Welcome to the interim report for the second quarter for Itera. My name is Arne Mjøs, and I will go through the highlights of the quarter and the business review, and Bent Hammer, Chief Financial Officer, will look into the financial review and some comments about the outlook. The highlights for the second quarter, I think we're quite satisfied with this quarter due to this COVID-19 uncertainty, so we are very glad that we can report for what we call the core digital business of Itera that exclude the data center, so all in all, it's 81% of the total business. We have delivered gross profit growth of 8%, and an EBIT margin of 12.67% compared to 11.1% last year.
If I look at the total business, including the data centers that we had decided for two years to sunset and make some kind of migration into the cloud, the total revenue was about NOK 151 million compared to NOK 143 million last year. That's an organic growth of 5% year over year. The gross profit amounted to NOK 131.6 million, compared to NOK 102.1 million last year. That's organic growth of 8% year over year, and the EBIT for the total business was about NOK 16 million compared to about NOK 14 million last year. That represents a margin of 10.5% compared to 9.7% last year. If we look at the COVID-19 situation at Itera, we only had some kind of moderate impact. We see some kind of increased competition, but our position is strengthened, really, because we have our hybrid delivery model with consultant onshore and nearshore.
When we meet some increased cost pressure, we also have the measure to mitigate this kind of discussion versus our competition or local competition, especially. We do not see any kind of productivity loss due to COVID-19 because we have been working remote from home office or from different location. That's a part of the core business model operating model of Itera. The number of employees has increased by 31 in the last 12 months. We're also very happy that we could continue with these summer internships as planned with the 31 master students in Norway. We onboarded them in the second quarter, and we conducted the project for them both in the end of June and also during July and completed the project in the first week of August.
If we look at the dividend, we paid out ordinary dividend for 2019 of NOK 0.20 per share, and we also have the authorization to distribute additional dividends later. That normally the board look into when we report the third quarter, so all in all, if we look at the total, quarter by quarter, I don't see any major impact or any kind of impact from the COVID-19. I think we are a solid position and also not at least the request or the demand for digitalization has seen, that is very important also not at least during the COVID-19. Okay.
If we go to the business review, as you know, our position of Itera is to be a specialist in creating sustainable digital business where we deliver end-to-end services, comprising the end user or the customer, the business, and more and more data-centric businesses, and also all kind of technology combined into one team. So for Itera, it's also important to take some sustainability responsibility. So if we look at United Nations' 17 sustainability goals, Itera selected three of them. That's goal number three is about the industry innovation and infrastructure, how we can actually advise our customer to move into sustainable value chain. That's very important for the services that we deliver and can also really contribute to that goal.
The next goal is actually goal number 11 about sustainable cities and communities, where from Itera's perspective, we also have a lot of smart technology or smart concept in terms of smart cities or smart mobility or smart energy that are directly connected to goal number 11. L ast but not least, also Itera as a player in the market should also have focus on responsible consumption and production. So that means that the sustainability is a core part of Itera's strategy, is a part of how we make a difference, so for our employees, our customers, their customers, and also the society as a whole.
The four fundamentals of Itera in terms of skilled people and multidisciplinary teams, platform first, one culture, one Itera culture across the border, and also the entrepreneurship and also local ownership is, added with the sustainability focus as the fifth pillar or the fundamental of Itera. The sustainability business has been a process that really started in 2019 where we established the strategy. We selected these three goals. We have been certified according to Nasdaq environment, social, and governance initiatives. We also have started to our consultancy also support our customer in their transformation towards more sustainable business. In 2020, we are really putting this into the core of our business. We will also report to the financial community our relevant KPIs for these three selected goals.
We have signed a contract with United Nations Global Compact, and we also have established the internal competency arena, like we call it the Itera Sustainability Academy, that also train all the employees all over the place, all over the location we are, into the same understanding about what Itera means and the responsibility we take in terms of the sustainability. In 2021, we will continue with the full realization. We will develop new concept and tools where combining sustainability and digitalization. We will, of course, when we onboard our new consultants, we, of course, sustainability will be a central part. We believe also developing sustainable business down the road will also be the new normal.
Every customer or every industry will really have that as a key focus and not at least also driven by the COVID-19 where the most of the sectors or the industries are really trying to shift into the green economy where Itera should also be a key player in that transition. So we are already doing a lot of several levels, call it sustainable engagement. One was actually reported in the previous quarter. We call it Elop, which has some kind of scanner technology that really scan all concrete, to have more information about the structure of the concrete structures. I f you combine this data with weather and other kind of data, you can also extend the lifetime of the concrete.
