Report for Itera for the second quarter. We have the same agenda as previous quarters. I start with the highlights of the quarter and then go into the business review section. Then Bent Hammer, the Chief Financial Officer, will go into the financial review section. We are together on the last part, which is Outlook. Of course, we also have a Q&A session. It's possible for all the guys that are attending today that you can also post a question that we will look at at the end of the presentation. If there are any kind of more specific deep dive you would like to do, we can also arrange a separate meeting for that. Okay, let's start with the highlights for the second quarter. I will just start with the financial part because our financial performance is still affected by the soft market.
We see all the uncertainty and the geopolitical discussion. That's still also impacting our industry. What we also see in this quarter, just to remind you that in the second quarter this year, we had an easy period while it was in the first quarter last year. That always has some kind of seasonality impact on the financial performance. What I also would like to mention, which I think is extremely important also when there's a soft market, is actually that we have achieved record high revenue from new customers because not all the existing customers are growing at the same pace as it was when this was a normal market. We have managed to really increase the new numbers of customers, which is also important that we have a larger customer base to continue the growth. That is something I will also deep dive during my session.
The second topic I would just want to put your attention on is actually the Enter Ukraine with Itera initiative that we have talked about that also started to have impact on Itera. The focus in this quarter is actually that we also are taking huge steps into the defense sector. The Enter Ukraine program or initiative is actually based on a quite interesting business model where we have both consultancy, billable consultancy, but we also have some quite interesting risk-reward business models. I'll go back to a little more about that later in this presentation. We really have strong progress in that area. Last but not least, of course, because of the market situation, we also need to continue improving our effectiveness in the company. One of the big opportunities here is actually to apply AI integration internally in the processes.
We also need to continue looking at the overhead and the operating spend expenses of the group to optimize even further. These are the three main topics for this quarter. If I look at the figures in brief, as I said, the second, the ESA was in the second quarter. We achieved NOK 203 million, which is year-over-year - 9% compared to NOK 224 million this second quarter last year. That also has an impact on the EBIT margin. That was 2.1% for the quarter. On average for the first year, we have about 5.9%. If you look at the revenue stream, it's actually a decline of 4% on average because if you take the first half year, you can have more comparable figures with the previous year. If you look at the operational cash flow, it hasn't been that impacted by the decline on the growth.
We still have very strong operational cash flow of NOK 68 million compared to NOK 76 million in the previous quarter. Operational cash flow is still very strong in Itera. That's one of the key focuses. We managed to continue paying the dividends for your shareholders, right? The number of employees has been quite more or less flat. I will say it's about 702. We still also need to adjust the capacity to make sure that we have the capacity needed according to the growth figures that we see today. Some comments about the market view. As I said, the demand is, of course, depending on the uncertainty in the market. I think that's also quite common for most of the players in our industry. That means that these longer sales cycles and also reduced visibility.
There are some areas that are growing quite well, which is also, for example, the cloud native, the cloud transformation, and the data-driven solution. Now with more and more AI capabilities, we also see that in Itera, that we also, in terms of what we have called the cloud application center or cloud application services in Itera, is showing quite interesting growth figures. Some part of the business is growing quite well and others we need to adjust and be more careful with the capacity going forward. As I mentioned, defense, of course, because of the security situation in Europe. Defense has become a very high growth market. Itera is also taking big steps into that, not at least also driven by the situation and the war in Ukraine. That's some topics I just want to mention in the beginning. I go more deep dive into the business review section.
As you see, we as a company are based on Nordic roots, but quite interesting European presence. We have been in Ukraine for 17 years and stayed together with Ukraine. Ukraine is really a big opportunity for Itera because it's a responsibility to support in the fight for our freedom. Not at least, Ukraine is also a very interesting area to take insights from different transformation or innovation they have achieved in different sectors and bring it to Europe. It also has a lot of business opportunities by supporting Ukraine. That is also part of the mission. If I go to the business model we have in Itera, this is something we presented in the first quarter that we are saying that we have two main offers.
One is actually the classical digitization services where we focus on financial services, energy and industries, public sector, and now also extended with defense and airspace. Airspace is also very related to defense, that's why we combine it into one area. The other one is actually the responsible business where we provide expert advisory service for businesses that are seeking to enter, rebuild, and learn from, and not at least protect Ukraine. That's why we have this Enter Ukraine with Itera initiative I will return back to you shortly. Let's start with the digitization services. I just want to put your focus on the sector development of Itera because if you look at the three largest sectors of Itera, we have the financial services, as you see, has been the largest one, but now it's a little reduced to 40%.
