Welcome to the DATAGROUP SE Conference Call on the Figures for the Q1 of the Financial Year 2022, 2023. 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 then call the questioners according to the order in which they raise their hands. Please unmute yourself to ask your question and then mute yourself again to prevent acoustic disturbances for the other participants. The presentation is also available for download in the Investor Relations section on the DATAGROUP's website. I would now like to welcome Mr. Andreas Baresel, CEO, and Mr. Oliver Thome, CFO of DATAGROUP.
Good morning. I am happy to welcome you to our Q1 figures presentation this morning. With me, my colleague, Oliver Thome, and I'm happy to show you our results of the Q1 within the next hour. We can say we've started again with a very good Q1 into the new fiscal year 2022, 2023, and with quite solid numbers. I think these numbers prove again the sustainability of our DATAGROUP model, of our strategy to focus on recurring revenues in long-term contracts based on the CORBOX service portfolio. We managed to grow revenue and EBITDA again. We have increased our revenues from EUR 123 million to EUR 127.7 million compared to Q1 of the last fiscal year.
We have increased the EBITDA from EUR 19 million- EUR 90.7 million, also slightly compared to last year's Q1. If we look on the EBIT, we see a much better development there. We have an also overproportionate increase in EBIT against the EBITDA. The EBIT rise from EUR 10.2 - EUR 11.5 million. You see there the additional effect of our CapEx reduction we were following in the last years. With this development, we have managed to reach the 9% EBIT margin target in this quarter. The EPS grew from EUR 0.74- EUR 0.87, so also an increase there.
Overall, we can say we see here the operational leverage, of further efficiency gains through our production model on the one hand, and also through our efforts in further automation and other production efficiency measures we have done through the last years. Another effect we see also in the Q1 in 2022, 2023 is the strong order intake, also coming from last fiscal year. you might remember that when a new CORBOX contract, it takes a transitional period of several months until these new contracts become effective. We see the effects of the last year's additional new contracts. We've won last year 18 additional contracts, 20 new. Only two customers have not renewed.
In a net result, there were 18 additional contracts, and we have also expanded 20 contracts and 34 contracts renewed. Ensuring also the strong CORBOX customer base we have. By the growth of this core business with additional customers, we now see and also will see in the next quarters the effects in the P&L with this additional revenue and also with the good margin of the CORBOX business we have in our core business here. That's something we are quite focused on, really focusing on this CORBOX core business. If you know our past presentation, we have changed a little bit here the way how we show our revenue split.
On the lower side, you now see the CORBOX core business, which has developed over the last years more and more. If we calculate in detail the development in the last fiscal year, 2021, 2022, we see an organic growth of 6.4% in this core business. That's what's quite important for us, because on the top line, we always have special effects of retail business or special effects in transforming revenues of new acquisitions, which don't do CORBOX business from the day they are joining DATAGROUP, of course, but we are transforming these revenues and also of course, sometimes reducing low margin revenues.
If we focus on the CORBOX core business, we see a continuous growth like, compared to the 2021 fiscal year, we have now calculated 6.4% organic growth. That's what I'm always saying is that our core business has a good organic growth, even if sometimes we have on a top line, effects of transforming business, especially the business of new acquisitions. That's something we are, even in the challenging times we have at the moment, we are still focusing on more and more CORBOX growth. That's the same we also do this time. Of course, in these times it's not this easy to still continue the, the growth in, in this business.
With our model we are quite confident that we can continue this way also in the next quarters. I would like to give you a short insight only on how we handle with our model these challenges we have at the moment. What are the challenges? It's often discussed in the economy at this stage. We have a worldwide energy crisis and the cost of energy has increased also during the last 12 months again. Of course we are also facing these energy cost increases with especially the data center services where you need energy to run all the data center capacities. The next point is of course the labor market, the wage increases or also you can name it inflation there.
