Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for the Q4. The agenda is the same as we have presented earlier. I start with the highlights of the quarter and go into the business review section, and then our CFO, Bent Hammer, will walk through the financial review and also some comments about the outlook. Okay. The highlights for the Q4 is that if you look at the core digital business of Itera, which represents about 82% of total revenue, we had a net revenue growth or gross profit growth of 9%, and an EBIT margin of 14.4% as a margin compared to 16.8% last same quarter 2018. If I look at the total business, that also includes the data center operation because we are transforming the data center into the cloud. So the total revenue growth was 3% in the Q4.
That represents 146 million NOK compared to 141 million NOK, and if you look at the gross profit, we had 8% growth with 127.2 million NOK compared to 117.9 million NOK Q4 2018, and if you look at the EBIT for the total business, it was 18.6 million NOK compared to 16.9 million NOK. That represents a very strong profit margin of 12.7% compared to 12.0% margin same quarter 2018, so Bent Hammer will go deeper into these details, but if you also look at other important happenings for Itera, we have increased the revenue from new strategic customers in new sectors, and that has been very strong during the quarter, but also for the full year. We have also strong order intake with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.2 in this quarter and 1.3 for the full year.
And the board has proposed an ordinary dividend for 2019 of NOK 0.30 per share. And the board will also ask for the possibility to make dividend payments two times a year as we have done the last two, three years. Okay. Let's go deeper into the business review and address some highlights for 2019, '19. This year has been, I think, the best year ever in Itera. We are still one of the top 25 most innovative companies across all industries in Norway for the fourth year in a row. We have new customers also in new industries that has been very strong. We have a world-class hybrid delivery model that also brings us into new geographies. We have a very solid development of some part of Itera.
We have started to work more on the western part of Itera. We call it Itera West, but also Iceland. That has also been a very substantial footprint for Itera services the last two, three years. We have focused on building the new competences, recognized as the key competence on the cloud platform. So we have more than 200 certifications during the year. We have built also a very strong managed cloud services offering, which has actually will be the replacement or the target destination for the data center operation. We have strengthened our recruitment and also attractiveness. The turnover of the company has really went down. So it's really improved during the quarter and also the year. We also have made very strong partnerships with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. If I look at the growth from nearshore business, that has been very strong for the full year.
So 26% of what we call the hybrid growth, which actually represents the nearshore part of Itera. And the growth for the full year in the core digital business represents an 8% for the full year. Itera is a specialist in creating sustainable digital business. So through a strategic process for 2020, we also implemented into the strategy that we should create sustainable digital business because digitalization is actually some kind of transformational power for all the United Nations sustainable goals. And we have selected goal number nine, 11, and 12 as our key focus goals in terms of sustainability. As we have discussed with you and presented several times, we have always a focus on the platforms represented by the tech platforms. Today is, you know, characterized by cloud, IoT, a lot of data, and also artificial intelligence.
And the major platform vendor, if you look at the technology stack, is represented by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. So we focus on all these three, but also other kind of business platform. I'll come back to some example on that later in the presentation. Just to show you some example, in power utility is one of the new industries for Itera. And you know that, the industry for power utility is really going in one direction, from the production to the retailer to be, also the retailer is not only consumption of energy but also becoming a producer of energy. So this, you know, the full value chain from the production, to the retailer will be two ways. And then you need to have a new technology, that really makes it possible to streamline these processes.
where you have new, you see new sources of energy. You have battery storage, new storage mechanisms that also are put into the grid. So it's more possible to really utilize the full chain of components in the value chain in a more efficient than in the past. So you need to have this kind of technology and use real-time data and artificial intelligence to really make this digitalization be some kind of a part of the business. So when Itera go into this industry, we are coming from a software engineering perspective. Of course, we know the user, how we should build a solution for the user, look into the business, and also all the technology stack, but we are not the energy domain expertise. We do not have these people. We have if you have some, they are very small.
We always try to go into an industry where we combine the industry knowledge by customer or by some partners. Where Itera bring our scalability, our, you know, platform focus, how we build this, the new digital business model. That is where we come into this kind of new industry. We also always bring in some partners either from technology or the key components that are needed in order to digitize this new industry. What Itera have in place, which I think is a very unique capability because a lot of these industry are lacking resources. We have a high scalability of digital talents and also build capabilities that is not only dependent on the people, and we also have. We industrialize also ourselves in terms of how we can increase the scalability.
