Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for the second quarter. My name is Arne Mjøs. I'm Chief Executive Officer. Together with me today, we also have Bent Hammer, Chief Financial Officer, where we are gonna go through the same agenda as the previous quarter. I take the highlights of the quarter and the business review section, and then Bent Hammer will join in and take the financial review and outlook. There are also chat, so if you have any questions, please post the question in the chat, and we will look into it during the Q&A session. Otherwise, you can invite Bent or myself to a meeting so we can go into more details as needed. Okay, let's start with the highlights for the second quarter.
In brief, I will say we had an organic growth of over 22%. Everything at Itera, we talk about numbers is organic. We don't have any kind of acquisition in the revenue. It's pure organic-driven company. That delivered 22% organic revenue growth and had an operating margin of 11.2%. As you know, when we talked about the last time, we have operation in Ukraine. The situation in Ukraine for our employees and also our deliveries has been really stabilized. We have come into a normal situation. We are working from home or from our offices.
A lot of the Ukrainian people are also moved back to their home cities or homes, because the situation in Ukraine, the war situation is more in the eastern part or south of Ukraine. In addition, we have also implemented three more location or offices in the Czech Republic, in Slovakia, and also in Poland. I'll come back to that one. As I told you in the first quarter, we are also close down our data center operation. We're establishing a new cloud application services unit that will do the same cloud journey that we have done for Itera Data Center for the last two and a half year.
We have also done that for some other customer, but now we are really industrializing it to make it even more effective and also onboard or support or enable a larger customer to also do the same cloud journey. That's also important to talk about in that case. Actually, we have also established a partnership with Microsoft Consulting Services, the organization that are working with the larger clients by Microsoft, because these organizations we also hired to establish the Cloud Center of Excellence at Itera. Now we're taking the partnership to a new level where we also will collaborate on sales and deliveries together. In the quarter, we also had a book-to-bill of 1.1 in the second quarter.
I just want to mention one other contract because we managed to win a strategic contract, a frame agreement with one of the public sector in Norway or units with an expected value of NOK 40 million-NOK 60 million. That is also where we are using all capabilities at Itera, our digital factory, but also world-class Cloud Center of Excellence. I come back to that also later in the presentation. Number of employees increased by 122 in the last 12 months, of which 19 in the second quarter. We paid an ordinary dividendw for 2021 of NOK 0.20 per share.
We also have the rights from the board of directors to also have an additional payment later this year. That has been the normal that we have paid dividend payments twice a year. Okay, let's look at the key figures before Bent Hammer will go into more details. As you see, the organic growth is 22%. In terms of number of employees, 23%, and also the operating margin is 11.7%. Previous quarter or the last, the second quarter in 2021, the margin was 3.2% higher.
That is because we also, after the discontinuation of the data center, we also are investing in our industrial products for cloud journey. I will also come back to that. I think maybe 2.5% of that is related to the industrial product or investment in the industrial products in the cloud journey for our customer. Okay. I go to the business review section. First of all, I just want to continue the discussion we had in the previous quarter, where we talked a lot about the Russian invasion, of course, is a key topic for everyone. Also, not least at the Norwegian Confederation of Enterprises, NHO annual conference in May.
We were invited to be a part of the keynote section because everything was about the change agenda to talk about the new security situation in Europe after the Russian invasion, but also not least how to support Ukraine. That is what we have been talking with also the businesses. It's extremely important that we continue buying more products and services from Ukraine. I believe it's more maybe one of the biggest corporate social responsibilities for business. It's not enough for all the governments to invest all the money. We also need to keep the business running in Ukraine. I visited Ukraine both in April and June. Someone told me I was the first executive to have done that.
Anyway, for me, it was extremely important to go and visit Ukraine, the cities, but also take by car traveling between the cities, where I think I traveled more than 22,000 km with car through the western part of Ukraine. I'm very proud to see how they were the life and also the work environment for our people employees. It's quite normal to go to the shelter. We are working from the shelter. If needed, we go to the shelter, but anyway, it's a full Wi-Fi connection because we are not based in the war zone, actually. There are still some missiles that are coming to some of the cities, but they are quite used to it. A lot of the people down there is not...
