Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the SNP SE conference call regarding the half-year results 2023. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn over the floor to the host, Marcel Wiskow.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This morning, we published our results of the second quarter. As usual, the report, the corporate news, and later on, the use presentation in this call can be found on our website in the Investor Relations section. Today, the composition of the participants on the company side shows a slight change. To begin with Jens Amail, our CEO. In addition, and for the first time, Andreas Röderer. Andreas is our new CFO. He joined SNP in June. Furthermore, and usually, our COO, Gregor Stöckler, would also be on this call, but he is currently in San Francisco, meeting representatives of our new U.S. partner, Snowflake. He will not take part in our call today. Let's take a brief look on our agenda today. The first part will be presented by Jens.
He will give us an overview of the Q2 results and our outlook 2023 and 2024. The second part, covering the financials, will be presented by Andreas, and the third part is dedicated to the Q&A, to the Q&A session with you. With this introducing words, I hand over to Jens.
Thank you, Marcel, and hello, everyone, also from my side. Thank you for taking the time to join this call, and thank you for your continued interest in SNP. A very warm welcome also from my side to my new colleague and our new CFO, Andreas Röderer. Andreas, as you know, we couldn't be happier that you are now here for a little bit more than two months. I'm personally super excited about that, and I'm really looking forward to working together with you in the years to come.
Thanks a lot, Jens.
Thanks to the continued trust of our customers and partners, and thanks to the phenomenal work of the entire global SNP team, we were able to grow our business in Q2 in a similar way as we did in Q1, both from a top-line perspective, but also from a bottom-line perspective. We see progress, and that's the, the second area of bullet points here. We see progress, and we see first results in some of our strategic focus areas. Our S/4 business continues to grow. Software revenues grow much stronger than services revenues. Our partner business is really contributing, and we see strong growth outside of our home market.
Overall, we feel positive momentum, not only because of the business development in H1, but we are also very happy and thankful about the feedback we are getting, for example, on Transformation World and our recently extended partnership with Snowflake. Before I jump to the numbers, just a quick update on the takeover offer by Octapharma. Basically, we deal here with a series of formalities as well. Octapharma, together with Mr. Mager, reached a share of more than 30% of SNP stocks, they were basically obliged by law to make a formal takeover offer. Then in return, we were obliged to formally respond, which we did with a neutral statement based on all the mechanics, which typically apply in a case like this.
We also made very, very clear, and I personally made very clear, that I very much believe in the future of this company, and I didn't think for a minute to sell my own shares. Octapharma and Mr. Mager currently hold around 61.3% of our shares, the offer will extend until August 10, which is next Thursday. As we communicated separately on, on Wednesday in a press release, we are currently preparing an extraordinary shareholder meeting for the end of September, if everything works out. Now, looking at the numbers. We report an order entry of EUR 51 million, which is 32% year-over-year growth.
We are showing a group revenue of EUR 48.5 million, which is 15% year-over-year growth. In spite of massive currency headwinds and other one-off effects, we are showing an EBIT of EUR 1 million, which is 44% year-over-year growth. I will share further details on that in a few minutes. We report, as I already indicated, strong software numbers and a very strong partner business in Q2. One could ask, looking at the bottom left side, one could ask, "Why is the services order entry growing even more?" First, of course, we have long-lasting services projects. Second, we are still investing in our partners in projects with customers, which also creates order entry. We are still investing in our partners to enable them to scale.
Third, we still had to deal with sell-out applications from partner contracts closed last year and in the years before, and this was an impact of EUR 2.4 million software, significantly more than in Q2 2022. Without that impact, our software growth would have been significantly higher. This leads then, and that's on the next slide, to the best H1 we ever reported in our company history. The mechanics you see here are very much the same, except maybe on the partner side, where Q1 was not as strong as Q2. Looking at the details of the partner business, Q2 year-over-year, as I just said, was much stronger than the consolidated numbers for H1.
