Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and I warmly welcome you to today's earnings call of q.beyond AG following the publication of the Q1 figures of 2025. With me today is CEO Thies Rixen and CFO Nora Wolters, so the management board will speak shortly and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly to them. Having said this, Mr. Rixen, I hand over to you.
Yeah, thank you, Margareta. Hello, everybody. We both are very happy to announce Q1 figures to you. The headline is "Growth, Earnings, and Financial Strains." Overall, the Q1 is, for us, delivered as we planned, more or less. We are quite happy with this. We are on the way to have a positive group income this year, the first one since 2018, if I'm not mistaken. We do it as always. Nora will guide you through the figures, and I will give an outlook later in the presentation. I will hand over to Nora now.
Thank you, Thies. Welcome to the financial figures. I'm very proud to announce that 2025 is an ongoing success story of q.beyond. We are very proud that we reached a further milestone. The milestone for 2025 is a positive consolidated net income, and Q1 is the next step for our goal. [audio distortion ]
Very much.
Thank you. To say it with the words of Robert Collier, "Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out." As you see in our key earnings figures, we have significant growth, a significant improvement in all key earnings figures. Our gross profit went to 8.5%, up to EUR 8.9 million. We increased the EBITDA by 15%, and the consolidated net income nearly goes to a positive value. Our strategy 2025 and 2025 plus is very effective. Looking at our key financial figures, first of all, we look to the revenue. Our resilient business model ensures a good start in Q1. In the last year, we concentrated on profitable solutions and services. That means we show you an adjusted revenue, which had a growth of 2% compared to the last quarter.
To say it in other words, our focus is increasing on our profitability, and this is also shown in the revenue. We have a solid order book with a constant share of recurring revenues. Our order book means we have up to 5%-15% new orders. That is a great value if you look to the actual environment, the challenging geopolitical situations. We are very confident in going on in the next quarters. Next, we report to you two segments. One is Managed Services, and the second is Consulting. As you see, we have selectively disposed of our low-margin contracts. We have a constant success factor with 22% and a significant contribution to our mission of being a service leader in IT. The high profit growth of 25% is the work of efficiency, investment, AI, automatization, and, of course, our customer satisfaction.
As you see, consulting has a significant increased gross profit from 8% to 14%, means 75% of difference. We have a memorable sales focus, clear successes through competence building. As you remember, we built the q.b eyond Academy in the last year, which means we skill up, we get new competencies in the company, new interesting projects, and of course, the needed skills, which are important for the future of q.b eyond. Additionally, we have a good increase in capacity utilization, which gets to the really good results in the segment consulting. How did we do this? Additionally, we reorganized the segment, so we get further efficiency, and consulting and development is a really important part of the value chain of the complete company. Looking at our P&L, we have a clear goal for 2025. This is a positive consolidated net income. We significantly improved all key earnings figures.
The EBITDA margin increased by 1% to 5%, and every development in our figures goes like we planned it. Unfortunately, we cannot plan everything, and we have a special factor, as you see on the slide. It is the individual value adjustment, means that we had a customer insolvency, so we lost the EUR 0.3 million EBITDA. We are already tracking the situation. We follow our invoices and have a clear management in these. Concerning our revenue, it is really a little part that we lost in Q1 compared to the whole revenue we have. Revenue makes you work. Profit makes us happy. We have, how do we get this? We have a really committed team and executive. We are really working successfully in all areas and, like cogwheels together, so we get a profitable value chain in the whole company. Additionally, we have a high impact of the near-shore ratio.
As we told you in former calls, 5% near-shore ratio means 2% of staff costs. We raise the near-shore ratio up to 16%, which means we have an effect of staff cost of 1.5%. Look to the sickness rate and the turnover ratio. It's very important that you have a committed team because we make people business, and therefore, a committed team, a healthy team, is a factor of success for us. Our sickness rate is below 1.3% of the annual value of the statutory health insurance, and the turnover ratio is below 2.2% of the IT benchmark of 10.9%. We are very happy and very proud to have such a great company, such great employees, and executives to go on with our service leadership mission. A very important factor is the cash. We are continuously increasing our cash positions.
