Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for the Third Quarter for Itera. My name is Arne Mjøs. I'm the Chief Executive Officer. Together with me today is Chief Financial Officer Bent Hammer. I will start with the highlights of the quarter, and then walk through the business review section. Bent Hammer will look into the financial review and the outlook. At the end, we have a Q&A session. If you have any questions, please use the chat. We will pick up the questions and take it in the last section. Okay, let's start with the highlights for the third quarter. Q3 in brief, we delivered 23% growth. Everything is organic in Itera, so...
We had an operating margin, EBIT margin of 5.9%. We continue to ramp up our new offices. We have three new offices and also our cloud capabilities to increase our international scalability. The profitability for this quarter is actually impacted about NOK 5 million in the establishment of the new offices. Overall, it's a very strong quarter for Itera according to our plan. We also have a good traction on new customers. In this quarter we had a framework agreement with Agder Energi and a subsidiary, Entelios, is important part of Agder Energi. We entered into a large end-to-end agreement to build a new customer solution.
In terms, we have talked about the transformation from data center to the new Cloud Center of Excellence. We also see a very strong pipeline of cloud migration and cloud modernization opportunities. Our operation in Ukraine is running as normal, despite the new, you know, the drones that are seen, the attack by the Russian or Putin, I will say. We are running quite normal. It doesn't have any kind of impact on our running business in Ukraine. We're also ready to continue our growth in Ukraine. In Sweden, we have appointed Joachim von Ekensteen as a new CEO to establish a larger footprint in the Swedish market.
We have a book-to-bill in this quarter from this, at, 0.8 in the third quarter, and that's 1.2 the last 12 months. The number of employees is increased by 112 last 12 months, of which 40 in the third quarter. The last but not least, for you investors, we have a supplementary dividend for 2021 of NOK 0.30 per share. That will be paid out the fourth of November. Okay, if you look at the key figures, as you see, we have 23% in the growth in the third quarter. Year to date is 22%, so we delivered NOK 171 million in this quarter. The growth in employees represent 90%. 19, yes.
Also, the operating margin, it was 5.9% in this third quarter, and year to date is 11%. The third quarter is normally the weakest quarter because of the summer vacation. When also in this quarter we have this investment and established three new offices in one quarter, so that has some kind of impact of at least the 3% in margin itself. Let's move into the business review section. Itera has 13 offices now, after these three new offices in Kraków, Brno, and Žilina. That is three new offices after the invasion in Ukraine. The strategy for Itera is working with Nordic-based companies and follow these companies around the world.
We're delivering services on a very customer-centric way to 20 countries around the world. As you see at the upper right corners, we are also delivering a lot of services to the U.S. market. The reason for being able to do that as a quite small company is actually because we have a very strong distributed delivery model, which is today, you know, enhanced into what we call a Digital Factory at scale. We had the very recognition by the Global Sourcing Association in 2018 that we was the best in the world that has this kind of distributed model based on the Nordic culture. As you know, very flat, you know, agile team, flat organization, et cetera.
That is why we had this top rated by the international organization, Global Sourcing Association. That has been the model for Itera. Also if you look at Itera's model itself, the growth model we are talking about, it's only organic growth. We don't have any kind of acquisition in the company because we really believe in the culture. In this case, we have 13 offices, so we see extremely important so that we have one Itera culture across the border. The strategy is actually based on a very customer-centric and approach. We follow the customer around the world in selective industry, especially with industries where the Nordic country has a very strong position, for example, banking and finance or energy.
In this case, we managed to grow together with this customer along their, you know, international presence. By that we also increase our scalability, both in terms of customer market but also talents market, talent pool. As I said, in this quarter, we established three new offices in Central Europe that increase the scalability on supply side of Itera. In addition, we hired a new person, the head of Sweden, that also access the new market in Sweden. When you have these scalabilities, it's extremely important that you grow as one company, and also that you have a very focus on the people growth.
