Okay, welcome everyone to Itera's interim report for the third quarter. My name is Arne Mjøs, I'm a Chief Executive Officer, and I will present the highlights of the quarter and also the business review section. And then Bent Hammer, CFO of Itera, will take you through the financial review and also some comments about the outlook. Okay, let's start with the highlights for the third quarter. I think we have a very strong growth in what we call the core digital business, which represents about 77% of Itera. So the revenue growth was 10%, and the EBIT margin was 9%. As we're told about, we also have a data center. We're transforming the data center into the cloud business. So when I take the total figures, we had a revenue of NOK 128 million compared to NOK 121 million in the previous, in the same quarter, 2018.
That represents the growth of 6%. So if I look at the gross profit, it was NOK 111 million compared to NOK 102 million , which represents a growth of 9% year- over- year. And the EBIT in this third quarter was NOK 9.9 million compared to NOK 6.4 million in the same quarter last year. That represents a margin of 7.7%, up from 5.3% from the same quarter last year. I also will talk about how we are increasing the revenue from strategic customers in new industries. That has been a key focus of Itera. I think we will show quite good progress on that. Order intake in the core digital business was 1.2 book-to-bill ratio in the third quarter, which is quite strong. Itera was also named as one of the top 25 most innovative companies in Norway across all industries.
That is also a very important recognition of the position of Itera in this quarter. And last but not least, the board of directors has decided to, for an additional dividend of NOK 0.3 per share, payable on the 1st of November. That is all in all the highlights for the third quarter. Let's have a deeper discussion into the business review part of the presentation. As you know, we have a strategic position to be a specialist in creating digital business, and we have a focus on platform. We always talk about platform first when we engage the customer. We have all the competencies that are needed in order to create digital business. We know how to make sure that we engage the user, but also not least also have a full customer experience focus.
We know how to build or develop a more data-centric business, and we also know all kinds of technology need to really build a new digital business, including, for example, artificial intelligence, IoT, or whatever. What we see in the market is there is a big shift from legacy system to the new digital platform or technology platform represented by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, which are the main drivers in this shift. So about 75% of the consumption in these platforms are actually based on legacy systems, but only 25% are from new applications built on this platform. So Itera is working both on the customer that is transforming the workload into the cloud, and we're also working with clients that really build the new stuff on the new platforms.
So when we have the technology platform in place, then we also are engaged in how we develop new business models and new business platforms, both in the business-to-consumer and business-to-business environment. So Itera has a position that has been a long-term position for many years, and we have also a very specific strategy how we really take our steps into the future. So one of the major steps is actually that we are working with selected clients. We call them first movers that really would like to be first movers in digital business. We are also, when we get engaged, we are also organizing our teams in terms of what we call DevSecOps or DevOps, which combines people from the development and also operation into one team.
We also include the Sec, but Dev is not only applications, also the UX people, the user experience people, or the people that focus on the customer experience, but not least also the product owner at the customer side, the business consulting people that we have. So we make a full-fledged team and working also across different borders. In addition, we are also moving existing projects on the legacy stuff into the platforms, and we are also transforming our own data center into cloud. So we're moving workload from the data center we have in place at Itera or data center for our customers that also take this transformation into the cloud. Just to mention some projects, I just selected three for this presentation.
One is actually for Oslo Kommune, where there's a renovation agency that actually would like to take a lot of the waste in terms of food, plastic, and paper from the business customer and try to take this garbage into more recycling as a part of the Oslo Kommune climate focus. So we are really working with the Oslo Kommune to really take this as a journey, make the service design, so they are making a very good process and solutions also for all the business customers in Oslo Kommune. So that's one example. We are engaging our service design capability. If we are looking into another case, which is actually Norwegian Hull Club, and they have a daughter company called Instech Solutions based in Bergen, which is a world leader in maritime or marine insurance software.
So they have built the software that are used by different brokers worldwide in order to support the business in insurance of the maritime sector. So we are actually a partner to Instech to build these state-of-the-art solutions. And the third example is actually Cognite, which is started by Aker ASA in Norway, which has a very global position in taking a global position to digitize heavy industries. And we are working on two different projects, one in the utility sector, digitizing the utility sector, and also in the oil and gas. So in this case, we are using the platform where Cognite has a very advanced platform for integrating and contextualizing all this kind of data.
