Hello, welcome to this webcast where we are going to be discussing the first half financial report and the financial performance of Digital Workforce. My name is Mika Vainio-Mattila. I'm co-founder and CEO of the company. There is also a chat window where you can type in your questions, and we will address those questions after the presentation. As you know, we are a relatively young company in the stock market, so this is actually the first half report that we are going to be presenting as we went public in the end of the year 2021 in December. We are at the end of this period living in a very different world than in the beginning of the period. The economic environment, the market situation has changed. Today, we are seeing raging inflation.
We are seeing raising interest rates and economic uncertainty partly triggered by the changed geopolitical situation in the world. In this environment, our turnover, our revenue increased by 8%, which we are not quite satisfied with. I will comment on this development later in the presentation. However, what is positive is that in these challenging circumstances, we were able to continue the strong growth of our Continuous Services in line with our strategy. Continuous Services revenue growth is our most important KPI, which we follow. With this, Continuous Services today accounts 60% of our total revenue at the end of the period.
In terms of a little bit more detail on the financials, our net sales of Continuous Services were EUR 7.1 million compared to EUR 5.6 million, which is an increase again of 28%, EUR 5.6 million in 2021. We don't show here the Q2 and the Q1 performance numbers separately, but we did make a brief release after Q1, and if you revisit those numbers, you will see that our growth rate accelerated from Q1 to Q2. This is very positive. Our growth rate in Q2 was slightly higher than in Q1 in spite of the circumstances. The net sales of our Professional Services business amounted to EUR 4.8 million compared to EUR 5.4 million the previous year.
This means a decrease of 11% compared to the previous year. This again is not a performance level that we are satisfied with. Our gross margin increased slightly from EUR 4.0 million to EUR 4.2 million, and our EBIT declined from -EUR 400,000 to -EUR 1.7 million. A couple of comments around our EBIT, our operating margin. First point to be made is we have made investments in accordance with the strategy that we have announced to grow organically in selected growth markets, U.S. and U.K. We have made organic growth investments in those markets. This is the most significant factor explaining, as expected, I would say, the development in our EBIT level.
Second point is that we have made investments also in system reforms, again to support our international growth. Finally, also an increased inflation rate, which is obviously a universal phenomenon, has impacted our EBIT level as well. In terms of the revenue growth trends, I wanted to show this slide, which I've shown before, which is highlighting the growth pattern, the different growth patterns and revenue patterns in our Continuous Services business and our Professional Services business. Continuous Services is shown as orange bars in both of these charts. On the left-hand side, you can see how Continuous Services is steadily growing quarter on quarter, year on year. Continuous Services is really the bedrock of our growth strategy.
Continuous Services includes the intelligent automation, managed cloud, and maintenance services that scale according to customer needs. Where this growth is coming from, it's reflecting our customers' need for business process automation and trust, the customer's trust in the easy and quick way to deploy services that we deliver. The growth is coming from existing customers, on the other hand, scaling the use of our services, and on the other hand from signing on new customers onto the platform and onto Continuous Services. For example, during this first half, we have signed 14 new customers into Continuous Services, most of these new customers coming from the growth markets in the U.S. and the U.K.
On the other hand, Professional Services revenue decreased, as I mentioned, by 11% compared to previous year, and there's a couple of explaining factors here that I want to highlight. First one is that, in 2021 we saw a number of large-scale Professional Services projects ending, and our satisfied customers moving those projects into Continuous Services with Digital Workforce. We have seen somewhat of a shift from Professional Services to Continuous Services explained by the fact that, the life cycle of a project has come to the point where the customer has decided to contract Digital Workforce for Continuous Services.
This is obviously in line with our strategy, which is very much focused on Continuous Services. In the Finnish marketplace, we see RPA projects maturing and a switching of customer needs moving from RPA, robotic process automation-based projects to more comprehensive automation deliveries. This has somewhat contributed to the flattening of the demand for RPA-related Professional Services. Finally, the growth has also been somewhat impacted, in our view, by postponement of investment decisions by customers due to the uncertainty in the markets. This is industry-specific, customer-specific, but we do see some customers delaying decisions due to the uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. Moving on to key highlights from the period.