That is the most important, that you start with the growth of every employee, because when the employee grow, then the customer growing, and then also the company is growing. That's why we have this fundamental approach to have a very strong culture that everyone like to grow, because then also the company is growing. Having this kind of distributed delivery as a part of the DNA of the company, that's not saying it's we just do it now and then, it's a really key part of the way we operate our model itself. In addition, if you look at the circle to the left, it's actually that we also have another scalability in terms of more package offerings and also industrial services.
That's why we established this kind of Digital Factory at Scale and Cloud Center of Excellence, but also all the kind of more offerings, value offerings, instead of in terms of, I will say, a deep, industry knowledge whatever, or, offering for, data analytics whatever. These are really increasing the speed for our customer, for Itera, but also reusability and also more recurring revenue or subscription-based revenue. That again increase the scalability of customers and talent again. Everything is about growth, growing the people, growing the company, growing the customer and growing the company. We really believe that today we can really look at the long-term target of increasing the capacity in terms of FTEs by 200-350 people.
We were running at 112 people in the last 12 months, but we really believe that we can increase that to about 200 to something between 200 and 350. That is where you again generate the value in addition to the scalability of the software itself, that this Digital Factory will also have a large contributor to the scalability of the people of Itera because you're not only depending on the people itself. One of the major investment I've done this last two years, I think, and we still will have three to 12 months, we are going to break even to have this because it's still economic investment case. We are doing this because we are taking a pole position in this area.
Everyone need to do the same that we have done in our own data centers that we move more and more of the capacity or the workloads into the cloud. We have established a very mature processes in terms of assessment, in terms of establishing digital strategy and all kind of cloud journey execution, migration and modernization of the portfolio. That's a large portfolio application and engagement. They're using 12 months to three years, whatever, in order to make this kind of cloud journey completed. That's a large opportunity and more and more customer going in that direction.
When you are in the cloud and most of the new application are building as a cloud-native application, where we have this Digital Factory scale itself, where we have a lot of application today that are really building from scratch into as a part of the cloud, where all the kind of services are available and all kind of innovation are coming into this platform every day. That's one of the component of the growth engine. The other component I will talk about is actually the supply side. As I said, we are increasing the capacity in Itera by establishing three new offices, one in Brno in Czech Republic, Žilina in Slovakia, and also Kraków in Poland. This is just to show you one video to establish the Brno office, as you see. Yes.
As you see, there's a lot of things we need to do in terms of recruiters, establish the office, administration, also building the brand, onboarding the people. It costs some money when you establish. We estimated to about NOK 5 million in the third quarter. That will also have some negative impact also in the fourth quarter, but less because now it's starting running the operation. We have hired people, and they started to deliver services from this location. As I said, our ambition is actually to manage to long term to increase the organic net increase of Itera by 200- 350 FTEs.
If you multiply that by maybe NOK 200,000 per employee, then you can really see the scalability of the model in terms of EBIT growth annually. That is what we are targeting, that we are building very strong model, growth model that based on organic very complete organic setup. According to this McKinsey saying that the shareholder value for organic driven companies is larger than the companies that are based the growth on a lot of acquisition. We really believe that this will have a material impact of the value for the shareholder at Itera also moving forward. Yes, we have talked about a lot of Ukraine.
As you know, we are quite well established in Ukraine. We went into Ukraine 14 years ago. Ukraine, as you know, was released from the Soviet Union 31 years ago, so we have a lot of knowledge about this country. We are doing also quite tremendous job, I will say, in order to look at how could we actually support Ukraine in terms of when they look at the rebuilding of Ukraine as part of the European Union, because every country need to participate in the rebuilding. The Prime Minister of Norway, Støre, and President Zelenskyy has agreed that Norway's contribution should be in the energy sector.
What we did in September when I was in Kyiv then, we had a very comprehensive meeting with the energy ministry, Ministry of Energy of Ukraine. As you see, the energy minister and his three deputy minister were attending. We also invited Rystad Energy to outline a process where we can establish a fast-tracking cooperation between Norway and Ukraine in the energy sector. Because Ukraine and the EU is actually building, establishing a Marshall Plan that has some estimated to $349 billion in order to rebuild Ukraine.