So the impact of that is actually the production of cement, which has a large carbon footprint, represents 8% of global CO2 emissions. So if you extend the lifetime of these concrete structures, you will, of course, reduce the CO2 emission, but also lower the community cost and the potentials also save life. If you, for example, think about the bridge, whatever, you can extend the life of a bridge, of course, and also make sure that you don't break down because you extend the life.
What is also important and what we also see after the COVID-19 and also the packages or the stimuli from the government in Norway, but also from the European, where there is some kind of large chunk of money that are putting into the transformation from the core and reduce the carbon footprint in the oil and gas, but also not least the rise of the floating offshore wind power, which is actually a benefit in the Norwegian industry because we have a long history of actually doing this kind of complexity in terms of offshore. So the whole offshore industry that has been working for oil and gas can also go into the renewable in terms of floating wind power.
And also you see many of the oil and gas energy players also within oil and gas are really also going into the floating wind power game. So Itera also have the technology and also concept for some of the clients mentioned here that are having this kind of transition either in the oil and gas, but also and not least also in power utility that really have focus on sustainability. Yes, I also talked about the summer internships that we had a lot of discussion whether we should continue. I think that's also part of the social responsibility that we take as a player in the market. So we continue with the summer internships for 31 employees or students that were participating in three to five projects for customers like Pelagia, Kvaerner, Nordea, KLP, and Fjordkraft.
And they really did a very good, good job, supported by the consultant by Itera. W e see several of the projects had real sustainability gains in terms of energy optimization, better, better working life, or also sustainable resource utilization. O ne of these projects was actually completed or done for Kvaerner, which is a quite large, they have a quite large yard at Stord, north part of north of Bergen, with 1,000 assets, such as wagons, production equipment, and trucks that are continuously moving. So what we did was actually using machine learning, different kind of tracking technology, and advanced robotics, like this Spot, this dog that are actually taking 3D street view review. So for the truck driver or the fleet management planner, whatever, they have complete overview where all the assets were located, dynamically.
So today is some maps that are not updated because of the grids have changed because of the asset of the structure. The asset in the yard is actually quite dynamic. By using the new information from this drone that have always information about where the assets are located, of course, they can onboard these assets into the construction work for offshore or onshore plants or energy station, whatever they build, because there are many projects in this kind of yard that are delivered in parallel. That's why it's so important to always have information on where all the assets are located. This project was actually delivered on time, and as a live prototype for the customer within seven weeks. I'm very impressed of the students, what the kind of quite advanced solution they managed to deliver only through seven weeks work.
That solution was actually based on the Cognite, which has a lot of these technology in place that is much easier to build an end user and solution on top of it. What is also important and we are very proud of that is actually that Itera during the second quarter was awarded as the best program management office in Europe in Europe. Project management office is or this association has about, I think it's 10,000 members in 110 countries. W e become the final winner of the European competition, where each country was actually competing and there was some kind of the final between the two best in Europe and Itera was the winner of the European part of it. N ow we are into the final competition where only four players left. We are actually top four.
In some weeks or maybe a month, I don't remember, but in quite soon, the winner of the global competition will be launched. We are very happy that already we have been the winner of the European league. I think it's very some kind of confirmation because in 2018, we also were winner of the best hybrid or the best sourcing model across border by the Global Sourcing Association. That was also a big achievement we managed in 2018. In 2020, we also managed to take another, which was within the project management. We really have the best project management team or the environment or the competencies in Europe. Yes, we are also doing a lot of seminar for the customer.
We, as we are mentioning in the second, the first quarter, we had done for some of the government initiative for the COVID, COVID-19. So there was a project called the Business Compensation Scheme that we were part of the team. So they managed to develop a solution within three weeks that has a big impact on all the business that are requesting money from the government. T oday, Itera, this solution is actually built in the cloud on cloud technology. W e have the operational responsibility for that solution today. So there's a lot of interest from different customers that we are looking into how did we manage to develop such a quite comprehensive solution only three through three weeks.
So the sharing of this knowledge and what we can, how we can utilize that for the new project going forward is actually a very interesting topic for many customers. So we have eight more webinars to plan in the second half year this year. If you look at the order intake from selected new and existing customer, it represents 0.8 in the second quarter. It's the book-to-bill ratio was actually 0.8, which is actually lower than in the past. But I see if in July, there were some kind of orders that has been coming. Normally, that's the vacation period in Norway, in the Nordic region, also some part of the nearshore. So all in all, it has been 1.1 in the second half year. We see there is a lot of activities in market.
