Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for Itera first quarter. My name is Arne Mjøs. I'm a Chief Executive Officer. I will go through this presentation in the same way we have done before. Today, we have presentations from our facilities in the headquarters in Nydalen, and we go to slide two. I will take the first part, first present the highlights of the quarter, and also a deep look into the business review of Itera. After me, we have Bent Hammer, the CFO, Chief Financial Officer. We'll also go into more details about the financial figures and also some comments about the outlook. Slide three, please. If I look at the highlights for the first quarter, first of all, I'm very happy to see that we have very high growth and profitability in our core digital business.
We had a gross profit growth of 20%, pure organic growth in this quarter, and the EBIT margin was 14.2% compared to 11.7% last year. The core digital business represents 81% of total business of Itera. If I look at the total business, these figures are quite strong also. The revenue came in with NOK 161.9 million compared to NOK 142.8 million. That's representing organic growth year- over- year of 13%. If I look at the gross profit, we have 15% year- over- year growth. Also, the EBIT for the total business was NOK 19.2 million compared to NOK 13.8 million. That represents the EBIT margin of 11.9% for the total business of Itera. Of course, I know that you are very concerned about the COVID-19. What is the impact for Itera? Overall, I will say we have only minor setback from the industry most impacted by COVID-19.
I will tell you more about that later, but overall, we have a strong position with the company. And also, we have been focused on also increasing the revenue from new customers, new industries. So we will also continue to onboard new key new positions, I will say, for further growth. We have a quite, yeah, we have a high ambition for the future. We need to adjust a little because of the COVID-19. But in any case, we still continue to work according to the strategy with new positions that will support the growth that we are looking forward to. And if you look at the number of employees, it's increased by 39 the last 12 months.
The board of directors has proposed to reduce the ordinary dividend from NOK 0.30 per share to NOK 0.20 per share, which is actually to have more buffer because of the more uncertainty going forward. But they also will have the authorization to distribute additional dividends later this year. So that's actually the highlights for the first quarter. So if you go to the next slide four, we will see the figures here. We delivered NOK 162 million in revenue for the total business. That's quite a good sequential growth from the fourth quarter. And also, if you look at the EBIT, we came in with NOK 19.2 million, which is about 39% improved compared to the first quarter 2019. And also, sequentially, as you see, it's still going and still growing. So that's also good sequential growth also for the EBIT. Slide five, please. Then we go into the business review section.
I will make some comments about that one. Slide six, please. First of all, I'm very happy with all the employees at Itera. They are really making a difference because when the COVID-19 really hit Itera also, we managed to move all employees to home office because we have been working in some kind of distributed model. So we are quite used to using social media, Slack channels, whatever, to operate across borders, across disciplines, whatever. So moving to home office was not that big challenge for Itera because that's a part of the business model. But anyway, when we had this, we saw this threat also impacting Itera. We established different task forces that looked at how we take care of our people, how we take care of our customer, and also what could we do with the cost level of Itera, the cost base of Itera.
So we were working quite systematically, immediately, to look at how do we handle this new situation because it really happened to impact all the environment, all the customers immediately. But we didn't have any big setback from industries like travel, whatever, where you have a very immediate stop, actually. And we have also delivered a lot of core systems. We are part of the core systems, so the core application, or also in oil and gas. We have some business in oil and gas. We are not some kind of add-on or nice-to-have project, but it's more a core or, I will say, radical innovation. We are working with also oil and gas and how they can really radically improve their cost advantages or improve the digitalization in order to be more competitive in their own business.
So for the time being, we are quite well positioned in the COVID-19 situation. Slide seven, please. And as I told you, in the fourth quarter, we have a position to be the specialist in creating sustainable digital business, where we understand the use, we understand the business, and understand the technology. So we are combining all these companies into one project. And I think that has been very important in this kind of turbulent times where you need to really work in the distributed environment with all these companies into the projects. And as we had told you before, we have quite a focused strategy on platform first. So we have that this COVID-19 actually is speeding the digital change. The use of cloud has really accelerated because all kinds of new solutions are actually built in the cloud.
