I would now like to welcome Mr. Max H.-H. Schaber , CEO of DATAGROUP.
Hello. Good morning. My name is Max H.-H. Schaber . I'm the actual CEO of DATAGROUP. I'm very proud to present a very positive Q3. If you are fine with it, let's go through the figures. We have switched into the turbo mode. We have outstanding Q3 results. We can confirm our updated guidance. First of all, we could grow the revenue from EUR 264 million last year to EUR 330.8 million this year. The growth was based on two facts. First is we have had a high organic growth of 9.6%, which is partly powered by some hardware and trading revenues, but also a very good growth in services revenues. Second is that we have had consolidated the first time our new acquisitions, URANO Informationssysteme GmbH and dna. They are consolidated from the May 1st this year.
We have two months of revenues from these two companies in the actual nine-month figures. We have also a very substantial increase in EBITDA. This is based on different reasons. One of the main reason is that we are in a very good mood in restructuring our business in the banking sector. You remember last year figures has been very bad influence from the situation in the DATAGROUP FIS in Düsseldorf. We talked a lot about this, I only want to say that the restructuring process is on a very good way, and all the figures we show today don't have only EUR 2 million effect from the restructuring reserves we built last year in our balance sheet, we have a potential of another few EUR million for the future if something happens with our restructuring of the company.
We are on a very good way to do that. The team makes a great job, and also customers are very satisfied at the moment. They see that it is changing, consequently, that we manage the business very good in a high quality. It gives us a very good feeling for the future of FIS to go ahead with the restructuring. We are not at the end of the way, let me say, but we have to go another few miles on this way. We are very fine to reach our goals, which are at the end of next year, we want to be positive in this company again. There is also a big potential for future growth, mainly in EBITDA and EBIT.
If we can reach the positive margins, EBITDA and EBIT, we have also the possibility to develop it in a company-wide EBIT margin. This will bring us a more than double effect in our total EBIT and EBITDA margins. Also, earnings per share went up 700%. This is based that we have a very positive tax effect and also based on the better EBIT and better interests in total, so that we have a very positive development here. This will have effect also next year. We don't think that we have here only a peak, but it is a substantial growth which we hope to bring also next year. We have a very good development in our market units. These all exceed expectations based on an excellent half-year results, we could continue this in Q3.
We showed the startup of new customer systems and significant upselling into existing customers, and all this led to a strong organic growth. We got 17 new customers. We could renew 40 contracts, which is a fine rate. This is also very important for our business that we can renew the existing contracts, and we could expand 24 contracts significantly. This is a movement, a development which is very interesting. I promised years ago that if we get a new customer, a new CORBOX customer, we also will develop it over the time. This is really showed by these 24 expanded contracts. Most of our customers are very fine with us. They feel our quality, they trust in DATAGROUP, and they give us new business. This is one reason for the accelerated organic growth.
Surely the first consolidation of dna and URANO from the May 1st. These both companies are growing very fast. URANO has incredible good figures so that we are fine with this acquisition, and it will make us very much fun from now into the near future. We hope that we can develop it together with DATAGROUP in the same speed they did the last 12 months. Based on all of these facts, we confirm our guidance. We guide more than EUR 440 million of revenues and an EBITDA of more than EUR 61 million. At the moment, we don't see an upgrade of the guidance, but we are fine. We are very fine with these figures, and we think we can beat it a bit. Now I will talk about some selected profit and loss statement figures. First of all, you see the revenue.
I said enough about revenue growth. We have had quite good development also in changes in capitalized contract costs. This is also a very positive sign that we don't have to capitalize these contract costs. This is based on lower big projects to start the new customer contracts. Total revenues count up to EUR 331, which is a change of 22.4%. This is based surely on a strong growth of material expenses. This is based truly on projects like Impfzentren vaccination centers in Germany. DATAGROUP Stuttgart and DATAGROUP URANO has significant part of this effect bigger hardware revenues. We think it's going a bit down in the future, but not so significantly that we will see a reduction of revenues in future. We will grow also in the future probably not in this tough way we did in the last quarter. Gross profit went up 18.6%.
You see if you compare these both figures, revenues went up 22.4%, gross profit only 18.6%. It is also a big growth in this figure, if you see that we have had a quite significant part of hardware revenues and normally hardware revenues are not as profitable as service revenues, and we could nearly hold the growth rate in these both figures. EBITDA went up 84.1%, which is surely based on all these positive developments I gave you before. EBIT also went up nearly 500% and it's very fine that we could go back to an EBIT margin 6%-6.5% from 1.4% last year. This much better EBIT margin we want to grow over the next years, as I said before. What do we do to grow the EBIT margin? We work very hard on our cost base.