I think that's a big share and quite interesting because we are increasing energy, which is almost 25%. Then we have more or less a flat share of the revenue connected to the public and organization. You see the order is also increasing and order is also where we have today the defense sector of Itera. After a while, I think we will also increase the public and organization because I think that will also contain the defense sector later. In any way, the reason for having this sector focus is actually that we get deep insights about the industry and then it's much easier to combine the business knowledge and all the digitization services to help the customer in the transformation to a more efficient and also more innovative company. One of the key topics in our industry, but all over the place, I will say, is AI.
I just want to mention that AI is also really taking huge, huge steps in our industry. We talked about, and I think everyone knows everything about some kind of assistant. You have the co-pilot or whatever. We are also having what we call agents, which is digital agents or AI agents, whatever you call it, that really also redefine how we build our software. A digital agent is actually, I will say, some kind of software-based entity that can perform tasks or make decisions or interact with users and other systems. What we see is actually that around each human or each person, there will be, we call it agents that extend the people capabilities by having software that develops or performs tasks on behalf of the human being or makes decisions on behalf of the being. We are talking about going forward, we are talking about human-agent ratios.
For each person, there will be also another virtual person or software that supports that person into a more efficient or doing more with less, what we talked about earlier. This is really a big step for the industry in building the software, but also the impact that the software has on every industry. For Itera, as a digital company, it's extremely important to embed AI all over the place in Itera. What we have done in Itera during the quarter is actually we have established a group-wide AI-enabled team to empower every part, every person in Itera to get the knowledge and the tools that are needed.
We are also building some very interesting tools in, for example, the area of how we analyze the complexity of the software portfolio of the customer and how we can use this to actually help the customer to accelerate the transformation into a cloud environment where we have much more innovation in terms of capability than they have on the traditional classical on-premise environment. This is, of course, extremely important. We are also using this in order to improve the efficiency of Itera. We can also use a lot of these processes of this kind of tooling or agents in our internal processes so we can be even more effective. That is what we also talked earlier today about improving the operational effectiveness of Itera. We need to also use this kind of technology to be even more effective in Itera.
I switch to some of the important milestones for Itera. One is actually we managed to close a frame agreement with Statkraft IT. Statkraft is, as you know, one of the largest European renewable companies. We are very happy to sign a contract with Statkraft because this is a large opportunity coming forward. Having this agreement in place is much easier for Itera to provide our services for such a large international company. That's one of the major milestones in this quarter. Another one, I will also mention that we also managed to win a frame agreement with Bane NOR in the testing capability area. This is, of course, an important step for Itera to also piggyback or to establish a relationship with such a large company. We should also go through a large digital transformation.
We're very happy that we also managed to build to win one of the categories that was in this frame agreement tender. Now we start also to build a relationship with Bane NOR and also get another sector credibility. As I said in the beginning, it's 13% of the revenue of Itera. This is another step to also build a stronger position in the public domain. I just want to mention that if you look at the international position of Itera, I just also put your attention on Iceland, which has been very successful for Itera. In this case, we have entered a frame agreement with Digital Iceland for web app development, which is a multi-year public sector engagement with quite large engagement. What is important is actually that we also build a relationship into the public domain in Iceland.
We are also having some other interesting partnerships with the tech firm Lagaviti. We are joining the Icelandic energy cluster. In Iceland, we are really increasing our footprint with more customers also in the public sphere. What is also interesting is actually that we are also extending our local presence because we really see that this is really growing fast in the Itera group. We can support it with more local capabilities so we can also grow even faster going forward. That is one of the areas, despite the decline in the group. I think Iceland is showing quite well progress. I just want to mention that. Another one is actually Pelagia. This is in the cloud transformation topic. I mentioned that cloud application services of Itera are really improving.
One of the typical cases is actually we help Pelagia in the seafood industry that is having a lot of factories and is really highly effective in the operation. Most are running on an on-premise environment. Now they will make some kind of transition in a smart way to cloud. We've done this assessment and are looking forward to the next step where we are also transforming in a smart way the on-premise into a cloud operating model where we also integrate IT and OT systems. This is also another quite interesting case in that area where we have just done this kind of first assessment. We're looking forward for the next step to really move this transformation for all the factories at Pelagia into a cloud operating model. That's the first part. I call it the digitization services.