What I hope that these highlights will help underline is that we are executing successfully on our previously communicated strategy. First point to be made, and I've already made it a couple times, but it's worth reiterating, is the growth in our Continuous Services business. Strengthening over time our recurring revenue base. Second point is that we are preparing for the next stage in the future of intelligent automation by investing into the development of the Outsmart platform. Outsmart is an update to our strategy and a new platform that we're bringing to the market that we announced in April of this year. To this end, there's a couple of highlights related to this broader theme.
First one is that we have launched a cooperation with technology provider Flowable, which is a Swiss company providing technology to support our initiative to build the Outsmart platform to support this new wave of the next wave of intelligent automation initiatives with our customers. Second very important point is that we were awarded a EUR 1.37 million grant by Business Finland for research and development of the Outsmart platform. Interestingly, by the way, this grant was awarded from Business Finland's Green Transition Fund, which indicates that green transition, which obviously has many perspectives that you can take to green transition.
Automation is in our view one of the most important levers to progress green transition, which is of course a very key sustainability target for the whole planet. Other highlights in terms of the other leg in our growth strategy that we have announced earlier is growth in our new markets. We have progressed well in terms of key recruitments in the U.K. and in the U.S. This, as previously explained, has increased our cost base, but it has also brought new customers. We have signed new Continuous Services customers in both the U.S. and in the U.K.
In the U.K. especially, the public healthcare system, referred to as the National Health Service or NHS, has proven to be a very good base for expansion in the U.K. market. We have signed several new deals with organizations operating under the umbrella of the NHS, health service of the U.K. A couple of post-period highlights, as well. Since end of the period, we have shared press releases on this topic. First one is a very significant deal in the United States, EUR 1 million Professional Services deal to analyze business processes and develop business process automations. The customer is a large energy utility company in the United States with more than 9 million customers.
Can't name the customer, but very significant deal for us in the U.S. Secondly, in fact I'll take the third point first. Keva is one of Finland's largest pension providers. We won a public tender in this space for this customer, contracting services for delivering automations, so Professional Services work, as well as Continuous Services for Keva, which is very important addition to our financial services business, in here in Finland. Finally, we made our first ever acquisition. We acquired ECLAIR Group in Ireland. Eclair is a specialist provider of intelligent automation services in Ireland.
Ireland is an interesting market for us in terms of healthcare and financial services, which are the largest customer segments for this company. A relatively small company, 10 employees. Very skilled, very experienced. We look at Ireland as an interesting growth market for our Continuous Services on one hand. On the other hand, this acquisition is very much linked to our overall growth ambition in the British Isles. Now we can talk about the British Isles as a target market for our Digital Workforce. Very happy about this acquisition and looking forward to expanding our presence in the British Isles together with the Eclair team. Moving on, in terms of more general market developments that we observe.
First one is, and I've I made a brief reference to this already, we see the market transforming from the automation of individual tasks into a market for the automation of broader, more holistic business processes. We call this the so-called automation fabric market. This is a trend that is progressing through different geographic and industry markets at slightly different paces. We see that companies who are investing in intelligent automation solutions are looking for acceleration of digitalization. Automation is a key aspect of digital strategy and digitalization strategies. Companies are looking for growth of revenue, they're looking for improved customer and employee experience, and better competitiveness. This is a shift from earlier stages in this market where companies were mostly looking for cost efficiency and cost-cutting.
Now there's a clear trend to look at improved competitiveness, and growth, revenue growth, and customer and employee experience. What this means is more and more complex business processes are being targeted for automations. Our response to this trend is the Outsmart platform. Basically, traditionally, we have been providing most of our services around digital workers. A digital worker is basically powered by robotic process automation or artificial intelligence, and it's an entity that delivers or performs certain tasks and delivers certain business outcomes on behalf of human beings.
When we take a broader view on business process automation and when we talk about the Outsmart platform capabilities, in addition to these digital workers, we will have process orchestration, meaning that we can manage and operate and enhance business processes in a more holistic way, involving the participation of digital workers but also involving the participation of human beings in a coordinated orchestrated fashion. This is a capability that we are bringing to the market and working very hard to make the commercial availability target that we have previously announced of quarter three. Technical availability is already there. We are working with a number of customers.