For example, we work very hard on our rented space. We want to bring that down. Projects have started to reconfigure our branch offices. We finish all the rental contracts we can do, because we think we need only 50%- 60% of the space we have had before COVID. This is based on a new concept by shared workplaces, this is based also on the idea that our employees are in future, are not more than 50% in office. We think with a little buffer, we can reduce in total over the next years, down 40% with our rental space, this will bring down our rental costs minimum 30% on the base of today. If we grow, surely we don't have or we have a lower reduction in total, in percentage, we will go down very significant in rental costs.
Second is that we work very hard on our depreciation costs, because we talked about that in many of the further calls we have had. We are working very hard on our CapEx level. CapEx level went down significantly, and this will also bring our depreciation rates down very fast over the next years, so that we will see results of these projects from the next year's balance sheet. We see a bit this year also in terms of CapEx and cash flow statements, but we will see it very strong in the next years in the depreciation. This will bring our EBIT margin up. We think we can go in direction of the 9% we talked about in the last calls.
Earnings before tax went up also very fast, more than 1,000%. No, this is based mainly on operating profit and the net income, which went up very high is based a bit on tax effects. We went up with the earnings per share from EUR 0.24- EUR 1.93, which is an increase of 700%. Unfortunately, we will see that not in the future in this size, but we will grow our EPS over the time, significantly. I cannot give you an expectation for this year at the moment, I do not want to. You can be sure that we will grow it significantly over these EUR 1.93. Okay. The balance sheet has grown in total, 11.8%, which is based mainly on the acquisitions of URANO and dna. This is based on goodwill, sure, and some non-current liabilities which changed.
What is very nice, we could hold the liabilities against banks around EUR 78 million and we could lower the leasing liabilities a bit and we could stabilize the pension provisions. They grew only 0.6%. This is based on the development of the long-term interest rates, which went up a bit and so, the pension provisions grew only 0.6%. Normally, this growth is bigger, but we cannot steer it exactly. What we are doing in the field of pension provisions is we are currently thinking about bringing it out of the balance sheet, but there are so many parameters to do that, and you have to think very exact about this part, because it's so many parameters like interest rates, like long-term interest rates. We are not yet able to give you some information how it will develop in the near future.
What is very fine, these both acquisitions, URANO Informationssysteme GmbH and dna, brought only a very little part of pension provisions with, so that we can expect that on full year figures, we will nearly stay around that, except the interest rates change totally. Okay. Total short term, the current liabilities went up a bit. This is based on an IFRS accounting reason. If liabilities came from long-term liabilities, which is more than one year, into a short term Verbindlichkeit, we grew up a bit in this field. Good. Cash and cash equivalents is a very interesting figure. We only went down EUR 16 million. We have had investments of EUR 35 million in acquisitions. So the cash went down only EUR 16 million, so you can see how strong the positive cash flow is in the company at the moment.
We also brought down our liabilities, trade payables down around 12%, but the total net debt surely went up 30%, not in this size we spent some money for acquisitions. Equity ratio went up. This growth is driven nearly total from positive cash flow and organic growth. We have, I said it before, a growth in the total balance sheet amount of nearly 12%. The equity profitability went up very fast, you can see, but this is surely based on all the other figures I explained. Cash flow has a very good change based on very good net income. A bit more-Received interest and a very big lower interest paid. The depreciation went a bit up, but in terms of percentage, it's nearly the same like last year. The effects in depreciation, I explained to you before.
These effects we will see in the next year balance sheet in percentage. The pension provisions went up in these quarters and we have had some very little gains and losses of non-current assets. The next figure increase and decrease of inventories changed very fast. Probably we can explain why this change has happened. [Non-English content] I can give you the answer probably afterwards in the questionary. The Ergebnis, the income out of business transaction, surely this is from our M&A business based. We have all in total a cash flow from operating activities, which is much better than the period before. It went up from EUR 13.6 million- EUR 14.7 million, which is 199%. Investing activities surely showed a very big investment. This cash outflow for acquisition.