We are focusing a lot on the digitization part of the energy sector for Ukraine, because Ukraine will also be a quite large contributor to the energy supply to Europe as soon as the war, you know, is stabilized or are completed. This is a great opportunity, and the planning for this is really happening now. They're not waiting for the war or what they call the war end or what they call the victory. They are talking about the pre and after, before and after the victory. That's as you see that the Ukrainians themselves have a really strong belief that it's possible to win the war in some way or the other.
That you can also look at the map here, because on the left side you see the map for on the 20 of March. I was visiting Ukraine a few days after that. It was around the 4th of April. That is, was a time that when Putin announced that he will withdraw his troops north of Kyiv. But at that time, I was also traveling from Lviv to Kyiv, and I saw that the most of the part or most part of the Ukraine was untouched in terms of you know this attack from Russia. You need to look at Ukraine as a large country. If you look at the western part is the size of Germany, and the eastern part is the size of U.K.
If you think about Ukraine, the western part is a large country like Ukraine, like Germany. That this area, yes, there are some attacks here and there. It's very small, you know, impact of the country. They're really united to manage to also win this war together with the support from EU and also NATO. If you look at the right side, that's the current situation where you have the red color is actually the new area where the Russia has taken or the rest part where the after the invasion. It's still a quite small area that they have occupied. Most of the country, despite the drones, is untouched.
It's about 1 million people that do not have electricity. Again, it's 45 million people in Ukraine. What is important is actually to, when we look and read the newspaper, we need to also look at the opportunities because the country, like the western part, size of Germany is more like business as usual. That's important that we keep running the economy in Ukraine. Because they need us. We can't take, you know, have 45 million refugees. It's extremely important that we manage to also look at the opportunity and not being, you know, yeah. Also look at the opportunities, despite this kind of dramatic situation we read in the newspaper every day. That's why I talk so much about the energy sector.
It's a big opportunity in Ukraine, but also as a part of the green transition of the energy sector, where Norway has a very strong, or the Nordic region have a very strong position in Europe, but also globally. That's the way to, for Itera to follow this customer, these big, large businesses in, through the whole value chain. There's a lot of use cases where we are actually using our Digital Factory scale to really, you know, increase the speed and also reusability and also more and more subscription because they have built these capabilities, so it's manageable to actually deliver services to another country around the world. This factory has, we have invested about NOK 30 million over time, so it's a quite big investment for Itera.
Now we are really seeing good impact on it that we will have also a large impact on the growth. We are talking about 23% in this quarter, and we really believe we can manage 30% growth because we also will have more effect from also the Digital Factory Scale and also Cloud Center of Excellence. Just to mention one customer in this area in the energy sector is actually Entelios, which is Norway's largest electricity supplier to the corporate market. They also have a strong position in the Nordic. They have offices in nine countries around in Europe, so a quite international company, and they have selected Itera as their digitalization partner.
We are using our Digital Factory scale with a full-fledged team, a multidiscipline team from Itera, where we are building a new customer solution, where the customer have data about their consumption, so they can set energy measures, efficiency measures, whatever, in order to be able to reduce the electricity cost and also strengthen their financial finances and also then not at least the sustainability goals. It's quite, you know, important today that you increase efficiency and not at least for the corporate market in Norway, but also in the Nordics. It's a very exciting customer that we won in the third quarter. We really believe that this customer can grow to one of the larger customer of Itera.
Another customer we have mentioned earlier is actually DNV, where we are working with the electric grids. Through DNV, they have a very strong software position, products in the U.S. that are used by 150 of the larger electricity suppliers in the U.S. and Canada. It was based on a desktop solution. Now we have modernized that application, built it in the cloud, in Azure, and it was launched now on the user conference in Oregon, where one of the key stakeholder Yuri from Itera in Ukraine was present.
He made a very strong presentation about how we have built this application also during the wartime, because he and his team has really been impacted in some way of the war, but it hasn't any kind of impact on the delivery to the customer. The customer or the audience were very, you know, happy to have Yuri presenting his work and the team's work, but also because he was a Ukrainian, I think they were applauding. The audience responded with a two-minute standing ovation, as I said on the slide here. It's extremely well appreciated that Ukraine are supporting DNV and the U.S. market in the building is also important in terms of asset management monitoring of the electric grid. We also have a customer we mentioned in the second quarter.