They don't care about going to the shelter either because they have this air siren more or less every day. Tha t's the new normal situation. They manage to balance the risk from the war, but also take care of their life and also keep running their business or the job opportunities. In terms of cybersecurity, we have implemented a new cybersecurity services in the cloud because everything we are doing is in the cloud. That is, we don't have any kind of exposure for cybersecurity because we are using the best technology. It's all based on Microsoft's technology. Also as a country, as you know, that they have been implementing, I will say, the world-class cybersecurity.
Otherwise, they have been much more destroyed by the so-called cyber attacks from Russia and other places. During my visit in June, I also visited several of the ministers in order to look at how Norway, how the Nordic countries can actually contribute to the reconstruction of Ukraine. There is actually the Marshall Plan coming in. It's about NOK 7.5 billion. It's a huge amount, and most of it will be from some of the Russian assets that are blocked in the western part.
There is a lot of discussion about how each country should contribute to the restoration or rebuilding of Ukraine. For Norway, our Prime Minister Støre and the President Zelenskyy has talked about that, Norway should take a lead position in the energy transition, both in Europe, but also not least for Ukraine. That was some of the talks that we'd have brought back to Norway. During last week, there was a huge event in Arendal, where we call it Arendalsuka, where I think it's the one of a kind meeting place for public and academia and businesses to talk about the challenges going forward. We brought in this to this Arendals Week.
We had some kind of debate in Arendal during the Arendalsuka. We invited on video the Vice Prime Minister and the Minister of Digital Transformation in Ukraine to have a speech to the Norwegian business authorities during the Arendalsuka. I just want to show you. It's a 1.5-minute, but I think it has a very strong message. Let me try to put this on. Please.
Greetings to Arendal from Ukraine. Thanks for the invitation from Itera to such an important political and business event in Norway. For almost six months, Ukraine has been bravely fighting for its future. We use every possible way to fight back and win. War is also a time for quick decisions, breakthrough tech, and the most creative solutions. The team of the Ministry of Digital Transformation has completely proved it. That's how we came up with our bravest projects. The first IT army in the world using AI tech, chatbot to report on enemy's troops, first NFT museum of war, massive Starlink usage and our army of drones. While Russia destroys Ukrainian infrastructure and blackmails the whole world with an energy and food crisis, Ukraine chooses the brand new way for the development.
I'm talking about our vision of the digital state and the most innovative tech in every economy sector, including energy sources. Tech is the future. Also, the future is about renewable energy instead of oil and gas. To boost the green shift in the energy sector, we need to digitize faster and develop the new industrial software and services. Ukraine has everything to do so. Around 300,000 talented IT specialists, solid IT companies, and willing to get rid of the old and build the new instead. Helping Ukraine to rebuild today is not only a moral choice, it's both an investment in European security and a huge business opportunity. Of course, it's important to donate and help Ukrainian refugees, but my message will be the following. In order to quickly rebuild Ukraine's economy, world shouldn't be afraid of investing in Ukraine now.
Engage Ukrainian IT specialists, take a look at Ukrainian startups and IT companies. They are eager to help any businesses in any sector in Norway. Freedom is worth fighting for, and we are worth every investment. On behalf of the state, we will provide the affordable business and financial conditions, such as our unique tax and legal space, Diia City. I do believe that digital economy is the only way to recover. Ukraine will win. It's only a matter of time. Let's bring this day closer. Thank you, Norway. Every action matters, so do act.
Okay. The key message is actually act now. We need to act. From Itera's perspective, we are looking at the energy transition. That's one of the key industry that Itera is focused on, how to empower also for the sustainable future. This is, you know, in order to be successful in the energy transition. Of course, you need to have also the digital transition in place. What Itera can do is actually we can help the customer both in terms of operating for the future, in terms of the more intelligent supply chain, in terms of having taken care of or integrate all the renewables into the new energy system. Of course, we can help to transform the workforce in terms of enabling the field worker to become more digital.