So Itera is working with the full-fledged services based in Norway, but also with the scalability of the location of Itera that really makes sure that we have high scalability of digital talents for this fast-growing business. As I mentioned, we also have a very strong intake of new and existing customers for our core digital business. So the book-to-bill ratio was 1.4 in the third quarter and 1.5 year to date. So the pipeline of new business is quite good. And also, if you look at new customers coming in, the proportion which is actually new customers increasingly higher quarter- by- quarter. So these are just to show you some brands of some companies which really are new customers for Itera during the last 12 months. But we also have a good prolongments and also new services from the existing clients from Itera.
As I mentioned, we are also very happy with the recognition that we are amongst the 25 most innovative companies across all industries in Norway. We have been that the last four years, so we are very happy to get this kind of confirmation. If we're looking at the customer development, as I told you, the existing customer accounted for 86.7% of total revenue in the third quarter. So that represents NOK 7 million in new revenue or new revenue from new customers that has been a part of Itera the last 12 months. So that has been a very good progress. And also, if we're looking at the top 30 customers, it's actually down by 5%- 72%, going from 82%- 77%, which I think is quite okay because we are increasing the new customers.
We do not want to be too dependent on a limited number of customers. So that we feel is actually bringing new customers in to have a stronger growth footprint also for Itera going forward. If we're looking at the net ratio, which has been continuously increasing. So in the third quarter of 2019, it represents 48% of Itera. So we still are increasing the capacity net ratio. We will also still continue to grow the Nordic part. So we will both grow the part of Itera which is closest to Itera, but also the net capacity that we have from a remote location. Also, just to mention, we are doing a lot of events with customers, but also for the employees. This was actually to show you one example. We have this new PSD2 Payment Services Directive 2 that was actually implemented by the 14th of September.
And we had some kind of analysis by the consumer to feel that this new directive has some impact on the experience as a customer. And three or four were saying that it didn't have any kind of impact. But the banking and the finance industry has put a lot of effort into this one. So still, the solution is easy to get account information from one provider, also banking services for all the accounts, but it doesn't have any kind of impact on the consumer. So we had an event about this. It was 250+ people from the banking and finance industry, including the fintech company. And we also made a podcast. So that was just to show an example where we actually go into a sector and take a position to learn and also drive these trends to more and more value for the customer.
So that was actually what we had in the business review. So we then go into the more deeper look into the figures. Please, welcome Bent Hammer.
Thank you, Arne, and good morning to you all. As Arne mentioned, we had a growth of 6% in Q3 this year. More importantly, though, we had a growth of 9% in terms of gross profits. And that signifies that the underlying growth produced by our own resources is growing at a higher pace. We have less usage of third-party subcontractors as well as other billable goods and services. The personal expenses were up by 8% in the quarter. And there are three major components to that. One is obviously the headcount growth. We had some underlying salary growth in this hot labor market.
As well, we had a weakening of the Norwegian krone, which had a detrimental effect on the cost of our nearshore resources, which constitutes almost half of our headcount. Other OpEx is seemingly down quite significantly, though part of this is just a reclassification from OpEx to depreciation as a result of the IFRS 16 leasing standard that was implemented as of January 1st this year. EBITDA is neutral to that, more or less. We produced an EBIT of NOK 9.9 million , which is 54% better than the corresponding quarter of last year. That gave an EBIT margin of 7.7% versus 5.3% last year. Year-to-date as well, same growth figures as in the quarter. Also the EBIT is up by 45% to NOK 7.6 million .
We had a very strong cash flow from operations this quarter as Q3 is traditionally one of the weaker quarters in that sense. But finally, for the first quarter in some time now, we had the last day of the quarter falling on a business day rather than on a weekend. So that gave us, excuse me, a bit of a catch-up in terms of collecting receivables. We ended the quarter with a cash balance of NOK 46 million , up from NOK 20 million of the same time last year. Equity ratio 23.6%, up from 18.1%. We also had a growth in the number of employees at the end of September, up 12 net to 505, though there was also a shift in the mix of people, a bit down on the traditional data centers and more up on the core digital business.
Digging a bit into that split, the digital business had a revenue growth of 10%, and year-to-date it's at 9%. It produced an EBIT margin of 9.9%, whereas the data centers that we are gradually now transforming into cloud services had a decrease in revenue of 4% and an EBIT margin of 1.7%. So we're still investing in the build-up of the new cloud services. And we have come quite a bit away on that now and have gotten several very interesting customers that are now running on cloud after a successful transformation. On the sequential part, we see that we have cyclical developments, and it's mostly related to the number of working days net of vacations. So Q3, always the weaker quarter, as we have the main vacation period in July and August.
