Welcome to the DATAGROUP SE conference call on the preliminary figures for 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 we would ask you to mute yourself again to prevent acoustic disturbances for the other participants. The presentation will also be available for download in the Investor Relations section on DATAGROUP's website. I would now like to welcome Mr. Andreas Baresel, CEO, and Mr. Oliver Thome, CFO of DATAGROUP.
Yeah, good morning, everybody, and welcome to our today's analyst call for the presentation of the preliminary figures of the last fiscal year. We are happy to welcome everybody. As we are more than 30 people at the moment in the call, and not only a lot of well-known colleagues here, also some new names. I would like to start today with only a short introduction to DATAGROUP , again, and our business model. For those who don't know us yet, this much, that you can see where DATAGROUP is positioned and what is our core business model. Then, of course, we start with what everybody's interested about, our last year's last year figures.
DATAGROUP, as the leading German full-service IT provider for mid-sized companies, we are. Our mission is that we run the IT for mid-sized German companies and organizations so that they can focus on their core business, and we are taking care of their IT. The focus is to help them to increase efficiency, save costs, and also provide skilled labor in this area. We are doing this at the moment with a revenue worth of about EUR 500 million, with 3,500 people, all over Germany. We are, in this area, the leading German provider. The good thing about this business model is that we can do this with long-term contracts. The typical customer has a contract period of 3-5 years.
So, we have, at the moment, a share of more than 75% of this EUR 500 million in recurring revenues. Which, especially in macroeconomically challenging times, offer a quite secure and stable basis. And as we are working for mid-sized companies and organizations, and also for a wide area of industries, we have a very good diversified customer base, and that means we have no customer exceeding more than 5% of our revenues. So no cluster risk, very good, diversified. That's also part of our business model. The IT services we are providing to our customers, we call them CORBOX services. I will explain a bit more about the idea of CORBOX in the next slide.
We are producing them with a high level of standardization, and this makes it also possible that we have a very high potential in future key trends, as using AI, artificial intelligence, as providing additional security services, in the increasing and with an increasing number of cyberattacks we see at the moment. And also with the trend to cloud services, which is still ongoing, bringing more and more workload to the crowd, to the cloud. We are part of this development and have a high potential in this area. As I said, the core business is our CORBOX business. The idea behind CORBOX, and the name comes from corporate IT services out of the box, is that we developed a service as a product approach.
You see here on the right side, our 9 service families, which cover all a mid-sized company needs to run their IT. And behind these 9 service families, there are approximately 40 detailed IT services, and these you can combine on a modular way. So you can choose exactly these services you need to run your IT. And we, on the other hand, are able to produce these services on a very good standardized and more or less industrialized level. And that, of course, makes us to profit from economies of scale through this industrial service provision. And with this approach, we have, as I said already, a very long-term relationship to our customers. So after a ramp-up time of 9 months, the typical customer contract period is 3-5 years.
And then, of course, if the customer is satisfied, and that's a big focus of our service production, he won't change, because the change is always a big effort in changing service providers. So a typical contract renewal is 3-4 or even more times. So if you multiply this, our typical customer stays for approximately 15 years. So that's a very good and stable basis to grow and increase the business with this CORBOX core business. And we will show later on how this core business is also in the challenging times we have at the moment developing quite good at the moment. And based on this business model and our CORBOX approach, we are happy to present another quite successful fiscal year, the year 2022-2023.
And, before I hand over to Oliver, who will present you the detailed figures, I would like to give you a short overview about the highlights of the last year. So we continued with a strong order intake in our CORBOX business. That means we managed to sign another 20 new CORBOX customers. So each of them in this kind of business, I just explained. We made another 24 up-sellings, what means we have a CORBOX customer who wasn't using up to now all of the CORBOX services or only part of the CORBOX service. And 24 of our existing CORBOX customers in the last fiscal year decided to sign up for further CORBOX services, and that brought up another additional growth in CORBOX business.
Of course, as I explained, the contracts are typically renewed after a period of three to five years, and we really focus on renewing regularly our contract base. In the last year, we renewed 33 CORBOX contracts for another three to five years, what means keeping this stable basis of long-term contracts as a basis of our business. As you might know, we have a second growth strategy, the acquisition of companies, which we are acquiring and which we are transforming then into this CORBOX business. So that's part of our growth strategy. Even if the company valuations are quite high, were quite high in the last year, we managed to acquire another member to DATAGROUP. The company is called systemzwo.
