beginning of the year that partial they worked further on. We for the moment believe that they will go further on, not on the in the way like we just had 12, 18 months before.
And this is very important for us and maybe for understanding the business of our one of the newest subsidiaries, URANO, and especially with the other customers and with a connection to DATAGROUP and additional services, URANO has developed quite well at first. The next question is to look for what's our cash flow situation we have to look for. We didn't see any wind from ahead that our earnings profitability will go down. You see, we have ambitions which rise on. We are very optimistic that we just are in a good mood to develop our cash flow or operating cash flow as well.
Thank you.
Okay. I guess with answering this question, we have no further questions. The call will be made available on DATAGROUP's website. With this information, I hand over to Andreas again.
Okay. I will thank to everybody, especially to everybody asking questions. We are also of always happy to answer these and discuss with you our business and our CORBOX approach. Yeah, we'll be happy to see some of you on one of the next conferences. Thank you for today's presence here. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you.