Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our conference call. With me is Andreas Baresel, our CEO.
Hello.
Hello, Andreas. This morning at 7:30 A.M., we published our preliminary figures for fiscal year 2023/2024. You can find the details on our website. Andreas will now highlight the business details and figures in a presentation. This will be followed by a Q&A session, the procedure of which we will explain after the presentation. Thank you so much. I now hand over to Andreas.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, and well, welcome from my side also. Welcome to the presentation of our preliminary figures 2023/2024. As always, I would like to start with a short introduction to DATAGROUP. Maybe there are again some participants. We have over 30 participants in the call now, which don't know yet DATAGROUP this well. And then we come to the highlights of the fiscal year 2023/2024. And then I would go a bit deeper into the details of our figures, P&L, balance sheet, and so on. And at the end, I would go to the set of measures which we announced to increase shareholder value end of last week and explain a little bit what's the idea behind there. So let's start with a short introduction on DATAGROUP. DATAGROUP, we are the leading German IT service provider for mid-sized companies and mid-sized organizations in Germany.
We are doing this business based on our CORBOX. You see it here on the right side. The CORBOX is our full-service IT service portfolio, where a company or organization can give us the whole responsibility, the whole service volume to do everything in running their IT services. We are doing this with 3,500 people, mostly in Germany. The CORBOX is a real made-in-Germany service. We will come to the numbers soon. We are doing this with revenue of more than EUR 500 million now. This kind of business is what we think a very solid business model as we are doing CORBOX business within long-term, long-running contracts. Typically, the CORBOX contract is three to five years long, and then it really also will be renewed by the customer as if he's satisfied with our services.
It's not worth changing providers as this service transition is always a bit of a work. We also will come past this, later on. We are doing this business with several generations of CORBOX. We have, or we will launch the Gen 7, how we call it, beginning of 2025. So already the seventh generation. That means we are always renewing the technologies inside the CORBOX as our goal is always to deliver IT services, including every service which is state of the art at the moment. What we've done the last one to two years is including quite new technologies into the CORBOX like AI, cybersecurity technologies, and also new additional multi-cloud technologies, within the orchestration layer to run really seamless multi-cloud services for the customer.
And we will also come back to this, as this was bigger investments in the fiscal year 2023/2024. But also we see good results in the order entry area, that these investments are paying out. So our growth strategy, and you will see the first proofs in this year we are reporting about, is a more organic growth. In the past years and decades, DATAGROUP was growing stronger and organically. And one to two years ago, we have changed this to a clear organic focus. And an organic growth is only a minor part. And we see good results there. But I will come to this with the numbers later on. And concerning the year 2023/2024, we are really happy to report on growth in revenue and earnings.
At the moment, that's definitely not a usual and typical situation that we can report this as a purely Germany-oriented company. We have quite challenges in our economy and all the customer base. But what's important is IT service business is really a type of business which is not influenced strongly in these times as we are kind of a measure to improve flexibility, reduce costs. Especially IT services is running well, especially if you have a good service portfolio as our CORBOX is. Going to the numbers, we managed to grow the company to a revenue of EUR 527.6 million. We ended up there in the upper range of our guidance, which was EUR 510 million-EUR 530 million. It's a real, real good overall growth.
On the results level, EBITDA and EBIT, we have a more sideways development, but still a small growth from 82 to 84 in the EBITDA and in the EBIT level from 45.3 to 45.8. The reason for this, and it will also come to this later on, are our investments in these future technologies, AI, security, and multi-cloud. We have already announced, beginning of the fiscal year, and we see this now as it is going into the results with a small portion. If we go to the highlights of the last 12 months, we see on a revenue level definitely, and as I said, that's not the typical result at the moment, a good, very good growth of 6% compared to the last year.
And what also shows that our change to organic growth starts to work is that there on a yearly basis is already included a 1% growth in organic, also something quite special for the actual, times. If you look closer on the quarterly basis, it's even more clear that this organic growth track is working. If we compare Q4 to the Q4 from the previous fiscal year, we have an organic growth portion of 8%. And that's showing very good, how really new customer contracts are going into production and increase our, our revenue. If you look on a quarterly basis, I will have a graph which is showing this ramp up of new customers, quite a bit later. What's also important for this organic growth is, of course, how's the sales going, how's the order entry going. And we are also satisfied with the numbers of this year.