We were growing the partner business in Q2 from an order entry perspective by 93%, 46% in H1. When we look at the revenues, we were growing the revenues in Q2 by 34% and H1 by 18%. We had a very successful partner day and overall, a very successful Transformation World, with 362 partner participants. We continue to expand our partner network. As I mentioned at the beginning already, we recently announced an extended partnership with Snowflake. At Transformation World, we announced a partnership agreement with one of the local companies here, headquartered in Karlsruhe, with sovanta, an expert in the area of HCM.
We continuously expand our ecosystem, and we also continue to be very proud that 16 out of the top 20 SAP system integrators, according to Gartner, are now partnering with us. At Transformation World, I'm sure some of you attended the conference as well. We had some fun with the famous ingredient branding campaign by Intel. Of course, that was at a different time, and of course, at a much bigger dimension. However, when you look at, for example, companies like Accenture with their Smart Field approach, PwC with their Smart Greenfield offering, TCS with Shell Field, IBM with RapidMove, all of them have BLUEFIELD in sight, so to say, and we are very proud.
I'm personally very proud that we are a small but very relevant partner for all these great companies. When we look at the deal bands, I'm quite pleased that we had a good quarter from an order entry perspective without the one magical mega deal. We achieved the 32% growth without a single deal bigger than EUR 3 million, but we had eight deals bigger than EUR 1 million compared to three deals or four deals bigger than EUR 1 million in Q2. If you look at the accumulated numbers of deals for H1, then we have 19 deals bigger than EUR 1 million, compared with five deals bigger than EUR 1 million one year ago. This is good news for quite a few reasons.
First, obviously, it helps us to grow the business. Second, it shows that our solutions become more and more relevant for our customers. Third, also from a sales productivity perspective, this will help us in the long run. Looking at the regional split, it's very encouraging to see for us that our international expansion kicks in. In H1, our home market in Central Europe has been growing very respectively by 11%. However, in the rest of the world, year over year, the growth is 67%. I'm personally very happy to see that two of my previous home markets and actually the two biggest IT markets in the world, the U.S. and the U.K., are significantly contributing.
The U.S. has been growing in H1, 80% year-over-year. The UKI has been growing in H1, year-over-year, 227%, and we also saw very strong growth in Latin America with 58%. On this slide, we also highlight some of the details on our S4 business. The third bullet you see here indicates the year-over-year growth in H1 with 83%. We were showing an S4 business in H1 of EUR 55 million, compared to EUR 30 million last year, and this amounts for more than 50% of our total order entry volume. In H1 last year, this was 36%. As promised, now a quick look at the EBIT bridge.
let's start on the, on the left side. Last year, we were showing an EBIT of EUR 700k. However, this EUR 700k was benefiting from a positive currency tailwinds of EUR 1.1 billion. Theoretically, the EBIT last year would have been even negative. Now, but let's take the EUR 700k as a, as a foundation. On top of that, we have EUR 6.2 million additional revenue compared to last H1, and out of the EUR 6.2 million, EUR 2.8 million, i.e., 45%, is from, is from software. Also, as shown already in, in Q1, of course, and this is offset partially by personnel expenses.
We have, of course, more employees than at the beginning of the year, so we have 50 more FTEs than on, in, in January. We also, as already mentioned in Q1, of course, we see the impact of the salary increase compared to last year. Just, because I also mentioned the takeover offer, we had to formally respond here, as I mentioned, with an external consultant. These external costs here, are reflected with EUR 300,000.
We could partially offset this by savings in other OpEx area and the total impact, so the positive one, the positive tailwind we've seen last year with EUR 1.1 million is unfortunately also, we saw some headwinds, some negative currency impact in Q2 this year by EUR 900K. The total currency impact we see in our EBIT, unfortunately, is -EUR 2 million. This leads then to an EBIT of EUR 1 million in Q2. When we look at the EBIT from an H1 perspective, you see that in spite of the currency headwind, in spite of the negative currency impact of EUR 4.2 million, we basically doubled our EBIT.
We had an EBIT last year of EUR 1.8 million, now we have an EBIT of EUR 3.5 million. Again, if you take the currency impact into account, and there are, of course, many ways to calculate them, almost all of them are wrong, but if you would just add the EUR 4.2 million on the EUR 3.5 million, you could argue that we have a year-over-year E-EBIT improvement of more than 300%. The last point from my side is the outlook. In March, we provided a qualitative guidance for the top line. We said, "The growth rates will be significantly above those of the previous year." For the EBIT, we said that we grow slightly stronger.
