The head of Tietoevry's Investor Relations. This morning, we will go through our earnings development and outlook. With me here today are our President and CEO, Kimmo Alkio, and CFO, Tomi Hyryläinen, who will next go through the highlights and results of the quarter. Kimmo, please go ahead.
Thank you very much, Tommi. A warm welcome also mine, mine and Tomi's behalf to our third quarter results announcement. Our third quarter performance characterized as a bit provided insight already a week ago, given that we did the guidance change. Let us go through the main drivers of the current environment and third quarter performance. Our main message being that improved profitability in a weakening market environment. The weakening market environment contributing to our revenue development, revenue decline of 1%. Furthermore, high degree of attention on the resilience of the company, resilience of all the businesses, a lot of attention on the cost-based management, enabling us to improve profitability to 13.5% level.
Today, we are also confirming that the strategic review of Tietoevry Tech Services is progressing, and we have advanced to an exclusive process with a non-industrial buyer. Just to move forward again, I want to reiterate, confirm the message from a week ago in terms of the guidance change, organic growth, around -2% from the prior 0%-3% level, and just to confirm, which we are elaborating on today by business as well, that the softening market environment contributing to the revenue challenges when we talk about the short- term.
While the profitability level, the guidance, at the 12.3-12.7 range from the prior 12.0-13.0, and the driver for the profitability guidance narrowing and development naturally has to do with the resilience and the profitability development overall. I'd like to also confirm our perspective, given the dynamics in the marketplace. This is good to spend a minute on. One of our main messages today is that during the third, especially towards the end of the third quarter, we have seen weakening of the market environment, and we anticipate this to continue into and meaning as we'll enter 2025. The market demand for IT services, likely not a surprise, continues to weaken.
Some of the shorter cycle consulting tend to be much faster impacted in a softer economic environment, and the lower demand environment has started to impact also software businesses. And we confirm, as has been the case in prior quarters, very high degree of attention on the customer side, on their own efficiency, on their own resilience, thus emphasis on short-term ROI versus longer-term transformation. I do believe that this is visible in the industry as a whole, as well. And we confirm our attention and activity level increasing on AI and GenAI intensity, cloud and data being the foundation. Volumes are still relatively low. Thankfully, the activity levels are up. I think the confidence that this will be a future value generator continues to improve.
We confirm, in the case of our company, the attention on the instability of the geopolitical environment, and we highlight this, as everybody is well aware, due to the exposure of Ukraine. From a customer side, very importantly and positively, we have strong customer wins in all of our businesses, highly modern technologies, cloudification, data centricity, AI in, so, important, to see a good progress in winning new footprint. We are talking more and more an increase in the level of visibility on the AI front. Just to confirm what we are sharing today, both from a customer reference standpoint, the readiness of the company overall, readiness of the company, including the responsible AI training we are running for all employees, and at a faster and faster pace, releasing really interesting customer cases to the marketplace.
I'd like to also confirm that Tietoevry Create will be launching a kind of next-generation AI lab during the latter part of the year, productizing innovation cycles and including design thinking and responsible AI into our value proposition. I would also like to share with everybody that nowadays we have all of our businesses have been releasing their value propositions. Every business has the value proposition that consists of both the expected value delivered towards customers through our software and services, and the second dimension being the potential implications, contribution of AI, GenAI technologies towards operational efficiency in own operations. So these user stories are being released at an accelerated pace.
All the information is available on the website, naturally, and being communicated actively towards current and future clients, and specific section also on responsible AI and how we link this to our overall sustainability objectives. Then to go into our more financial view and the business highlights, we've already highlighted organic growth of - 1%, adjusted EBITDA 13.5%. Important to see a healthy cash flow of EUR 58 million, order backlog at the +8% level. Here, I would like to highlight that the primary contributor is, as we also communicated in the second quarter, the record high backlog in the banking side, and that backlog to be realizable over next several years. That's a prime contributor to the strong backlog generation.
Our commentary would also be that in terms of third quarter order intake, quite typical as the seasonality on third quarter, slightly better than the third quarter a year ago. Then if we go into Tietoevry Create, organic development on the top line, negative 4%, healthy profitability continues. We'd like to be very clear that this type of a digital engineering, primarily shorter cycle consulting engagement, is experiencing a weakening market across geographies. This is much more profound at this point in time than in prior quarters, and we continue to highlight the challenges we have had in Sweden, a lot of attention going in. We are also sharing that the decreasing internal revenues is impacting growth as we began to have the specialized businesses running as independently as possible a couple years ago.