We have reached EUR 26 million new orders as annual contract value, in the year 2023/2024 and another EUR 24 million in the cross and upselling, which means adding new services to existing COREBOX customers. Often, CORBOX customers start only with a smaller set of services. We are trying, of course, to convince them also to buy additional services out of the service portfolio they are not using yet. That is this cross and upselling number. In total, EUR 50 million we packed on top, or we will pack on top, because what is important to know is that this business needs a certain transition period of about six to nine months mostly before the services start. I will explain this on a later, upcoming slide. Taking these numbers, we can show that we have reached all the pillars of our growth model.
EUR 24 million in an area where our target is EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million at least additional revenues in on an annual base. EUR 26 million is in the new customer business, also, where our target is EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million . So we are really happy. And we have not reached such a level of new business order entry in previous, in any of the previous years. What's also important to really grow the overall business, not just adding new customers, means not losing the existing ones. And that's measured by the extension rates of our existing contracts. And there, our target is 20% of our, existing contract value always renewed each year following a, approximately a five-year duration of, of a typical contract. And this year, we have renewed 75 contracts. That's also within our target range. So also the basis is quite stable.
Of course, we also have some churn in our customer, but that's always our target to keep it below 3%, 2%-3% of the overall volume. So if we see we have something like EUR 350 million pure CORBOX run rate in our EUR 527 million volume, that would mean 7% to maybe 10% reductions, and we just overcompensated this, of course, with this EUR 50 million additional business.
But we are still also following the M&A growth option, but instead of seeing at the the pure growth measure, we are now using it more as a a leveraging measure, so acquiring companies which help us to drive the organic growth model means acquiring companies which bring special technologies with them. An example for this is ISC. They brought additional SAP consulting expertise with them and helps us to fulfill the cross and upselling potential on our existing customer base.
Acquiring ISC means not only acquiring the volume they were around EUR 30 million in revenues when we acquired them, also acquiring a much higher capability in future growth when we include them in our model. Another example for more strategic M&A is iT TOTAL. They are positioned in southwestern Germany, a region where we were not represented this well, the really lower southwestern area. And they give us access to this local market with the full CORBOX portfolio. Same story, not acquiring only their volume of business, instead getting this additional market access and then driving CORBOX business there. They can directly bring COREBOX capabilities to their customers. And that gives us additional growth potential after the acquisition. The last one, CONPLUS, was growing our small and mid-sized company segment.
We, by acquiring CONPLUS, are a really relevant player with a small- and medium-sized company solution from SAP called Business One. They are also a consulting business, Business One. And so it was also a strategic idea bringing us into a significant position in the market, which is below the typical CORBOX market, which is really focused on small and medium-sized companies, something like 20 to maybe 200 IT users, while DATAGROUP with CORBOX is addressing more companies with 200 to 5,000 users. So we have reached our goals or even over-fulfilled in all areas. And I have here some examples, not to explain everyone, but some very good ones who really prove that we have, with a widespread customer base, no cluster risk, no sector risk, especially in these times as especially certain industries are struggling.
For an example, five-year contract with a wood and wholesale wood wholesale company with approximately EUR 1 million annual revenue volume, or a health industry company with workplace services, four years, EUR 2.6 million. Another example, they are starting with a workplace service family now, but they for sure bring additional potential for other CORBOX services.
So we are just starting with this EUR 2.6 million, and we will try to upsell in the future to other services. Another example, and this is quite good to explain how our investments, for example, in the cybersecurity area are paying out. We acquired 24 universities as a bundle with a three-year contract with EUR 1.4 million annual contract value. And that was only possible because we invested in advance in our cybersecurity capabilities. So you see here the investments which have a certain impact on the results this year, they are starting paying out.
I think this customer, he's now in run mode since three months. So only three months, revenues in this year means full 12 months in the year 2024/2025. We've just started. So the payback will also be much stronger in next year on all these investment areas. So that are some examples from our customers. I don't want to explain everyone, but good examples how widespread we are. Maybe one last one, the manufacturer of windows and doors. There we have acquired hybrid cloud service. And that's also another example for the investments we are doing. One other investment area is multi-cloud, which is another name for that. And that means orchestrating in a seamless service approach several clouds for the customers as a seamless approach. So we can change workloads between clouds.
