Okay. Welcome, everyone, to Itera's interim report, first quarter 2021. Let's go to slide two and look at the agenda. We have the same agenda as the previous quarters. I will start with the highlights of the quarter and deep dive into the business review section, and then the CFO, Bent Hammer, will look into the financial review and outlook. We'll have a question and answer session at the end. There is a chat connected in this channel that you can also pose some questions. There is one-minute delay, so please do it as soon as possible, because then we look into the chat at the end to look at are there any questions that we will have follow up during this session.
Let's go to the first section, the highlight, the first quarter 2021. We go to slide four to look at the first quarter in brief. I'm very happy that we achieved 11% organic growth in the core digital business. As we have discussed for several quarters, and actually for two years ago, we had the strategy saying that we will sunset the data center. This core digital business represent 92% of the total business of Itera, where the remaining 8% is relating to the data centers that are migrated into the cloud. By the end of this year, our core digital business will be Itera's full 100% business model.
If I keep focus on the core digital business, this 92%, we achieved strong growth in terms of 11% top line, and we also managed to have EBIT margin, operating margin of 50% for this business. That, I think, is a good start for this presentation, and I think we will also bring you through. We have also been quite long journey this, I will say, during the COVID-19, because we see that the market, due to COVID-19, really has accelerated in terms of digitalization and sustainability. We have a strong market in all location that we are operating for the time being. We have also, during the last one, two years, worked quite focused on strategic partnership with international, some are quite global, players like DNV, Cognite and Microsoft and others. That also bring Itera to other part of the world.
We are not only delivering to the Nordic region, but also delivering almost to 20 countries around the world. We are also looking at geographic expansion, in marketplaces that we have facilities. Especially in Norway, we of course go to other part of Norway. We have been in Bergen for a long time. We expand our position in the western part of Norway. We also going into Fredrikstad, not far from Oslo, to also look at the region where around the capital of Norway, also quite close to the Swedish borders. This is also some kind of geographic expansion in the market that they are already in place. We are also building a delivery factory at scale, with the hybrid cloud center.
Most of the application that we are building will also go into the cloud, because that's a tremendous platform that you need to be on in order to make or create the digital and sustainable businesses. If I look at the book-to-bill for this quarter, is 1.0. It also has a kind of seasonality. We had a very strong book-to-bill in the fourth quarter last year. If you're looking at the 12 last months, we have a strong book-to-bill at 1.3. If you're looking at the number of employees, we increased by 19 in the core digital business in the first quarter, and about 60 the last 12 months. The cash flow, the operation cash flow is still strong. The last 12 months is NOK 93 million. The board proposed a dividend of NOK 0.25 per share.
That is the highlights, I will say, in brief for the first quarter. If you go to the next slide, you see the figures here. In terms of revenue for the core digital business that we present here, we have NOK 144 million. That represent an organic growth of 11%. If you go to the number of employees in the core digital business, it was 523. That's representing growth of 30%. If you look at the EBIT operating profit, we had NOK 21.1 million. That is a margin of 50%. I think this is a good summary of the financial figures, and we will have a deep dive into these figures later in the presentation by CFO Bent Hammer. Let's go to the section two, business review, and then on slide seven, as you noted, we have also established a new brand of Itera.
We had a strong project, and we launched a new brand in March. We're really working on becoming a very edgy, I will say, international player that find human solution for complex challenges. That's the position that Itera have. We saw that it was important to also rebrand Itera to take this more international position. If you go to next slide, we see that crisis actually accelerating the digitalization and sustainability. This refers to two survey, I think is quite important to understand what's really happening in the market. One is from the Gartner, the IT resource analyst globally, quite well-known in this industry, that has some survey saying that the 65% of the CEOs across the world in different sectors will accelerate the digital to business transformation.
Also, if you look at a survey by McKinsey, they are saying that speed of adoption of digital technology is increased by seven years globally during the last 12 months during this COVID-19. We are really taking a huge step into the digitalization across the world, and that is something that is really happening across every industry, every country involved in one very short time period. What we see is actually that digitalization and sustainability are really interconnected. After the COVID-19 or as a consequence of COVID-19, every industry is also more into sustainability, because sustainability is also a business driver. It's not only some kind of left hand, it's really becoming a core focus of each business enabled by digitalization. That is what we see is really happening in the market for the time being.
If you go on the next slide, this is showing the market. We are splitting into two parts, actually. The mature part, we will call it business to consumer, where we as a consumer have been using technology for a long time in terms of buying something or doing our insurance services or whatever on the net. That's a part of the way we are operating as human beings. If you go to their business to business, there's a lot of what we call operation technology. The technology around the machines, and then you have the IT. In the business to business is really to unlock the data in the operation technology around the assets and the machines, and connect it to IT. It's an integration operation technology and IT technology.