Of course, you can ask yourself, what does this mean in terms of numbers? What is significantly more than 1%? Yeah, you could have a debate if 2% is significantly more than 1%, let's not even go there. The view we currently have on order entry is between EUR 210 million and EUR 230 million for the year, which would be at the midpoint, 14% year-over-year growth. For the revenue, we see a range of EUR 190 million-EUR 200 million, which would be at the midpoint, 13% year-over-year growth. On the EBIT side, we are a little bit more conservative because of some special effects, as we have already shown for H1.
We see negative currency effects, we see costs for the response to the takeover offer. We have investments for our transformation, like some strategic hires, consulting efforts, investment in our partners. Here we see a range from EUR 5 million-EUR 10 million. Looking at 2024, we see a revenue increase currently of around 10%, i.e., this would be a range between EUR 210 million and EUR 220 million. From an order entry perspective, we continue to assume a positive book-to-bill ratio. Here we see a range from EUR 220 million-EUR 240 million, and we are counting on an EBIT improvement by 1 - 2 percentage points every year.
Again, we are humbled by the trust our partners and customers put in us. We are also encouraged by the first results we see from our transformation efforts. We do like the momentum we feel in the market, but we also appreciate that there is still a lot of work ahead of us. With that, I will hand it over to Andreas, who will lead you through the financial details, and Andreas will also share some of the concrete measures we put in place. With that, Andreas, again, welcome, and over to you.
Thanks a lot, Jens. Thanks a lot for your kind words and a very warm welcome, also from my side. Please let me allow to introduce myself similar to like Jens did in his first earnings call, so that you know who is joining the SNP crew. I just want to highlight the most relevant steps of my professional career and briefly outline to you why I have joined SNP. In the last three years, I was the CFO of SAP Germany, which is one of the biggest markets units in the SAP group. In that role, I was helping the company to transform from an on-premise software model into a cloud model. SAP Germany had a very strong cloud growth, and my team and I supported this growth with a very robust financial backbone, with a clear focus on profitability and cash flow.
Before joining SAP Germany, I worked several years in SAP's corporate financial reporting team, and I want to highlight some of my key projects and learnings from this time. I was heavily involved in several of the key activities for SAP's cloud transformation. For example, the reshape of SAP's external P&L, as you know it right now, was designed in a project that I was leading. This was needed for the transformation from an on-premise software model into a cloud recurring model. Several of the key steering KPIs of SAP's cloud transformation have been designed with the help of my team. For example, today's key KPI indicator, the cloud current cloud backlog.
The most enriching part in my time in, in SAP's headquarter from 2010 to 2020, was that I had the chance to be part of the acquisition processes of all of SAP's major cloud acquisitions in that, in that time. For example, companies like SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, Qualtrics, and finally, then also Qualtrics. In a nutshell, I have more than a decade of experience in cloud business model transformation, and I'm 100% convinced that this know-how will help SNP in the transformation process that the company is undergoing right now. Last but not least, I started my career as an auditor at Deloitte, auditing mid-sized companies, so also this experience will help me in my new role. Now, let's come to the question, why? Why SNP?
During my time at SAP Germany, I met many, many CFOs from all different industries and company sizes, and realized that all of them seem to have a similar issue. They all need to move their highly customized ECC systems to an S/4 system. Then, I checked the numbers for SAP Germany to see how many customers are still sitting on an old ECC system. To be honest, this was my wow moment because it was a pretty big number. Keep in mind, SAP has a long history in many other countries. Jens mentioned our growth already in North America and UKI, and this is something that is, is big, to be honest. This is how the discussion has started with the board of directors.
