Good morning, everyone. Thank you for. I will present the fourth quarter interim period for Itera. Let's jump to the agenda. It's the same agenda as, you know, from the past. I start with the highlights of the quarter, then walk through the business review. We have Bent Hammer, Chief Financial Officer, that will go through the financial review and have some comments about the outlook. We also have a chat that you, if you have any kind of question, you can post in our chat, and we will walk through the chat during the Q&A session. Let's start with the highlights for the fourth quarter. In brief, we deliver very strong organic growth, is 29%. That's amazing.
I think it's, I'm very proud of all the people in Itera that managed to deliver this kind of growth during a time when we have the invasion in Ukraine. We had an operating EBIT margin of 9.5%, which is also very strong, when you also take into consideration what we have done in this quarter and this year. In general, there's still a very attractive market for digitalization, especially when you look into the green energies, sector and also sustainability. Every company need to talk about and implement strategy, the strategies for a more sustainable company and more sustainable future. There's a big drive for that.
Digitalization is also a tool for the customer to improve their cost efficiency when they're also in the time with a more darker macro environment, also need to increase the efficiency. If you look at the growth for 29% growth, it's also fueled by our investments in the Digital Factory at Scale and also Cloud Center of Excellence. We started, as you remember, we finished the transformation of our own data center in the first quarter, and we have used three quarters to really scale up our Digital Factory at Scale and Cloud Center of Excellence. That has a big impact on the revenue growth in the fourth quarter.
As I also said in the third quarter, we are also ramping up three new offices in Central Europe to increase our international scalability, but also have some kind of alternative when we see that the operation in Ukraine do not have the same growth potential because of the invasion in Ukraine. We really stand with Ukraine and doing a lot of different kind of practical support and humanitarian aid or support in any kind. Of course, Ukraine is extremely important for Itera to stand with all the Ukrainian people and write the history together with the Ukraine, the brave Ukrainians.
If you look at the book-to-bill, it was very strong in the fourth quarter, 1.5, and for the last twelve months, it was 1.2 as expected. Number of employees in the last twelve months has been 81. Most or more than 50% has been from the Nordics because we are making this kind of transition in terms of growth from our initial location from Eastern Europe to Central Europe. It, it takes some time to really establish the same growth capacity that we have in Eastern Europe to make it to happen in Central Europe. We have a very strong progress there also going into 2023. We have 12 months rolling cash flow from operation of NOK 76 million, which is very strong.
The board of director proposed yesterday in the meeting to make an ordinary dividends of 2022 of NOK 1.3 per share. We also have, the board of directors will also ask for permission to have a additional dividend later this year also. What we have done the last two, three years, I think we have two dividends payouts during the year. In total, I'm very happy. I'm very, yeah, very, I didn't, I couldn't imagine that we, during this war, this in Ukraine or invasion Ukraine, we could deliver this kind of financial performance then also do a lot of the changes that I've shown you here.
If you look at the figures, in terms of the growth, for the full-year, it was 24%. The EBIT operating margin, it was 10.5%. The growth in number of employees was 13% for the full-year and the fourth quarter. As you see, we have also scalability in the company that is not directly connected to the number of employees, which is very good. I think I'll stop with the figures there, and Bent Hammer will make a deep dive into the financial figures in the review later in the presentation. Let's go to the next session, which is the business review section. As you know, we as a company, we are specialists in sustainable digital transformation.
We have 13 offices in the Nordics and Eastern and Central Europe. We have established three new offices to balance the new situation in Ukraine. We have established Kraków, which is a new country in Poland for us, Itera. We have established Brno, which is a new country in the Czech Republic for Itera, and another office in Slovakia, where we have already for many years Bratislava office, now we have also established Žilina. These offices we started to establish, let's say, in the third quarter, late second quarter, we have really building the position in these new areas, new offices to access the talents to balance the situation we had in Ukraine.