And he also can decide to run which workload in which cloud. Five-year contract with EUR 500,000 annual. So another example how our investments are working quite, quite well. And if we look on these new customers from a financial perspective, so how are they adding to our revenues? You have to keep in mind what I already mentioned is that these new contracts always need a kind of a startup phase of approximately nine months. What you see in the graph here is that we have the order entries from the year 2021/2022, light blue, 2022/2023, dark blue, and in red, 2023/2024. And for the year we are now reporting about, which started in October 2023 and ended now in September 2024, you see how strongly, even from all these three years, the ramp up phase took its time.
That means you don't have the full year effect, even not from the contracts coming from 2021/ 2022. For the ones of 2022/ 2023, maybe a half year effect. The ones from 2023/ 2024 in the same fiscal year, only a very small effect, the red triangle you see there. That's important to know when you're asking, oh, they are quite well, and good order entries. But why are these coming not up in the revenue and is stronger this year, only 1% in organic growth? There you just have to wait some time, as you can see. You follow the timeframe for the next, or the fiscal year, which just started from October 2024 to September 2025. Then you see the full blocks in additional revenue, which will be part from the upcoming year.
Of course, we are not giving any guidance yet, but you can easily calculate by following just the model that these new contracts will have a much bigger effect on revenues, compared to the year before. I would now come say again some words on our investments, which we did mostly in the 2023/2024 fiscal year. The topics were AI, cybersecurity, and cloud. We invested around EUR 6 million in these future technologies and already mentioned two examples, one for cybersecurity, one for cloud. As we are now starting to win additional contracts, we wouldn't have been able to win without these investments. So the payback is just starting now. It's coming. That means not maybe the full EUR 6 million, but a major part of it is it's represented in our results this year. Next year, we will see much more payback.
It means we won't stop these costs, which we are giving to cybersecurity and cloud service, but instead we will have additional paybacks. So the influence on the results will be reduced in the upcoming next year. One area where I would like to show you a bit more of the effects is AI. You might remember one year ago or a bit more, summer last year, we acquired a company or the assets of a company which brought with them an own AI technology, which is especially made for automation of IT services. We call it HIRO technology. And we then started to implement it to our systems and to automate our own processes and service production with it. And the results of these automations you see on this slide. We see there we still needed quite a time for the basic implementation.
Setting up interfaces, implementing the software, the authorizations and all other things. We didn't have much effects until the middle of 2024. Some effects in May and in June. Starting with July, it really picked up then that we saw the implementing, automation. We call this knowledge items. What we do there is that our administrators bring in small knowledge items. That's a specific name, their knowledge to the machine. Then the machine can use it for new additional IT service tickets. You can see in June or up to June, we brought a lot of this knowledge items already to the machine. In July, it started to work. Additional new tickets were resolved by the machine or at least semi-automated resolved. That also helps to save time in our workforce.
And the number of tasks picked up every month. We are now higher than 20,000 tasks automated per month as the machine is learning more and more, using these knowledge items, which our experts have taught it. Following this, of course, we will then see what we've reached. You don't have to train it every month. Instead, the 20,000, we will see the full year effect in 2024/2025, so another example that the paybacks are coming now. We will have the level of 20,000 automated tasks every month at the start of fiscal year now. We, of course, continue our automation and we will report and we will see how we can do further progress. That, of course, also helps us in getting free workforce capacity for onboarding the additional customers.
So it means we don't have the need to set free or get less personnel costs. Instead, we get free workforce for boarding new customers because the AI technology is taking part of the workload and we get free capacity for new customers. And that means on the one hand, improved efficiency, improved profitability on our results, but also more flexibility to offer competitive prices for further growth in the next months. If we look on our P&L numbers a bit more detailed, you see we have increased, like we already mentioned, by 6% our revenues. If you split it into the details, so services and trade, we have a bit more services increase than trade. But for trade, it's also important to know that's not classical IT hardware trade. Excuse me.
It's always, or a very big part of this trade, business is also linked to CORBOX. So for example, if you sell additional workplace services, the hardware is often included in the service package. And that means that we are adding the hardware here and we show it in this line of our P&L. Maybe some further numbers. You see also what I've mentioned, a good growth in gross profit. But then on the personnel expenses area, you see our investments. So more than 6% increase in personnel expenses. And that's exactly where you see the investments. So it's not an investment like I explained in assets. We have invested in experts for AI, for security, for cloud. And before we brought them to production, they have developed these new capabilities.