It's in the southern German Ulm region, there's already an DATAGROUP Ulm existing, and we strengthened their position in the Ulm IT market by the acquisition of systemzwo. And we also increased our Urano stake to the full 100% of stakes. So continued also the inorganic growth strategy there and made with systemzwo another base for transforming business into CORBOX business in the mid-term. Another highlight for me was our investment in AI. So we made for DATAGROUP a much bigger step than many other companies on the market. So not just doing another POC for an GPT application. We really invested in own IP rights or our own AIOps platform.
I explain later a little bit why is this important to have your own AI technology or what is our idea behind this. Together with this technology, there came also a team of specialists, and we founded, or this is the foundation of our future AI strategy, because as we have already a good level of standardization and this economy of scale in the CORBOX production, that's a very good basis for using AI technology in the future, and we see a big potential there, and that's why we decided to make this really big step in investing in own AI technology in the area of AI operations. I will explain a little bit later. These operational highlights led us also to the financial highlights we had this year, and there you see now the first figures.
So we made a revenue in the last fiscal year of EUR 497.8 million. That's at the upper end of our renewed guidance, and Oliver will later on explain what's behind there, as it's more a sideways development compared to last year. But we had some special effects, more from Oliver later on. With our results, we are very, very happy. So we managed to further increase our EBITDA to EUR 80.2 million, and we were exceeding also the original guidance we have there, which was up to EUR 80 million, so a small extension here. On the EBIT level, we also managed an increase this proportionally to EUR 45.3 million.
So a very good increase on the EBIT level. And what we are really happy about, that we managed on the full fiscal year to reach our midterm target in terms of the EBIT margin. So the overall EBIT margin is now 9.1%. And you might remember our ambition was to reach more than 9% EBIT margin in the future, and what we set as an ambition in the last years. Besides this, we made a new financing of EUR 70 million, which will also help us for an organic growth and future investments. But we did it in a way that we simultaneously improved the balance sheet structure and now have an equity ratio of 31.7%. Very good one compared to last year's.
So for me, that are the highlights of the last fiscal year, and we are really happy with this development. But, I would like to hand over to Oliver now for a more detailed view on the numbers. Oliver?
Thank you very much, Andreas, and I welcome you all, participants of the presentation of our preliminary accounts of DATAGROUP. And, like Andreas just said, what we just reached this year is that with our revenue, we reached the upper end of the revised guidance. And, that who just follows us since several quarters just knew that we have some challenging macroeconomic environment, but especially we had EUR 40 million special effects in the full year, 2022, 2023, which I will explain in the further slides.
Very important for us is that with the strong operating development of the CORBOX and our business model, and, in this way, in the digitization segment, we were able, besides lowering a little bit the revenue stream, but over proportional increase the gross profit with about 3.5%. And that shows that we are on the right way with our CORBOX business at DATAGROUP, and, that we focus on the profitable CORBOX business as our core business, and we say this pays off. Let us now have a quiet look on the next slide, and, which shows that, we just exceeded slightly our EBITDA guidance.
This is what Andreas just mentioned, but very important for us is that we exceeded the EBIT margin above 16%, and this for the first time. And by the stabilization of the CapEx in the past years, and we always explained and said CapEx costs can be or must be about 3% of all our total revenue, and we stabilized this ratio in the past years, so that we were able to increase disproportionate the EBIT versus the EBITDA. That means we just achieved an EBITDA with a plus of nearly 5% to EUR 80.2 million, and we just realized more than 9% in growing our EBIT up to EUR 45.3 million euro.
And what we made especially is our promise to you that we stabilize our EBIT margin in the midterm target of 9%, and we just realized 9.1% in the past fiscal year 2022-2023. Now, let us make a little bit more deep dive in the profit and loss ratios in the past fiscal year. What we just explained is that we roughly reached a similar level in the revenue side to the past year, with about EUR 500 million, which include the EUR 40 million negative effects on an annual basis. For us, very important is the proportion of services, and they remain on a very high level. We always say they must be more than 80%, and we just reached 81.4%.
How did we have done this, and what's the special effect when you look, when you see the switch between the material expenses and the personal expenses? Like in the past quarters, we just improved our earnings by reduction and to reduce external specialists, which we need in our core business, and to switch them or to hire new specialists as own resources at DATAGROUP. So this effect just gives us the tailwind for our EBIT and EBITDA development of the past fiscal year. And what we can see is, again, a significant increase in the EPS. The EPS was driven at first by a strong result, but at least by the return to normal tax ratio.
When we look in the next slide and see how did we earn our money in the balance sheet, and there is some of this, what Andreas just explained. Our solid balance sheet structure gives us the scope for further growth, and I want to switch to the point which Andreas just explained, that with a more flexible finance structure, which we just closed in March 2023, we are now much more flexible. We just switched it that we can now reduce in the total assets and the total asset reduction with the good earnings we just had in the past fiscal year. We are now able to present to you an equity ratio, and this improved for more than 30%. We are just now reaching 31.7% equity ratio.