If you go to the next one, I think it's just to do this one. If you look at the model itself for Itera, we have a very strong, steady growth organic model. I talk about the inner circle and the outer circle. The inner circle is actually our core business model, where we focus on the consultancy, where the scalability is connected to the number of employees. We are very customer-centric. We, we are. Just a moment. I need to take this one here. Very customer-centric. We have the customer-centric and the focus on the selected industries. We have the scalability in terms of the more and more customer and talents.
Most important is actually that we focus on the growth of the people. Itera is a growth company, what is the most important thing is actually grow the people. And then the customer automatically grow and also the company. We need also to focus on building one Itera. Instead of having different offices that go in different direction, we really would like to have one Itera model. That also makes sure that we are working very well across the border as one Itera. That's the inner circle. If I go to the outer circle, it's about actually how can we use more package offerings and more industrial services, which is not one-to-one co- dependent on people.
We are using the scalability to really increase the software actually to increase the scalability and speed of Itera and also increase the recurring revenue. That has also impact on the scalability for the group in terms of more customer and more talents. These two circles, the inner circle and outer circle is extremely important for the organic growth model of Itera. If I go to looking at the inner circle in terms with the scalability, in terms of the people, number of people, we have a long-term ambition to increase the growth of number of employees by something between 200 and 300 FTEs per year. That's an ambition. It's not any kind of guidance, but that's the drive we have.
We have established 13 offices, so we have the potential of going in that direction. What we have seen now, until now is actually we are increasing the Central Europe position of Itera. We have Eastern Europe that are keeping at more or less the same level, but the growth going forward during the war in Ukraine is actually to increase the capacity and the scalability of Central Europe. When the invasion or the war in Ukraine is finished, we will also continue to grow in Eastern Europe as we had in the past. But the ambition is actually to really have a net growth of 200-350 FTEs using one Itera focused on the people growth.
That's the inner circle growth engine. If I look at the outer circle, it's about increasing the recurring revenue. That's why we have established this growth engine to enable the cloud migration and cloud modernization for our customer. A lot of customer have a lot of system on the traditional classical data center. What we are doing is actually to make this kind of journey, we start with a light discovery and assessment, make a digital strategy for the customer, and then we have normally the cloud journey execution is something about two, three years time.
It's a portfolio of a lot of projects that are running, but the first one is actually to make the cloud migration, make the lift and shift of the core system in some way or the other to make sure that you establish the core platform in the cloud. That has been extremely important, and that's why we have established this kind of capability in Itera. We are also ready to really make large migration project for customer because we have all the capability in place. A lot of the migration is about using software to lift and shift and migrate a lot of the from the existing systems today, existing data center.
Just to mention one example of a customer in this quarter is actually TESS, which is a strong, has a unique position in Norway. They have about NOK 5 billion as revenue to 1,200 employees and various position in a specific area with 130 offices in Norway and some international places, locations. What we have done is actually to really migrate the systems for this customer during the light assessment and discovery assessment first, like discovery and discovery assessment, I mean, first and to make a plan for this. Now we will finish the migration of the system from the existing data center during the first quarter.
That's for Itera is a new long-term agreement, three years agreement, of about NOK 30 million over a three years period. This is just one example of how we are working with clients that would like to migrate their data center into the cloud. If I look more from a business perspective, this is with reference to also to Gartner, they're talking about the digital dividends. What they're saying is actually that the business growth for company is more dependent on digital technology than people and machine that has been the growth engine in the past. Of course, digital, every product will have a digital component.
If you have the speed to complete initiative is by behind expectation, as saying here is some kind of analysis, about 60% of the initiatives don't have the speed that was expected in terms of execution of the initiatives, and also about 50% of the initiatives do not have the speed to realize the value that was expected. Of course, this has a lot of impact on the digital dividend, they call it. Of course, that also have impact on the financial dividend or the financial value of the company.