But like I said, the payback is starting now and we still will have this cost level next year, but it will end up with additional business on the top line. On EBITDA, EBITA and EBIT, we see the numbers we've already mentioned. So following this increased personnel expenses, it's only a very small change on this level. What you also see on this slide is, of course, the increased interest rates, which means we have now a full year in 2023/2024 with higher interest rates. In the previous year, we also had some impact, but not the full year impact. There were still some former quite low interest rates included in our financial financing mix. And that means on an EPS level, we see a small reduction.
But if you compare it, it's following, especially the higher, so the lower financial result with higher financing costs. When we look on the balance sheet, we have, of course, an increase in goodwill because we have still acquired some companies, the three ones I just explained. And we also have an increase in the bank loans of EUR 45 million. It is spread over the liabilities. And you also see an increase in cash. The cash is a bit higher because we are doing our financial planning and there are some payments from the M&A area upcoming. So this is a bit higher even if we are trying to manage it quite good and not to pay for money on the bank interest rates.
So the overall net financial debt has increased to 1.7, a number which was even a bit higher during the year. So we are back to 1.7 now. And we feel in the overall situation quite comfortable with this. Let's look to the cash flow in the financial year 2023/2024. We have a good increase and a quite stable operating cash flow. It's remaining quite solid with nearly EUR 60 million . We have a small reduction in the investing activities. They are including on the one hand the acquisitions, and on the other hand, the CapEx investments. The CapEx investment, was increased a little bit as we have in this year some additional renewals of infrastructure with a duration of five years. And the last higher investment level was in 2019. So it's but still on a stable level.
I think we will see a similar or maybe even a bit lower level next year. From the financing activities, you see we took a bit additional money, which is on the bank at the moment, and that means this higher level is also on the cash and cash equivalents level. Okay, so that was a bit deeper look into the figures, and I would like to come now to the set of measures we have just announced to increase shareholder value. What we are planning to do are more or less two main measures, and the first one is a quite big one, and it's also not so typical for DATAGROUP as we were formerly more buying, acquiring, and integrating companies, but we have now decided to put under review a spinoff of the Almato AG. Almato is our digitization subsidiary.
They are working also for several years now on digitization project. Why I will explain this a bit more. They are also part of our AI activities. They have at the moment a quite very interesting and a business opportunity with a high potential where we think this can be better realized beside DATAGROUP than under the roof of DATAGROUP. The idea is to do a spinoff of a ratio of one to one. For every DATAGROUP share, our shareholders will receive one Almato share. Like I said, we have this measure under review at the moment. We announced it to be clear and transparent. There are still several checks to do to see if this is working like we planned. The second measure is a buyback of shares of up to 9.79%.
So, plan adding to reach the overall capacity of 10% of own shares. As the market was quite weak in the last week where this measure was announced, the buyback price is EUR 42.13 per share. We will see how this is running. The offer is still up until the 3rd of November, sorry, 3rd of December. We will see how it's working under the actual environment of the next days. As we are, or we at least would pay additional money to buy back, more or less indirectly to our shareholders, we decided if we do so, we would suspend the dividend in the actual year. Of course, we can't know exactly how everything will end up. We say we will wait until we see how the buyback process is ending and then have a final decision also on the dividend policy.
The last measure is a segment change. It's specific for the German stock market. At the moment we are on the Scale segment. We see there the risk of additional regulatory requirements. We still want to keep flexible even if we say we don't want to change our level of transparency. But we want to be free in what we exactly do and not just because we are following certain regulations. Probably these regulations won't hit the Munich Stock Exchange, so we decide to change the segment there. It leaves, like I said, the same level of transparency to our shareholders and also the same level of options in trading DATAGROUP shares. As the spinoff of Almato is for sure the biggest step here, I would like to explain a bit more what's happening there and what's the business idea behind.
As I said, Almato is our digitization business, also for several years. But as we have acquired the last year and Almato also already entered this area, business area, earlier, as we have acquired this AI knowledge, we also started developing external AI business. We are not using the AI technology we're using for our automation there. We call it HIRO. We also acquired some basic technology, which is more or less included into HIRO or below, situated below HIRO. And this basic technology is a kind of a semantic data platform. And that's very important for actual data-driven business. So if you're doing a business model which is relying strongly on capabilities, working with your data, you need today this kind of technology. And that was part of the acquisition we did with Almato and we brought to Almato AI.