The IT industry had a strong challenge in getting all these experts, finding the experts, lack of experts already in the last years. The wage increases also has its effects here, and I will show you how we try to handle it. We still have disrupted supply chains all over the world, especially what need, what also addresses IT technology, servers, storage, all these things we of course also need to run our CORBOX services. The fourth point is cybersecurity threat situation. It's still becoming more threatened situation there. We still have an increase in the effects on the cybersecurity space.
Not only because the war in Ukraine, but it's definitely part of the reasons there. We think our DATAGROUP model is quite strength handling these effects. How do we do it in detail? Focusing on energy as a first topic, we still centralize further CORBOX cloud capacities. The effect of our central productions, of course, is that you reduce the number of dedicated platforms, and therewith you reduce the energy requirement of all these capacities. We are, for example, tracking the number of virtual machines we produce with a certain amount of KWh energy. Tracking this over the last years, we see a steady increase of the capacities which we can produce with the same amount of energy.
This, of course, helps us on the other hand, to handle the increasing prices. Besides this, we are making multi-year contracts with energy suppliers, so ensuring good conditions. Of course, it's a part of a planning issue to see or to forecast how the energy prices will develop in the next years. We are using our purchasing volume here to get better purchasing conditions. Besides this, of course, all these measures have a good effect on or positive effect on our CO2 neutrality and sustainability because energy we don't even need anymore also has a good effect on the sustainability. In the same way, more or less our model helps us to handle the labor market challenges.
By further consolidation of the platforms we run, we also can reduce the personal intensity. Consolidation but also automation or partial automation of the services we run. All these measures reduce the personal intensity. Of course we are also using AI technology since several years now. Something which is since the ChatGPT discussion came up, of course a very hot topic, but we are following a quite continuous path there in improving from quarter to quarter, also our automation abilities there. That, of course, reduces the personal intensity, like I said.
With the same amount of people, with the same staff, with the same team size, we can also produce more capacity output in terms of data center delivery capacities. For example, we are tracking there also the number of SAP systems or virtual machines we are producing with the same team size. We also see a good impact on a good effect over the last years there. A further look on the global supply chain issues, there of course, we also have a positive effect of the further compression of our production capacities. Reducing the amount of capacity we need to produce a certain amount of services.
We ongoing follow the data center consolidation, what also reduces the capacity you have to purchase in terms of IT equipment of all kind. This helps us to hold an additional capacity reserve. So reducing the number of platforms you can afford a higher number of capacity reserve. With all these supply chains and securities, that's quite helpful that we have a more bigger reserve of capacities to being sure to handle the customer requirements of new contracts or increasing capacities from existing contracts. Of course, this also helps us to reduce CapEx requirements a little bit. Like you saw, we still have a positive effect of increasing EBIT compared to a more or less stable EBITDA ratio. The last part, again, cybersecurity threat situation.
We have, we are facing this by still expanding our security service portfolio. The security service family within the CORBOX was the family with the strongest growth over the last 12 months. More or less all customers are purchasing additional CORBOX security services now because seeing what happens out there in the cyber space and knowing that only additional technologies and services helps them to address these issues. We at DATAGROUP also renew the services with new innovative technologies. For example, also AI technologies are used to automatically recognize cyber threats today without any interaction of administrators to analyze these problems.
They are automatically recognized by having patterns from further older threats and bringing this knowledge or learning automatically these patterns and recognizing threats automatically. That's also necessary to help the security situation. With our centralized platform, we of course, can handle these issues then easily. That's a kind of development, I hope it's fine for you to give you a bit more insight on these challenges during this call. That we also can manage to have quite good figures, a good development of our financial figures by strengthening our base, by strengthening this DATAGROUP model. For the figures in detail, I now would like to hand over to Oliver.
Thank you very much, Andreas. I welcome you from my side as well for the presentation for our Q1 figures of the fiscal year 2022/2023. Would like to make a little bit more a deep dive into some selected P&L figures. The market frame and the things which become relevant for us from the market, from the situation outside in, are just very good explained by Andreas Baresel. What you have just seen in the presentation is that we were able to increase our revenues to a total of EUR 127.7 million.