In fact, we have signed two customers to pilot the Outsmart platform, and we're negotiating with a number of additional customers to participate in pilot phase, to bring this to fruition and bring this to the market. We talked about the changing market conditions. Within this new reality, we want to anticipate potentially flattening demand for RPA-related services, particularly here in the maturing Nordic markets. To this end, we have reviewed our operations and our cost structure, and we have started certain savings measures, especially targeting our Nordic operations, which by the way, is where we generate most of the majority of our revenue today. We still expect moderate growth across the Nordics, and we will continue to invest in growth in the U.K. and the U.S.
The bottom line being that we are with these actions accelerating our profitability target. We are accelerating our journey to profitability as a company. We do see a shift in terms of our growth from Nordics to the U.S. and U.K. in line with our strategy. As such, we do see a shift from Professional Services to Continuous Services, again, in line with the previously communicated strategy. We do also see a shift from basic task automation enabled by robotic process automation technologies to more comprehensive process automation with the Outsmart strategy, again, very much in line with what we have discussed before.
Behind all this, even though we always emphasize Continuous Services and cloud-based services, behind our success this far and going forward is a very strong, very talented, very experienced team of professionals, our people. Today, we have an international team of about 196 talented employees. In addition to that, then we will have the 10 new talents joining through the acquisition of The ECLAIR Group in Ireland. We've been successful in recruitments in the target markets during H1, in again, the U.S. and U.K., where we now have a very solid team in place in both of those territories.
In Finland, we have been running a trainee program, bringing new young talents to the organization and building a future talent pool for the business here in Finland. People are really the most important element in our execution. We have, according to surveys, a very positive, committed, and meaningful work environment. This is something that we work very hard day in, day out to make sure that we have an environment in which our people feel that they can succeed and make their targets and be a part of one of the most fascinating industries in the world. With this, I want to conclude my presentation. Thank you very much for your attention.
We can now take the questions from the audience, as they come in. Thank you very much.
Okay. We have a couple of questions here. I hope that you all have access to the video sync chat window. Please submit your questions through the chat and we'll pick them up here one by one, and I'll respond to the questions. First question is from Joni Grönqvist from Inderes. In relation to our international growth aspirations, question is how did your international strategic growth markets develop in first half and what kind of investments did you make there? Thank you. Thank you, Joni, for the question. This is obviously very important for us because as we've said, we've isolated and identified clearly two strategic growth markets being the U.S. and the U.K., and we have progressed very well in both of those two markets.
I'll make some remarks. They're obviously very different kinds of markets, but solid performance in terms of our growth in those markets to the extent that the share of our strategic growth markets has doubled over the year. It's starting to be a significant share of our overall revenue. We've actually published quite a few new deals as well. We have assigned a number of new customers in both markets. This is where the profile of the markets are slightly different. In the U.K., we've discovered, as I mentioned, that healthcare is a tremendous growth opportunity for us in the U.K.
We've signed a large number of healthcare related Continuous Services deals in the UK. In the US, the focus has been more on mid-market. It's a diverse set of industries. Mostly mid-market customers from, let's say, 500 to 5,000 employees type of size of customers. A number of new customers and Continuous Services. Continuous Services is the thread across all of these new signings. We did publish also this is a kind of a diversification from the mid-market theme very significant add-on business with a very large energy utility company in the States. We do also serve enterprise customers and this is a Professional Services signing. I believe we also published that one.
Additionally, in terms of other aspects of your question, Joni, we've been successful in our hiring across both of those markets. We have built up the team both in terms of sales resources, marketing resources, and we've started to build a local delivery arm to our Professional Services as well as our Continuous Services teams in the United States. On all of those fronts, we've seen good progress. I think I'm gonna move on to the next question. This is also from Joni. Joni is asking. I'll just read the question out loud here. What kind of efficiency effects are you expecting from the Nordic program?
How do you expect your personnel amount to develop this year and next year, keeping in mind the efficiency program? Clearly, as I stated, in terms of our growth, we're placing big bets and have big expectations from the growth markets and the indications in this report are very positive. In the Nordics we see some growth opportunity. We expect moderate growth in the Nordics. Really the statement is that we are remaining more or less stable in the Nordics and the growth is happening mostly in the new growth markets. I hope that answers the question. I overall expect moderate growth in the personnel amount over the next year coming from this strategy.