And we see a very good business chance at the moment to drive this technology, this semantic data platform. We have given it a name. We call it Bardioc, as a really interesting software as a service business and scale it up within the next month and the next years. And to do so, we found out that we need an ecosystem and a framework which is a bit different to the one we have at DATAGROUP. I will come later on to this. And that brought us to the idea if this framework is different and it's also mission critical to develop this business, it would be a good option to bring Almato in a, say, standalone situation to make them, or give them the possibility to develop this business, which is a really great business opportunity in a better way.
To explain a bit more where the difference in the framework is, we have to look a bit more at what this business, this semantic data platform, software as a service business is addressing. They are addressing bigger companies. As the bigger the companies, the more data they are producing, the more important today it is for them to work with this data to increase their business models and processes and improve them with this data. That means we have a kind of a bit different target customer as we are addressing at DATAGROUP, more mid-sized companies. Here we are looking really for the big ones. The big ones, not only in Germany, developing such a technology means you can easily address also in an international market. The potential there is also existing.
It's not so closely connected like in IT services where local service means local business. There you have a real technology and every company who could use this technology is a potential customer. So also a difference to DATAGROUP where we are addressing more Germany as a target market. We have the worldwide, the global market from day one. And that means you either can go yourself, of course, it might be quite costly, but you also can go via partners. And partners, of course, means they should be quite committed to the Almato technology. And an Almato, which is, at the same time, a subsidiary of DATAGROUP, might bring up some conflict. Though another point why a separation makes sense.
Of course, driving such a business and growing it also might mean additional access to capital for Almato and other strategic movements like partnerships and so on. And also maybe another risk profile. So we said, a separation of the companies might be a good option to really use this chance. But like I said, it's not decided yet. We are checking it, doing all the checks which might be necessary to really be sure to go this way. And then if we have done these checks, we might probably propose it on the next annual general meeting. But up to then, as I said, some such checks have to be done. But we see a very attractive also development for Almato in this track. So maybe and our goal there was to really be transparent to our shareholders about these ideas.
That's why we already announced it. And, I'm sure we will report on this also in the upcoming next calls and at least in the next annual general meeting. And next calls, next meetings, that's where we can meet. You see here our financial calendar, Equity Forum in Frankfurt, Berenberg Conference, Pennyhill , and, also with the annual general meeting, which will be held in March. So thank you up to now. And then back to Anke and your questions.
Thank you, Andreas. Thank you for the presentation. So before we start with the Q&A session, we get a little explanation on how this works on the procedure of this Q&A session.
Thank you so much for handing over. To keep this conversation engaging, we appreciate it if you would ask your questions in person by audio line. To do so, just raise up your virtual hand. If you have dialed in by a phone, you can use the key combination star key nine to enter the queue, followed by pressing star key six to unmute yourself. If you do not have the opportunity today to speak freely, you can also submit the questions in the chat box and we will read them out for you. Having said this, Ms. Banaschewski, I hand back to you.
Thank you. So the floor is now open for your questions. And the first comes from Gustav Froberg from Berenberg. Gustav?
[Crosstalk]
Thank you for your question.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, both. I just have two please. The first is around the buyback. How are you planning on funding it? And how do you think about that, in the context of your balance sheets? That's question one. Question two is on the Almato spinoff. I know you were just considering it and it's early days, but do you have a timeline in mind for the potential spinoff as well? Those are my two questions.
[Crosstalk]
Okay. Thank you. There was a background noise on your first question, but if I understood you right, you're asking about financing the buyback, activities considering our balance sheet, right?
Yes.
Yes. Okay. Yeah. Of course, it's always a question when we look at our financing situation at the moment. It also could be an option increasing financing capability with the banks instead of buying back own shares. Our idea there behind is that we are improving with our new or adapted strategy with less M&A in the next years our financing needs definitely, so our debt ratio will reduce, and on the other side we see the market situation at the moment, and own shares of course at least if we think maybe not buying companies in small portions anymore, but we still of course if we want to grow further have the option to make maybe one day a bigger step.
So, I think it's now a good chance to have some shares on our own balance sheet because within the next years, the debt ratio will decline anyway, and we decided to use it at the moment because it's a good moment and good chance to do it. Of course, it's not improving our balance sheet ratios in the first step, depending how many shares we will get at the end, but we see this situation won't come back so fast or within the next years, and like I said, our idea to have some shares on our own balance sheet to have some additional options and tools for future growth or other strategic steps.