What we have done from Itera to really be on the cutting edge to increase the efficiency and increase the speed of this kind of digital initiatives, we have established what we call a Digital Factory at Scale, where we typically increase the speed and throughput by 20%-30%. By working in what we call a virtual factory, where we have all the people, all the competencies that are working in delivering these products, they can work on one product, or they can work with other kind of products instead of locking each individual person to a specific project.
This is really a new way of operating, where you really work more as a team based on best practices, and you utilize, and you enable to adopt the technology that are actually coming to the market every day instead of starting from scratch and build this kind of functionality by yourself in the system. That's why we believe that we can typically increase the speed by 20-30, throughput by 20%-30%. We also have already examples where we achieved 40% compared to a traditional CV staff augmentation project.
If I also refer to McKinsey is also saying that digital factory is really a new concept that you need to establish in order to scale the digital transformation, to bring products to the market faster, to do more with existing resources, whatever. They also have go into more deep dive. They're saying that you can achieve 50% reduction in management overhead for technology teams. You can achieve 70% reduction in number of business analysts that needed to write the technology requirements. You have 90% reduction in number of testers due to using test automation. The last but not least, you have eight times higher performance of the top engineering teams than the level of peers.
That means that these top engineering team, people can really work on different project or more projects in parallel because they have this team working according to the same model. Just to have one example, this is also the industry that we are using this kind of digital factory, Itera is really taking a strong position in the energy sector, where we have both new, several new customers, such as Å Energi subsidiary and Tellus, Hafslund Eco and Laki Power. The Laki Power is, for which example, on Iceland. We also have a strong growth from existing customer, which are Eviny, BKK and also DNV Energy Systems. These are just to show some example of customer where we have in this sector.
We are also doing some kind of, together with partner like the Thema Consulting, doing a report which shows, we call it Strømrapporten in Norwegian, where we discuss how the electricity crisis in Europe creates new opportunities for electricity companies. The energy crisis and the need for more electricity is really a key topic for Itera and for the whole Norway and the whole world. This is also topic that we are also in, looking at how could we really contribute to increase the efficiency of using electricity, but also increase the energy production in terms of electricity into the grid. This is of course, an important sector for Itera.
Just to mention another example, this is Opplysningen 1881, where we also establish a new system, cloud-based system, for the call center, because they have some customer service agents using Opplysningen 1881, with the phone and SMS, but now they have new tools, digital tools, widgets that we call it, so that make it much easier for the agent are using the call center at Opplysningen 1881. Okay. These were some kind of example. I also just want to say something about what we are doing for Ukraine. As you heard, we are really using a lot of time for Ukraine people. This is an example of something very special, which started with a panel discussion by the Norwegian-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce, where Itera has a very strong position.
We have a board member been part of that for a long time. During that meeting, the minister, the Vice Minister of Infrastructure in Ukraine was present, and he said that we need a lot of stuff in this kind of to rebuild the infrastructure. One of the topic he mentioned, it was temporary bridges. We picked up that topic. It was our Group CEO, Jon Erik Kjølberg, that was present and also together with our people in Ukraine and also the Norwegian Embassy in Ukraine, also, not at least, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, Statens vegvesen, made a team together to look at how could we support Ukraine as fast as possible.
What we did was actually in December, and I think they were transported in December, but now it's installed in January and February. Norway had delivered 10 bridges to Ukraine, 310 meters long together, that are really needed in Ukraine to, you know, connect the settlements, but also ensure delivery of humanitarian cargo, the passage of ambulance, repair teams, whatever is needed. It's really important stuff. I think this is a good example how Itera contribute to Ukraine much more than what we can do as a company. That is one of very many initiatives that we have that really supporting Ukraine in the best way.
I just also want to mention that, we also hired Taras as our new director for Central and Eastern Europe. He joined the company from the first of January. He has more than 20 years of professional experience from another company. He brings his knowledge from the scalability of that company and also make sure that we continue the fast growth on Central and Eastern Europe as one Itera. That's extremely important that we build the company as one Itera in order to have the scalability and make sure that we can also continue to deliver as one Itera across all or across the borders. I also would like to make some focus on the sustainability of Itera. We as a company also have very high targets on the sustainability.