If I start to go into the other part, I call it responsible business, just to make you understand what we are talking about because this is also redefining Itera because it's a new business model where we have a business advisory, billable business advisory on one hand, but we also have a risk-reward model. After this full-scale innovation, we started, as you remember, with a lot of work effort for Ukraine, for example, bringing the bridges to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. We have done energy supply by Bergen Engine that they have electricity generators that provide energy to Ukraine, whatever. These are some kind of examples that we've already done. What we see is actually that the portfolio of this kind of engagement is really expanding.
In total, if I look at all the activity on the existing and the opportunities we have discussed, we are almost talking about NOK 10 billion. This is something we have spent time on the last three and a half years, and we really see that it started to have impact on revenue. Still, we don't have every quarter where we have this kind of additional revenue. As long as the portfolio is increasing, we will have a more sustainable model that brings in revenue every quarter. One of the examples, just to put your attention on that, is actually we have talked about Moelven as a case. Moelven has been working together for almost two years. We have spent a lot of time together with Moelven. We are doing some billable work for Moelven as a company.
In terms of these major projects for Moelven, it's actually to provide housing capabilities, building modules, whatever, from Moelven into Ukraine. What we have done in the first half year together with Moelven is actually to make the first pilot in the Pyrodenko region, which is about one hour driving a little north of Kyiv, where they have built the first palace. It's free of charge for four apartments there. What we managed to do now during the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome, we managed to establish an LOE between Vlastimisto and Moelven in terms of delivering 1,350 facilities, apartments, I mean, to a region in Lviv. In this region, they are really building a future city of 47,000 people. This is the first agreement where we will establish, deliver 1,350 housing apartments to this region that are really building from scratch.
In this case, we have got some billable consultancy, but now we are also starting to get some risk-reward revenue because now these start into real projects where all the investment we have done together with Moelven is starting to also pay off and be recognized in the revenue stream of Itera. This is just to show you about this NOK 10 billion portfolio that we have. Now we have NOK 1.5 billion already in terms of contracts, and we will piggyback on that going forward. In terms of the energy space, I think there is more than already in place, almost NOK 1 billion. Altogether NOK 2.5 billion. It's about 25% of the portfolio is really in place with either already delivered services or that will also have impact going forward. This is quite interesting going forward that this will also impact the revenue stream for Itera.
By doing this, it's not only for the risk-sharing model, it's also bringing in value for other kinds of digitization services. Another example is actually this partnership, Ukrainian region partnership that launches a platform for post-war recovery to develop what we call a Blaho for Communities. It's some kind of Ukrainian word. Blaho is actually, let's say, welfare for communities. We are building a digital platform for enabling transparent, targeted, and very accountable support for the reconstruction of small towns and rural areas in Ukraine. We are building these digital services, all digital platforms, so all kinds of donors are seeing that the value, the donors that bring value to Ukraine is done in a very transparent, targeted, and accountable way. This solution will be launched in October.
We have built this from scratch together with this, and there will come some consultancy services going forward as long as this model will be successful in the market. This is also another example of our support for Ukraine that also has a revenue impact over Itera going forward. I just also mentioned that defense is an extremely important sector for Itera. We won't make all the announcements with what kind of customer that we make an agreement on because of the safety of being in Ukraine. It is important that we can't tell anything about the very concrete stuff we are doing. I will say that in this second quarter, we have made a framing agreement with one of the larger defense players in the Nordics.
This is also an area where we can help the player and the industry itself in terms of delivering trust and secure digital backbone or empower personnel and modernized facilities, whatever, as you see from the slide. This is also based on the knowledge we have from, I will say, the most advanced warfare situation. We are piggybacking on this experience and also make sure that when we are building the European military sphere, we also make sure that we are also modernizing everything based on all kinds of learnings from the war in Ukraine. Also, during Arendalsuka, which is the largest event where the politicians, business leaders, NGOs, academy, and the public in general are meeting to discuss different kinds of topics, we managed to have focus on how Norway can learn from the war in Ukraine.
On my right side, you see the Chief of the Norwegian Army, Eirik Kristoffersen. We have representatives from NATO. We have representatives from the politicians and also the Head and the CEO of Kongsberg on the left side. This is showing you that we, as a company, based on our presence and our Enter Ukraine with Itera capabilities, are really able to really bring this knowledge into the defense sector and also see how we can support the players when they take a position because they need to build more and more of the capability in Ukraine. This is just to show you an example that this kind of Enter Ukraine with Itera is not only about the unilateral support. The responsible business is very strong at Itera, as you know.