It was more uncertainty in this second half year, but now we see that the business is coming back. Some have stopped in the second quarter, but they are coming back now, so we really believe in the recovery in for our business going forward, and it was very interesting also. We are happy for looking for some of the existing customers, which is Gjensidige that entered into a frame agreement, a five-year frame agreement with Itera. It's a three plus one plus one agreement that covers Gjensidige operation in the Nordic and the Baltics, so we are very happy that we can also expand into other part.
Today we have most of the services that deliver for the Norwegian part of Gjensidige, but now is a frame agreement that also goes into the Nordic and the Baltic countries. The services that we should cover is actually the full range of services in Itera. So we're very happy that we can utilize the full Itera capability for that client that has been client for Itera for more than 20 years. That is also if we're looking at the customer development, existing customer accounted for 89%. Of course, Gjensidige is one of them that has been there for 20 years. We have many or actually this customer that has been with Itera for many, many years.
But we have also put focus on winning new customers to have a larger customer base to continue to organic growth. So the share of new customers that weren't customers for Itera 12 months ago was actually 10.9% in the second quarter, representing 16 million NOK in the second quarter. A s you see, the top 20-30 customers represent about 76% of total revenue in Itera. So it's quite stabilized, but we will still continue to win new accounts, large accounts, because we historically see that the accounts, the large accounts for Itera minimum are customers for Itera 5, 10, or maybe 15 years. So winning more of these customers gets the trust and really scale up is a part of the demand side for the growth of Itera.
If I look at the employees, we have a lot of skilled and innovative employees. I think there is a very high standard. I'm very happy with all the employees we have at Itera and the work they are doing, or at least during the COVID-19. So we were 530 employees at the end of the quarter. That's up from three last quarter and 30 from the same period last year, the 12 months ago actually. T he nearshore ratio is stabilized on 48%. So it's more or less according to the strategy.
And as you see, if we go back, we had some kind of intake, the last 12 months, net increase of FTEs, employees, has been around 100. If we go back to 2017, and we are working quite hard to go back to that track. That was a part of the plan. We need to adjust a little due to COVID-19, but hopefully I will, we'll soon come back to the track that was actually initially planned for Itera coming into. So that was actually what we had in the business review session. So maybe Bent can talk more about the financial review.
Absolutely. I'll be happy to. Good morning, everybody. As I mentioned, we had a growth in this quarter of 5% on the top line. More importantly, our gross profit grew by 8%. So, I'll come back to more details about this development in a second. Our personnel expenses were up by 9% in this quarter. There were multiple impacts on that. One, of course, was the growth in the number of employees, most importantly. We also had some foreign exchange effects on our nearshore and Danish operations as the Norwegian kroner was quite a bit weaker in the quarter compared to last year.
On the other hand, we had some relief from the Norwegian authorities with respect to social security, taxes, so that provided 1.5 million NOK or something like that in relief in this quarter, as a one-off. We ended with an EBITDA of NOK 25.8 million, which is up by 14% versus last year. Our depreciation charge was NOK 10 million, which is 15% higher than last year. That was to do with the investments in expanded facilities in Kyiv, due to the growth in headcount there. Also, we modernized our IT platform. A lso, we had this currency effect on the assets that we have in our foreign entities.
So the EBIT ended up at 15.8 million NOK, which gave an EBIT margin of 10.5%, versus 9.7% in the corresponding quarter of last year. We had a very good cash flow from operations of around 40 million NOK. That was also helped by government incentives or relief packages, I would say, from the COVID-19 virus, whereby they extended the payment deadlines of some taxes and VAT and so forth. So the relief from that was, I think, close to 23 million NOK in this quarter. O bviously that will reverse in subsequent quarters. Nevertheless, the underlying cash flow was quite positive, as I will go through in more detail in a few slides. Equity ratio at 18.6%. The number of employees ended at 530, which is 6% above last year.
If we look at the two main business segments that we have, the core digital business with the consulting and some of our IPR offerings, that grew by 5.2% last quarter, and that was the part of the business that was mostly impacted by COVID-19, as there were some customers that decided to either defer the startup of new projects or even canceled some of the existing projects due to the uncertainty they were facing in their own businesses. The data center operations grew by 5.5%, which is the kind of growth rate that we've seen for the past several quarters now. The data volumes that they have in their data centers is on a constant growth path, as their existing customers consume more and more data.