To say it clear, profitability overgrows and consisting management. Another positive aspect for you to know, we are looking for EUR 5 million liquidity in Q3, which are the results of the million of the plus net deal in 2029. Therefore, we waited for the notice from the tax office for the years 2017 to 2019. We already received them, and at the moment, we are on to get the money. q.beyond is a healthy and a solid company, which has clear goals and a consistent management. We are very proud of our satisfied customers and our rising share price. As you may have noticed, we go up to EUR 0.92, 92 cents, sorry, and we are really looking forward to go on. Now we come to the most exciting part of the financial figures, the guidance. My message for you is very clear. We deliver.
That means every month, every quarter, every year, we deliver what we promised to you. As you see it in the key figures, up to 5% adjusted revenue, an increase of 14%-42% EBITDA. Finally, as Thies already said in the beginning, a positive consolidated net income which is one of the requirements for paying you a dividend. With this perspective, I give back to Thies.
Yeah, okay. Thank you, Nora. Now, a little outlook on the strategy. As we said in the beginning of the year, we will not stop. The overall goal is to have at least 10% EBITDA margin. How do we get there? We choose that we want to be the service leader so they have the best IT services in the industry. I'd like to explain the three main pillars to you a little bit. One is that we concentrate on not only technology expertise, we put industry expertise on top. This will mainly be built on external growth, like M&A. If we hire new teams or buy new companies with new expertise, this will help us to boost the margin even more. We will build the q.b eyond, not now, we are only in Germany, more or less.
Yes, we have 15%-16% of our people outside Germany, but only 1%-2% of our business. We will grow this to 15% in the midterm. q.b eyond is more a European company than a German company. The third thing is boosting team competencies. Nora elaborated a little bit on that or explained that we believe that skill and competency is the factor for the future to beat the competition and to convince the customers to stay with us or come to us. This is what we called our 2025 plus strategy. This will be boosted by AI. As you may have seen, we launched our own private AI service.
Out of our own data center, we have built up a platform for our customers where they can work with their data on their AI model to automate or to boost their business. We think in this quite decoupling world right now, when we offer our clients and sovereign services, AI services, as we have in sovereign cloud services as well. This will help them, and this will help us. This is there. We sell this over several use cases. I will show two of them. One is for retail e-commerce, where they can automate their service desk to boost service efficiency and to be, let's say, 24/7 there with low cost. This will help our retail clients. The other one is logistic, where there's often manual work to do.
Also in this tariff chaos, let's say, we have a solution where we can very flexibly react on certain requirements and help the customer to automate their processes, their data processes. There we have very good feedback. There are others already, let's say, in the sales process, and more to come. With this, we hope to boost AI, which we already use inside the company. This we do, as you know, not only in Germany. You see the black dots in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Ulm, our data centers. We have the already known nearshore centers in Latvia, India, and Spain. We have our first sales office for the logistics business in Charlotte, North Carolina.
We aim for at least the first market entry in Europe this year, also. This will help us to boost the margin up to 10% in the midterm. We said 2027, 2028. We will be there. Let's see how fast we are. Therefore, we are convinced that our share is a very attractive investment opportunity. As you may know already, strategy is clear. We, Nora and myself, execute on this. 10% margin is at least our goal. AI, nearshore, offshoring will help us on the cost side. We are debt-free. End of the year, I think it's more like EUR 50 million cash instead of EUR 40 million. Our business model, at least in these circumstances, shows great resilience because of the, let's say, two-thirds of the current revenue we have inside the business model.
Having said that, I'd like to thank you for your attention. I'm very happy to take your questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Mr. Rixen and Mrs. Wolters, for your presentation and the dive into your first quarter. Ladies and gentlemen, now we would be happy to take your question. If you would like to speak directly to the management board, just raise up your virtual hand. If you have done them by phone, you can use the key combination star key nine to enter the queue, followed by pressing star key six to unmute yourself. If you are not able to speak freely today, you can also submit your questions in our chat box, and we will read them out for you. Having said this, let's take a quick look to the line. By now, we have no questions. Let's wait. Maybe a question shows up, or you explained everything so well that there are no open topics.
It seems everybody is happy so far.
No, even better.
Even better. So, dear participants, maybe if further questions show up at a later time, please feel free to contact Anna Tull from Investor Relations and M&A. And yeah, then this is it for today. So thank you very much for your shown interest in the q.beyond AG. And a big thank you also to you, Mr. Rixen, and Mrs. Wolters for your time. And yeah, from my side, I wish you all a lovely remaining week. And we say thank you and goodbye.
Goodbye.