To sum it up, Jens, I'm extremely happy to join the team with Jens and Gregor to start the next chapter of SNP. Now, let's get into detail and have a closer look at our P&L. Jens has already explained the EBIT bridge, so I will just highlight a few points. The increase in personal expenses can be divided in three pieces. I think Jens has already elaborated on that. I will just pick up on the inflation increase. I think we paid an inflation uplift this year, and we have also committed to pay an inflation uplift in 2024, so there is some additional expense to come also next year. Let's go on to the other income and expenses.
The change here is mainly attributable to the negative FX effect of EUR 1.4 million, compared to a positive FX effect of EUR 2.8 million in the previous year. In addition, we also had to cope with individual one-off costs, for example, from the takeover base that Jens has already elaborated. You can see the EBIT margin has improved by 1.4%, although we had significant FX headwinds to cover. Some of the measures we initiated to start, we started, start to pay off. On the next pages, I will also provide some insight into the planned measures and outline some of my key focus topics from a finance point of view. You could go on to the next slide.
In the revenue segment, as outlined before, in half year 1, the overall revenues increased by EUR 12.3 million, up to the unbelievable amount of EUR 95.6 million. The increase comes from the software and services segment in nearly similar amounts. Both segments contributed approximately EUR 6 million to the overall increase, but the software segment increased above average by 26% in half year one. Let us have a look at the different segments. Let's have a look at the software segment. As outlined before, overall, the software segment had a very strong growth of 26%. Now, looking at the software license revenues only, these revenues even increased by 42% to EUR 20.3 million. Whereas our revenues from support and cloud remained largely at previous years' level. The segment also had a very strong EBIT increase.
Now, let us rather focus on the services segment, as this segment needs some more detailed explanation. Looking at the numbers first, we see that although the services segment increased in half year one by 12%, the EBIT is negative, with EUR 0.3... EUR 0.5 million. Now, in previous earnings calls, the performance of the services segment had been challenged a few times. Therefore, let us have a closer look at the segment. If you look at the numbers, you could get the impression that the profitability did go down, i.e., that we made a step back with our profitability and our services business. As Jens has already elaborated, here, I kindly ask you to exclude the currency effects, because then you see that we are continuously improving from an operational perspective.
The measures and close tracking that Jens and the team have initiated are helping us to continuously progress also in the future. As you have seen in the EBIT bridge, S&P is facing significant FX headwinds of EUR 4.2 million, and based on our allocation rules that we derived from IFRS 8 segment reporting, we had to allocate EUR 3 million out of the EUR 4.2 million FX headwinds to the services segment due to the size of the business of this segment within S&P. What I really want to say, this segment had to absorb a very big portion of our currency effect that had been negative. If you look at it from an operational side, utilization did go up. Sure, sure, ratios increased. Due to the FX development, we just don't see it here.
From an operational side, if you compare apples with apples, we see a very good progress, and in absolute numbers, we would even see an increase of EUR 1.5 million compared to half year one performance, excluding the currency. Now, let me allow a comment to the FX topic, because this is also, for Jens and me, complicated just to exclude all those effects. Believe me, I would love to have an at constant currency reporting to exclude currency impact, to help you with the focus on operational performance only. We are looking at this at this point in time, but I'm not sure when exactly we can implement it. Until then, we need to manually exclude such effects as we did in this presentation.
To sum it up, we made good progress in the profitability of our services business, even though we still have a long way to go, and I also want to share some of our next steps. In November this year, we have a go live of an internal project that will help us even better to plan the utilization on an international level. This internal project will also help us to deploy our different skill levels from our consultants on an international level, better than we are able to do right now, and this will also help us to reduce our third-party costs. Hmm.
Before I sum it up, thank you very much for your patience here with this long explanation, but as the topic of the services profitability was discussed in some of the previous earnings calls, I wanted to outline this topic to you in detail. Taking into account what I have seen in the last eight weeks in detailed reviews with our services team, I just want to outline that I'm pretty confident that we will see continuous progress in the profitability of our migration services business. We could go on to the next slide, please. The XR segment.