On the other side, you can see that the personal expenses increased up to EUR 57.7 million. This is due to the acquisition we made and have now our first consolidation from Hövermann IT and Cloudeteer. Besides this is a very good success for us, we were able to replace external specialists, which were normally shown in the material costs, and switch the capacity into own employees. This result is an increase of our EBITDA with an EBITDA margin of again, more than 15%, to a total of EUR 19.7 million. Very stable development. More interesting is that we were able to over proportional increase our EBIT. This is due to the ability to reduce our depreciation.
We were now able to present you in the Q1 a total EBIT of EUR 11.5 million and, what we have for our own goal with an EBITDA, with an EBIT margin of 9%. The strong increase is also shown in the EBT and the EPS, you have just seen in the presentation on the first slides. Now have first a short look into the balance sheet. There you can see the increase of the goodwill. The goodwill rises up to EUR 151.4 million, and this increase is driven by acquisitions. The acquisitions I've just explained with Hövermann, especially.
Much more important for us, and this is quite good, is that we were able to reduce our total net debt to EUR 96 million. This due to the acquisitions I have just explained. Very important for us is the EBITDA and the total net debt ratio, which is with 1.2 on a very low level. This allows us with a lot of firepower to finance the further growth of DATAGROUP and this on the organic as well as on the anorganic side. The equity ratio, meanwhile, with nearly 28%, we are very comfortable with this, and we have now a very solid balance structure for the development for DATAGROUP and for our future.
Now let us have a quite shorter look into the cash flow statement. What you know from us and from our business is recurring revenues and recurring cash. We have still a very solid cash flow from operating activities with a total of EUR 17.4 million. The change and the special effect in the comparison of the Q1 of the previous year is that we reduced the factoring volume in cost of optimizing the interest situation of DATAGROUP.
What Andreas Baresel just has explained is that the CapEx costs and the investments in our CapEx is still on a very low level and you see the effect of this, what we have seen now in the past two or three years, and that we reduced our investments and the depreciation, who gives us now the space to develop especially the EBIT very positive. Let us have now look for the long term EBITDA.
This development is very good shown and you can compare this with the slides Andreas Baresel just has shown with the development of our CORBOX sales. What you can see is, the decision in increasing the sales with the high margin CORBOX deals is very, very good to see, especially in the past four years. We started with DATAGROUP 10 years before, with a total EBITDA from EUR 10.8 million, and now we have developed it to EUR 76.5 million in the past fiscal year.
The percentage of the EBIT margin still remains in the past four years on a very high level, within 50%, a little bit more than 50%, and this shows the strong business of DATAGROUP. More impressive, you can now see in the next slide, in the development of our EBIT. This is where we just talked about and what you can see especially in the past three or four years. The impressive development of the EBIT was achieved with an EBIT margin, which absolutely rise from EUR 4.3 million now to 10 times, nearly 10 times more, EUR 51.5 million in the past fiscal year.
Now you can see that with a stable EBITDA margin, I've just explained in the previous slide of more than 15%, we were now able after the high investments into the CORBOX infrastructure three, four years ago, the depreciation now they are declining and stabilize on a much lower level, so that we are now able to increase our EBIT and this not only absolutely in percentage as well. This for a short deep dive for our financials and now have a quite closer look for the future and for the ambitions.
Okay. Thank you, Oliver. Yes, let's have a look in the further future and what's our call strategy to go on. We are still following our dual growth strategy combined as 50% inorganic and 50% organic growth. We are of course, still working on new acquisition targets. Let me have also a look on the organic growth side. We still see a good potential of new CORBOX customers in the German market. Our yearly growth target is EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million out of CORBOX core business growth from new customers. Of course, there's always a question when which new contract will become fully effective. On an annually level, the total contract should be effect EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million from new CORBOX customers. We are tracking this quite closely how many CORBOX new customers we are winning per year. The other side is cross and upselling.