For us, very important is that the net debt situation is on a comparable level to the past year, and this despite the investment in new subsidiaries, in new technologies, and by the dividend payment of the past year made in 2023 in March. When we now have a short look into the next slide and the cash flow for the past year. We have a very good cash flow from operating activities. What we see is compared to the previous year, which has been much higher, but this was driven especially by the tax provisions we could build.
Because when you see the figures of DATAGROUP in the past years, we had a very, very strong increase of the EBIT and EBT between 2021 and 2022. So that for this case, we could build tax provisions by the strong result, but this year we had to pay out these tax provisions, and this has been a negative effect, which we had to compensate. On the other hand, and this is important as well, that our CapEx costs, I just explained in the detailed view on our profit and loss statement, with roughly EUR 15 million, are in our expectation, and this is in nearly the 3%, what we always explained that we need for our further development in technology.
When we can see in the next slide, the development of our trends in the revenue. What we made is that we just reached nearly the upper or we are on the upper end of the revised guidance. And what we have just explained to you is that we had some negative effects besides or instead of the past fiscal year, especially, this have been three effects.
The first was the COVID-19 related special boom, not only the vaccination centers, this has been especially trade revenues made by the schools, where we bring the digitalization to the schools and in this area, and this ended very strong to the beginning of the year 2023. A further effect has been the change in our accounting policy to IFRS 15 and Principal Agent segment, at least the premature adjustment of less profitable existing contracts.
We are very focused on bringing new companies after an acquisition period and after coming to DATAGROUP, and to understand our business model, to bring their system integrator revenues to our long-term and profitable revenues of DATAGROUP and our CORBOX business. So when you now see, compared with the previous year, we had, and we are very proud to see how stable we had an organic growth in our CORBOX business. And this is just shown in the effect that we were nearly able to compensate the total effect of these three points I've just explained, with CORBOX revenues with high margins.
On the next slide, and the next slide, you can see, that, and this is very important for us, and this underlines what I've just explained, that the gross profit increased disproportionally. The gross profit rose about 3.5% full year in 2022, 2023. And that despite losing the gross profit of negative sales effects, I've just explained, the EUR 40 million we have lost instead of the past year, there were EBIT effects as well inside, but we were just able to overcompensate this, not in the revenue, but in the gross profit side. This is where we are very focused on, and we are proud that we can just ride further the strategy in the future with high gross profit and margin.
On the next slide, we can see what the EBITDA is, and very important for us, and this is not the absolute development of this. We were able to rose from 76.5 to 80.2 million euros. But what you can see is in the development of the strict strategy of focusing on CORBOX business, we were the first time able to improve our EBITDA margin above 16%. And this is very important when we look on the next slide, in which we can see, and this is with the EBITA. For those of you who are not the finance specialist, the EBITA for us is very important.
Like Andreas Baresel just explained, our second pillar of growth is the inorganic growth, and the inorganic growth is driven by additional depreciation from the Purchase Price Allocation. So the EBITA in our business model shows very, very good the operating earnings of our business model, and there we come from EUR 48.9 million in the past year to EUR 43 million. That means nearly 1% more than in the past year. We rose it from 9.7 to more than 10%. That means 10.6% in our EBITA margin. And this trend shows that our margin for our CORBOX core business is improved above 10%, and that for the first time. On the next slide, you can see the EBIT development as well.
Important for us is that we achieved the first time our midterm target of 9%, and we can confirm the midterm guidance of 9% EBIT margin by 9.1% in the past fiscal year. Important, Andreas will just explain the investment in artificial intelligence, in which we invested in the past quarter, in the fourth quarter of the past fiscal year, more than EUR 1 million. And this EUR 1 million EBIT effect is just included in the EUR 45.3 million. So, we just reached our guidance. But we are very focused in investing into future trends. Without this, we were able to be in the middle sector of our EBIT guidance.
But I think this is a very important investment in our future and in the earnings we will make in the next years. This has been the past, and the future will be shown in the next slides when you look what are order intakes for us, and these order intakes will be the revenue stream of the future. And now I hand over to Andreas to give you a short overview for some interesting order intakes, which we won in CORBOX business.
Thank you, Oliver. And yes, what I would explain a bit more to you is what's the basis of this very good development in our numbers and the way we drive it. And we drive it by really managing our core, this CORBOX business, and growing and developing this core year on year. And as it is, quite a long-term business, you're winning a customer, you're doing the transition, and then this customer is coming into revenue, revenues, but then you have a long-term relationship of more than 10 years in an optimal way, and you can put new customers on top of this every year. So that's what our focus is on and also how we are tracking it.