It is, from our standpoint, very understandable each business decide what type of business partners one uses, and this internal revenue development is with us, for a couple of quarters, and then it will be normalizing, we believe, across the businesses, and to confirm, in the case of Create, in light of the weaker market environment, softness in revenue development, very importantly, we have ongoing really active capacity management actions underway and significant degree of attention, especially on the non-billable side of the Create business.
While we are highlighting quite a bit on the implications short- term on the market environment very positively, I want to add that the significant contracts in the telecom side and a U.S.-based pharmaceutical clients, the team is working very actively in increasing the pipeline in the U.S., and we continue to be committed and believe that once the economy bounces back, we'll be playing a much bigger role in the U.S. market. Here, as highlighted earlier, the next AI lab to really increase the speed towards client value and increase activity level on the AI side. For banking, main highlight being stable profitability, we had 4% organic growth driven by part of the portfolio, specifically the credit, the cards, and financial crime prevention.
We are also highlighting openly that the Norwegian bank merger that took place one year ago is impacting revenue negatively, and that will be with us for a couple of quarters in light of the very high comparables from a year ago. Stable profitability, and we'd like to remind everybody, increase in depreciation of capitalized R&D impacting by approximately EUR 2 million. In this business also, a high degree of attention on efficiency measures, both in terms of slightly lower growth area and to ensure that we have the right cost structure post-strategic review, and to confirm Endre Rangnes began as the managing director on third of September. Then to go into Tietoevry Care, here the highlight being solid performance, softening demand in certain markets. I would say only 3% organic growth in terms of our historical top-line development.
We are seeing very tangibly growth being affected by the public sector deficits in Finland and then in Sweden, practically in the municipality sector, and we have some legacy software exposure in Norway and Sweden. Just wanted to highlight these developments, and we remain very committed and positive of the strong competitiveness if we think about the first nine months of this year in winning new footprint with the Lifec are software solution, and as an example, double-digit growth in the data and analytics side of Care. And we confirm we absolutely continue to drive our investments for market expansion. I think more to come in the subsequent quarters, but this is highlighting Norway. And to confirm the healthy profitability level, supported by our long-term investments and attention on R&D scalability and continued attention on efficiency.
In the case of Care, we are releasing at a very healthy pace new use cases, very specifically being strengthening actually our Lifec are solution suite. Samples included gen AI assisting, classifying customer feedback data, and we have gen AI-enabled speech-to-text recognition already improving in the proof of concept stage, the workflows of doctors in the sample hospitals where these are running. In the case of Tietoevry Industry, we are highlighting softening demand in certain markets, and very specifically in the paper pulp and fiber industry and public sector Finland. These are factors why we are seeing only 1% growth, while the larger part of industry, the data platforms did continue to grow.
A profitability level of 16.3 does deserve further efficiency measures, which are currently being worked on and will be taken forward during the latter part of the year, then when we go into tech services, here a couple of very important considerations: improved profitability from 9.5% level a year ago now to 10.5%, and very importantly, business mix is developing favorably. Cloud and platform, cloud platforms and security, 20% growth, data and applications, 4% level, while the traditional infrastructure solidly in our expected range of minus 7% -minus 9%, was at -8% level. End-user services tends to be, as expected, highly volatile, much lower profit level, declining by seven percentage points as a cumulative sum, organic growth of -3%. As recognized, the profitability improvement achieved through systematic attention on the cost efficiency, and that attention will naturally continue. We'd also like to highlight that the ransomware customer settlement impact on growth was approximately one percentage point. With this in mind, I'll hand over to Tomi.
Thank you, Kimmo, and good morning, everyone. So the main highlight of the quarter was our improved profitability compared to prior year. In addition to improving adjusted profit, we did improve reported EBIT, both in nominal terms and in margin terms. Due to the slow market, we have proactively managed the cost base in all of our businesses to protect the margins and ensuring competitiveness. We will continue to reduce capacity in Q4, which is why we increased our OTI estimate for the year from previous 1.5% to closer to 2% of revenues. Other highlights of the quarter, as mentioned, healthy operating cash flow, and then closing of the bypass divestment, which we thought we would close already in Q3.