We make some kind of benchmark regularly using EcoVadis as one of the world leading, the largest and the most trusted rating company for sustainability. In the fourth quarter, we went up 10% from 60 to 66 points of 100 points, which gives us a new silver medal in sustainability. We only need two more points to get the gold medal, gold medal. I know that the head of sustainability at Itera is really eager, and together with Itera to get the last two points to really be amongst the top get the gold medal. We are already amongst the top 6%.
The next, we are always would like to climb in that direction to have more and more according to the best practices for sustainability. We also have one idea from or one example what we are doing from the communication part of it. We are really sharing what Itera is doing internally, but also with customer. We call it Bits. It's a new YouTube series. You can also go to the link and look at some of these examples. They all are in Norwegian, but it's very... It's showing, you know, Itera as people, which is extremely important for Itera. Let's move on to the last part of my presentation.
The order intake for the fourth quarter was 1.5 and 1.2 for the last 12 months. It's a lot of the existing customer that are growing, but also some new customer coming in. You can also look at this in terms of the customer development. Existing customer accounted for 80%-88% of the revenues the fourth quarter. Then we have the last 12% is coming from new customer, that's a customer that we didn't have for 12 months ago. But a lot of the customer that we have in our existing ones are really some are growing, some are declining, but the portfolio of existing customer is quite, you know, flexible, and we have a strong portfolio that we can really continue the growth.
The share of revenue from the top customers is 83%. It's up from 76%. That's also important if you look at the macro environment that can have more darker view going forward. It's important in terms of because we have this strong strategic relationship, we also have very strong, I will say, visibility also when we're going into more different macro situation. The last one is actually to look at the number of employees. We are 81 the last up by 81 the last 12 months, and that's temporarily impacted by the invasion in Ukraine. I said, as I said earlier, more than 50% of the FTE growth in are coming from the Nordics because we are stabilizing Ukraine, flattening out Ukraine and building up Central Europe.
Meanwhile, we have increased the number of employees, the capacity in the Nordics, which is also good for Itera. The nearshore ratio of Itera is 52% compared to 53% last year. I think that was all from my section, and then we have a deep dive into the financial sector. Let's go into that, Bent.
Yes. Thank you, Arne. You might remember that when I was here on in Q3 reporting, I told Arne that I would bet on a 30% growth in the fourth quarter. Well, I'm a bit sorry to say that we just missed it by about NOK 0.8 million. That translates into less than two hours of production time. It was very close. I guess our employees had to do some more Christmas shopping than I anticipated. That's fine, well deserved. You know, this is for you, Arne. It's a Norwegian bill. Don't have many of those anymore, but it's my last one. Yeah. The growth was very impressive, all things considered.
you know, we are in a situation where our biggest office is under frequent missile attacks from Russia. Despite that, we delivered 29.4% growth. It's quite amazing, I would say. The growth comes partly from new customers. They accounted for like 12% of total revenues in Q4. More importantly though, the growth came from our new cloud and application services, which constituted around 40% of the total growth. We're very happy to see that line of business also now taking off, and hopefully will continue to do so through 2023. On a full-year basis, we had 24% growth.
This was not just a one-off effect from Q4, but we have constantly delivered very strong growth throughout 2022. On the gross profit side, we actually did make 30% just about and 25% on a full-year basis. We have considerably higher personal expenses in the quarter. That's somewhat driven by weaker NOK versus our dominant currencies of USD, which we use in Ukraine and then EUR for Slovakia, and now as a more recent, the CZK and the PLN. That all contributed to to the reported figure in NOK being higher.
We also see that, you know, after last year's or 2021's lockdown effect, we now do some more traveling, we have more social activities, and so forth. Last but not least, we have invested quite significantly in recruitment capacity in these new locations in Central Europe. Obviously, it takes more effort to drive recruitment in a market where we are a newcomer, where nobody has heard mention of Itera before. It takes some more time to penetrate that. On the OpEx side, we also see a sharp increase of 42%. Again, that's partly due to the new offices, as well as some external recruitment fees, et cetera.