This is one of the advantages that we have for the people and the customer that provide value or engage with Itera. We're also looking at how we can extend the business dimension of it because Ukraine would like to have business. We need to keep the economy running. This is also from Itera perspective. It's not only supporting. We need to also make sure that all the time we are spending on this is also adding value in our company. Okay, let's finish with some numbers that you already know before I let Bent Hammer go into the financial part. As you see, we have an order intake of NOK 0.8 million in the second quarter. On average, you always need to look at this figure as an average of the last 12 months. It was NOK 1.1 million.
Comparing to the revenue growth, as I showed you, this is quite okay. For the time being, we would like to, of course, go to NOK 1.5 million, NOK 1.2 million, whatever. As you see, some of the numbers, some are new ones and others are existing ones. This is quite interesting to look at that we have a very interesting company or customer in our portfolio. As I mentioned, one of the key takeaways from this, look at the figures on the left side. Share existing customer, 82%. That means 18% of the revenue in the second quarter is based on new customers that we achieved the last 12 months. We are thinking about that. That kind of number is more or less quite normal in the area of 4%- 5%, 6%.
In this quarter, we registered that we have 18% of the revenue, which is new for Itera. That also has impact on the top 30 customers, which is down from 82% of share of the revenue to 73%. They are not growing at the same pace as it was in the past. That's why it's so important to also extend the customer base with new customers. When the market is actually maturing in a more normal way, I will say both the existing customers that is 73%, but also the existing 30%, the top 30 customers represented 73% will also start growing faster. We have a much larger customer base that should manage that Itera comes back into quite interesting growth pace. That's just to make a comment on that. If we look at the employees, as you see, we are careful with hiring.
We are reducing net by some people. We also see that there are some very large opportunities. There might also be some increase depending on the contracts that we see. At least in some of the national organizations or some of the opportunities that we see in Ukraine, for example, we also believe we will scale up again after a period that we have downscaled the capacity based on the demand in the market. I think that was all from my end. I hand over to Bent Hammer. That will bring us into the financial review section. Thank you.
Thank you, Arne, and good welcome. Oh, welcome to you. As Arne alluded to, we hoped for a better quarter this quarter. I said that the trends that we saw emerging in Q1 were on the positive note. However, those seemed to take a dip after all the geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty reemerged again. That coincided with us having three major projects that employed some 20+ consultants that coincidentally ended at the same time, which is really a normal course of our business. Because of the market at this point, it took some more time to redeploy these resources into new assignments. That meant we had a quite significant dip in our utilization in the first part of the quarter, which only reemerged at the end of the quarter. Entering into Q3 is at a better place than last year.
The utilization isolated in Q3, sorry, Q2 was below our expectations. That meant we ended up with a revenue of NOK 202.9 million in the quarter, which is 9% lower than last year. Part of that effect is the Easter effect, which provides fewer working days. As a lot of our revenue comes from hourly work, the number of working days is an important factor in terms of our ability to generate revenues. When we have the lower utilization, that trickles down pretty much to the bottom line as well, at least on a short-term basis. On a long-term basis, we're able to adjust the organization. Short-term, and when we have good prospects of returning back to better utilization, we will be temporarily stuck with a higher cost base. That is reflected in our EBIT of NOK 4.4 million in the quarter.
Neutralized for the Easter effect, if you look at the H2, we have NOK 25.4 million in EBIT, which is quite a bit below last year's NOK 40.3 million. The soft market that we have experienced in the last couple of years has put pressure on our leader rates. At the same time, there doesn't seem to be so much pressure on the war for talent because there are a lot of companies insourcing IT competitors as well. We're not only competing with our competitors, but also other potential customers of ours for the same people. There is a pressure on margins resulting from that. That means we have to continuously look into our cost base and become more effective. AI is a tool also for us internally to achieve that.
Looking at the sequential development, as you can see from the graphs, the last couple of years have not been very positive, not for Itera, but not for the marketplace as a whole. The underlying demand for IT services is still great. There's a lot of things that need to be digitized. In order to make proper use of AI, you have to have your data in order. There are a lot of projects out there that we are waiting for customers to embark on. We have a lot of potential opportunities for margin expansion as well as revenue expansion related to the pipeline we see. Just getting normal utilization again, there is a huge upside in terms of margins from that. We have new markets for us that we have not fully gotten up to speed to explore yet. There are plenty of opportunities there.
Lastly, we have this Enter Ukraine with Itera initiative where we are uniquely positioned. That could provide us with some significant both revenues and profits from that in the next few years. Looking at breaking down the revenue by type, we see that the main issue has been the revenue from our own consultants, which is down 9% to NOK 166 million. I think I've gone through the explanations for that. On the subscription side, we continue to grow, not much in this quarter, but that is a constantly growing part of our business. We had some large projects involving subcontractors that stopped in Q1. Revenue from third-party services was actually down 50% compared to last year, whereas we grew other revenue by 16% to NOK 10 million. In other revenue, there are also things like Azure consumption that is on a steady growth path. Cash flow is doing well.