We have had from EUR 20.8 million positive, which was based on a big goodwill from the purchase of Portavis last year, and went to a negative amount of EUR 39, which is not supported by any goodwill, you have to remember. We paid this EUR 39 million in total for the investing activities. What went very much down, I explained you before, is the cash outflow for investment in property, plant, and equipment from -EUR 11.6 to -EUR 3.1 million. We cannot hold this very, very positive figure for the last quarter of this year, but we accept in total a lower than EUR 10 million cash outflow in this segment, which is much better as we promised before. We promised around EUR 18 million for this year, and so we are much better than our own expectations. Now, we also have a very good development.
We didn't pay dividend, we have no expenditure here. We have in total the figure of net cash used in financing activities is nearly the same. It went a bit down 2.9%. We paid back more than EUR 12 million in a promissory note. DATAGROUP is able, without any capital increases, to pay back their debts and to pay out for M&A activities, which shows us in total a very good balance sheet. Let me say something to our equity ratio. We will grow that equity ratio in the near future, we do not plan any capital increase, except we have a very big M&A transaction on the table, this we do not see at the moment. You can be quite fine with my promise. In the next months, we won't give out any new shares.
There will be no capital increase and no dilution of the shares in the next few months. We don't see any big acquisition at the moment. So far to the figures. I hope I could explain it clear. I'm fine with questions afterwards.
Okay. If you have any questions.
Moment. I'm not ready. I only want to drink a bit water. Let's talk about the business itself. We have a very good order intake in the segment AI and automation and mobilization of business processes. These, you remember, we have an own segment in DATAGROUP, which is working with RPA projects and mobilization projects, and this business is running very good. We got additional contracts for the development of innovative AI-based services, where we have recognition of bills for bonus programs with a smartphone app. We have recognition of handwritten text on forms. We also have a recognition project of custom documents to the automation of Brexit procedures. All these projects will help our customers to increase their efficiency in business processes. One of our very innovative customers, Sparda-Bank is very active with Almato, our digitalization company. They say the cooperation with the team has been outstanding.
High expectations on the solutions and targets have been fully met. This is a very nice statement of a customer. We did very interesting AI and RPA projects. You can see here, I don't want to explain all of that, but you can read it in the backup. If you have questions to these projects, we will be fine to answer it. We have some information about the share. DATAGROUP share is doing not bad, but we hope we can go in the future again on top of development of our peer group. We think the share price is a bit low for the good figures we have at the moment, but the market will show how it sees our status. We are happy to talk to all of you about the chance, about the future of DATAGROUP. We are very bullish.
We are very positive in the moment that we can develop very good in the future. We have some good ratings. You see Hauck see us at EUR 88, and the Baader Helvea don't changes the position. The others are more than between EUR 70, EUR 75 and EUR 80. We are quite fine with the ratings of our analysts and I think we see a good growth in the future. The consensus estimate of our analysts show for this year, EUR 444 million. I could not comment this, surely, but we want to show this. The EBITDA is seen as an average of EUR 61.5 million and also the EBIT margin is seen at 6.3%. This sounds a bit low. I hope we can go over these consensus. I do not want to promise anything, but we see it higher than 6.3%.
These figures for 2021- 2022 are all without any further acquisition and further M&A transaction. We showed the market that we always do an M&A transaction. It is not realistic to see no M&A transaction in a whole year. What we are working very hard on is our commitment to the ESG sector. We have the publication of the ESG report. You see it, you know it. We are working hard on this segment, because it is part of our DNA, of the DATAGROUP DNA. DATAGROUP was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, very good on the way, but we didn't talk about it. Now the thing is we have to talk about it. We have to show what we are doing in this segment.
We have to talk to the market what we have done and what we will do in the future. We are very fine. We believe that this is a very important part of the life of a company. As I said before, it is part of our DNA. We have had some activities from the management in buy and sell shares. Mostly the management bought shares. Even myself, in November last year, I bought shares for the amount of EUR 9.05 million and also Mr. Baresel, which is a board member, bought shares. As you can see, this was for both of us and for all of the management who bought shares, a very positive, a very good business, a very good movement. I can promise I don't sell shares at the moment.
Because I believe in a good development of our share price, also in future. The shareholder structure at the moment is my family office owns 53.9%. Executives are around 4.1%. Free float is around 42%. To the relatively high rate of my family office, let me say some sentences. What we are planning to do with the family is we want to stay into DATAGROUP. It is surely possible that we reduce our percentage on two ways, probably, if there is a big bid for the shares, we also could sell some shares, going on with a possible, but not actually realistic capital increase. The 53.9% of HHS is not fixed for the future. We are fine going down, let me say, for probably 45% or 40%, but we plan to stay in this percentage, not to sell more.