The only thing I want to outline here, that XR will return in half year two, as some of the projects did slip, but we just recently checked the pipeline for half year two, and the team is confident that XR will deliver in half year two and contribute their part to S&P's overall success. As we speak, we are also increasing the cross-sales efforts, and there are also some changes in the XR management board. For example, Joel Kasprza joined the XR management team from an S&P company, and that should also help us to further increase the cross-sales effort with our S&P sales force. Let's have a look at the order entry and backlog. Jens has already outlined we had a very strong increase in order entry of 32%, especially due to very strong growth from UPI, U.S., and LatAm.
Now let's have a look at the order backlog reconciliation. On this page, there is not too much to explain. The order backlog increased by 6%, with the already outlined book-to-bill ratio of 1.14. Now, let's have a look at the balance sheet. Let's get started with the positions, receivables, and contract assets. To compare apples with apples, we need to keep in mind that S&P did a receivables factoring in Q4 2022, without that transaction, the receivables at the end of 2022 would have been EUR 5 million higher. We need to keep this in mind because this was a one-time effect. Besides this, the receivables did go up due to higher sales volumes. Now, let's have a look at the position of cash and cash equivalent. This position did decrease by EUR 13.5 million.
There are mainly three effects to be considered here. The payment of our bonuses to our employees. You have already seen the expenses, as Jens has presented in the EBIT bridge. We did a repayment of a loan of approximately EUR 6 million, and there is an increase in working capital, which I have just explained to you. Let's go to the other financial assets. The other financial assets did go down, as we received another EUR 5 million from our partner, All for One, for the sale of S&P Poland that was executed in 2022 and became due now. This has also increased our investing cash flow, as we will see later. We have a look at the liabilities. Let us get started with the non-current liabilities.
We have approximately EUR 9 million in loans that will become due in March next year, and they have been reclassed to current liabilities as repayment is within 12 months from the balance sheet date. Within the current liabilities, we do see effects that net off each other. First, there is that increase from the reclass I have just explained. Second, we also did the repayment of another loan of EUR 5 million. Third, we paid our bonuses to our employees. Finally, let's have a look at the equity ratio. The equity ratio increased to 43.5%, as we did not pay a dividend, so last year's profit was added to retained earnings, while at the same time reducing the balancing total. Now, finally, let's come to the cash flow statement.
As you can see, for half year one, the operating cash flow is at the minus of EUR 8.9 million. Am I happy with this number? Certainly, I can say we can and we will do better here. We also need to keep in mind that the half year one, 2022 operating cash flow was at EUR 12.5 million. This means that some of the measures that had already been initiated from my predecessor, Thorsten Grenz , are taking effect now. We also need to keep in mind that we did that factoring at the end of last year, and then, of course, we could also not collect this cash in the year 2023. I want to highlight a few of the action items we are doing for a faster cash collection.
The team around our new Chief Revenue Officer, Alexander Arnold , has recently established a new deal qualification process. This process will also include stricter guidance on the payment terms for software and milestone billing. As we speak, we are also preparing a more detailed training and rollout to our entire sales force, just to explain to everyone why it is so crucial that we just get that cash collected faster than in past. I'm pretty confident that SNP can get better here in the future. Let's have a look at the investing cash flow. The investing cash flow did go up because we have received another part of the transaction price for the sale of SNP Poland, as explained to you. With approximately EUR 25 million in cash and cash equivalent, the company is still solid finance.
Jens has shared our updated guidance with you earlier on this call, for the cash flow, we will not provide a detailed guidance for 2023. Let me assure to you, this topic has my utmost attention, and I'm getting great support from Jens and Gregor to stress this topic within the organization. Our clear goal for this year is is a positive operating cash flow for the full year. Now we are coming to the last slide, which is about headcount development. Jens has already elaborated on that. We are growing by 50, but especially in the area of of our consulting business and services business, our plan was to grow even stronger.
As you could see in the numbers Jens presented, our order entry is growing fast, and we need our colleagues from consulting to deliver this order entry to our customers and ramp up our partners in our factory approach. Now I'm coming to an end, and I want to thank you for your patience and providing me the time, just to explain who has joined the company. After eight weeks with the company and meeting several of our key stakeholders, I'm very optimistic about the future of S&P. With that, I would like to hand over to myself for our Q&A part.
Thank you, Andreas. Operator, I guess we are open for questions.
Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press nine and the star key on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to withdraw your question, please press nine and star again. Please press nine and star now to register for a question. First up is Lukas Spang from Tigris Capital. Over to you.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon, gentlemen, also welcome, Mr. Röderer at S&P. Thank you, first of all, also for the detailed explanation in terms of EBIT development, which was influenced by the FX effect and also on the cash flow topic. Maybe a follow-up on the cash flow topic, first of all. You mentioned that you're, you have implemented with your new colleague, some, some deal processes and stricter processes for payments and milestones. What do you think in terms of a time frame? How long will it take to have implemented all these processes that you have, let's say, a process you would like to have?
From the current planning, I think if we get it into the transactions that have been partially negotiated already for Q3, we will probably not see an impact immediately this year. For the Q4 transactions, considering that we usually have, have a standard payment terms of 30-60 days, we might also not see an immediate impact. I can assure you, we have stressed the topic now to the next level, that everyone understands we really need to put focus on that. Especially also on the software part that we are invoicing, we will, we will be behind that topic.
C-can you maybe give us a little bit more detailed what you will change exactly in the process? What, what kind of milestones will you change compared to the current process?
If, for example, if we deliver our transformation software upfront. In the past, we often had scenarios where this wasn't paid immediately, it was rather paid over the project duration. There, we just need to be much stricter to get the software portion in earlier, but also on the milestone payment. We sometimes had delivered for quite a long time, but we did not have the milestone payment agreed with the customer. There, we just need to get the, the invoicing closer to, to as how the services are delivered. Those are the key measures, measures we will focus on.
On, on the software business, you, Mr. Amail, mentioned that you have sold some $2.4 million in software sales, which you have recognized also in the, already in the past. If I include these $2.4 million, it's rather similar in the, in terms of growth of the order intake to the professional services segment. I'm asking or I'm wondering why, if I include this effect, the margin, the, the, the growth of the order intake in, in software is still just on a similar level than the professional services segment. What is, what is the, the, the reason why software is not even growing much faster?
I, I see this a little bit differently, right? I, I see the class here full. If we take the sell out, we had to do based on deals we did in the past, and by the way, this is a perfect example where we completely decoupled revenue from cash, yeah, what Mr. Röderer just mentioned. Yeah. If we include that, we have a, a year-over-year order entry growth from over 30%, which is fantastic. We have a lucky problem that we also have a fantastic services organization and a fantastic services business. I look at this more the class from a class half full perspective.
As I said, right, we have long-running services projects, yeah, where we still have commitments to our customers and where they want us to complete the projects. Second, there, there is, of course, a, a partner life cycle. Yeah, some of the partners are already very mature, like Accenture. In other cases, we still need to over proportionally invest in customer, partner enablement, and we do this in projects. So I'm quite happy with the, with the software growth. I believe more than 30% growth is a good number in this market, from, from a software perspective. Also we see growth in, in services, which also helps us both from a, a top line as well as from a contribution margin perspective. Midterm, Mr. Spang, here, you're absolutely right.
We see clearly more growth on the software side than on the services side.
Yeah, because you have to, if you want to reach this 50% or even more in terms of, order intake or, revenue share on, on the software side.
Fully agree.
On your-- you still call it midterm outlook, but I think it's more a short-term outlook, if you look at 2024. That, that what you provided us is everything you understand as a midterm outlook, or should we expect more to come if you have a clearer picture, for, for more than just one year, ahead of 2023?
Yeah. Give us some more time, yeah, and then we would also be able to maybe give you a more strategic outlook, beyond just 18 months as we do right now. Right now, that's the horizon we see.
Yeah. Okay. Also on 2024, if we look on the margin side, I think that was very disappointing because the previous outlook was 10 percentage points above the 2021 level, and that was 4%. If we sum it up, we would come to 14%. If I take your outlook now for next year, yeah, I, I come up at, let's say, 6-7% EBIT margin. Why are you not able to scale up more, with higher revenues in 2024?