When you manage to do this, you can really have a huge value creation also in the business to business in more or less the same amount that I had seen value creation in the business to consumer. The fastest speed in terms of digitalization is actually in the business to business, and that's where Itera also put a lot of focus the last two, three years and really taking a strong position. If you go on slide 10, you will see that how this business to consumer and the business to business are really getting connected, interconnected, because it's really a value chain that need to be along from the consumer into the production.
The full total experience, how you can actually industrialize or look at the value chain in a complete different way and a more sustainable way that we have been used in the past, actually. We are talking about the fourth industrial revolution. That's just maybe a large word and a huge step, but I really think that if you're looking at the speed of adoption after COVID-19, we are really more closer. I will say we are part of the fourth industrial revolution already because of the duration of the technology that we have seen the last 12 months. If we go to the slide 11.
That is also where Itera have a strong position because we have end-to-end services, so we can also unlock the new opportunities with a full range of services and processes, methodology, where we start with a vision and design the journey, what build the solution, and also take a full life cycle approach on that using all kind of digital understanding in terms of the data and how the user should actually be a part of this to make sure that we build human solution. Also how we work with different partners that really add services into the new ecosystem of players, for example. Everything will be about the cloud, and it will also be about the edge, which is more like the IoT.
A lot of the assets, the cars that we already seen have actually a computer, but every physical asset will also be a computer. That's why we are talking about how the cloud and the edge are working together, how we're really getting the AI as a part of the cloud, because we need to have a lot of computing power to really look at the artificial intelligence. That's the new ecosystem we will be a part of, and that's why we also needed to reshape Itera in order to address these needs coming in. If you go on the next slide. Itera have, during the last, I will say two years, really build an industrial approach for delivering consulting services. We call it the delivery factory at scale for data-driven businesses.
The goal for this is actually that we assist our customer to actually increase the innovation, the speed, agility, have control of the cost, efficient use of the cost of the resources that you put into the project, but also not at least the control in terms of security, and predictable flexible service delivery and operation end-to-end. These are some kind of targets that we deliver for our clients. What we need to do is actually to reshape the Itera, because they have a data center that was the classical data center for the classical business models, but the adoption into cloud is really accelerating. That's why we have built the Cloud Center of Excellence, based on the best practices from the global vendors.
We invested a lot into the Cloud Center of Excellence to really take the pole position, to manage to build this new application or this new solution for human users. With a very fast speed, we do not have any kind of obstacle because we have the legacy from the past that we need to take care of. That's why I said that we take this position, reshape the company, and we work with partners like Microsoft and Red Hat, to make sure that these Cloud Centers of Excellence are also not only based on one cloud vendor, but it's a multi-cloud vendor supported, what we call the hybrid cloud center. This is actually what we have done in Itera, and if you go on slide 13, this is just to show you one example for a quite global company.
This is DNV, based in, with headquarters in Oslo, but are represented in about 100 countries around the world. Itera is working end-to-end in terms of digitalization services, in combination with DNV, very deep knowledge, business domain knowledge in different sectors. DNV also have a digital solution, so they also have software engineering skills. With the partnership with Itera, they also have much faster scalability to really accelerate the digitalization and the sustainability for all their business sector around the world. This is really where we see the delivery factory at scale and the Cloud Center of Excellence really fit into this global company. What I think also is very interesting in this perspective is actually that we see there is a green transition.
If you look at the oil and gas discussion in Norway, what should happening going forward, I think there's a large push for the floating wind that will have a huge potential for Norway and not only Norway, but all the connected global business they are part of, to really take a global floating wind position. Also make sure that the energy, the oil and gas companies are transformed into energy companies which are much more sustainable than the pure oil and gas companies. Really, a huge demand for these kind of services in this sector and also in order to support or enable the sustainable transformation of the planet, I will say.
This is just an example of a very interesting partnership that we have with DNV. We see other players like DNV, that we are also working more, very strategic to have access to different part of the world. If you go to the next one, I talked about the geographic expansion. It's important to Itera to also not only be represented in the capital city, in the location we are present. This is example in Norway. We have the western part of Norway, where we have already been in Bergen for about two years. This is about 45 FTEs or consultants that are delivering service to clients based in Bergen with a typical ratio, with one person locally placed in Bergen, and the rest is actually from other location. In Itera, we call it distributed.