As you might know, CORBOX customers often start only with one or two services or with only a part of our service portfolio. Then you can upsell other services to them, increasing their share of the CORBOX service portfolio but also doing a cross-selling to projects solutions, which are also part of our service portfolio. From this, we also expect a yearly effect of EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million in increasing this business. Of course, it also depends on which additional projects and services would become effective in which time frame. Besides this, we are still following in the transformation of low margin revenues as a counter effect on the top line.
And that's the reason why we are really focusing on the core business growth, and calculating this separately, since sometime. For the M&A activities, as I said, we are working on new acquisitions. For the long term growth, we need two to three, of course, depending on the size of the companies we are acquiring. With the acquisition of URANO, we of course had a quite a big portion, one and a half year ago. We will see which kind of companies we can acquire next. Using these effects, we are still sticking to our midterm management ambition, which is reaching EUR 750 million revenue in 2025, 2026.
This by continuously having an EBITDA more than 15% and reaching our midterm EBIT target of 9%, what we expect to reach this year. The more detailed guidance for the actual fiscal year we will give on the Annual General Meeting on the 9th of March. We can give more insight on this year's expectations then. That's what we've prepared for today. Like I said, we are quite happy about the Q1, even we also have really challenging times at the moment. I also confident what the development concerning the development of the next quarters. I'm also looking forward to the Annual General Meeting presenting the expectations in detail for 2022, 2023 series then. Thank you up to now, and we open the space for your questions.
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 able to ask your question. Alternatively, you can type your question into the question box. We have two questions from Varun Kapoor. The first is: Are you seeing any changes or reduction in valuations from sellers in your acquisitions pipeline due to increased interest rates and potential recession?
Maybe I can answer to this. What we can say, or what we have seen is one year ago when the Russian-Ukrainian war starts, there was a little bit calm around the M&A sector. Meanwhile, you can see that with the rising interest rates, the multiples are still standing on a high level. The development of the past years that especially with the stage when the private equity sector starts into distance acquisitions in Germany, that the rising multiples are a little bit more e-ending now, but still on a high level. The market on M&A sector is still quite busy, we are comfortable that we will be able in the future for realizing our M&A targets.
The second question is, can you please provide your expectation around organic growth that you expect in the medium term, as well as how competitive the market is right now?
Maybe I can answer to this. We are, like I showed in our growth strategy, expecting this annual growth of EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million from each path to new customers and cross and upselling. Of course, at the moment in these challenging times, especially acquiring new customers, it's not this easy because changing your IT provider brings always a kind of a risk with you. It's not this much the competitiveness on the market. It's more a reduced number of chances to acquire new customers. Of course, the reduced number is, there's a bit more, that's right, a bit more competition at the moment between the service providers.
We've seen this also in the past, and I'm quite confident that even if we have less new CORBOX customers, the effect is compensated by a better cross and upselling. Because if you stick to your provider, you then have to fulfill all your needs with your existing providers, and that often is a kind of a counter effect we see there. And yes, competitiveness in both sectors maybe is a bit higher in the new customer area, and a bit less compared to other periods or economic situations in the cross and upselling.
The next question is from Mr. Knut Woller.
Hello. It's four questions, which I like to do one by one. First, looking at service and maintenance, it was slightly down year-over-year and only slightly up sequentially over Q4. Is that reflecting the transformation of the lower margin business that you cited? How should we think about service and maintenance, which is a bit lagging behind the overall growth rates, which is primarily driven by the trade segment? That's question one.
Oliver, you want to answer?
I can answer. At first, hello, Knut Woller. It's nice to have you again here in the stage. I think we have to differentiate a little bit for that. The business of DATAGROUP is quite another business than of the competitors like a Bechtle or a CANCOM. Because the material deliveries are often not only, but often are very close to our CORBOX deals. You cannot only say we have a reduction in maintenance, and we have or in services, and we have more deliveries. They are always depending on our total business. We do not see that we will have a decline in our CORBOX service. It's still going further on and the businesses like Andreas Baresel just has explained is expanding.
Maybe I can add, you're right with the idea that that's also part of the transformation of lower margin services, because it's not always a retail business or trade business which has lower margins. It's also, I would say, simple service business, in a kind of a material mode, which with lower margins on hourly or daily rates. Of course, that's also something we are transferring, and that's part of the effect you've just mentioned.