We're talking about digital field work. We have all the tools in addition to the physical world he's normally operating in. We have both what we call the digital twin solution, but also connected to the physical environment that he normally is a part of. The third area is about transition to the clean, but also not least reimagining the energy in terms of actually the energy efficiency, the scale or integrate the electric vehicle with the batteries, large big batteries for the electricity. It's a quite complex energy system that actually arising in the future. What we are doing is putting our digital factory. Instead of only having people, we are also trying to industrialize the way we are delivering our services.
That's what we have done during the two, three years, building our industrial delivery capabilities in terms of a digital factory for data-driven business to increase the innovation, speed, scale, and quality. We partner with Microsoft. We are quite agnostic, but at least also with Google Cloud and Amazon or IBM Red Hat or one of the customer that also have quite interesting technology, Cognite or Salesforce, whatever. We're quite agnostic in terms of always trying to put together the best pieces of technology in order to enable the customer business and digital strategy. That is what we are doing. In terms of Ukraine and the energy transition in Ukraine in Europe, but at least also in Ukraine, we have very strong capabilities. We talked about capacity.
Of course, Itera organic driven capacity. During this quarter, we have established three new offices. When establishing office at Itera is always according to one operating model. It's quite easy, I will say. It's not never easy to enter a new market, of course. But for Itera, as long as we keep the business model, the one Itera running at the same way in all of the places, it's quite easy to rotate the people from one location to build up a new location, another place. That is what we have done. We have established three new location, one in Žilina, which is within Slovakia, where we have office in Bratislava.
This Žilina office will be a satellite office to the Bratislava office. We have some people already living there. It's not far from Bratislava. It's two hours driving. In this place, we increase attractiveness of Itera because instead of having all the people going to Bratislava, we have established office in the near, close by, close to the Bratislava office. It's a smaller city, it's quite interesting to actually tap into a small city where not all the competitors are located or trying to fish in the same bowl, actually.
It's a nice place to actually attract people that would like to live in this smaller city, not far from Bratislava. Another office is in Brno, where we are targeting one of the largest tech universities, or it's a city with a lot of talents, not least for some specific talents that we are looking for. It's also very close to Bratislava, and you know, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, it has been quite a cultural fit, so this is also organized in the range of our Bratislava office. That we have established a new office in Brno, and last but not least, also Kraków, which is where we had some of the people, Ukrainian people that moved to Poland and Kraków just after the invasion.
We also decided to hire local people in Ukraine and build an office. That is also up and running. We start some smooth establishment of new offices. What we will see in terms of capacity, we will still continue to grow Ukraine. After the second quarter, we have stabilized situation, and we are looking forward to increase the growth during the second half year because a lot of companies are also coming to Itera and say, "I would like to stand with Ukraine. Can you help me?
Can we have people from Ukraine through Itera that work for in our digitalization project in the Nordics?" I also believe that there are more customer that would like to contribute, and IT is one of the services that's quite easy to deliver from any places. But in addition, we have also two offices in Slovakia, one office in Poland, one office in Czech Republic. We have quite good capacity and flexibility, so to actually continue our growth. That's what we did in the second quarter to invest in new offices to continue the growth in terms of independent of any kind of situation that could happen in Ukraine or not.
That is one of the area that we are working on in order to increase the capacity and supply at Itera, now also in Central Europe, in addition to Eastern Europe that we have been in the past. That is one area. The second area I will talk about, the cloud journey because we closed down our own data center, so we have been through a cloud journey. We have moved all the workload from the data center at Itera into the cloud.