Now we look at the next level, and have established a new office facility that we move into in May to really continue the growing western part of Norway. There is also another quite interesting, next week, we will move into a new co-location in Fredrikstad, close to Oslo, but also with a very interesting market in Sweden. We also have more customer in this region, not far from Oslo, but also access the labor pools that a lot of people do not want to move into the capital city. This is also very interesting. They can stay, live where they live, and also be a part of delivery factory at scale, and also work for international clients, despite they are working or sitting or living in the neighborhood, not only in the capital city.
This is also very interesting how we establish this new kind of offices to reach both customers, but also the labor, the market. If you go on to the slide 15, I think this is also something I just want to address because we have in Itera, a very strong position in banking and finance and there is a in-house analysis unit in Itera. We've branded as Cicero Consulting that has done a very in-depth mobile bank report, survey, using our best analysts and experts on the services side, user interface and UX, where they tested 60 mobile application and they identified that Sbanken had the best mobile banking app in Norway. Followed by SpareBank 1 and DNB. We had a lot of webinar and media coverage because we orchestrated this competition.
It's a very respected analysis and a feedback loop to the banks because they always would like to compete in terms of the mobile bank. Everything is about that one, Itera's analysts and experts are really available for supporting or assisting other clients in order to make sure that they will have improved the application for their clients. This is really how we are using example or we are using very deep domain knowledge in this sector combined with the end-to-end delivery capability of Itera. If you go on to the next slide, the order intake was quite normal, I will say. In the first quarter is 1.0, seasonality very high in fourth quarter, but the last 12 months we have 1.3, so that's very good. Here are some existing ones, but also some new ones. There's always some kind of combination.
We are also have a focused strategy to also look at new logos because that's the part of the growth strategy of Itera. If you go on the next slide, you will see that new business was represented 88.5% of the revenue in the first quarter. New customer are actually defined as customer that we won since end of the corresponding quarter last year. That's a new customer that wasn't a customer for Itera 12 months back in time. If I look at the revenue, they represent 11.5% of new business or new customer in the first quarter. I think that's quite strong. If you look at the visibility of Itera, we are quite large engagement. Top 30 customers, the 74% of total revenue, is really a strong figure. It's down by 3%.
I think that's okay because we have some of the new commerce or new customers that really are stepping up quite fast. I think when looking at the top 30 customers, that it was a little too high. Now it's more going down 3%. For me, that's very good because I see that there are other customer coming in. We can go on to the 18. This I was talking about the data center, save for to tell you more about that. As I said, in the fourth quarter it was 81%, the core digital business, and in the first quarter it's 92%, and by the end of 2021 it will go down to zero. We are talking about core digital business will be 100% of Itera.
Also the last one, if you look at the slide 19, in this section, as I said, we had in the core digital business, it was up by 62 people the last 12 months. While we have the reduction at the data center by 22. Also in terms of the nearshore ratio, it was now 50%. That has been a part of the strategy that we should reach 50%. I think also going forward, we will see some kind of ratio one to third. It will also still continue to increase, but we will also have full focus on the recruitment also in locations that we are represented close to the customer because that's the part of the business model itself, that we should be close to the customer. I think that was everything in this section. Let's move on, Bent.
I think you take over from here.
Yes. Thank you, Arne. Good morning to you all. If we can move on to slide 21. As Arne mentioned, we will focus our financial reporting from now on the core digital business as we think that provides you a better picture of Itera going forward. I will, of course, also present the numbers for the data center operations. The main focus will be on this core digital business which as of now represents 92% of the business, and increasing. Next slide. The core digital business had a growth of around 11% in this quarter, and this was driven primarily by some new customers. For example, we managed to get a new client called Aize which is a part of the Aker system. We developed that from nothing to being our third largest customer in March, over just a few weeks time.
That goes to show how well we are able to scale up on new engagement really fast using our distributed delivery model. We also used subcontractors in a larger extent than before, so that also provided some additional growth. The cost side, we see that our personnel expenses were up by some 11%, and that's slightly below the average headcounts year-over-year. Other operating expenses were down NOK 2.4 million . Some of that is related to the lockdown situation we are in. There was basically no travel at all in Q1. That provides a bit of a saving. There were other activities as well that are naturally at a lower level than regular. We also had NOK 1.5 million less in depreciation and amortization in this quarter.
The main component of that was that we subleased around 40% of the office in Kyiv, because we're not using the office at this point in time due to the lockdown. Also we see that on a short to medium term, even after the lockdown is over, we think that our employees will continue to utilize home offices to some extent so that we can optimize the usage of our own office facilities. In addition, we had around NOK 600,000 of lower depreciation due to some past development costs that were now at the end of life in terms of depreciation. That gave an EBITDA of NOK 28.3 million and a margin of 19.6%, which was slightly below last year and due to more subcontractor work, whereas the EBIT was up from NOK 18.7 million to NOK 22.1 million.