And some examples for these type of customers I have, I have for you on this slide here, where you see the different size and duration of typical CORBOX customers, but also the, the difference in scope. For example, we have here a commercial industry. We did a full outsourcing for five years contract, so already very long term from the start, but it's a smaller company, so they have 600,000 EUR on an annual base, and that's what we are always looking for, what the annual contract volume we are winning. But compared to this, we have also quite bigger companies. For example, the clothing industry here, they have selected service desk, end user, and end application management.
Not yet the full services, but as it is a quite bigger company, they made a three-year contract. Only for this scope, we have already EUR 3 million on the annual base. Quite a bigger one, and we are mixing this type of customers in this area. Another example is for a very special industry, the financial industry, a highly regulated industry with high demand for special regulative features. For example, their new customer has purchased the sub service for a three-year contract, so only with a sub service, EUR 1.2 million per year. Also an example where we can add additional services from the CORBOX portfolio in the next year.
And that gives you a bit of an insight how we are managing this core business and where our focus is really winning this type of customers, and then increasing their yearly service revenues by adding additional CORBOX services. And with this basis, you have no cluster risk, no sector risk. So, even if we of course always see changes in economic environment in certain industries, we have such well-diversified customer base that this has nearly no effect on DATAGROUP. And that's also represented in our figures, and what I'd like to show you is going a bit more deeper in the revenue structure. And Oliver just explained the special effect we had on this EUR 500 million or nearly EUR 500 million revenue top line.
But as soon as you look below this top line, how this revenue is structured, you see there the growth in CORBOX core business I just described. And we made another good step, even in a weaker economic environment in this year, so increased our CORBOX revenues. So that's really the recurring revenue for the IT services year-on-year from EUR 319 million to EUR 340 million. And this pure CORBOX service revenues are quite stable basis as long as the company is working, they are purchasing these services. So there are not as project services where you can decide to spend less money in the next years because the economic environment is weaker.
The running business to run your IT, you have to continue, and that's why this part of IT service is very stable, even if it might be a bit boring sometimes, but it's a very, very stable business because companies have to continue doing this business and purchasing these services no matter how the environment is developing. On top of this run rate in this EUR 340 million, we have also in this year, another EUR 42 million CORBOX related services. So what's important to understand, as soon as you have these customers, they are more or less needed, that they have to acquire certain projects with DATAGROUP as we are running the systems in the daily run services, they are also purchasing related projects from us.
So that's another very sticky parts of business as IT is never stopping, and, it's always changing year-over-year. You have, at least from a, from a regulative and fiscal point of view, you have also, always have to change some things, and that also gives us a quite stable and continuous revenue stream with these CORBOX related projects with, CORBOX customers. And overall, we so increase this CORBOX business, which we are counting, on a very detailed level, continuously year-over-year from, a totally 359 last year to now 382. That means a 6% growth. That's a bit stronger than the, the IT market is growth.
And, as I said, it's a slower growing business, but very, very stable, because these customers are staying for a long time, and we are able to put additional customers on this customer base year on year. In the additional other services, the light red area, you see also the reduction of low margin services. That are the effects Oliver just described. There was a reduction from 47 to 23, as we have reduced in this year low margin, our special business in this area, like also the vaccination centers, which were part of this part. And we have a nearly stable revenue in trade business.
What's important to know, but we are still showing it in this area, there's also a part of trade business which is related to CORBOX business because IFRS are showing some hardware parts, which are related, for example, in client services, long-term client contracts in this area, that's also IFRS specific. So even in this 93, there's a quite important part of very continuous and sticky business. And with this development in this core business, that's what I said, what we are managing every year, month-on-month, as we are tracking our targets, our KPIs. And when we look in the last fiscal year, we managed to fulfill our all our CORBOX growth targets. These are in detail, the cross and upselling.
So adding additional services to the existing CORBOX customers, our goal there, our target there, is to add every year, EUR 10-15 million in additional CORBOX business. We very well fulfilled this target. That's 1 part of the CORBOX growth. The other part, of course, and that's what I showed you on one of the earlier slides, are additional new CORBOX customers. There we have the same ambition, EUR 10-15 million on an annual basis, additional CORBOX business. So really annual revenue, not total contract value. And this target, we also managed to achieve in the last fiscal year.