It was closed October 16th, so we will be recognizing gain on sale of EUR 4 million in the Q4, which will be treated as one-time item. So we delivered healthy cash flow, operative cash flow being EUR 58 million, net working capital, a seasonal increase of EUR 20 million, driven by vacation accrual releases and AP. Accounts receivable decreased EUR 45 million, where we recovered the prior quarter weakened impact. Free cash flow was EUR 26 million, which, for a seasonally weak Q3, is at very healthy levels. Interest-bearing net debt landed on EUR 900 million, which contributed to net debt EBITDA being slightly lower at 2.1x. Then to personnel topics, LTM attrition was stable from Q2 at 8.8%, which is at very low levels and reflects the current slow market environment.
Our cost management measures drove capacity reductions of approximately 500 FDEs, out of which 300 in Create, 100 in Tech Services, and 100 FDEs in aggregate in the software businesses. We will be continuing managing our capacity into Q4, as commented. Our new hires reflect the seasonally high graduate intake, which is how we manage our competence pyramid, so our new hires were 600 in Q3. We keep our group-level salary inflation expectation unchanged around 4.5%. Then I'll summarize the performance drivers for Q4. Our growth drivers on business level, the drivers remain very consistent with Q3, however, in a slightly weaker market setting. On profit drivers, the weakening market conditions place pressure on margins, while Q4 is typically supported by seasonal volume increases and end-of-year license sales.
Now, here's where the softening of the market will not take place, likely a bit of uncertainty how this driver plays out. Our efficiency measures are expected to support Q4 profits. We expect that we will book majority of the ransomware event-related customer settlements in the fourth quarter. We expect only minor impact from FX and working days being positive 0.1% impact on growth. Then to Q4 profitability outlook per business, we expect Create to be below the 15% prior year level. Data, Banking, and Tech Services, we expect to be at or below prior year level. We expect Industry to be at prior year level, and Care to be above prior year level of 30.1%. Back to you, Kimmo.
Thank you, Tomi. In parallel to, of course, company continuing to build resilience, in terms of the, the short-term, weakening market environment, I would like to confirm that we are absolutely also looking into the future, remain fully committed for driving our strategic transformation of becoming a, a really strong software and digital engineering-centric company. This will open up new growth, scale, and value opportunities over the next, years, especially once we'll see the economic environment also improve. Yes, currently we focus on resilience, and to be fair, in parallel our businesses are working on longer- term strategies, potential market expansion choices to be prepared for future, growth opportunities.
And as shared during this session as well, we continue to be very active, more and more capabilities, trainings, customer engagements, value propositions, repeatable, components, for client-technology components for clients to be very strong in the AI and GenAI domain. And we look forward to concluding the Tietoevry Tech Services strategic review. So this would summarize the main messages. Glad to be going into Q&A.
Thank you, Kimmo and Tomi. We are now ready for the questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Felix Henriksen. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. It's Felix Henriksen from Nordea. I have three questions. I can take them one by one. If we look at your updated full year guidance, it sort of implies a pretty weak fourth quarter of the year, with roughly minus 5% negative sales growth. Can you sort of elaborate a bit more on the Q4 growth drivers and how large of an extent the ransomware headwinds play into this growth? Thanks.
Yeah. So, thank you for your question, Felix. So ransomware is impacting, as we commented, so in this quarter, impacting tech services growth of 1%, so that you can count being approximately EUR 2 million impact. Then into Q4, as we commented, we are staying within our original estimate of the full impact of the ransomware customer settlements, which we have said are below EUR 10 million. So this is the delta that we have put into the revenue growth number for Q4. Then in the specific growth drivers for businesses, naturally, as I mentioned, there is a weakening of the market impacting all businesses. Create, we're commenting that the weakening of the market now is visible, or market weakening is visible in all markets. We rather commented in Q3 that it was in specific markets.
Now it's visible in all of the markets, and then the internal revenue driver, which remains. On banking, we're specifically highlighting the impact of the merger impacting comparable number and four percentage point headwind for Q4, which is relatively significant. On care, the budget deficits, this is, of course, where we have typically in the Q4 experienced a higher license sales towards the end of the year. The budget deficits will likely impact this quite a lot. In industry, there's a bit of a same phenomena on the public sector when we're not getting as much as we used to in at the end of year license sales. That is the expectation. Pulp paper fiber continues as Q3. On tech services, specific driver likely, compared to Q3 being the hardware/software resale, which we comment, there's negative four percentage point headwind into Q4. Those would be in summary, just going through all the businesses as well.
Thanks Tomi . That's very helpful. Then on the demand outlook, you're talking about the market having weakened in the latter part of the Q3 and the weakness also continuing into next year. What do you think will eventually change the demand for the better? A lot of companies are talking about lower interest rates and so on, but what's the key delta? What needs to happen so that the market recovers in next year?