It is not planned yet at the moment, but it is possible if the businesses, mainly the M&A transaction business needs some capital increase, it can lead to a lower percentage of HHS. Okay, some upcoming events you can see in the publication. Also, Claudia is fine to answer your questions. Okay. Far from my side, Sarah, I'm through now and I'm fine with questions from the audience.
Thank you, Mr. Schaber. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the hand symbol. You will then be unmuted and able to ask a question. Alternatively, you can type your question into the question box. We have four questions from Mr. Knut Woller. The first question is: how confident are you to be able to maintain the organic growth acceleration beyond the current fiscal year?
Yeah. This is a question I ask myself every day. What can we say? Surely, the post-COVID digitalization movement will hold on, let me say, I expect between 12 and 24 months, nobody can say does it accelerate or does it go back? I cannot make any promises for the rate of growth. What we see, that we have some really good new projects. We have some really good new customers. Let me say, for example, HELLA, which is not included in the figures yet. We will see it next fiscal year and the year after in a full amount. We have some very interesting new projects. Sales is working very well. We see a little reduction in hardware-based revenues over the next years, not in total, but percentage-wise.
The second question is, capitalization went up quarter-over-quarter and adjusted for this tailwind, you wouldn't have beat my EBITDA estimate. What is the reason for the sequential pickup of capitalization and how will it develop going forward?
I have to give it to my back office. Do we have an answer to this question? We cannot give an answer now. Knut, if you are fine with this, we will give you the answer later on. Sarah, is it possible to put it on our website? The answer to this question.
Of course, we can put the answer on the website.
Perfect. If you are fine, Knut, we will do that.
All right. The third question is: your equity ratio is still below 20%. Should we expect a capital increase in the next fiscal year?
I discussed this question, I think, and the answer was given in the presentation.
The fourth question, which I believe, Mr. Schaber, you also answered in the presentation, is what measures are you taking over to lower the pension burden?
Yeah. I gave it in the presentation. We are working on it, but we don't have a final solution at the moment.
All right. Next up, we have three questions from Mathilde Guillemot. The first question is: CapEx reduction. Which kind of CapEx do you decrease without future impact on the activity?
Yeah. We reduced our investment in data center equipment. This is based on the special situation that we had to invest a lot in the last years in such big projects like NRW.BANK. These investments, for example, in NRW.BANK and in the CORBOX banking solution data center, is made, and we don't have to invest in this intensity. Also the focus on hardware investments we did in the last 18 months, focus to reduce, to combine all our investments in, let me say, in bulk orders to our hardware suppliers. Led to a significant decrease of cost of hardware, and that altogether has led to a lower investment. What is very important to say, this brings us not to a problem in solving our customership questions and our delivery possibility. We manage now our hardware investments much sharper than before.
The second question is regarding the EBIT margin of 9%. When do you think you can achieve this level compared to 7.7% in 2018/2019?
Okay. I will not promise an exact year, but we are on a good way to do that. I explained in my presentation what are the main drivers of EBIT margin. We see, for example, in rental expenditures, we will bring from 0.5%- 1%, and we also expect 1% probably over two years in the decrease of depreciation. We should reach it. I don't want to promise a year, but within the next two years, we will make big steps in this direction.
The third question is, if I remember well, you don't have nearshore or offshore employees. Could this change in parallel to the change you have mentioned of no more than 50% in the office?
It is a small amount of people offshore, but it is a nearshore engagement. We have around 15 people in Barcelona, and we have around 150 people in eastern countries such as Poland, Czech Republic. We will not grow that very fast. Probably we will expand it a bit, but it has no influence to the 50% rate we discussed before.
Next, we have two questions from Bastien Jallet. The first question is: how can you explain the significant decrease in CapEx from one year to another? What should we expect in the coming years?
Yeah, I explained this before. Stronger, sharper management of CapEx. Sometimes we prolongate our service contracts so that we can use, for example, computer parts four years or a year longer than expected. We bring down our costs of hardware buying. For example, we did a tender two months before, it was like an auction for our suppliers, we bought a EUR 4 million contract, in one day it brought the cost down 20%. All these things we did and we are doing at the moment. You can ask now, why didn't you do that before? Yeah, one reason is that we grew very fast, all these processes you need to have for such actions, they are in development, now the grip is going onto the street. For example, we are talking on multi-year contracts with our hardware suppliers.