Yeah. I, I disagree here as well, Mr. Spang. You have to take into account where we're coming from. When you take into consideration the one-off effects, like the sale of S&P Poland, a few strategic deals where we still have to do the sellout, and a few other very unique one-off effects, the EBIT. There is no EBIT, Mr. Spang, in 2022. The EBIT would have been negative. We now have to deal with currency effects. We have to deal with the takeover offer. We still need to invest a lot in transformation. Trust me, Mr. Röderer and I, we turn every stone in terms of how we, how we can improve the cost structure.
This is what we see right now. Let's see how we end the year, and then we reassess. Yeah. Based on the history we had, yeah, where we had never a year, I believe, looking at Mr. Vierfuß, since, since 2017, yeah, where we even Or 2016, where we even scratched the 5% EBIT margin, looking at a, a non-existing EBIT in 2022, I believe, the team did a good job, right? In terms of also optimizing cost structures and, and realizing efficiencies. Yeah. Let's, let's speak again, Mr. Spang, at the end of the year and see.
Yeah. Last question, you and, Mr. Röderer , also mentioned this transformation investments. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more detailed what you understand in this terms of investment and transformation? You, you already said that, you are hiring on strategic-
... positions, and we can also see this on LinkedIn, that you have hired some people from SAP and Salesforce, and so on. Maybe you can give us even more details in, in this topic, especially.
Yeah. That's a very good question, right? I mean, I mean, one is, of course, we are hiring for the company we wanna be in the future, which means we need to hire big leaders. Yeah, not only like Andreas Röderer, but we hired Nicole Burhenne from Salesforce, Mr. Alexander Arnold, who also comes from Salesforce, and a few others. As you mentioned, some strategic hires. Second, we have some consulting efforts where we need external opinions on a few strategic topics, for example, on our compensation structure with regard to long-term incentives, et cetera, et cetera. We invest in partnerships.
As I already mentioned, yeah, and as you pointed out, rightfully so, we still don't see the efficiencies, the full efficiencies out of our partner business, so we're investing in our ecosystem here. We also, I, I believe Andreas have a few legal costs, right? Which we need to take into account this year and next year, or at least where we have made some accords, yeah, to settle some of the issues we had to deal with in the past.
Mm.
examples, I believe, we are scheduled to speak after my vacation, and then I can give you all the details, yeah, what we're doing from a transformation perspective to repaint the company, and, and, yeah, come, come closer, closer to the EBIT margins we, we all wanna see.
Yep. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you.
At the moment, there are no further questions. If you would like to register for a question, please press nine and star now. Nine and star, if you have any additional questions. There are no further questions. Oh, I'm sorry. In this moment, we have a question coming from Yannik Siering from Stifel. Over to you.
Yeah, thank you, gentlemen. Sorry, there were some technical issues. I would have one further question, and it would be a little bit more on the operational front right now. I mean, we have seen a very, very strong development of the international business. Could you maybe provide some more color on, like, the areas that you see especially strong demand, also given that the M&A market right now is rather subdued? Maybe any, any sectors that stand out, and what's really driving, driving this, this development? That would be helpful. Thank you.
You know, thank you very much. I mean, it's just the size of the markets and that we have to do catch up, right? As I indicated, right? Some, some, some markets or two markets I know very well, yeah, from my past are the U.S. and the U.K., and they happen to be the biggest IT markets in the world, yeah, and the two, two of the biggest SAP markets, yeah. We didn't have a strong focus on them, yeah? We're catching up, yeah, in terms of ecosystem relationships, in terms of having the right sales people in place, sizable, scalable services and partner management organization, an established relationship with SAP, et cetera, et cetera. It's more a catch up, right?
That we're, we're under our potential in the past, yeah, in these two big markets. We also start to see more growth out of Latin America. Here, we wanna refocus the business more on our own transformational business in the area of data migration and data management. Yeah, but also here in the two biggest SAP markets, in Mexico and Brazil, we have not been present, right? I mean, we had a strong presence in other markets of Latin America, but we are now just entering the two biggest SAP markets, which, when you look at the top 100 companies in Latin America, 80% are in Mexico and in Brazil.
It's more, more a catch up, that we didn't have a, a very strong focus on these very important markets in the past.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
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