Also using the relationship with Microsoft, we are also industrializing the best practice way to move more and more or help or support more and more customer to do the same cloud journey because 95% of all new digital workloads will be deployed in the cloud or on cloud-native platforms by 2025. A lot of customer are saying that we have cloud-first strategy, because the security, et cetera, is more easy to establish and use in the cloud instead of having it on the data center. There will still be customer that are working on the traditional data center, so we are also talking about hybrid cloud. That is what we are doing through this kind of assessment to try to identify what are their current situation.
We define the end target situation and looking at both the business strategy and the digital strategy and make a business plan for it, business case and also business plan. What kind of workload should you move first and last? What should you replace by a SaaS service? What should you actually just retire down the road? After this kind of planning, we will start with the migration and modernizing the different workloads. That might take 18-36 months, depending on the ambition for the customer. That is, I will say from Itera perspective, what we have actually invested in the last two years, but also after the closing down of the data center is actually to establish this kind of growth engine.
It's, for me, it's some kind of industrialized products. We also get a lot of new portfolio of customer that will actually do this kind of cloud journey. It's a large investment. It's a large use of activities in two, three years for a customer. That is the new growth engine in Itera, but we are already from the core business, we are already using delivering cloud-native application for a lot of customers. This is how this is the DNA of Itera, how we build this application. Now we are actually doing this kind of transition and help more and more customer that has said cloud first in the, in the strategy. That's a huge opportunity. That also will bring increasing managed services and also not least subscription revenue for Itera.
What we are doing is actually doing more for less. That has been a main driver. Another, I will say, doing more for less initiative is actually the low-code because according to some estimates, there is a shortage about 85 million tech workers in 2030. It's extremely high numbers. The reason for that is that all industry is actually becoming a tech industry. Everyone should be a developer more or less. It's not possible to develop or educate so many developers. What the industry itself need to do is actually to develop tools where everyone can become a developer because you don't need to write any kind of code.
It's low-code or no-code, we call it. For Itera, we established a practice and we have Ulrikke as a new practice lead, which is also a Microsoft MVP person. She is one of the recognized as the most skilled person in this area. She has this very strong passion for this and is extremely valuable for all the customer because it is much easier to build this kind of solution, like dashboard or reports or whatever, using the tools in the platform. She or this practice fits quite well with the digital factory at the scale. At Itera, we are really building this application quite fast with a high value for the customer, and the customer by themself can also build and continue building this application by their own, by themself.
That is talking about the digital factory and the cloud journey, and I just also would like to mention Microsoft. We also have a quite agnostic approach, but in this case, I just want to talk about Microsoft because we engage them to build this digital factory scale and using their best practices. Now we are taking the partnership to the next level, where we are also working jointly on sales and delivery opportunities. They have a strategy to target the largest customers. On the large customers, we will be a subcontractor to Microsoft because they will use our competences and capabilities. We are working together with Microsoft on the largest customer.
We will also get the learnings that we can bring into our digital factory and also bring it to other customer, because Microsoft Consulting Services do not have time or will or resources to work with any kind of customer. By using this kind of collaboration on sales and delivery, we really are getting the best practices, I will say, the IP, intellectual property that Microsoft has established, the learning from the leading worldwide organizations, you know. That's a very strategic competence partner. What I will say that with together with Microsoft or maybe IBM or Red Hat, whatever, we do not have any kind of limitation on what kind of customer, the size of the customer or where the customer is placed in order to compete with other large vendors.
That has been one of the driver that we are delivering services to about 20 countries around the world. We are following the customer from a Nordic perspective, but are delivering services to U.S. or to Germany, whatever, because we have this digital factory scale, and we have this partnership, so we have the scalability also in terms of our competencies and also the best new services in the cloud in order to manage to meet any kind of challenge or complex need. Okay, just to talk about two cases. One is actually from an existing client, Storebrand, which has been, I will say, taking a strong position in sustainability.
What we have done for Storebrand is actually to build a sustainability dashboard that visualize how the pension savings for business customer score, how they score on sustainability. Storebrand has actually taken sustainability as a core differentiator for the business customer. That's just one example, is a large customer to Itera, but in this case, we are really working on building products driven by sustainability. The other example is the integration and diversity, I will call it the directorate or department, whereby we are entering two-plus-two-year framework agreement with an expected value of NOK 40 million-NOK 60 million.