We have depreciation of NOK 8.8 million, which is up from NOK 6.3 million. Included in those numbers are a write-down of leasehold improvements and furniture in parts of the Kyiv office that we decided to exit in November. Both because of obviously a drop in the growth trajectory that we had there. Also, even before the war, there was less usage of the office as people were getting accustomed to working from their home offices part-time of the week. We also had another two point...
Sorry, NOK 1.8 million in other out-of-pocket expenses directly related to the invasion of Ukraine. That had to be do with acquiring Starlink and power banks and so forth for our employees, so they could also be sure to have full uptime during energy shortages and the downfall of the other two main internet lines we have into the office and also, of course, to home offices. That gives us a even more robust protection against any attacks.
Also, we contributed to with the charitable donations, both through our employees, who generously set off a part of their salaries to charity. The Itera matched the same contribution. We have been able to provide the Ukrainian army with, for example, SUVs and drones, et cetera, that they need to be able to their defense of Ukraine, which is very important not only to them, but for Europe as a whole. We appreciate them standing in the front line of this conflict.
We had a resulting EBIT of NOK 19.4 million, which is up from NOK 18.1 million from last year. Giving an EBIT margin of 9.5% versus 11.4% of last year. If we adjust for those kind of direct cost of the war, we would have had an EBIT margin of around 11.0%. For the year as a whole, we delivered EBIT of NOK 77.2 million, which was on par with 2021. We delivered cash flow from operations of NOK 41 million, slightly up from NOK 33 million of last year, of the year before, I should say. Still in 2020.
We ended with a cash balance of NOK 42 million, which is, you know, the appropriate level, I would say, in terms of having sufficient liquidity for our working capital. We were ended with 698 employees, or 700 on average for the quarter. That's up 13% end of period, and 16% on average. For the year as a whole, we had an average headcount, which was 22% higher than in 2021. I just wanted to, you know, show you the development in our quarterly revenues and earnings. We see that there's a quite steep curve on the revenue growth side.
In fact, we have almost delivered 22% annual growth over the last couple of years. We have done so with a pretty good profit of 11.6% on average. You will notice that, you know, the last couple of quarters have been somewhat below the average. I'll go and explain that a little bit as well. For 2021, we had an EBIT margin of 13.0%, we actually had a margin expansion on our existing business of 1.6%. But this direct cost of the invasion had a total of negative and 1.0% on our margins. I should stress that these are just, you know, some specific costs that we have identified as out-of-pocket costs.
If we had included, you know, the massive effort done by the whole organization inside and outside of Ukraine in managing the crisis internally, making sure that we have, you know, consistent and strong deliveries to our customers while safeguarding our people. You know, trying to calculate that would I guess leave us depressed in terms of what could have been. We are very happy to be able to support in the manner we have done for Ukraine, and we will continue to do that. We as mentioned, we also have invested in three new offices during the second half of 2022.
Obviously it takes some time before we can recover all the startup costs in terms of, you know, settling into the place into a new organization with especially recruiters, but also other types of management and other overhead. That I think we will during Q1 be sort of up to a more regular run rate in terms of achieving profitability in those new locations as well. That's just not a big deal, but it does leave us very well positioned for future growth and less reliable on a single location.
Lastly, we have as mentioned many times invested heavily into this cloud offering. We need to have in place quite a large organization to be able to deliver on all aspects of this kind of delivery and also have enough manpower to be able to take on, you know, larger and also multiple cloud migration projects at the same time. This has been a conscious decision to run with a large organization than would be profitable in the short term. Again, this is something where we start to see the tail end of that kind of investment.
I think the losses have gone down considerably in the last couple of months, and we expect that to continue into H1, and probably by H2, we will turn a corner on that one. It will be a very important vehicle for us to achieve a margin expansion in the future as we're then able to packetier both our resources irrespective of location and combine that with the IP that we have developed and should therefore be able to deliver to the customer at a much higher speed and at a lower cost than sort of the traditional development efforts.