So Felix, thank you for that good point as well. As we have commented purposefully today, that this type of weakening, we believe, is an indicator into 2025. Naturally, in addition to the macro drivers, we have the very typical ones on the interest side, interest level, and all the same ones. In addition, of course, we listen a great deal to the business drivers that we hear from our customers. I think in our case, we'll see a lot of tangible input from both the customer input, customer side on how they see the demand for their products and services picking up. And then we tend to see potential early signals from the pipeline as well.
But so these are something we, as everyone would be expecting, we are looking into continuously, very thoroughly. Currently, our thinking is, naturally, we are working through the business plans for next year. We can here mention on this call as well, that, as we have already commented, year will begin in a weaker market. We are hopeful that second half of the year, there will be a better signals and opportunities to be actually turning the corner.
Thanks. That's helpful. Last question from me regarding this exclusive process with a non-industrial buyer for tech services. Understand it's a sensitive topic, but can you provide any more color on when did these exclusive negotiations start and how they have been developing on a timeline?
Thank you, Felix, for that as well. And like you comment, it is a sensitive topic, so there's not much more to comment at this point in time. We believe for today's purposes that we have shared that we have advanced to this exclusive process with the non-industrial. That's more or less what we can say. And when one refers to exclusivity, I think everybody has. We have all our own sample sets that how the M&A and D processes work. So that's why we talk about we've advanced to this level. That's what we can say today.
Fair enough. Thank you.
The next question comes from Sami Sarkamies from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi. I have three questions. We'll also be taking this one by one. Firstly, starting from the cash flow, if you look at the year-to-date operating cash flow, it's EUR 85 million above last year. Can you elaborate on the main differences and which year is more appropriate to estimate of a sustainable level going forward?
Yeah, thank you, Sami, for the question. So, LTM free cash flow EUR 215 million, LTM operating cash flow EUR 350-ish. So, this is naturally the levels that we feel comfortable with. What we experienced last year was a bit more abnormal. We were losing on the working capital elements. Now, of course, good to note that we did experience EUR 40-ish million recovery from the AR, which has last year impacted negatively the cash flows. So, at these levels, we feel comfortable with.
Okay, thanks. And then moving on to banking, you highlighted ongoing efficiency improvement program. Can you talk about the magnitude and, you know, for example, what is the current offshoring ratio? Where are you going to take it going forward? And then maybe finally, putting things into perspective, you have 17% margin target for next year, you remain below 13%. So what are you thinking on the upside potential from these levels?
Maybe this banking and the plans, we don't want to share now any concrete euros of the plan. So what we're now doing is that we are taking out all of the strategic review-related excess cost that was built in, and then we're sort of further building competitiveness into these businesses. This includes SG&A and normal capacity as well. Then in terms of the, y ou referred to our CMD targets from two and a half years ago. These we have already earlier concluded, as you all likely remember, that we would need market recovery to reach these levels. We will naturally guide 2025 then in February once we come out with Q4.
Okay, thanks, and then finally, maybe a question regarding your forecasting ability. If we look at the segment level performance in the third quarter, there were actually a number of deviations relative to your own expectations that were given a quarter earlier. So what were some of the biggest surprises for you during the quarter?
I think there wasn't sort of, let's say, bigger surprises. So we hit our forecasted numbers June, July and August. September, we saw this decline, and then our businesses clearly indicated this softening of the market. We will not get to our forecast as they were there, they were at that point in time, and this is also the result of the guidance change that we did. I wouldn't highlight any specific other driver.
Okay, thanks. I don't have any further questions.
The next question comes from Daniel Djurberg from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead. The next question comes from Mark Hyatt from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, Kimmo. Hi, Tomi. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I've got a couple of questions, please. Firstly, could you just talk a little bit more about the weakness that you've seen in industry? It was kind of one of the more market slowdowns we saw this quarter. I know, Kimmo, you've talked about some of the specific end market weaknesses, pulp, paper, fiber, industry, and Finnish public sector. But could you talk a little bit around where you're seeing the weakness from a kind of license or SaaS side, or was it more on the services side? That's the first one.
And then secondly, Kimmo, you, you mentioned in the presentation a bit about what you're seeing in the U.S. market. You called that a key win there. Looking at your peers across the industry with exposure to U.S., it seems like the demand picture in that market, in particular, is a little bit better than what we're seeing here in Europe. So how are you thinking about the U.S. market going forward and your exposure there? Thank you.