The other part of our growth, or the third part of our growth strategy is the M&A activities, the inorganic growth, which are only the basis or a step before getting this business into CORBOX business. As we are acquiring companies which are doing traditional service business, and we are transforming them and their business into CORBOX. So that's one step before doing CORBOX business. There we had the situation in the last fiscal year, because of quite high company evaluations, we not fully reached our targets of 2-3 additional acquisitions.
But what we see, and I will show you on the next slide, a good development in these areas, as maybe because of the increased interest rates, we see a slight reduction in company evaluations, again, which will enable to us also to do more acquisitions again in the future. The fourth area we are really managing in detail is, of course, always tracking the contract renewal. These long-term customer relationships only work when customers renew their contract at the end of the three-to-five-year contract period. And our target there is to renew approximately, year-over-year, 20% of this order backlog.
That is another target we managed to achieve last year in this area, and that's also enabling to have a growing core business. And with this 20%, we are also managing the churn rate, which our target is to have this churn rate of losing customers. Of course, this also happens sometimes to have a churn rate of below 2% on this annual base, and that's also something we managed to reach in the last fiscal year. And with these targets, we also started in the new fiscal year, 2023-2024, and I have to say we are on a very good track with all of these targets like I already said, especially the M&A activities.
We have a quite good filled pipeline of new targets there, and I see a good trend in this area to reach our targets this year again, because as we see, valuations are going down a little bit. But also in this other your CORBOX targets, cross and upselling, new customers and contract extensions, the first one and a half months started quite good, and we are confident also to reach our targets in this area in the new fiscal year, 2023-2024. And that will mean another year of healthy and successful core growth, and that what makes DATAGROUP in the long term successful.
Another point, which is, of course, in the long term, important, is also to watch on new trends and what are the technologies and the trends of the future, which are important to invest now to really ensure successful business also three to five years in the future. And there we decided to address specifically three areas, which we see as the major and the big trends at the moment, especially out of our DATAGROUP view, because they will help us to further grow and scale our business, even in the situation we have at the moment in the overall economy. The first area is AI technology. I just explained to you, part of our CORBOX business is a quite industrialized production model.
We have centralized production units, which are producing these CORBOX services on an already quite good level of standardization. Now with AI technology, and there we are addressing especially the AI technology, which you can use to run IT operations automatically. That's called AIOps, in a specific word. With this technology, we now will be able to address also the part of IT service production, which we were not able to standardize up to now. That's still an area which is left, where people are working manually because the processes are quite specific and classical standardization was not working up to now. And there, we decided, like I already explained, to acquire our own AIOps platform with our own IP rights now, and with them, also a team of specialists.
We did this in the last quarter of the last fiscal year, and now are starting to implement this technology. Of course, that's also an investment we are doing, but we believe that this will be a big lever in the future to further automate the production model which is behind the CORBOX business. Maybe two or three words on why we decided to go on our own technology with an own team. One of the reasons is, when you're using AI, you have today a lot of these cloud-based technologies. So the AI is running in one of the big hyperscaler clouds, and it's provided to the companies which wanted to use them.
But the issue is, as soon as you want to work with AI technology, with more confident and secure data, you have the problem that these training data and all the transaction data has to be transferred to the public hyperscaler clouds, for using the AI technology. And therefore, we said, the right decision is using a technology which we can run in our own sovereign CORBOX cloud, and therefore, we don't have the problem when we give IT service production data to this technology, that they are leaving the DATAGROUP perimeter. They keep or staying on our own platforms, and we can use the technology without problems with data security, information security, and that's one of the reasons why we decided to invest in an own technology.
The other reason is working here with an own team, that we see it's a real change of mindset, when you're using AI. Coming from classical standardization, companies are often thinking, "I look for a certain scope of processes. They are running in a similar way and are automated." But with AI, it's different. You're just taking ticket by ticket, IT service process by IT service process, and you are training the engine in learning and making it learn to run this process automatically. So that's really, really a change in mindset, and that's taking some time, and therefore, it's important to not have a kind of a customer-supplier relation, where this learning process is quite more difficult.
Instead, we have our own team, where colleagues are working on these change in mindset together, and that's another important step why we decided to go this way. A bit different, like a lot of companies are doing it at the moment, all following this big, large language model approaches. They are, of course, also interesting, but for our business, we see our strategy as more successful for the future. The second part is cybersecurity. As you know, we have a big increase in cyberattacks, and it's increasing year on year, and it's nearly boring to hear it every year, another increase in cyberattacks. But that's the reality, how we have it at the moment.