So we are really aware of what you address, but still have decided that it should be a good option at the moment. The Almato spinoff, your question was concerning the timeline. Of course, we announced it quite early as we are just checking options at the moment. But as we are planning to do this one by one split, we think as soon as the annual meeting has confirmed or agreed with this step, we can then implement it within the next upcoming months, in 2025. So timeline for me is around summer 2025. Of course, Almato will also would be publicly listed. We would also have to prepare the investor relations process for them. But around summer, I would say is a timeline.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Andreas.
So did this answer all your questions, Gustav?
Yeah. All clear. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you. So the next question comes from Andreas Wolf. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hello everyone. I hope you can hear me well. Congratulations on a successful year. I have a couple of questions. The first is on the order book figure. Could you share the order book at the end of September versus September last year, how it has developed? The next is on the investments into HIRO. You spent EUR 6 million additionally for investments. How is this figure going to develop in the next financial year? Is it going to be approximately the same or, will you invest more? Also looking into next year, is it fair to assume that the Q4 organic growth rate kind of provides a pace for, for the next year already? Question number four would be regarding CORBOX. How does Gen 7 differ from Gen 6?
I assume it's new features like AI or anything like that, maybe, but maybe Andreas, you could elaborate more on that. The last is also on Almato. When it was acquired, I think the main business focus was robotic process automation. It seems like it has changed, at least according to the description and the new solution that Almato apparently has, the proprietary solution. Maybe you could also explain the business focus shift and who Almato competes with today. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, Andreas, for your questions. Maybe starting with the order book figures, the full order book figure we are not tracking in detail, so I don't have these numbers for you, but what we are tracking is our growth portion in this order entry figure, and what I can say, we ended up with this EUR 50 million in CORBOX business. There's some additional business in the solutions area, and what we have to deduct is, of course, our churn and transformational revenue, which is around in this year something like 2%, so maybe something like EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million only, and from a transformational perspective, we ended somewhere around EUR 15 million or EUR 16 million of revenues from older acquisitions with which we've lost, and besides this, we have something around, I think, EUR 17 million from acquisitions, and that's much higher organic growth rate compared to last year.
The same numbers in last year. We're also starting with the new CORBOX order entry around something like only a bit more than EUR 20 million, EUR 24 million, I think it was. So that is compared to EUR 50 million now. We had more or less the same portion of churn, something around EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million from a CORBOX area and something around EUR 15 million in transformation revenues use. So you see not only the growth rate is already showing in the revenues, also the sales process and the order entry is performing much more, and that's also the reason maybe to add this here is when you see our former goals, they were EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million in each area. So overall EUR 20 million-EUR 30 million.
We are now planning also to increase these goals for the fiscal year we've now started because we see at least that we are in the situation that we can reach maybe something like EUR 30 million- EUR 40 million in these areas if we have proved ending up with EUR 50 million in this year. So we are really also happy about how we perform on our service market with our sales results and that. And maybe I can add this to your question with the pace of organic growth. Of course, the fourth quarter is not the one as it is our last quarter, which you can just take and multiply it by four and you end up with the revenue of next year.
But what's still, and you saw it also on the graph, is a situation that the additional ramp-ups of the fourth quarter will be part of the full next year. So we really see more organic growth next year than this year because the ramp-up was not as strong as we had only sales in the previous year of this EUR 24 million . So it's more or less a kind of easy calculation. You always take the additional new business from the former fiscal year and that will be more or less part of the growth in the next one. And, as we already have said, we have something like another EUR 15 million -EUR 18 million, more EUR 15 million of transformational headwinds and also something like this EUR 6 million . Maybe next year will be a bit more of churn.
The rest of the additional order entries of this EUR 50 million will end up in our revenues. That's why I think the P&L will next year to the one we have just closed. Another question was concerning the EUR 6 million. Let me explain again. The EUR 6 million were on all areas. I would say 50% on AI and the other 50% distributed between multi-cloud and security. You saw they brought up a higher personnel cost ratio. Yes, next year this level will stay. But anyway, if we wouldn't have done this, we would have had the need at least by increasing our workforce for delivering the new contracts, also the same effect increasing the personnel costs.
But as we have now already this workforce in place or not directly as they are helping us to automate instead of getting new experts as workforce themselves, we will keep the EUR 6 million, but they will compensate kind of other workforce we don't have to take on board to deliver the new contracts. And that means at the end, and the question also was asked in the German column this morning, if we leave everything stable around, it will end up in increased EBIT ratios again. But of course, we also see this capability as additional driver to maybe be more aggressive on the market. But as we said, if we continue just the growth rate from this year or next year, we are able to improve margins.