Gross profit is where the two businesses separate more clearly, as we grew the core digital business by 8.3% in the quarter, versus 4.5% in the data center. Year to date, 12.6% for the core digital business. EBIT margin as well, very distinct difference there now with the mature data center operations, which we are on the way to transform to more cloud-based business had a very low margin, whereas the core digital business have a very strong margin in the double digits. We will intensify the transformation of the data center in the next coming 6-12 months, as our customers are now gaining more matureness in doing that journey from on-prem to cloud, so we will likely see some more investments and transformation costs related to that in the next couple of quarters.
Looking at the sequential growth, we can see a distinct pattern in the EBIT margin, whereby the Q4 is traditionally the quarter with the best profitability and Q3 the lowest. You have a line between there for the Q1 and Q2. We expect the same to be true for this year, as Q3 is typically, you know, a quarter with a lot of vacations, and also a slower startup in terms of utilization, billable utilization as we take on this year's university graduates, and it takes some time to deploy those into the marketplace. The 12-month rolling revenue shows a top line of NOK 587 million, which is 7% higher than the corresponding 12 months earlier.
The EBIT has grown by 24% to NOK 63.5 million, giving an EBIT margin of 10.8%, up by a point and a half from 12 months before that. We grew our own consulting services, as well as the subscription services by 8%, in this quarter. Those are the, you know, two dominant business lines. Our third-party services, as well as our other type of revenue, like hardware and software sales, but also billable travel, were both down by 25%-28%, albeit on very small numbers. Looking at the cash flow statements, we had, as mentioned, NOK 40 million derived from operating activities, of which NOK 14.4 million came from balance sheet improvements. A lot of that was attributable to the government in extending their payment schedules.
But we also had very, very favorable development in our customer receivables, which were down like NOK 12-13 million, I think, from June 30th last year. So that there's no sign of customers delaying payments or defaulting on their payments. Our customer base is consisting of very strong logos, which are going well through the COVID-19 situation, I think, all in all. Investment activities somewhat lower than last year when we invested in more of facility costs. So only NOK 3.9 million this quarter. From financing activities, a high outflow this year as well, same as last year, where we paid a dividend, ordinary dividend payment of NOK 0.20 per share this year. We also did a rather large repurchase program of own shares, some of which have been sold to key employees in July.
So there will be a positive inflow from that in Q3. W e ended our cash balance of approximately 48 million NOK. 12 months rolling, we see that we have generated 106 million NOK from operations, which is up from 65 million in the 12 months before that. Yeah, as mentioned, we paid the dividend on June 4th. Share price was 11.55 NOK per share at the end of Q2, which is up 52% from the corresponding date of last year, if you include the dividend payments that have been distributed in the meantime. A s you will have seen, the share price has increased quite considerably after quarter end as well, now trading at some 14 NOK per share. W e had 1.7 million own shares at the end of the quarter. I think we're now down to a bit short of 1.2 million.
As mentioned, the balance sheet is progressing pretty well with receivables and work in progress going down NOK 18 million from NOK 105 million to NOK 87 million. The big chunk on the top right-of-use assets is related to the IFRS 16 leasing accounting standards, whereby we had to capitalize the rental agreements on facilities, predominantly some other rental agreements as well, but mostly facilities. So that also reduces the equity ratio by approximately 4 percentage points to 19%, compared to the previous accounting standards. That was what I was going to tell you about the Q2 results. Just looking briefly at the outlook, we are of the opinion that the underlying demand for digitalization is still very strong.
And I think those businesses that were lagging behind in their journey to digitalize their business has had a tough awakening in this COVID-19 times with lockdowns, and that should, I would think, give them incentive to speed up their digitalization. There are, of course, still uncertainties with respect to their own financial outlooks, so there's still some hesitance in starting up the projects, but we're seeing a sharp increase in activities in that respect these days, so we expect demand to pick up in the next few weeks. We're probably, I would say, a month or so behind in our normal upsurge in utilization, but we're, as I mentioned, confident that it's on its way now.
We're looking forward to a stronger end to the year. We, as mentioned, will also now accelerate this transformation of our cloud journey and create a hybrid cloud business unit that will combine the traditional on-premise data centers with the new cloud offerings. I hope to be able to tell you a bit more in detail about that in our Q2, sorry, Q3 presentation, to be held on October 27th.
Hope to see you there with us then. In the meantime, if there are any questions online, we'll be happy to field those. There seems to be no questions from the web. Okay. We thank you all for watching. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact either myself or Arne Mjøs at any time. We'll be happy to give you a more in-depth presentation of our company or answer any questions you may have. Thank you very much.