These facts also, the governments, the European governments and regulators have or are seeing, and that's why more and more regulatory rules and laws are coming, where even smaller companies are now forced to run their IT following certain security principles, security regulations. There are regulations like NIS2 is one of them, or other security standards coming for specific industries on the market. And these companies who are now in the year 2023 and the upcoming years are forced to run their IT following these regulations. They see that's something they can't do anymore on their own capacities. And that will be a driver, that security and security-related services will be a driver for outsourcing for purchasing IT services more and more, instead of doing it on your own, with your own IT team.
That's the reason we also decided in this area to do investments in additional capacity and capabilities. For example, we founded here a specialized DATAGROUP cybersecurity entity in the last fiscal year, or end of the last fiscal year, which is acting as an additional task force to prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks. And this company, this team, we are now able to provide also to our customers to, as I said, prevent them in terms of cyberattack, detect cyberattacks, and at the end, always also help them to respond to cyberattacks in case they happen. And that's the next step in broadening our cybersecurity portfolio. So another area which is important to use the trends we have at the moment for further growth and scalability.
The last area is the cloud business. Cloud is not, of course, nothing totally new. We have a cloud trend, a big cloud trend already, the last, I would say five years, where more or less the clouds of the hyperscalers like Microsoft, AWS, and so on, they collected a lot of workload and a lot of business. What we see at the moment is an additional trend for the workload, which has not reached these hyperscaler platforms already, because these workloads has more requirements concerning data security, information security. And that's the reason why companies haven't brought this workload to these hyperscalers there. And in this area, we see the trend to more sovereign cloud capacities. And that's where we also invested on, now focusing on the own DATAGROUP, CORBOX Cloud.
We are at the moment developing the CORBOX Cloud to one of these sovereign clouds, which at the moment is spoken about to provide our customers a basis with the highest standards of data security and sovereignty. So which is a good basis for this workloads, which is still waiting to go in one of the cloud platforms, and we want to be, with the CORBOX Clouds, one of these providers which are offering services to run this. In this area, but we are also partnering with other European players. In our point of view, it's necessary to have a strong European sovereign cloud partnership ecosystem. And the first of these partnerships is with STACKIT. That's the cloud of the German Schwarz Gruppe.
This cloud has special features, where it's addressing special workloads. The CORBOX Cloud as an enterprise cloud is not focused then. And we are combining both clouds to provide our customers a good strategic multi-cloud approach. Of course, besides the hyperscalers. We are also working with Microsoft, with AWS, and the workload, which is good located in this area, but the new trend is also having the capability to provide own cloud in a sovereign European way. So that's a little bit of a deep dive in what are we working for at the moment to further grow our CORBOX core business, also in the mid-term 3-5-year period, with following the important trends, which are a basis for this further development.
Yeah, and that's why we are quite confident for the DATAGROUP future and another hopefully successful year, 2023, 2024. I would be, of course, happy if all of you are following us on this journey. You see here the next financial events where you can meet Oliver or me personally. But of course, before we meet personally, we are now open for your questions. Thank you.
If you would like to ask a question, please press the hand symbol. You will then be unmuted and able to ask your question, or alternatively, you can type your question into the question box. Our first question is from Mr. Knut Woller.
Yeah. Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. Actually, three. The first one, looking at growth next year, I think you will provide guidance at your AGM, as you usually do. However, just looking at the one-off headwinds you had to digest on the revenue side in the last fiscal year, is it fair to assume that no similar revenue headwinds have to be expected in the current fiscal year? Then secondly, on the margin potential of the business model, you absorbed EUR 1 million invest in Q4 in AI, and you confirmed your midterm EBIT margin target.
So if we think short term and looking at your confirmed EBIT margin midterm guidance, is it fair to assume that, that the margin leverage of the business in the short term due to the investments is rather limited, but that due to all the investments you do, that the company has a noticeably higher margin potential than in the future? And can you give us some ideas here? And then, lastly, housekeeping questions. Looking at the cash flow and the tax rate, what kind of cash flow, operating cash flow, should we expect as a percentage of revenues in the next fiscal year, and what kind of tax rate should we put in our models? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Woller. Maybe I will answer the first two, and then Oliver, of course, additional comments and you to the second. I think the first question you are asking for similar headwinds, yes, we can—we, that's a right assumption. I think we won't have in the actual fiscal year, again, this consolidation of several effects, which all together made this big effect of, like Oliver explained, about EUR 40 million. We will always have transformation effects also in the started fiscal year, where we are changing business, transforming business from the simple service type way into the long-term CORBOX way, and also the effect that some services can't be transferred, and we these contracts are wanna at one time stopped.