And we also see that if you look at the healthcare industry, they are focusing more on having data and also analyzing the huge amount of data in terms of using artificial intelligence. So these kinds of cloud technology, which has this IoT space, so the capabilities, data, artificial intelligence is much more in focus now than it was before the COVID-19. So we really believe that the COVID-19 is actually an opportunity for Itera. So if you go to slide nine to go more specifics into it, because if you look at what has been the consequences of this COVID-19, it's actually that the value of digital channels for products and operation has really become important.
You see quite a big difference between companies that really have been successful with the digitalization compared to these, I would say, late mover in terms of digitalization because they have struggled more with remote work, as you know, so all these kinds of new paths of shopping experience that you need to do online instead of going into the stores, all these kinds have a big impact on different industries and also different companies within the industry, so we also see more industries that are also starting to use artificial intelligence because it's really a push to be more radical in innovation, and artificial intelligence is some of the capabilities that you need to have in place that you need to use in order to be more effective, for example, in oil and gas with these lower oil prices that we have seen as a consequence of COVID-19.
For Itera, with these kinds of changes in the market, we believe it's also kind of a window of opportunity for Itera. We have a very flat organization structure, so we are able to really work close with existing and new customers to enable the digital change. It's not the top-driven company that the latency in terms of action taken is dependent on myself as the head of Itera. We have everyone working close with the customer, and we intensively work. We increase the efforts on the people and the customer to really get real facts of what's really happening there. We believe that this COVID-19 is actually a strategic advantage for Itera because we are used to working multidisciplinary in sales and delivery. We can really demonstrate our way of operating.
And also the customers that are working from home office are also part of this digital collaboration model that has been a part of the business model for Itera for a long time. So for Itera, we believe that the platform first strategy we need to really just continue the training and certification and get the competence of this platform because they are really crucial for the future. As soon as the COVID-19 situation is more, I won't say coming into normal, but we have a more managed control of the COVID-19 situation, both in the Nordics, but also in some kind of in the global perspective. Slide 10, please. So for Itera, we have this five-four focus area in the strategy. So the most important thing is actually to grow our people, and when our people grow, our customers grow.
Of course, when the customers grow, our people grow. So that's very important to focus on our people and customers. So that's two of our most important focus areas. The third one is actually creating a winning team, always go the extra mile, to make the customer very happy, to make sure that we're always delivering high quality, to make sure that we are winning the next contract, etc. So we always think about the winning team to make sure that everything is actually we can grow when we can make a new step for the organization, for the people, for the culture, whatever. So that's the third one. The last one, but not least, also very important for the society itself, but also for the employees and our customers, is actually the sustainability.
So we have put sustainability into the core part of the business at Itera. Slide 11. I'm also happy to announce that during this COVID-19 situation, we have also onboarded three very key people in the organization. I would like to introduce Anine Ragnif in the new role at Chief Delivery and Performance Officer. She has more than 25 years of experience from the industry, not at least from Capgemini as an international company. So she will have more as she's coming from a position where she's had a leadership of 350 people. So she has the scalability and the management structure of Itera to really look at how Itera can increase the speed of the growth and take the next step as a more international organization also.
I'm also happy to onboard Mette Mowinckel, which is 20-plus years' experience from Asia position in the IT industry, both from Embron and Capgemini. She just started in Itera and has a very important role in terms of what we call the people and culture to make sure that we have the focus on the people and culture also going forward, but also looking at how we can increase the growth of Itera and make Itera really different and make a difference as the vision of the position we have in the market. And not least also André Nyman, he's actually just onboarded during the COVID-19. Quite interesting, but he's also one of the best in the market in terms of he has got into a new role at Itera, Chief Experience Officer. So he has more than 25 years' experience in digital media in Norway and the UK.