We had a framework agreement with the Directorate of Integration and Diversity, IMDi, that is responsible for implementing the government integration policy. In this case, we are using the Digital Factory at scale, I mean, where one of the projects we call the Jobbsjansen program, where we are working on how to increase the employment among the immigrant women who are far from the labor market. We have a goal that for the project that about 7% of all the participants either go into the work or some kind of education for the immigrant women.
It's extremely important project that also have a big value for the country, but not at least for the women that is not a part of the working life today. That's another project that are using our Digital Factory at Scale. I mentioned that we are increasing our footprint in the Swedish market, so Joachim von Ekensteen is appointed as our new CEO for the Swedish entity. We will increase our market share and also build the local organization in Sweden. We are about 40-50 people that are delivering to the Swedish customer from remote locations. Now we are building a local footprint that we also have more of a hybrid model that Swedish people located in Sweden are working very close to the customer.
We have the distributor model with the people or talents from other places at Itera. Again, using our Digital Factory at Scale, it doesn't matter where the people are located. He will look at the opportunities to build this organization locally, but not least use the scalability as such in Itera. I just want to also mention our design and user experience unit because that's also quite interesting story itself. It's named Experience, and they are really taking the pole position by developing and hiring the top talents in the market. This unit is delivering service design, business design, brand innovation, interaction design, and digital design..
I will say is most creative people in Itera, but they are also very strategic because they are bringing Itera to a higher level discussion with the customer in terms of working with the business and product agenda and creating higher value by delivering the optimal experience, broadly defined as not only the visibility, but it's also how the service, how the products, you know, is experienced by the end customer. They are really doing a very business development, strategic development for the customer and bringing in the rest of the factory at Itera that really have everything you need to realize this project or this new products at speed and also with higher efficiency than only delivering in terms of a team of consultants. Yes.
We have also in Itera increased the visibility. We had Arendalsuka, I think I mentioned that in the second quarter. Of course, Itera is present in many different arenas, not least also bringing the agenda from Ukraine to the business side. Now more and more are also quite interested in what's happening because they are seeing that there will be established some kind of Marshall Plan. A lot, based on the knowledge we have, we have a strong executive connection with many companies that are really looking at this opportunity as soon as the war is ended.
We also have at the Arendalsuka. We also have the team in terms of data analytics and AI, and also using low-code that present at Arendalsuka that had very interesting speech to the audience. We also are building a very strong culture. As I said in the beginning, it's extremely important that we also build a strong brand among the people that attract more people to Itera and build One Itera. We also need to onboard a lot of these people in the same way. It's not only one office here and there.
We have 13 offices, so we need to be very structured in order to make sure that they know and learn the tools, they learn the culture, they learn how to operate, learn how to work, how to learn or teach or share knowledge, whatever. That's why we are in this case. These are from weekend we had at Vestlia Resort in Geilo in Norway, where a lot of people from the Nordic or the Norwegian organization were attending. Extremely important to build the culture and keep the people at Itera. The order intake I mentioned here, just to show you some logos. Some are new, some are existing ones.
If I look at the customer development here, it's more quantified in terms of the red color is from existing customer. The blue one is customer that are new the last 12 months. 8.7% were from a new customer in the third quarter. We have, you know, all the existing customer growing continuously with Itera year by year. Now we're also looking at more new customer logos because the supply part of Itera is quite too strong. We're also looking at the new customer to increase the demand side of Itera. The last one before we go into the financial review section is the people, number of people. We had, as I said, 701.
If you look at the graph on the right side, on the, yeah, the lower side, I will say. You see the rolling 12 months net FTE growth. It was 122 in the second quarter, 112 now, but that is what I really believe that we will go into 200-350. That's the engine in terms of the growth from the people perspective. The other engine, as I told you, was the Digital Factory scale, where we grow more than the people itself in terms of services. That will. I think I will stop there, Bent. Let's go into the financial review section.