In this case, we are using our digital factory scale and also world-class Cloud Center of Excellence because they would like Itera to help them to develop and modernize all kind of digital registry services and ensure that this customer has the necessary expertise and capacity to establish a modern cloud-based platform. This is a case we are using all kind of industrial products. We are working in multidiscipline teams in our digital factory scale, and we are also doing this cloud journey to for this customer. It's a really exciting customer. It's quite interesting to also the value of it, I will say, because we are really spinning off more and more project for this customer. Okay, let me finish my part before Bent Hammer go into the financial.
I just want to mention the book-to-bill ratio is 1.1, as I said, and in the quarter and 1.2 for the last twelve months. We show you here the customer development, existing customer accounting for almost 90%. It's up from almost 85% last quarter. I will try to get even more new customer. I think the situation in Ukraine in the second quarter that we need to concentrate on the existing customer has some kind of impact on that. I try to go back to more or less 50% of the revenue, which is very strong KPIs versus our competitors.
We are really pushing on to have more and more customer for Itera. As you see, the share of revenue over the top 30 customer is 82%. We have a very long-term relationship with the customer staying with Itera for a long period, all of them. In terms of number of employees, we are 60 and 61 employees at the end of the quarter. If you look at the utilization ratio, the people working from Central and Eastern Europe is about 54% of the business.
If you look at the illustration at the bottom here, rolling twelve months net FTE growth is showing quite interesting growth because that is what I believe that we should build the capacity increasingly. The last twelve months should actually continue the growth. That is one of the growth engines for a consultancy company, and we do that organic, pure organic growth in Itera. I try to put this curve to even higher level, 150, maybe 250, maybe 250 people. That's the ambition we have in the long term, as long as the macroeconomic environment is quite stabilized.
We always need to look at the macro environment. Anyway, that's our driver for the growth for Itera. Let's go into the financial review. Bent Hammer.
Thank you, Arne, and good morning to you all. Yes, I said last quarter that we would strive to achieve the same type of growth figures in Q2 as we did in Q1, and I'm happy to say that we succeeded. We have 22% growth in the second quarter, and also for the first half of the year as a whole. It was particularly in our own services that we had the high growth by, with 25%, and also the subscription-based services grew by full 34%, whereas the third party contractors that we use in the business declined by 24%, I believe it was.
Overall, very positive top-line growth. We see the personnel expenses were up 27%, and that's mostly due to the number of employees rising. The cost per employee only rose by 1%. Also, other OpEx up by NOK 3.6 million. That's partially the society returning back to normal after two years of COVID. We see people go into external seminars, do some traveling again, and not the least, have some social activities, which we really longed for doing for a while now. That's good. Positive spending, I would say.
We also have some costs related to the development of three new offices. In terms of OpEx, that will probably be more dominant in the third quarter. We have now established recruiting capacity, management capacity, et cetera, to drive that growth. It will take a few months before we start catching up in terms of revenue on that spend. Depreciation up by NOK 1.2 million, and that's primarily related to the investment we did in the Cloud Center of Excellence of last year. Now being amortized.
That left us with an EBIT of NOK 21.5 million, which is 4% down from last year's quarter. An EBIT margin of 11.7% versus 14.9% in Q2 of last year. Year to date, 13.3% margin, which is 1.8 points down from last year. There are three sort of main overarching factors I would like to highlight, and that one is that we have obviously spent this second quarter to try to stabilize the situation in Ukraine, which we have done a tremendous job, I would say.
Both the management team inside and outside of Ukraine, but also our Ukrainian colleagues themselves have really, you know, shown what, you know, what great people they are. They were very much willing to stand up and fight and continue to deliver the high quality they always do to our customers, regardless of the surroundings they are in at the moment. Second, as mentioned, the investment in a new delivery capacity, it's obviously a lot of effort that goes into setting up three offices in parallel.