Great. Thank you. Then, two questions. The first one, which room do you see to further reduce external specialists, which you cited, Oliver, as one of the drivers of EBITDA? What is still the room or can you quantify the freelancers you still use? How should we think about further margin improvement from a reduction going forward?
You cannot get into a very detailed answer because often we reduce these external specialists in transformation phases. At first, in a transformation phase, you need these additional capacities, which are normally good placed with external specialists when it's only the transformation part or part of the transformation. After this, when you run into the long-term contract, it's more important to have this knowledge on your own side. It depends a little bit, but what you have seen is that especially in the past year, we were very successful with new CORBOX deals with 18 net 18 new contracts. This is the thing. We are now changing them into our own recurring business.
In this phase, we are just quiet and we are focused on bringing these experts, which we can use for us, for the contract, for a long time period, to get them on our own payroll as employees. On the other hand, this is I think a situation you have just seen in the past month as well, that especially the hyperscalers reduce personnel. With the reduction, we get now in excess to high sophisticated and motivated employees, which are now free to work with us.
Great. If we look at the factoring element that you said was a headwind for the cash flow, can you quantify this effect and how do you expect this effect to work out for the full year?
It's a one-off effect for the Q1. I would suggest it's about EUR 5 million. Other main effect is that on the end of the quarter, we were forced to put some more inventory on our stock for some projects which are now rolled out in January. These are the two main effects.
Okay. The last question, do you see that customers are renegotiating prices for or try to renegotiate prices for existing outsourcing contracts? Is that happening or is that something you guys don't observe at all?
Maybe i can answer on this one. I would say we have the other effect. We are trying to give on price increases to our customers. So yes, there is an additional negotiation on existing contracts. But in most cases, it is combined with extending, for example, the contract period and so on. But of course, we are ourselves pushing price increases from the hardware, from energy costs, from software maintenance and giving it on to customers. Of course, in long-term contracts, it is not this easy always because we have not always a kind of energy clause or something like that where we give on energy costs directly, but it is part of our service prices. But it is more from our time that we are pushing price increases into the market
It's a bit different. Depends on the industry. Some areas they know prices are increasing anyway, are more open to this. Also being happy to have a stable service provider in this situation. With others, of course, it's more discussion. That's another measure how we handle these challenges I've just explained about besides the internal possibility. We are in the happy situation that we don't are forced to give on all price increases to the customers. It's more kind of a 25% portion I would say we are giving on to the customer and all the other effects can handle by our own synergies internally as the ones I have just explained in the slides.
Excellent. Thank you.
Next we have Lukas Spang.
Yes. Hi, good morning.
Morning.
Good morning.
My first question is relating to organic growth. I don't know if I missed it in your presentation, but, what was the organic growth in the Q1?
Do you want to answer?
I can. Yeah, I can do. I think, what we have done is, that we have shown the organic growth of the CORBOX core contracts. I think they are shown on the slides. I think the CORBOX contracts, for what we are looking for is, with the organic growth of about, I think between 6% and 7%. Beside this are the effects. This is why we are focused on these CORBOX contracts and where we are looking for. In course of the transformation, Woller just asked when we buy a company and switch their business from more or less, very material and one-off, business to our CORBOX business. We stop this or we change it to our CORBOX business and the organic growth we realize is between 6% and 10%.
Okay. Mr. Baresel, you talked about the new contracts. If I understood you right, you still have some, let's say, potential out of these new contracts because they are still in the transformation period and don't have their full potential in terms of revenue right now. Can you quantify the additional revenue we will see in the coming quarters out of these already secured contracts?
We haven't calculated this in detail. It's more or less on a total year effect. It's around this EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million compared to last year. What we have as an additional growth out of new CORBOX customers. I would say exact breakdown for the next quarters, we don't have this. What I can say or what I've said, we don't have the full EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million positive effect yet in the Q1. There will more effect come. The EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million, that's a total annual effect. If you take the full contract within the year, what you can calculate that in the last quarter we have a quarter of this full year effect on board and that's rising especially because some of the CORBOX wins were only in the second half of the last fiscal year. We don't have a detailed breakdown there.