And the platform is a part of the scalability that enable this new approach to the customer. So that is the way we manage to go into new industry without being the domain expert on the industry itself because we don't believe that we can be more experienced than the customer or the players that have been in the industry a long time, but they are not that good at the software engineering. So these kind of combinations is some part of the key advantages that we bring in. I talk about the platforms from technology perspective, but there's also what we call a business platform. If you look at some of the key processes for most industries, it's actually this customer relationship management. And there is a software as a service provider by Salesforce that have been in the market for a long, long time.
Some of our existing customers are requesting, asking Itera, "Why don't you bring your hybrid model into this game?" Because there's a lack of resources. You have a very beautiful scalability and also cost efficiency in your model. Could you actually go into this market? In this quarter, we have established a strategic partnership with Salesforce to build capabilities on this platform. Already through a partner with niche provider in nearshore, we are already 80 certified Salesforce experts, as a part of the pool. We are also in parallel building competencies and certify our consultant and also onboard more people in order to make this some kind of big opportunity for Itera.
And this opportunity is actually if you look at the full range of services for Itera. We put our full service range of services into a Salesforce context. So we build and combine our way of working into the perspective of Salesforce because they have a lot of experience that we also use, and we implement this solution for our end customer. And what is beautiful here is actually we have the flexibility of bringing people onsite and from different other locations. We from nearshore or other places in Itera. So we have the full scalability where we can deliver the services from. Just to show you some project, I will start with managed cloud services because that's a new offering that we have established during the last 15 months more or less.
What is important when we go into the cloud is important to look at also the governance model, how you make this use of the platform in a cost-efficient way. If you refer to Gartner, they are saying that by 2021, 75% of all organizations that do not proactively manage the cloud infrastructure will spend at least 30% more than on-premise deployments. A lot of expectations are in the market that the cost will go down, but it won't go down if you don't manage this platform in a matured way. What we did in Itera, instead of taking the data center and transforming into the cloud, we started from scratch with the best people from the data center and from Itera, from the application perspective, and build a new managed cloud services operation, based on Azure.
And we build what we call a managed cloud management platform where we have this capability in place. We also integrate the security perspective. So you manage to do the security by design and privacy by design and also operate this security requirements or obligation you have for your business. So this kind of scalability in terms of the end station for the data center, we really have managed to establish and onboarded a lot of new customers. So we call it a Itera Managed Cloud Platform that enables everyone to take a secure and controllable journey to a public cloud based on the actual need we use of best practices from our specialists. That's the value proposition. And just to show you some example on that, these are just for selected customers.
We also have others, but just to show you some of the examples from a smaller customer or the smaller organization like Kredinor to a larger corporation like Storebrand. These are all clients from Itera, but in this case, we have implemented or extended the collaboration to also take control of or manage the operation part of it. For all these customers, we are really using our managed cloud platform in order to make this in an efficient and controllable way, and also if I continue with some other examples, if you look at power utility, there is a company in Norway, established by Glitre Energi, where they would like to establish a fully new digital retailer, power retailer.
So they started the discussion with Itera in 2017, and 2019, they really had a very beautiful new startup company up and running. It was called Oss and quite recently, in December, that company was actually merged together with Agder Energi that also have a, you know, other, initiative in the same, direction. So they've combined this, initiative into one company where they really try to disrupt and be some kind of, really new, power retailer where they are using smart metering data to really disrupt their own industry. So Itera has been a part of that project.
We are also connected to try to some insurance company to use this kind of data from the retailer, in terms of looking where you can find some faults in the electric system or incorrect use of the electrical equipment because that also can trigger a fire, which is very important for the insurance company. And we have also been a part of some kind of innovation where we call it some kind of flexibility marketplace where the consumer that also become a the producer can have a market where they can sell or buy this overcapacity and energy.
So we have been a part of the process how we can make the micropayments working where we are using some other innovator, which is also a customer of Itera, Bynett, where we're looking at using the blockchain technology to address the micropayments needs that we see will arise as a part of this new flexibility market where all the consumers are also some kind of producer of energy. This is, just to show you one example from a Nordic perspective or Norwegian perspective, but we also have project running in Oregon and Pennsylvania for the DNV GL, which is also a very interesting electric grid market where DNV GL has a strong position. So we are a part of the DNV GL to really make the transition into the new next generation, utility asset management system for electric grid based on Azure.