We have another question from Daniel in Danske Bank. The question is, can you describe what's behind the gross margin contracting year-over-year, despite clearly higher proportion of Continuous Services revenue? Thank you. Thank you, Daniel, for this question as well. We saw a slight improvement in terms of euro amount of gross margin year-over-year, but our gross margin % declined by 0.8 points. A couple of things behind that. The most significant point is to do with inflation. There are elements within both business lines, Continuous Services as well as Professional Services, involving purchasing external services and licenses, and those have become more expensive. This is the short answer.
We have also, as I just mentioned, made delivery related investments in recruitment in the new markets, which has somewhat increased our cost in the gross margin level. We don't report separately the gross margin levels for the different business lines, but these are the most significant elements. There is a third element which is to do with licenses. Here in Finland particularly, we also work with customers, particularly in the public sector, who are, let's say, who do not have the possibility to utilize our cloud-based public cloud-based services. We deliver licenses as such to those customers. The share of license sales has slightly increased over this particular six-month period.
That is also having an impact, because the gross margin level in license sales is somewhat lower than in Continuous Services. I hope that helps explain the situation over there. There's another question from Daniel. I'll just read it out loud. Can you explain how is current uncertainty in economy suppressing customer willingness to invest in RPA? Thinking about the obvious benefits of cost savings and efficiency improvements through RPA projects that should be highly in demand in such an environment. Yeah, this is an interesting question. The answer is really multicolored in terms of the differences across the different markets that we operate in.
In the new markets we see as we expected, I don't know if you remember this from previous discussions, but as we expected in the U.S. and the U.K., we have organizations who are just starting their journey in RPA. Clearly, cost savings in this current environment has started to become one of the key criteria why people are interested in pursuing these projects. In the more mature markets, particularly in Finland, I would say that we're seeing a second generation, even third generation, demand for RPA. RPA is not new anymore.
Companies have invested in RPA over the years, and they are moving on to let's say new kinds of the demand is shifting towards new kinds of services within RPA. This is still outside of the Outsmart development that the automation fabric development that we see. We just talk about RPA and people are more interested in gaining efficiency within RPA. How do we operate the automations more efficiently, in order to indeed, as you indicate, save cost, and bring efficiency to the business.
We think that we have a great response to this demand in terms of our Continuous Services, because as you know, we operate a platform, the RPA platform on behalf of our customers. We deliver maintenance services. All of those are a great way to respond to this demand. However, the large, let's say, new RPA projects are more scarce than before, and that is what I was referring to as I was saying that demand for Professional Services is flattening in this maturing market. Let's see. I'm just making sure that I'm seeing all the questions that are coming in. Here's another question from Thomas. Could you explain how the Outsmart platform works and operates?
How it technically works and adds value for customers? Does it work for most of your customers? Okay. I wanna avoid getting into a very technical discussion that is a different forum. The basic idea of the Outsmart platform is to help, let's say, extend the horizon of the possibilities in applying intelligent automation in an organization across various business processes. RPA is a great tool for very rapidly implementing automation, bringing automation, raising the automation level in the business processes.
What Outsmart does allows us to extend the scope of those automations to the kinds of process scenarios where we need to involve human beings, integrate the role of a human being in executing an automated process, and where we need to involve other kinds of tools besides RPA. We can directly address legacy systems through API interfaces. We can use RPA. We can involve other kinds of automation agents like chatbots more smoothly into the automation scenario. This is the basic idea of Outsmart platform. Outsmart is relevant to any and all customers because it's all based on open interfaces. You know, so you can...
True to the spirit of RPA and our company, we're trying not to force the customer to tie their hands in big technology investments, but we're allowing the customer to, you know, pick and choose various technologies and combine those under the automation program. Outsmart brings the capabilities to do that in a more smooth and more flexible way than what has been seen before. Okay. Trying not to get too technical. I hope that helped understand the benefits of the Outsmart platform. Okay. We have another question from Daniel around the Eclair acquisition.