Okay, thank you for those. So, on the industry side, as reflected upon, we want it to be clear that it's very specific in the paper, pulp, and fiber, and then, in the public sector Finland. So let me open that a bit further. Public sector Finland is the Public 360 portfolio, which is a well SaaS-ified software that we have within that business. The budgetary cuts has very tangibly impacted any new projects as very specifically in the Finnish market. And to be fair, in this Public 360 business, there is also a shift of reducing the magnitude of professional services, moving into a fully SaaS-ified model. So we are a little bit in between that transition that is also impacting, but that's a smaller component.
But the SaaS-ification, with this in mind, that the good kind of readiness from a technology standpoint, what releases we have out there, second quarter also, an AI-enabled Public 360 SaaS release, but the budgetary cuts impacting really tangibly. Second factor would be in the, in the paper, pulp, and fiber, cost level optimizations for customers, and this would be impacting the given the type of a longer-term transition towards a SaaS-ified business model, that would be impacting the combination of licenses and professional services. We follow your consideration on, on the, on the US market. We follow that naturally, separately as well. I wouldn't yet go into... We have some signals potentially in that direction that you are reflecting upon. We need a lot more proof points before we would be ready to say that there is a tangible uptick in that market.
That's helpful. Thanks.
The next question comes from Aditya Budvarapu from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Aditya Budvarapu, Bank of America, your line is now unmuted. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Kimmo, Tomi, can you hear me?
Yes, absolutely. Good morning.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, on care, I know earlier in the year you had mentioned you expected some recovery in the second half as you started to see the healthcare reforms in Finland playing out. So could you just talk about has that started to come through yet? And if you know if that could maybe be a contribution in growth in 2025. And then second, if you could just comment on again a bit more on Create. You're talking about peaking demand across markets. Could you just maybe talk about in terms of the capabilities of that business where you're seeing more or less demand? So, for example, digital engineering versus application development versus cloud or other areas. So maybe just what are customers spending on, and what are they actually being more cautious on? And then finally, banking, you mentioned the impact of the Norwegian bank merger. So when can we expect that to stop being a headwind as we head into 2025 ?
Okay, thank you. So let's take them one by one. So on the care side, just to confirm, so I think folks on the line who might see more of the economic development and the budgetary deficit in Finland, people would have seen that there's tremendous pressure in the cost-based reduction of the 21 social, so called Sote districts. So there's an enormous public, even a debate, that how quickly the cost optimization happens. So the reduction on the budget has been very tangible on the care side. So that's why we have brought that up, hopefully, very, very clearly, that these implications.
Somewhat similarly, in purely the municipality, not the nation state, fully as Sweden, of course, the participants from Sweden will super well know, while there are deficits within the municipality level, so that's quite interesting that not often has happened in the Nordic countries, end-of-year budgetary, kind of, reductions have taken place. These are the factors behind what we see. Exactly what will happen with the public sector budgets, that is, of course, unknown.
If we think about the, let's say, short-t erm, here, if I may, I'll refer, let's say, for the next couple of quarters, while the strengths we see in our Care business, when we think a bit more about the mid and long- term, currently we feel that we have high degree of competitiveness and continue to work on the expansion agenda for this business. Yes, we are currently very dependent on the three Nordic countries, no wonder we are working on that expansion. Create side, so naturally, the lesser demand is with any type of a more traditional application management services that in some markets can, from a legacy standpoint, in Create still exist. So these would be the main foundations.
I wouldn't further segment the demand between the different practices we have. Naturally, the activity level on data and AI continues to increase. I personally believe we'll see a lot more improvement in the data and AI, given that the investments into data is a prerequisite to get value out of AI or GenAI. That would be my full expectation. The cloudification and cloud-native apps development continues, but then to be fair, the budgetary reductions and cost cuts by customers, they happen across the portfolio. Those would be my comments, and- Maybe on banking, the impact is highest now in Q4, and it will gradually go away early part of 2025.
The next question comes from Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. It's Jaakko from SEB. Most of the questions have already been answered, but perhaps one follow-up on the software side and the expected softness there. Could you elaborate what kind of impact you are expecting? Will it be customers leaving or just the existing customers scaling down the number of seats or licenses there? Or will there be negative pricing or challenges to hike prices? A bit elaborated commentary on that one.
Thank you, Jaakko. So I would, on a big topic, I would like to focus on couple of factors. First, I think best describe just cost optimization that customers are doing. No, we have not seen cancellations or lost contracts, which was one of your points. No, we have not. I can also give an example that is very unusual. We would have seen a software-centric delivery from backlog being moved into early from fourth quarter to early next year. So these are just samples that call short-term cost optimization.