Last position was actually head of Fjord by Accenture, but before that, he also had been a co-founder and creative director for Bekk for 16 years, so he is also a very skilled person that is really taking Itera to the next position in terms of both experience, but also product innovation, so I'm very glad that these people have onboarded at Itera. If we go to slide 12, please, then I'll talk more about the selected project, and slide 13, the first one is actually quite interesting. It's connected to the COVID-19 because when the Norwegian Government needed to establish quite fast, it was actually during three weeks, a payout solution to enterprises with a significant drop in revenue. That solution was based on Azure, so they had one week to develop the solution, one week to test the solution, and one week to put the solution into production.
And you know that the financial bodies and all the different public bodies needed to work together as multidisciplinary teams where Itera were a part of the team by Bits, which is our customer. We had done some Azure projects for Bits in the past. So Bits asked Itera could we join the team and be a part of the team, work day and night to make sure that these new solutions were really operating 24/7 with management solutions in Azure. So we created a dashboard to determine the performance and health and availability of this solution companies on Kompensasjonsordningen.no. And today have the single point of contact 24/7 for follow-up and escalation operational events. And what is amazing of this project is actually that this project wouldn't have been possible maybe if it should be some kind of ordinary physical meetings.
These people that were involved from different bodies didn't have any kind of physical meeting. So they needed to collaborate in the digital space, take fast decisions, focus decisions, make something up and running, ensure that the security was in place, etc. So that's a good example of that despite we are not working in the same way as in the past, we can actually increase the speed and do some kind of radical stuff within a few weeks, actually. So we are very proud of being a part of this project. And I think the payout, just to get some numbers, I think the payout is about NOK 20 billion each month that are distributed to these SMB-related businesses. So it's quite important functionality or process for the Norwegian Government to reach out to these companies that needed to have this money in place.
So that was one example of a solution in this quarter, but also if you look, go to slide 14, please. We also have a project through our collaboration with the startup Cognite. This is another startup called Norwegian company Elop that has developed technology that makes it possible to read the state of concrete using ultrasonic scanning called Cobri. So it's actually what they are doing is using the Cognite Data Fusion platform that also collects pre-existing legacy data and sensor data and combines this data with the data from the Cobri scanner functionality. So by having this kind of new data collected and analyzed through artificial intelligence, then it's possible to actually extend the service life of critical infrastructure. That has, of course, a contribution to the environment because today the production of concrete accounts for 8% of the global CO2 emissions.
So if you extend the life, you will reduce the consequences of the CO2 emission in the environment, but it also will reduce the community cost and also potentially save lives. So all these kinds of projects are really supporting United Nations goal number nine, 11, and 13. And the third example, if you go to the next slide, we also had a customer that was more or less desperate in terms of we need to work remotely. They have been working remotely. So we helped a Danish recruitment company with 800 people. During 24 hours, we managed to make sure that this organization was running as it should in terms of from the homes by using Teams.
Because Teams has been a part of Itera as a part of our offering, we managed to make sure that this recruitment company will actually have been running just during 24 hours. That was the third example of what we did during this COVID-19 time. If we go to the next one, slide 16. If you look at the order intake in this quarter, the book-to-bill ratio was actually 1.1 in the first quarter. It consists of both prolongment of existing clients that we have been in the portfolio for a long, long time. 50% of the revenue of Itera is in the bank and insurance that are not hit in the same amount as you know that other industries. They have got a lot of financial support from the government all over the place.
We haven't seen some kind of very hit back from that sector. We are also represented in the oil and gas sector, but as I said, we are mostly connected into the core system and also for some of the projects related into, I will say, the need for innovation, radical innovation by using the platform in terms of doing smart maintenance or increase the production of time by having more data in place. Looking into the second quarter, I also see that we have also a good pipeline going forward. Some of the extensions have also been closed in the second quarter in April. We are also focusing very strong focus on how to actually really start this new engagement, some expansions also as soon as possible because we also have capacity that we can actually also make sure that these contracts are fulfilled.