We delivered NOK 20.8 million from operations in Q2 compared to NOK 28 million of last year. For the rolling 12 months, we've delivered NOK 68 million versus NOK 76 million in the prior 12 months. We're not investing much. This quarter, it was NOK 2.7 million compared to NOK 1.9 million in Q2 of 2023, which I think was a bit lower than the normal. NOK 2.7 million is pretty much our normal rate. For the last 12 months, we've invested NOK 9.6 million versus NOK 16.6 million the year before. In terms of financing activities, this is pretty much driven by dividends. We paid out a dividend of around NOK 16 million in Q2, a bit less than the year before. All in all, we've spent NOK 51.5 million in the last 12 months on financing activities versus NOK 81.7 million in the last 12 months.
If we compare this to our earnings, our EBITDA, we see that we have a very strong conversion of this into cash. In fact, this quarter, we were above 100%. We can also see that we've had an upward trend in the last couple of years. On average, some 90% conversion rate, which I think is very strong. It shows that we don't need a lot of working capital in order to sustain our business. This is an important part of our business because generating cash, free cash, means that we can repay our shareholders as fast as possible to sustain our dividend policy. Coming to this now, we paid an ordinary dividend based on the 2024 results of NOK 0.20 per share. The board was again authorized to approve a supplementary dividend later in the year, as we have been accustomed to over the last several years.
Share price has had a poor development in the last year for us and many of our competitors as well, unfortunately. That is part of the sentiment in the market, I guess, that it's been on the slow side for a couple of years now. If we include the dividend payments, it's down 15% at the end of June. We hold ourselves a bit shy of a half million owned shares in stock. That's it for the financials for Q2. Looking ahead, as mentioned, we still believe that there's a lot of untapped demand out there. It's now a matter of getting the customers to start investing at a larger scale again. As I said, AI is a driver of this because you need to prepare your organization and your data and your systems in order to fully take advantage of AI.
As you all know, it's more than just a language model. It can be used in many different ways to both become more effective, but also to drive new revenue streams for customers. This entire Enter Ukraine with Itera initiative where we have entered into several contracts with different players in the Nordics and in Ukraine holds the promise of generating some, I would say, quite substantial revenue and profits for us in the next two or three years. It will not come at an even pace because we have this risk-reward business model embedded into most of these that could suddenly give us a spike in revenue in any given quarter.
Related to this is the traction we now have in the defense industry where we are able to utilize our position in Ukraine to get quite unique feedback from what is working live in Ukraine and use that to constantly drive innovation in terms of defense technology. That's something we're exploring more and more. Our main focus, though, remains now on profitable growth and still generating cash. I think we will see better results going forward. I think we're over the worst slump now. I think the market will slowly, maybe, but gradually come back. We will do our best internally to make sure that we're in a fit state in terms of cost effectiveness. All right. Thank you. I don't know if there are any questions posted online.
It actually came in a question in this very second. Can you please comment further the surprisingly major sector drop in financial services?
Yes. It's actually, I will say, it's going back to one of the larger customers we had in 2024. We got a drop there, and it's not fully back to 100% the level we had. That's one of the scenarios. Of course, when we are also increasing the capacity on the other one, you know, it also will have some impact. I will say the financial services, both banking and NCDs, a lot of opportunities there. It's not that they're not downscaling. I think there's sometimes a project that's finished, but they're also looking into AI integration as a new way of innovation. I think that's more normal that it will have some up and downs also in that area. From Itera's perspective, we have in the past, we believe we were a little too much focused on one sector.
I think it's more 40% is quite a major part of Itera still, right? One of the opportunities that we're also seeing from Ukraine is actually in the financial sector. I think that will also, depending on some quarter going up, there have been trends going down because we have that focus on energy. Now we also focus on defense. It will be, I will say that it will be more level to more not 50% or 46% as it was in the past. I think it maybe will stand on the 40%, I guess.
Thank you. Other than that, I think you have explained very well this quarter. No other questions.
All right. The next time we meet, when is that? Is it the 24th of October, I think? Yeah. If you have some questions before that, just reach out to Bent and myself. We are really happy to meet you and discuss with you. If there's anything you need to have more information, we are ready to support you on that. Thank you.
Absolutely. Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.