You might remember we also have former acquisitions, which were acquired with special service types included, which are also in a planned decrease. But as I said, we won't see again this consolidation of several effects in this high level. So I would say yes, right, right assumption. Your second question short term, limiting the EBIT margin development, mid-term additional potential. Yes, that's exactly our strategy. Of course, every investment is increasing or reducing the theoretically possible margin development. But we think for a very good midterm future, it's very, very important, and there's a big potential with the technologies I just explained.
And therefore, we are accepting more of a stable development in the short term, but further potential in an increase in margins in the mid-term by doing these investments. Okay, then I would go to the questions to the cash flow. To make an output for the cash flow for the fiscal year 2023, 2024. It's early, therefore, we have to wait for the AGM and the upper guidance. But for you to try to find the right way, is that our business model normally is very, very stable. That means that normally the operating cash flow is nearly to the EBIT plus the CapEx investments. And this year, we had two special effects.
The first one I've just explained has been the main point of the provisions to protect us, which we just had. And another effect, roughly EUR 5 million, is the difference between the rates and the receivables to pay. So I do not expect that there will be a quite big difference to the future. So I think in my opinion, my cash planning, I would suggest, and I would mean that we will have an operating profit with this nearly EBIT plus our CapEx. The next question you had has been the tax rates.
The tax rates in this year have been slightly or slowly pushed by or not pushed by some deferred tax positions in the pension provisions, and this deferred tax result, we do not expect further, but you, you don't know. Our goal is we are now with 31.5%, I think, in the tax ratio, so that I would expect nearly a normal industry standard between 30%-31% for the future.
Thank you.
Next up, we have some questions from Yannick Siering. Three questions. The first: have you seen a deterioration in customer demand recently in light of macro uncertainties among small and medium-sized enterprises?
Maybe I will answer with this question. We see in the area of projects, IT projects, in where the customers are improving or transforming their IT further, we see a slight reduction in the mid-sized company market, definitely. So the overall weaker economic environment, companies are getting more careful in this area. But as I mentioned, with our CORBOX core business, the IT service, the run business, is running quite stable as that our run rates, where companies can't save money because they stay with the platforms, the sizes they need and the quantities they need to run their IT. So our core business is quite stable.
We see slight, slight reduction in the additional business, our customers are demanding, but the typical projects we do as CORBOX-related projects that are always things which are necessary to do, like upgrading systems and applications, upgrading the platforms, doing security improvements. So also in this CORBOX-related area, it's, it's quite stable. So we, we see that this trend is existing, but it's not touching our, our core business in an, in an more, more impacting way.
The second question is: Having reached your midterm EBIT margin level, how should we think about the margin potential going forward?
Yes, I would again say what I said on the question of Mr. Woller. I think the trend to keep it stable around the 9% for the next year will be a good strategy as we are doing these investments on AI, on security at the moment. In the midterm, so 3-5 years, of course, it's always a difficult question to ask when the big impacts of these investments will follow. Maybe already in the next fiscal year, maybe the year after. We definitely have the target to further increase our EBIT margins in the two digits area by getting the results of all these investments.
Especially AI has definitely the potential, especially for our type of service production, to bring us on, on this mid-term level.
The third question is: Do you consider fast-tracking your AI ambitions via M&A?
It will depend on the opportunities. It was for DATAGROUP, quite a bit big step we did at the moment in acquiring this technologies, this IT, IP, and this team. Of course, if there's the opportunity to strengthen our AI capability, especially, what, for example, means adding additional capabilities for AI-based services to our customers. What's at the moment, not the focus of these AI ops activities. We will follow this, but of course, that's an area where a lot of companies are looking at the moment, and evaluations are very, very high and very optimistic what's concerning all the topic. So we will look carefully on this, but of course, this is an option.
Next up, we have questions from Andreas Wolf.
Thank you. I have three questions as well. So the first is on cloud. Since you've emphasized the cloud-related opportunities, shall we expect an uptake in your investing activities? Would you also expand your proprietary infrastructure? That's my first question. Then on the pricing of new CORBOX contracts, I'm curious whether it's possible to increase the price per delivered service unit, or are clients very price sensitive given the economic uncertainty right now? And then, I think you still have some provisions related to the financial services contracts, which were signed roughly three years ago. Will those be utilized by DATA GROUP or what's the current state of the project and accordingly, the provisions? Thank you.
Okay, thank you for the questions. The first one on our cloud investment activities. Of course, that's a good question if investments are going up again because of higher capacity there. I have to say, the cloud platforms have a much better leverage on investing compared to capacity you generate by these investments than a classical dedicated platform, which we were partly running in the future. So, we see this increase in our own capacities in the area or in the range of investment. We have also seen in the last two fiscal years, for example. So our targets is always to be somewhere around this 3% of CapEx from our revenues. We were a good step lower in the last years.