That's something that takes a toll on the organization, but it's progressing well. Lastly, last year we built the state-of-the-art service offerings in terms of the cloud operations. Now we have the available capacity to be ready to take on board larger customers that are ready to jump on this cloud journey. That business as well will take probably another six-12 months before it has the sufficient volume to sort of justify the capacity that we have currently and with that, we need to be able to succeed in this business.
Looking at the sequential development, we see that we have a very steady growth path. In fact, we have grown by 17.8% on average over the last 2 years. We have done so with an EBIT margin of 12.5%, which I would say is in the upper part of our industry. We're very satisfied with that. Both revenues and margins will fluctuate a bit from quarter to quarter. Q3 being the most difficult quarter for us, as we have all the summer vacations being taken in that quarter.
In terms of cash flow, we generated NOK 13 million from the operations this quarter versus NOK 23.8 million last year. Year to date, NOK 12.6 million versus NOK 24.4 million. That's slightly lower. In terms of investment activities, we had NOK 3.9 million of spend versus NOK 11.4 million last year. Last year being the investment in the Cloud Center of Excellence as the differential. In terms of finance activities, we have, as mentioned, distributed NOK 0.20 dividend payment versus NOK 0.25 last year. Last year we had a quite aggressive repurchase program of own shares.
I think we acquired a net 600,000 shares just about. This year we have net sold 600,000 shares. That's the difference there. We ended the quarter with a cash balance of NOK 27 million, which is NOK 12 million higher than last year. Looking at the rolling 12 months cash flow from operations, we are at NOK 58 million versus NOK 76 million the previous year. About NOK 22 million negative can be attributed to the discontinued operations that we have. As Arne mentioned, the board has been authorized to pay a supplementary dividend later in the year if they decide so.
An alternative could of course be to launch a repurchase program of own shares instead. We'll come back to that in the Q3 reporting, probably. Share price has along with the rest of the Nordic IT service providers at least taken a dip in the last 12 months. We are down 9% or 6% if you take into account the dividends that we have paid in the meantime as well. We currently have a holding of about 1 million Itera shares ourselves. Yep. Lastly, our financial position on the asset side, the main change is another NOK 12 million on the cash side.
Whereas on the liability side, we have a reduction of current liabilities of NOK 21 million and an increase of NOK 30 million on the equity side. We have a much stronger equity ratio now versus last year, 25% versus 12%. Yep, that's it. I'm just gonna comment a little bit about future outlook. As mentioned, this regional expansion with more offices will take a little bit of toll on earnings in the next few months before we expect this to have a positive impact in terms of growth and profitability.
We recently entered into agreement with Microsoft we can see has already started generating both leads and wins. We're currently doing some cloud assessment projects for customers, which will then in the next phase be converted to a cloud migration project and then a cloud operations subscription type of engagement. In the meantime, we have excess capacity in terms of the current business volume to be ready to do those both migrations and the future operations.
That will also in the short term, next six months or so, have a negative impact on earnings as it has for the past six months. We stand fully committed to Ukraine as an invaluable source of IT specialists that we need in the Nordics to realize the sustainable digitalization needs that the businesses have, and the energy sector as Arne mentioned, being one of them. Today is Ukraine's Independence Day. Let's hope that next year they will be able to truly celebrate this day. Today we just stand by them as best as we can.
Slava Ukraini. I wish them all the best on this day and the weeks and months to come. We are very proud of our own colleagues and support them as best we can. I'm not sure if there are any questions being posted online.
There are no questions.
There are no questions? No? Okay. We are always welcoming any one-to-one meetings you might want to have with us to discuss Itera. So just feel free to contact us and we'll set up a meeting. Other than that, we look forward to meeting you on October 25 when we present the Q3 results. Yeah. Yeah. Any closing remarks?
Yeah. Slava Ukraini.
Slava Ukraini. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Thanks a lot.