If we see the option to maybe even increase the EUR 50 million in sales in next year by acquiring with attractive prices some additional customers, well, it also could be that we give this additional EBIT potential to these new customers. Of course, it then will end up in the delivery situations in the following next year. So it's difficult to say if this potential, from the investments of additional payback, is going directly to an increased EBIT ratio. If everything around stays stable, our target is definitely to come back. And I've said this already sometimes from 8.7% to come closer or even higher than 9% again. But of course, it also could be the option that we invest again in new growth, but that would then mean that we further accelerate also our growth compared to this year.
Next question.
I like this one very much. Gen 7, what's new? Because we just internally launched the CORBOX last week. And what was a great event with all our colleagues, which of course had to know the same question. What's new about Gen 7? Gen 7 has the idea to have the new technology we've invested this year at its core. So we are talking about now about COR AI, COR Security, COR Cloud, and a fourth one, which is new, COR Compliance. You might know the German market is bringing up or the governments are bringing up additional rules, considering the rules, how IT business is done, how IT has to be operated. And the innovation we have now besides AI security in the CORBOX is that it is compliance ready.
So all our services have a setup that they are able to fulfill the typical compliance regulations we have on the market, like financial compliance with BaFin, DORA, BIT, like the NIS2 activities, which are coming from the KRITIS area. So that's a very good innovation. And also where we in the past were just adding the technologies, AI, multi-cloud, we have now designed the services that's really in the core. So every service already, for example, has security at its core, and you can add additional security on top, but it's fitting quite good to the existing core. And that's the difference to the past. In the past, it was a pure service and you added security on the top and it was not fitting this well. Now these capabilities, AI security, multi-cloud and compliance are really part of the service design of the Gen 7.
And that's more or less the really innovative part of the portfolio. And we see us really as a leading provider, as I don't know any other German provider who has really this deep change in service design integrating these future technologies. Last question, Almato's focus? Yes, you're right. When they were acquired, their focus, they were coming from two different companies. What's today the Almato? The one was Excelsis. They had a focus on mobile solutions and pure Almato. They were coming from RPA. Of course, that were kind of hype technologies at that time. They are still doing this business, but not as a in such big portion. Instead, they have quite developed themselves as a good mid-sized company player for digitization of our customers' business process and business models.
AI starting not only with the acquisition of the Arago assets, also before, of course, as part of this new technologies, which you need today to improve or to digitize your business. Yes, the focus of business has changed a bit, but what we plan to do now is even a further step. As their role was up to now, the one more of a part of a digitization system integrator company, they will now go with Bardioc goes a step into a software as a service company or even at least a part of it as a software as a service company. That's also the reason a pure system integrator under DATAGROUP roof that would be quite good fitting. But SaaS with really pure play software in your core or as part of your core, that's quite different.
And that's part of the reason why we are checking the spinoff option at the moment.
Thank you. Thank you.
And just on the competitive landscape of Almato and their proprietary solution?
Okay. Yeah, that's quite interesting. And really this specific Bardioc, of course, with digitization services, a lot of companies are offering this kind of thing. So in their former or existing business, they have a lot of competitors in various sizes of companies. The Bardioc technology is really a kind of unique technology where only few companies are existing offering this kind or even also a part of this technology. Most of these companies are American ones. And that's also part of the idea. As you can imagine, for a lot of data analytics and data platform applications within the customers, the question is quite important, which software do I use for this business?
And especially if you're working for data analytics for the public sector, the question if it's a German-owned software which is used here instead of a depending American or even other area of the world owned software, it's quite important. So if this is working, they really have a very good USP and they are, as we know, for example, only one or two European companies who are doing something comparable. The rest is from everywhere in the world, and it's also a quite small market. Maybe a very big name which is mentioned here is Palantir. They are offering also this kind of a software, of course, that's another size of company. We know about this, but the idea behind is really addressing similar applications like Palantir is doing today.
Sounds exciting. Thank you.
Thank you.
So at the moment, I can see no further questions. In case you have some questions, some more questions, please raise your hand. So that's not the case. So thank you everybody for joining. It was good to have you here. Hope to see you soon at one of the upcoming events, and otherwise you can see the audited figures will be published in the middle of January, and hope to see you in one of the next events and see you there. Thank you. Bye bye.
Thank you. Bye.