Yeah. Okay. When do you expect to fully see this secured contract in your revenue in this fiscal year? Is it already in Q2 or in Q3, or?
It will take up to end of the fiscal year. The last transitions will end in September. In the September revenue, there will be the full effect on a monthly base. You can of course say the 2021, 2022 new customers are in 2023, 2024. You have a whole year of this effect. We have the same way winning customers this year, depending on what we have already won some in this fiscal year. They will become effective in the next year. Just typically you have to calculate a nine to 12 month transition period. As you know, these transition efforts are shown as an IFRS effect over the whole contract period.
Yeah. Okay. These transformation periods are more or less similar than one year before?
Yes. nine to 12 months is the average transition period.
Okay, thanks. That's from my side.
Next we have Mr. Andreas Wolf.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I have also four questions. I'll ask them also one by one. Could you comment on the automation tools you're using? Are those basically off-the-shelf tools that you implement to automate your service delivery?
Not only out of shelf, I would say for coming from the effects, we have more or less 50%, I would say 40%-50%, a bit less than half, from commercial off-the-shelf tools. These are more or less data center orchestration and automation tools. The other 50%-60% are own automation approaches. Because you can imagine in a shared infrastructure, you have a lot of specific processes in monitoring and processes handling these monitoring results, for example. Within service desk in supporting the agent by half automation effects like finding information faster, finding solutions faster, bringing solutions to the ticket resolution process and so on.
That are things we are developing on our own and using our own digitization path there, which is, you know, is acting as Almato on the market. They are specialized on digitization for customers. They are working mainly, but of course we are using them also on our own, and they are doing a lot of internal projects, also bringing, for example, AI effects or technologies to our processes and so and so on. I would say 50/50, 40/60, maybe like that.
Okay, thank you. Then, I have a question regarding accruals, which you had in your annual report for restructuring slash unprofitable contracts. How should we think about these amounts going forward? Is there a need to utilize them or is this still a cushion that you have in your balance sheet?
This is a question we just discussed in the presentation of the fiscal year and presentation of the fiscal year account 2021, 2022. They are especially forced or not forced. The first step we managed especially with one company in the banking cluster was successfully restructured so that these accruals are mainly now for the next step, where we can put the whole infrastructure for the banking cluster together and to optimize this sector. Therefore we have built these accruals.
Okay. Thank you. The third question is on potential inflation-related payments to employees. We've seen that some companies are doing this. Are there any specific quarters in the current financial year when we might expect such payments to happen? Or is this inflation adjustment basically part of the overall measures that you are implementing?
Mm-hmm.
Do you want to answer to this?
Maybe I would say it's a mixture of all of all. Of course, we also use these inflation extra payments, I would call them, which are also supported by the German government with special tax advantages like you might know. We also use these measures but also other measures like typical increasing of wages and so on. Also, as I said, a lot of trying to manage a lot of counter effects. What you see in the personal expenses at the moment it's the result of all this mixture. Yes, we are also using these measures as kind of extra payments. We have this kind of decentralized organization. Each DATAGROUP company is handling this on their own, depending on the type of workforce they have, the kind of business they are in. The handling is in a decentralized approach.
Okay. Thank you. The last question is, on potential impacts of higher interest rates. Do you see any implications for your goodwill that you are sitting on your balance sheet? Thank you.
We don't see this. We just simulated this, but we are far away from a triggering event or something like this caused by the rising interests.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Next we have Yannik Siering.
Thanks for taking my questions. I have just two left. First one would be on overall demand. Do you notice that customers start to turn maybe a little bit more cautious when it comes to new projects or also upselling situations? The second one would be basically a follow-up question on margins. We see that the upward trend is intact. Could you talk about how important price increases will be this year to continue with the margin expansion? Did I get it right that the majority comes from internal, let's say, efficiency gains? That would be helpful. Thank you.