Thank you, Arne. Good morning to you all. Yes. We had a net growth of 23% in this quarter, which is up a little bit from the first two quarters of this year. Year-to-date, we have 22% growth. This acceleration in growth we expect to continue into the fourth quarter as well, and indeed, as Arne alluded to, we may even reach the 30% mark for the fourth quarter. Gross profit is up by 1% higher than the operating revenue, both for the quarter and for the year as a whole. Whereas personnel expenses and other OpEx are up by 28% and 51% respectively.
There are a number of factors contributing to this growth. One is that we have a natural hedge on most of our contracts in terms of foreign exchange currency. But there was a very swift increase in both the dollar and the euro versus the Norwegian krone, which led to a negative impact of about NOK 1 million in September. If and when the Norwegian krone appreciates again, then we might have a reversal of that.
Furthermore, we have invested in these three new locations, where we have a lot of hiring capacity, as well as overhead, with respect to that. Also onboarding of new employees, which take a little bit time to get into the marketplace. All in all, roughly maybe a NOK 5 million negative impact from that during the third quarter. This will continue at some speed in also in the fourth quarter, albeit at a lesser impact. We also had a number of main training and social events all coinciding in the third quarter.
That also had a particular impact on this quarter compared to other quarters. I think just for those in sort of more one-off impacts, we have a profitability that is more or less in line with the previous year. We ended with EBIT of NOK 10.2 million and an EBIT margin of 5.9% versus NOK 14.3 million and 10.3% respectively in the same quarter of last year. Year-to-date, we have an EBIT of NOK 57.8 million versus NOK 58.9 million in third quarter of 2021.
We generated net cash from operations of NOK 22 million versus NOK 12.5 million previous year. We end the quarter with NOK 41 million in cash. Number of employees at September thirtieth was 701, which is up by 112 from September of last year. Looking at the sequential growth, we see that we have a fairly steep growth curve, and indeed over the past 24 months, we have an annualized growth rate of about 20%.
We have managed to do that with an EBIT margin of 11.8%, which is, you know, a relatively good profit figure for our industry and compared to our peers. Cash flow, I mentioned the cash flow from operations. From investment activities, we had an outflow of NOK 3.7 million versus 6.4 in the corresponding quarter of last year. We had a net outflow of NOK 4 million related to financing activities versus a net inflow of NOK 1 million last year. Inflow was due to the share purchase program that we had for our employees. Yeah, the rolling 12-month cash flow from operations was what?
NOK 67 million versus NOK 73 million 12 months ago. As Arne mentioned, the board has resolved to pay a supplementary dividend of NOK 0.30 per share based on the 2021 figures. We will trade ex-dividend tomorrow, and we will make the payment on November fourth. The share price was at NOK 12.65 per share at September thirtieth, which is down 19% from the same date last year. That is, I'd say, more or less in line with our Nordic peers. We currently hold about 1 million own shares, which were valued at NOK 12.8 million at September thirtieth.
Looking at the balance sheet, we have an equity ratio of 27% at the 30th of September. This will obviously go down when we make the dividend distribution in a few days. Our cash balance is up by NOK 18 million from last year. Receivables and work in progress up by NOK 13 million. Our so-called right-of-use assets are down NOK 7 million. Those are related to the capitalized lease expenses on our facilities. Our equity up by NOK 27 million. Again, this will take a hit when we do the dividend distribution of approximately NOK 24 million. There were no other really significant movements on the liabilities side.
That was a quick run-through of our financials for the third quarter. Looking ahead, we see still a strong demand despite maybe some macroeconomic uncertainty, I would say. We continue the regional expansion with the new offices. We see a still high demand for our services. Obviously, our services are helping the customers to realize cost efficiencies and also to generate more revenue potential. We're still a very good investment in terms of buying services.
Our focus is to grow and to do that in a profitable manner and generate cash flow, which we will distribute to our shareholders more or less as fast as we can. We have sort of maintained a biannual dividend payment for most of the last several years, and that's still the intention. With that, I'm not sure if there are any online questions.
There are no questions.
No. We are always available for investors to get in touch with if you have any questions or you'd like a more in-depth presentation of Itera. Just feel free to contact myself. I'm easier to get a hold of than Arne. We'll bring him in by demand.
Good. Good. Okay, thank you for attending. See you soon.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.