Both these projects are representative of, in this case, supporting the sustainability goal number seven and nine. For most of the project going forward, we'll see that really Itera is a part of making the world more sustainable because we have the technology that can make this happen. To summarize what we have done this year, I don't feel that Itera is any kind of Norwegian-based company or a Nordic-based company. We have really become an international company. We are delivering our services to almost 20 different locations in different countries from eight locations from Itera. The DNV GL is one of the global companies that we are serving. I think in five countries.
Cognite is a new startup in Norway in the oil and gas segment, but also we are in utility, which also have a very strong scalability and attrition, attractiveness in the market, so we can follow them to more or less all places in the world, and also, if you look at the fishery, where Norway also have a strong history, we have also onboarded some new customers in the fishery that also have a global position. I think this is very important for a lot of global businesses that look to Norway or look to the Nordic or look to Itera because the sustainability of the global world is quite interesting from a Nordic region, and we also have this Nordic culture where in terms of agility, etc., when we can serve these clients in other industries and other geographies.
If I look at the order intake in this Q4, it was 1.2, book-to-bill ratio of 1.2 in the Q4 compared to 1.3 for the full year. And also what is important, this is just to make mention some points on that, but also more importantly, I think, is also looking at the new business, which represents 13.7% of revenue in the Q4, about 20 million NOK. That was actually only from the new clients that was onboarded in the last 12 months. So that has been important for Itera to extend the customer base. So, now the top 30 customers represent about 75% of total revenue. That's down by four points, which is also important in terms of the growth path that Itera are working on. If you look at the nearshore ratio, it was 49%.
So it increased by four percentage points the last 12 months. So that's more accordingly to the strategy. And we will continue, I think, in the ratio one to one local in the Nordics and three nearshore. So that's, I think, the ratio that will continue going forward. And the last, but also what is very important that we won the award as the best provider in terms of the category Customer Experience by Global Sourcing Association. So this kind of model working cross-border, across discipline, we are best in the world. But I think what we also are very important also to be one of the top three best project management capability in Ukraine across all industries.
And so that was also a very important achievement because project management is also, of course, very important when we have distributed project across border for very, you know, important and critical industries. So we need to have a very strong focus on the quality. So this is a very big milestone for the people that we have nearshore. So that was actually all from the business review. So let's continue with the financial review, Bent.
Thank you. And good morning to you all. As Arne mentioned, we had a growth of 3% on the top line in Q4. But the gross profit growth was significantly stronger at 8%. I will come back to our revenue mix there to explain more in details in a minute. Personnel expenses grew by 5%, which was in general driven by the number of FTEs.
We had apparently some reduction in operating expenses, but as you may know, the IFRS 16 leasing standard has another classification of cost than we had in 2018, so in fact, it's up by a bit. That has to do with us hiring a business developer to help us out on Iceland while we're now setting up a legal entity there. Also we had some more recruitment charges, particularly in some key recruitments that we did during Q4. Our EBIT, up by 10% to 18.6 million NOK. We're giving a EBIT margin of 12.7%, which was comparable to 12.0% in Q4 of 2018. Looking at the full year figures, we had a top line growth of 5% and a gross profit growth of 9%, and we grew the EBIT by full 31% to 56.2 million NOK.
So we are very satisfied with that development. We just managed to get a double-digit EBIT margin for the year, which is always a victory in itself. Cash flow from operations continued strong conversion there in Q4 on the back of a very strong Q3, so more or less on par with Q4 in isolation, but for the year as a whole, we had 80 million NOK from operating activities, compared to 56.8 million NOK the year before. Ended with a cash balance of 53 million NOK, and an equity ratio lowered by the IFRS 16 again, at 19.2%, 3.9% lower than it would have been under the previous accounting standards, so we ended the year with 512 employees, up by 26 from the year before. It's a good development there as well.