The question is, acquisition of ECLAIR Group, this is the acquisition we made in Ireland very recently. Are these employees ready for billable work immediately, or is there any downtime due to the acquisition? The quick answer to that question is yes, the employees are ready for billable work. This is a great first acquisition for us. It's relatively small. It's a team of 10 people. It's a company that we know well before. We've worked with ECLAIR Group in the past. It's a very skilled team, very experienced team. They work with similar technologies as we work. There is really no downtime. Existing customers and contracts are continuing, and we are enriching what Eclair has been offering in that market with our Continuous Services portfolio.
I personally met several of our new customers in Ireland, and we are all on both sides of the table very excited about what we can do together. It's a very good prospect for us. Okay, another question from Joni Grönqvist. Can you elaborate more on what this means when you are focusing more on profitability, the time period, and the extent? Elaboration is really around the fact that, you know, we obviously, as we all know, live in a very different market than we lived in January of this year. Clearly circumstances have changed. We want to speed up our journey towards profitability.
I will not give any timeline in terms of when we are profitable, but it's a different timeline from what we have communicated before. We are going to be making the company profitable in a much shorter timeline than discussed before. I know that's a little bit vague, but I hope that that's helpful. We have a question here. Doesn't have a name, but I'll read it out anyway. What kind of competition are you facing in the U.S./U.K. market? I'll try to be cautious about combining the U.S. and the U.K. We sometimes kind of make that mistake. It's two very different kinds of markets.
In broad terms, the competition that we are facing in those markets is very much project and consultancy based, right? In general, players who are operating in a you know in a similar space as we are are approaching customers from a consultancy perspective. You know, customer, Mr. Customer, I'll help you understand what you can achieve with RPA. We'll build some business cases, model some use cases, test the technology and so forth. This is obviously something that we deliver and we are extremely good at. Where we are different from the competition is the Continuous Services. We can install or plug in our RPA platform and automation platform.
We can, you know, we can scale that up very smoothly for the customer, and we can maintain the automations that are in production over their life cycle. We are really there to stay with the customer throughout their automation journey. That's a highly differentiating aspect of what we offer in both of those markets. Okay, then there's a question from Daniel. Again, you say that you now expect moderate growth from the Nordics. How does this impact to your 2026 target of EUR 100 million sales? Thinking that one of the major building blocks to get to the target is to more than double your revenue from the Nordics in addition to UK and US highly contributing.
This is a great question. I will remain optimistic about our aspiration of making EUR 100 million revenue in 2026. It is clear that this will be requiring a stronger M&A-based growth pattern than what we have initially envisaged. We expect growth in the Nordics. When I say that we expect moderate growth, it's more of a short-term statement. We believe that when customers mature for Outsmart type of investments, we are going to be seeing more growth in the Nordics as well. Okay, let's see. Other question from Daniel. You note that Finnish market is transitioning to comprehensive automation deliveries, which has declined your PS revenue.
Does this mean that your potential customers are collaborating more with bigger one-stop shop players? No. I wouldn't say that. I'm basically stating that there is a shift that is starting, which we are very much promoting ourselves, which is, you know, for those customers who are ready to make that transition, who have already kind of climbed high enough on the RPA ladder to start moving towards more comprehensive process automation projects. We're in the middle of that transition right now. We're having a very large number of negotiations with customers to have customers participate in our pilot program, in terms of working with the Outsmart.
This is not an overnight journey, you know. This is a long journey for both of us. We've signed on the two customers on the pilot program, and we're looking to sign many more during second half. We are somewhat behind our targets here that we I don't remember if we actually discussed numbers of customers to be joining the pilot program in earlier sessions, but we'd like to see more customers faster joining the program. I think I also mentioned that we have technical availability in terms of delivering Outsmart already today. It's not commercially available yet. We have still quite a lot of work to do to get the service packaged and really start to deliver the service.
I'd be cautious to make sort of very detailed forward-looking statements about the share of Outsmart revenue going forward. It is coming. Okay. Thank you. Lots of very interesting insightful questions from the audience. As we don't have any questions online anymore, I think this will be it. I'll close the session here, and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you for your time, and look forward to seeing you again, if not before then, November third when we have our Q3 business review. Thank you very much.