If we go to slide 17, please, if you look at the customer development, I will say I'm very happy to look at that number. The share of new customers is almost 12.3% of the revenue in the first quarter 2020. That means that these customers are actually won since the end of the corresponding quarter last year, so new customers that we managed to close and start business within the 12 last months, actually, and that's, of course, very important in this COVID-19 because we are safeguarding our position at the existing customer, and you see for some of the existing customers, they reduce or delay something of the projects, and that's why it's very important to have a new portfolio of new customers that really increase for Itera in terms of new opportunities for Itera.
We have the pipeline in order to continue the growth of the company. And if you look at the top 30 largest customers of Itera, they are more or less 77% of the revenue, which is also important in this kind of COVID time that you have a high value for the customer. If you are a big vendor for a customer, that's also important now because you are not the first one that will like to change the relationship to. There is more or less they put more opportunities to less vendors. And mostly some of the biggest vendors are the places that are having the best position at the customer side. So if you go to slide 18, please, and also look at the nearshore ratio, that is also more or less sequentially following the same pattern.
Now, 49% of all the employees at Itera is located nearshore in Itera, so that's fully according to the strategy, and we have this hybrid successful model, I will say, which is important in this COVID-19 when the customer will ask for reduced prices, whatever. We have the vehicle to respond on that challenge by the customer. They need to really reduce some costs, and we can do more for less because we have this strong established hybrid delivery model where we have the flexibility to also meet the client's needs for cost savings in some of the industries, so that was actually the first part of the presentation, so let me switch over to our CFO Bent Hammer that will go into the financial review section.
Thank you very much, Arne. Good morning to all the viewers out there.
If you go to slide 20, as Arne mentioned, we had a very positive growth on revenue going up by 13% and gross profit even more at 15% growth. We had the personnel expenses that went up by 10%, and that's mostly attributable to a higher headcount, which grew by 7% on average. And also, there were some foreign exchange rate impacts as the Norwegian krone has weakened quite considerably against USD, euro, and Danish krone, which are the main currencies in our cost base. Other OpEx and also depreciation are also impacted by this foreign exchange valuation. OpEx is up also because of some higher office costs related to the expansion we did in the Kyiv office to accommodate more consultants. And as for depreciation, we did some investments to modernize our IT platform that we use for our customer base last year.
And also, we invested in the intellectual property of our Compendia software, which now adds to the depreciation expenses. Nonetheless, we delivered a strong EBIT of NOK 19.2 million , which is up 39% from the corresponding quarter of 2019, and an EBIT margin of 11.9%, which is 2.2 points better than Q1 of 2019. Cash flow from operations were also seasonally strong, I would say, at 7.5 million NOK versus minus 5 million last year. And we ended the quarter with a cash balance of approximately NOK 51 million . Equity ratio also up by 3.3 points to 25.6%. And the number of employees at 527 at the end of the quarter, which is up 80% from last year.
So if you go to slide 21, we have for the last several quarters reported on two different business segments, one being the data center operations that are under transformation to more cloud services and the main core digital business. These are being reported separately because they have very different developments at the moment. The core digital business is growing very fast and with high profitability, whereas the data center operations also had a decent growth of 7% during the quarter, but have a slimmer EBIT margin of 1.7%. Slide 22, please. Looking at the sequential growth, we see, as Arne mentioned, a very good growth on the top line, even sequentially. And the number of employees have now grown positively in five quarters in a row. So that's good for our ambition of growing the company quite considerably over the next few years.
Even more positive, I would say, is the sequential growth on EBITDA and EBIT. Typically, Q4 is the most profitable quarter of the year. We actually managed to exceed Q4 with our Q1 numbers this year. That's the first time in five years that Q1 has been higher than the previous Q4 figures in terms of profitability. That's very strong. Despite the fact that we had at least three weeks of impact from COVID-19 in our March figures. Page 23, the mentioned revenue increase of 13% is primarily driven by the increase of our own service revenues from consultants, both onshore and nearshore, with the nearshore part of it being considerably higher in terms of growth, though the onshore revenues also grew by double-digit figures.