We had the strong Q1 and Q2, though, and also Q3 is up significantly compared to last year. I mentioned the employee growth. If you look at the EBITDA, that has seemingly almost the same pattern as the operating revenue, but I should caution that the 2019 figures are inflated by some NOK 3 million from this change in accounting standard. EBIT, though, is a more accurate comparison to 2018 figures. We see that we had a very strong Q4 last year, which is traditionally also the strongest quarter of the year, where we have kind of the full running of client projects typically in October, November, and up till Christmas at least, and Q1 and Q2 are a bit dependent on when Easter falls because that shifts a few working days from one quarter to another.
But again, Q3, very strong at NOK 9.9 million , which is a significant improvement from the same period last year. Going into the revenue split, I mentioned that we had a lot of growth coming from the production of our own services. This is up by 11% to NOK 83 million in the quarter. Subscription revenue also has a healthy growth of 6%. In particular, the subsidiary Compendia has had a very good response in the marketplace with its new chatbot functionality that it's built into its software as a service on the HR systems. Also, the data centers have some growth on its incumbent customer base as the amount of data is ever increasing. So does the subscription revenue on that. Third-party, I mentioned, is down as much as 35% in the quarter to NOK 5 million .
And also other revenue is down by some 14%, but again, on quite low figures. Cash flow statement is looking very positive in the quarter, as mentioned. Again, I should make you aware of the IFRS 16 impact that also hits the cash flow statement, where some NOK 3.5 million of the depreciation charge from that has been added to the operating cash flow and subtracted out of the financing cash flow. So that makes the cash flow from operations even more favorable than the comparative data from last year. Nonetheless, though, if we correct for this, the 12-month rolling cash flow from operations is a full NOK 69 million , which is very high compared to the underlying operating incomes. And that's due to a very positive development on the balance sheet, which I'll come back to in a second.
We had quite a bit of investments in the quarter, partially related to an extension of our office facilities in Kyiv, in Ukraine, as a result of the growth there. And also there were some renewals in our data centers by our customers. So it's customer-driven and also the responsibility of the customers to compensate us for this investment in the event of an exit. And also, obviously, add to their subscription revenues or cost, rather. So ending the cash at NOK 45.7 million, up from NOK 19.6 million in September of last year. One of the happy news, I guess, for this quarter is the announcement of an additional dividend of NOK 0.30 per share. The share will trade ex-dividend on the 25th of October, and the dividend is payable on November 1st.
The share price development this past 12 months is negative due to the very high spike that we experienced in Q3 of last year, where we went from about NOK 9 per share in July to, I think it peaked at 13.5 or something, but since the drop in Q4 of last year, it's been fairly stable around the NOK 8 mark since. We hold about 750,000 own shares in treasury, and it's almost unchanged since June. Lastly, the balance sheets, as I mentioned, we had a very favorable impact on receivables and work in progress. Hardly any work in progress, i.e., work that had been performed but not yet billed, and also the receivables were close to the level of one-month invoicing.
The total balance is obviously, again, hugely impacted by the IFRS 16 leasing standards, where we have now capitalized the full amount of the future office lease commitments, among other things. So that brought another NOK 45 million to our total balance sheet with a 5.4% impact on the equity ratio, which is still solid at 24% before this dividend payment. That was it from the financial review. Outlook for the future is unchanged. We operate in a very strong market. Everybody wants to digitize the business, and we're there to help out. We see good traction on the cloud services. We see that we have opened up several new accounts that will utilize our nearshore capabilities. We see that every customer that goes for either a hybrid onshore nearshore solution from us or even a pure nearshore setup are very happy and continue to build their business with us.
So that's a very good signal for the future. And we also see that the sales cycles for opening up new nearshore accounts are finally going down. So there's more willingness to adopt such a model. So that bodes well for the future, I think. So thank you very much. If there are any questions from online, which obviously there aren't, then we will close this session. Should you have any questions coming up or you would like to have a more full business presentation from us, then feel free to contact us, and we'll set up either a physical meeting or a Skype call or something. Thank you very much for joining. We'll see you back on February 25th when we deliver the Q4 results as well as the preliminary 2019 financial statements. Thank you.