Statement of cash flow, as mentioned, NOK 41 million from operating activities. Not much on the investment activities, just NOK 3.6 million, about half of last year's or 2020 to 2021's. The same is the case with the year as a whole, where we invested NOK 15 million versus NOK 33 million in 2021. In Q4, we have splashed out quite considerably cash on financing activities, namely a dividend of NOK 0.30 per share to back to our investors. Also indirectly, we have also purchased 600,000 of our own shares from the marketplace, costing about NOK 8.5 million.
Those shares are intended to be used in the upcoming share purchase programs for our employees, as we find it very beneficial to have our employees on the ownership side, in order to have same motivation and same targets as our investors. Yes. 12-month rolling cash flow is NOK 76 million, up NOK 6 million from the year before, and but not as strong as 2020, which was a corona year where there were some strange impacts, I would say on the cash flow. Among others from a government providing some deferred payments.
Looking at the dividend payouts, Arne mentioned that the board will propose to the general meeting to distribute a dividend of NOK 0.3 as an ordinary dividend. It will also, as tradition has it, ask for an authorization to distribute a supplementary dividend during the year as well. Our share price was 15.2 at the beginning of 2022. Ended at 13.45 and we paid dividends of NOK 0.50 in the meantime.
Decline of 8% and I think that's comparatively quite strong compared to our peers, both in the Nordics as well as globally as tech related shares have taken a beating during this year, as you may know. With the share purchases, we have currently a holding of 1.6 million of our own shares. They were valued at approximately NOK 22 million at the end of the year. We will continue our high-end consistent distribution of earnings as we are still intending to pursue an organic growth strategy. Therefore will distribute all surplus liquidity as fast as possible, I would say.
Possibly in combination with share repurchases. Finally, a look at our balance sheets. It's up NOK 30 million to NOK 234 million. It's most notably on the receivable side that we have an increase and that's obviously linked to the high growth that we're experiencing. On the liability and equity side, it's mostly the equity that increases by NOK 9 million. We end up with an equity ratio of 21%, up 3 percent points from on 2021.
It would have been three points higher if it had been for this IFRS 16 leasing standard which makes us take all the office lease agreements, for example, into the balance sheet. That was it. Quick word on the outlook. We don't guide specifically. Just to say that we continue our regional expansion in Central Europe and also in the Nordics. For both of course on attracting more customers as well as more talents in these markets. We have an ambition of continued high growth.
Macroeconomic environment will influence of course, whether it's will be a very high growth or a quite good growth. We're quite positive that there is a strong market for the digitalization still out there, which is an important vehicle to achieve cost savings as well as provide new business opportunities. We are ready to take on more and larger cloud transformation cases.
We are positioning ourselves strongly to be able to help both Ukraine and Norway with or the Nordics I should say, with the green energy shift, which needs to be coupled with a lot of digitalization. We know Ukraine has an abundance of IT talent, and they are also a future positive energy provider to Europe after the invasion is over, hopefully soon. Although we have a strong focus on growth, we will continue to do so on a profitable note. We will have cashflow generation as a key focus point still to come. That's it.
I don't know if there are any questions online. We have no questions today. No. Let's just end on a note that we will continue to stand by Ukraine. We are very much open to have a one-on-one discussions with you if you would like to have so. Just feel free to contact me. I will get Arne to join if needed. I'll leave him to pursue more deals.
Very good. Okay, I think that's all. Let's do this for all the Ukrainians...
Yeah
...for the support you, together we are making. Hopefully the war will end and we'll back to a normal situation. We stand together as a company. Really looking forward. I think you have very strong figures that you have presented. Looking forward for the first quarter that we'll launch on the 11th of May.
Yeah, eleventh of May.
Yeah. Yeah.
Hope to see you back then.
Yeah. Okay. Goodbye.