Maybe we will be around the 3%, but there will be no big investment step in the future as we have a quite good stable basis already with our cloud platforms. The CORBOX clouds, they are on a good technological level, and it's more going step by step ahead, but with no big investment steps. You won't see these in this year or the next year. Your question concerning the CORBOX prices, yes, that's of course, at the moment, an important topic, as our cost base also is increasing, energy costs in the last year, for example, but also labor costs. And now we have in all new CORBOX contracts price clauses that will enable us to adapt prices to cost factors, which are increasing externally.
But of course, on the other hand, or the other side of these long-term contracts, is the basis to have for the customer a stable price base. So we have, in my opinion, quite good contract mechanisms at the moment to increase prices in case our cost base is rising. But also, these long-term contracts give our customers the security to have a stable basis. And, for example, that brings some customers getting back workload from hyperscaler clouds, as they see. There, they don't have this long-term relationship, and they are in the situation that, for example, Microsoft is increasing prices on their own decision, and they can't do anything against it, and that's a reason to bring some workload also back to sovereign local clouds, for example.
So that's the situation about CORBOX prices, having a good, stable basis for the customers, but on the other hand, having no risk in case price or costs are increasing, not being able to increase the prices on the customer side.
Maybe I can-
Yeah.
Maybe I, maybe I can answer the third question of the provisions we made in the finance sector. Maybe at first, what we just explained one year ago, that we had an organizational merger of the banking cluster in total, and we now see that this works very nice, so that we have a stabilization in this part, and that we are very... We think we are sufficient with the provisions we just made in this sector. This is what we can see in the provisions we made three years ago.
Concerning the contract renewals in this area, the contracts were, most of them, made at a quite similar time in the past, but they had different contract durations, so they come up to a renewal in different time slots now. That gives us a chance to work in detail on every customer contract situation. At the moment, we are on a good way, also renewing the contracts, which are in this situation at the moment.
The next question is from Mr. Tim Wunderlich.
Yeah, good morning. I have just a follow-up question on the, on the artificial intelligence investments that you, that you are making. So you had, P&L effective expenses of EUR 1 million in Q4. What kind of, what kind of expenses, quarterly expenses can we expect, going forward? And then maybe you can also give us, an idea about the, about the efficiency gains and the, the respective cost savings per EUR 1 million of AI investments. That would be appreciated. And apart from that, all of, all of my other questions have been asked and answered. Thank you.
Oliver, you want to?
Yeah, I can. I can. Hi, Mr. Wunderlich. A very nice question, and, the detailed answer, we want to give you as soon as possible, but we are not able. What we can see is that the AI works, and that we believe that there will be an effect, but we cannot describe very detailed what will be the effect. What we have, what we have now made is a cash flow effect and an EBIT effect. The EBIT effect, as you have just said, is about EUR 1.1 billion in the past quarter. The effect we have, we have on the other side, in which we have just boarded the first customers on this system is so, is, is there at all.
So we are not able to give you a concrete sign where we will be from quarter to quarter with the cost on the earning side of artificial intelligence. What we see is that like I've just explained, the AI works, and that we think that on the long term, anyway, we will see that there will be a positive effect, but we are not able to give you such a detailed answer to this. But we will follow up as soon as possible when we have more experience with this new technology and our standardization model of DATAGROUP.
Our next question is from Oliver Frei.
Thank you for taking my question. I just have one left. Regarding your ESG strategy, can you give us some insights, what projects you are currently working on? Maybe from a reporting standpoint, you already have an ESG report out, for example, but also from an operational view. Thank you.
Maybe, I can answer this as well. What we have done this year is to renew our ESG report, and we are just working hard on the next ESG report we want to publish. And we have reorganized us in our management team and with employees, which follow the ESG point very, very close. So, that we... I can't give you too many details on this point, but we look very strong on this point of the ESG aspects, because we think that ESG will be an integrated part of our strategy, which will be part of financing, of making our business and so on.
We will inform you as soon as possible. I hope we are working with partners, with our own employees to renew and to work hard on the ESG strategy as well.
If there are any further questions, please press the hand symbol now or type your question into the question box. All right, at the moment, we have no further questions. The call will be made available on DATAGROUP's website, and, I would now like to hand over again to Mr. Andreas Baresel.
Okay. So thank you, everybody, for joining us on the call and of course, also for your questions. And as I said, I would be happy to meet you in person on one of our next financial events you see on our website or just on the calendar here. And that will bring us more exchange on these topics. So thank you again, and hopefully see you soon, and thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you very much.