We have been communicating, and Arne Mjøs has also referred to it as well, that we have this traditional data center that we are currently transforming into managed cloud services, and where we've come quite a bit along on that journey during 2019, so for 2020 we will start to report that managed cloud services together with the core digital business part, and just leave the legacy data center transformation operations as a standalone in the reporting. For Q4, we had a gross profit growth of 9% on the core digital business, 10% full year. We had an EBIT margin of 14.4% for the quarter and 12.1% for the year as a whole. Similar figures for the data center transformation transition, sorry.
We had a gross profit growth of 3% for the quarter and 2% for the year, and very strong EBIT margin, comparatively, for Q4 at 7.9%, whereas the full year figure was 4.0%. Sequentially, we can see that it's fairly stable over the last five quarters with the natural exception of Q3, which is the main holiday season. But the underlying gross profit development is obviously a bit different to that. We have five consecutive quarters now with the headcount growth, which we think is very satisfying, of course, in our quest for higher growth. We're also very happy with the margin development, which then resulted in this 18.6 million NOK of EBIT in Q4, as mentioned.
Digging into the revenue mix, although the total revenue only grew by 3% year over year, we saw our own service revenues growing by a full 13% and our subscription revenues by 7%. So both of which was pretty good. The downside here was that we ended a rather large subcontractor project that we ran in Denmark in the Q4 of 2018. So that more or less halved the revenue from subcontracting to 6 million NOK. And also the lesser activity in the data centers, as well as the closing of our web shop, where we did some hardware and software sales previously, also meant that other revenue were down by 40%.
All in all, the most profitable elements of the business grew significantly more than the other ones, and that's obviously then also reflected in the profits. Cash flow, as mentioned. Very pleased with the conversion there with a full 80 million NOK from operating activities, bit inflated by the IFRS 16 again. Adjusted for that, still 67 million NOK compared to 57 and 50 million in 2018 and 2017 respectively. We invested 5.7 million in Q4 and 18.8 million in the year as a whole. A big portion of that was the extension of our Kyiv office. We now rigged for further growth there as well.
From financing activities, the big toll on the cash was obviously the dividend payment that we did in Q4 of NOK 0.30 per share, whereas we didn't have that in last year, and ending the cash balance with 53 million NOK on hand. With respect to dividends, I'm happy to announce that the board last night decided to propose an ordinary dividend of 0.30 NOK per share to the general meeting that will take place on May 24th, so payment date will be on June 4th, if approved, and it will also ask for a renewed authorization to pay a possible additional dividend at the later stage this year, as we have been in the last, I think three out of the last four years or something like that.
Share price at the end of the year was 11.5 NOK per share, compared to 8.5 NOK the previous year. So that gives a yield of 35%, and 42% if you also count the 0.55 NOK per share of dividends that were distributed during 2019. We have treasury shares of approximately 750,000 shares. We do have some share option programs that end now in June, second program that ends next June, and there was also a smaller program that was released in December of 2019 of some 440,000 options to a handful of new key recruits, as well as some incumbent employees that we bank on will help us drive the future growth of Itera. So we continue with our profile of a high distribution of earnings.
So it's really the available cash flow that is the limiting factor of our distributions, and hence our decision to do that semi-annually to keep it at a high level. In terms of the balance sheet statement, it's pretty much flat in the total asset side, apart from this effect of the IFRS 16, which brings another 45 million NOK of future lease obligations onto our books. But we're very happy with the level of our receivables and the work in progress balances that we had at the year end. And it, I guess it's well reflected in the cash conversion that I just presented as well. So solid financial statement, the equity ratio of 19% is a bit deflated by this accounting standard that, as mentioned. So it would otherwise be some 23%. Good.
That was what I was going to go through in terms of figures. We don't do specific guiding on our outlook. I can mention that we have hired a separate recruit for our new office on the west coast of Norway to drive further growth in that local market. Although this will be a market that we will service heavily with our remotely delivered services from Kyiv and Bratislava. We're also in the process of setting up a legal entity on Iceland, as mentioned, to get at least a thin local front to further service the 60-odd seats that we have on Iceland, serviced from our nearshore locations. If you have any questions, I'm not sure if there was any posted online or not.
If not, then you're very much welcome to get in contact with us. If you want to set up some calls or physical meetings to get to know the company better, then we're always available for that. So just give us a ring. I hope you have a pleasant afternoon, and I look forward to seeing you back on May 5th, where we present the Q1 figures. Thank you very much.