We also implemented projects for supplier consolidation. We want to bring down our number of suppliers. All these things will bring efficiency and broad efficiency. Sure, we said to our managers, we cannot spend so much money in hardware, and we should find solutions to do it in a more efficient way. This works.
The second question is, what are the reasons for Dirk Peters to sell a large amount of shares in November 2020? Is he still in the management board?
Dirk Peters is still in the Management Board. The reason for Dirk was that he arranged his family office complete new, and he decided to sell some DATAGROUP shares. He still owns around 120,000 pieces, shares, and he still want to stay in this shareholder position, and he is still in the Management Board. Yeah, that's the thing.
Next up, we have questions from Mr. Andreas Voigt.
Yeah. Hi, good morning. Hi, everyone.
Morning.
Good morning, Max H.-H. Schaber . My question is obviously on scarcity of skilled personnel. Many IT companies are complaining about increased employee attrition and difficulties to onboard people. Is it something that you observe as well, basically in your employee base? The second question is on organic growth and the drivers behind that. You've mentioned already more upselling into the existing customer base, more new clients, CORBOX, et cetera. Are there any specific technological drivers behind that growth that you would like to highlight? The third question is regarding DATAGROUP Ulm. Obviously last year, there were some obstacles moving customers to CORBOX contracts. Has this changed? Have you been able to migrate the clients to your preferred form of service delivery? I'm not sure if I missed anything, but maybe you could also elaborate a bit on the working capital management.
What you're actually doing here, how you are able to improve working capital with the positive working capital effects or occasional effects that you spoke about. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Andreas. First of all, employees. Yes, employees are getting more expensive. It's a quite normal trend. Also customers are willing to pay a bit more. We can cover the bigger costs quite good. What is the difference between DATAGROUP and, let me say, adesso or others? We get a lot of people via acquisitions. You can see if you look at the growth rate of our employeeship, we have now around 3,600 people on board, and many of them went in via acquisitions. We have a quite low churn of people. Also we have with a very active employee campaign, with a new work campaign, we get very good people on board. People are not the main problem at the moment for us. Surely, there is always a problem with specialists.
If you need some BI specialists in SAP, you will not find it. You have to develop it by yourself, except you pay incredible amounts of money for them. In total, we manage the employee thing very good. Yeah. Second question was organic growth. What are the main drivers? I explained that I think very deep in my presentation, main drivers are, first of all, bigger projects around COVID. The vaccination centers, which are working until the end of this calendar year and a bit more probably. We expect in second half of next business year, we expect a reduction in this field. It will be covered, not total, but nearly with other projects we have on board, we have in our books now. Second driver is surely upselling. Sometimes you get some orders from your customers and you don't have to invest any money.
You can only write higher invoices. Because you have the machines, you have the computers on board. We invested a lot years before, and this we can use now without additional costs. The third driver is surely all projects around public and hybrid cloud solutions. You remember we invested in a little company called Cloudeteer. Cloudeteer is now one of our very, very good investments. We think about stocking up our percentage. It's not decided yet, but we think about that because the company is doing very well. What the real good thing is, company is doing very well together with the parental companies in DATAGROUP. For example, we have had very good projects for forest administration in Baden-Württemberg. We also have big public projects with sometimes total public cloud solutions.
The nice thing is that our income is even the same or better with these solutions in comparison with our own cloud solutions. The message is cloud services, even combining public and private cloud, so-called hybrid cloud solutions, are moving on. The growth accelerates in this field and we are very fine with this acquisition, Cloudeteer. I told to you our digitalization projects we make they help us to grow and they help us to establish as also a solution and digitalization partner in the future. Next question, Ulm. What's the situation in Ulm? It's not as good as I expected. We have to go a very long way in Ulm, and a hard way in the future.
We implemented a new management in Ulm, which is getting grip on the street and we expect from Ulm also in the future, not in the short future, but in the mid-future, we expect really good EBIT expansion, and this will help us to develop the EBIT in total in direction of nine. Working capital management, I want to give to my back office, and we will answer this question later on and put it in our website.
Okay. Thank you.
At the moment, we have no further questions. If you still have a question, please use the hand symbol or type your question into the question box, and we will be happy to answer them. All right. We have no further questions. Thank you for participating in our conference call today. The call will be made available on the DATAGROUP website.
Yeah. Thank you to all participants. I am very proud to show you the extremely positive development of DATAGROUP, and I promise that the management will do all they can to accelerate and to do the best job for you as our shareholders. Thank you very much.