Okay. And then perhaps on the banking and the slower demand towards the quarter end, could you shed some light on which type of business you saw the demand softening in banking?
So just to confirm what we have commented from the, at the group level, I want to confirm that like Tomi well said, that we saw the beginning of quarter moving forward solidly, lower demand across the businesses towards the end of the quarter. And naturally, we have a number of businesses within banking. There are six distinct businesses. One is the core banking side. Yes, there can be cost optimization for customers. There's a lot happening to drive efficiency, lot of contract negotiations, price increases, but that's very Norway-dependent, so I would not generalize on the core banking.
Then when we go to the whole cards business, cards business can be dependent on the number of transactions and what will be that prediction on the number of transactions that the clients will be running, so there can be degree of volatility. Then when we start to go into our transaction processing or the payment side, there can be cost-saving optimization by banks, even around the world, so those are some of the fluctuating elements. Then when we go to wealth and credit, I would say lesser fluctuation, financial crime prevention continues to grow, high degree of demand. Why, I did a bit of an elaborative summary of the six businesses, so the cumulative sum of banking is that, also banking being at least somewhat impacted by the weakening market.
Okay, thank you very much. That's all from my side.
The next question comes from Daniel Djurberg from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. This time it seems to work. Yeah, hi, guys. I have a question a little bit on industry division. You have an ambition to reach, I think, 75% recurring revenues and close to 60% software as a service by 2025. I think you were at 48 % and 69% in 2021. Can you give us a little bit of an update if you're on track to meet this?
So the drivers, of course, that we refer to Public 360, which is a fully SaaS-ified software solution, that growth is coming, so we are definitely moving towards that direction. Now, we are not officially sort of guiding those numbers, but there's positive development towards the targeted guided numbers, which we have published, of course.
Okay, I guess we'll get an update next year. May I ask on, obviously, as you mentioned, the capital markets day back in 2022, we see some delays in the ambitions given the market downturn, which is understandable. But my question is, should we expect some of these quite high ambitions to only be delayed into, you know, 2026 timeframe, or should we rather expect a new capital markets day with new targets in 2025?
Thank you, Daniel, for that consideration as well. So I think today we'd like to then give a commentary on the, kind of, also CMD and timing. So background being now that we have a number of new executives in the company of the future core four businesses, three have started in the past eleven-month timeframe: industry, banking, and the Create. So all the businesses are working through their longer-term strategies. I've a couple of times reflected on how the considerations we will be going through on potential for market expansion. I think we have much better foundation for scalable software in the software businesses. So this is just a background, tha o ur current, clear plan is that we would have in a capital markets day during the second quarter of next year, and we would be bringing fresh views on naturally each of the businesses, and it would not be fair now to hypothesize exactly what will be the levels.
Perfect. Thank you. And may I also ask you on the order backlog? It was nicely up some 8%. Can you say more or less how large percentage of the EUR 3.2 billion that is estimated to be invoiced in 2025? And also if you have a comparable number or only the growth in that part would be great.
So that EUR 3.4 million, which is our order backlog, we don't now give out that when is it invoiced, because that in the current setting where the orders that we get in are shorter and shorter, it doesn't really give that good of an indication how the company will be growing in the coming months and quarters. So we don't sort of give that officially out, that information. But as we said, the 8% naturally is good improvement. Q3, we typically consume some of the order backlog. That's the seasonality of the Q3. Order intake in Q3 was higher than in prior years. So from that point of view, we're well off.
Yeah. Do you have a book-to-bill number to share?
So we had 0.7 book-to-bill. Last year, around 0.6.
Perfect. Yeah, and my last question would be on tech services. Obviously, you're in discussions with this non-industry player, exclusive. And my question, if it's possible to give any kind of probability for the divestment, is it like 50/50, 75/25 , or? And if not selling, would we see any negative impact on the operations, or is it yeah, nothing that would come out negatively?
Yeah, so as you would understand, we don't go into this type of speculation, unfortunately, so we leave it the way it is. Yes.
Okay, thanks.
There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
As it seems there are no further questions at this point, I would like to thank everyone and hand over back to Kimmo for final remarks.
Very good, and thank you, everybody, for participating. Thank you for your good questions and reflections. Looking forward to continuing the active dialogue, and the page we see in front of us describes that we have a big and also future-centric agenda, and yes, we'll be surfing through, hopefully, very resiliently, this lower demand era. Thank you for joining.