Maybe, to your first question on demand. I wouldn't say in the project and the cross and upselling there's a reduction of demand visible, at least not up to now. Of course, most of our customers are on a calendar year. Their fiscal year is like the calendar year, and we are still quite early in 23, and we don't see exactly already how 23 budgets will release projects. I'm not expecting too much reduction in demand there. What I've just spoken about is maybe a bit of a reduction in the willingness to really change IT service providers in long-term contracts, yeah. In these times, companies are getting a bit more cautious about changing providers because it's always bringing risk with it.
What I'm expecting is that we maybe are not able to win this many new CORBOX customers as in the last year. We are calculating this only on a yearly basis. Maybe this effect is compensated by more cross and upsell, and we will see this in the end of the year. Yeah, I don't expect too much demand reduction. Of course, it's always a matter of all the main economic situation. As our customers are more widespread among the industries, it should be not not this much effect. The overall economic situation, we also see better than expected, like the rest of the economy.
Maybe on the margins, what we managed to keep in line and what we pass on to our customers, we see an effect from, let's say, 2%-4%, I would say, in increasing CORBOX prices, in the existing customer base, a bit more on the new customer level. With this range, we are even a bit lower than the pure time and material market or the pure retail and service markets. Their prices have increased a bit more. Of course, our customers are expecting from a service provider also this effect. In long-term contracts, you then won't have this big steps prices up and down. In the last years, we had a lot of effects of prices down, which we also didn't have this effect, only one-digit percentage in decreasing prices. The same situation we have now with increasing prices, maybe somewhere between 2%-4% we pass on to the customers.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Thanks.
Next we have Tim Wunderlich.
Thank you. My question is on the EBITDA margin. The margin was down year-over-year in Q1. Maybe I missed this, but could you once again explain why the EBITDA margin was down? I mean, I understand the EBIT margin was up, which is great, but EBITDA was down. In this regard, you talked about the higher energy costs. Could you maybe quantify the negative impact of higher energy in Q1? Thank you so much.
Yes. This is quite easy to answer because you see that our business is switching a little bit. That means that we are in the past, especially I would say two years, able to switch our projects and the investments into finance leases. So, they are shown in the other costs or in the material costs and not in the depreciation. So, it's a little bit more that we are focused on the EBIT to see that the EBIT especially we are able to rise. Because the investments we need for our own used infrastructure is also included as the infrastructure we use in customer projects for CORBOX sales. This is the main effect that we see in the market, that there's a little bit more change, but it's still with a stable EBIT margin from with more than 50%.
Okay, sounds good. The energy impact?
Energy impact, it depends on which time period you see it. On a short term that were quite higher rises. Not to afraid anybody, in energy only, we have sometimes increases from about 50% in energy costs. The good message is energy is, in running shared platform, only a low portion of the total production costs. I would say in, for example, if you're looking at one of our standard project products, a kind of a managed server, where you're delivering a virtual machine as a managed service to our customers, the whole energy impact like this, maybe 50%, we had in some periods compared to the period before, ends up only in something like 2% cost increase.
If you then watch the overall effect I've mentioned or explained during the presentation, where we consolidate capacities and so on, you can. If energy only would be, you can compensate easily. Beside energy, we of course have effects also on the software costs, maintenance costs, the hardware costs. With all of these effects, you have a total effect, where I said we can compensate, maybe, 75% internally and maybe a quarter we pass on to the customers. That's more or less our basic calculation.
Okay, got it. Thank you so much.
At the moment, we have no further questions. If you would like to ask a question, feel free to use the Hand symbol or type your question into the question box. Right. We have no further questions. The call will be made available on DATAGROUP's website. With this information, I hand over to Andreas Baresel.
I want to thank all of you for joining, and maybe we met on our Annual General Meeting. The one or the other will join. We are doing this in present again this year, not virtual again. I'm really looking forward. As we said, we also will give a deeper insight into our expectations for the rest of the year and would be happy to see you there, otherwise maybe in one of our next quarterly calls. Thank you very much and have a nice day.