We're up at NOK 112 million from these services, whereas the subscription services is at NOK 38 million , which is up by 10%, both from the data centers as well as the subscription services provided by our subsidiary, Compendia, which, I could add, has received a lot of attention in the last few weeks from customers wanting to take part of the services they provide to have more automated HR-related services, including chatbot functionality. So they're experiencing more demand for their services, which is very positive given the investments we have made into their software as of late. Third-party services were down by 19% to NOK 7 million , and other revenues were up by 8% to NOK 4 million . Slide 24, the cash flow statements, as mentioned, positive inflow from operations at NOK 7.5 million .
If you look at the last 12 months rolling, we see that we have generated NOK 93 million in cash from operations. That's a bit higher than EBITDA less paid taxes. Very strong cash conversion, I would say. We spent less money on investment activities in the quarter with NOK 3.8 million versus NOK 5.5 million of last year. Finance activities were pretty much in line with last year at a negative NOK 2.5 million . Slide 25, yes, Arne mentioned that we will distribute or at least propose to the general meeting that we will distribute an ordinary dividend for 2019 of NOK 0.20 per share. The board will also ask for an authorization to pay a supplementary dividend later this year if the financial situation will allow for it.
We have not changed our dividend policy, which says that we will distribute at least 50% of earnings unless there are exceptional circumstances that would exempt us from this. The share price is just 3% approximately higher than the same period of last year, but that's, of course, on the back of a significant decrease in the general stock markets of some 20% plus decrease. So I think we've held up quite well so far and before this earnings call, our share price was trading at around NOK 9.5. I see that so far this morning, the stock market has reacted positively to our report. We hold about 835,000 own shares in treasury. That's up 65,000 from year-end. Yeah. Next slide. Our financial position. We see that our total assets are more or less unchanged from the same period of last year.
We have a little bit more cash and a little bit more equity than the corresponding quarter. The equity ratio of 26% is obviously with the new IFRS 16 financial standard, where we have placed so-called right-of-use assets onto our balance sheets, which are predominantly office leases, but also some other leasing contracts. So yeah, so with the previous accounting standard, the equity ratio would have been some 3% or something higher than we report now. Slide 27, the outlook, and we can switch to 28. Sorry. Slide 28. We feel that the underlying market for our services of digitizing the customers' businesses is still very strong. Obviously, the COVID-19 shutdown that we have had in the Norwegian and also the other Nordic markets have put some brakes on the general economy, as well as to various degrees impacted our customers. Was it predominantly negatively?
There are some businesses that I'm sure that have seen an upturn in demand even because of the nature of their services. But we do expect and we do see some softening of demand in the short-term space. I think, not the least, because of the whole uncertainty of how long the shutdown will last and how long it will take for the economy to pick back up again. But I think we're very well positioned to gain market shares in this period and also when the economy picks up again because we have a very attractive model for doing this in a cost-effective way. And now that more customers have gained firsthand experience of working in a distributed fashion with home offices, that would lower the bar for utilizing our hybrid delivery model where we work with a distributed delivery.
So we can hope and expect that more customers will be positive to utilizing such a delivery model. Yeah. Other than that, we don't really provide any specific guidance. So I think we will leave it at that and open for any questions you may have submitted online. And if not, I will hand back the word to Arne to make a closing remark. And thank you for watching and look forward to seeing you back on August 25th, hopefully in a more normal session where we have an audience, at least for the Norwegian run-through. Thank you and have a nice day.
Thank you, Bent. Excellent. I think the financial figures are very strong. We will focus on this quarter, second quarter, and the third quarter. We have full attention on the uncertainty in the market.
We need to continue working hard with the customer, spend as much time together with our customers, take care of our people. There is a window of opportunity, and I'm very happy that we are well positioned for this opportunity. So I'm looking forward to seeing you next to present the second quarter. So we will do our best to also present the next quarter just after the summertime. So thank you for attending this call. Thank you.