The margin was also up by 1 percentage point to 15.3%. End of period employees counted 523, which was up by 62 compared to the same quarter of last year. That's up by more than 13%. Going on to slide 23. We'll look at the quarterly development. As you can understand, we continued to recruit full-fledged during this COVID period, even though there was some pause in demand from customers, especially in the first phase of the COVID situation. We see now that towards the end of Q1, we are coming back to normal levels, and that gives an impact on the EBIT margins that we see now in Q1.
In terms of quarterly, both the revenues and results, these are heavily dependent on the number of working days after vacations. Q3 will always be the lowest quarter for us, and the other one will sort of be somewhat impacted by the number of working days. In Q1, we had one fewer working days than the corresponding quarter of last year. Moving on to slide 24. We'll look more into the subscription revenue that we have from the own data centers. We see that we had a very sharp drop from year-end to Q1. That's part of this transformation that we have been planning for the last couple of years, really, of transforming the data center into cloud. By this we went into the next, and I would say last phase of this transformation.
Q1 saw the fallout of our biggest and most complex customer that we have on the data center operations. A sharp drop in revenues and corresponding drops in profitability as well. There will be some lag in the timing of when the revenue drops out and when we are able to also get rid of the associated costs. We're currently below sort of a critical mass to service the remaining portfolio in a profitable manner. Now it's a question of migrating the remaining portfolio and/or terminating those customers that do not want to migrate as quickly as possible to also get rid of the associated cost base. A lot of the manpower that we use in this business segment are in the process of being reskilled to move into the cloud operations.
There will be cost reductions in terms of the legacy equipment and data center cost that we have. Going to slide 25. We can see in blue, we have the core digital business, and then the data center operations and the total figures. This quite drastic drop in revenues from the data centers of 59% was almost mitigated by the strong growth in core digital business. We had a drop of 2.6% on the total business. Isolated, we had also then a loss of NOK 3.7 million from the data center operations, which again was almost mitigated by the increase of the core digital business. The net impact was only 800,000 NOK. Looking at the cash flow on next page. We had a cash flow from operating activities of NOK 1.2 million , which was down from NOK 7.5 million of last year.
The running last 12 months shows cash flow from operations of NOK 93 million, which was the same as the previous 12-month period. We invested NOK 7.9 million in Q1 versus NOK 3.8 million in last year. The difference being this investment in the Cloud Center of Excellence. This will be even higher than in Q2 when we complete this NOK 15 million investment in the Cloud Center of Excellence. From financing activities, we spent NOK 6.4 million, which was approximately the same as last year. We ended with a cash balance of NOK 41.2 million, down from NOK 50.7 million of last year. Slide 27. As Arne mentioned, and as we have already communicated as well, the board will propose a dividend payment of NOK 0.25 per share to be paid in early June. They will also, again, ask for an authorization to decide on supplemental dividends later in 2021.
Share price end of the quarter of NOK 14.6 per share, was an increase of 73% compared to end of March last year, where we obviously had this massive COVID-19 impact on the stock market. If we include the dividend as well, the shareholders return have been 80% during this past 12 months. We have own shares of almost 1.3 million, which was valued at NOK 18.7 million at the end of the quarter. Next page, 28. The balance sheets. We have reduced the total balance by NOK 32 million to NOK 296 million . One significant component of that was the sublease agreement of the office space in Kyiv, which reduced the so-called right of use assets. In total, together with the other offices, this was down NOK 14 million from NOK 41 million to NOK 27 million. The equity ratio ended at 22% versus 26% of last year.
Adjusting for this IFRS 16 leasing standard, equity would have been at 25%. That was it. That was what I was going to present about the Q1 figures. Just briefly on the outlook on page 31. We still see a very attractive market for our core digital business. If anything, this market has accelerated with the COVID situation. I think the restricting factors of the total market is the lack of competent resources in this tech space. We obviously have access to one of the larger IT pools in the world through our nearshore centers. We're in a good position in that regard. We also have a strong position through our end-to-end deliveries, and this distributed delivery model that we have has received a lot of accolades, even internationally, i.e., outside the Nordic region. That puts us in a good spot, we think.
We have also, over the past year or so, developed several very interesting and strong partnerships with the likes of DNV, Cognite, Microsoft, to name but a few. This will also add another layer to our position that we will pursue further. We're investing, as mentioned, heavily into this Cloud Center of Excellence, and we're ramping down and sunsetting the owned data centers. That will have some short-term impact on our revenue streams and also profitability for that line of business. As mentioned, the core digital business is growing fast and profitably. That will mitigate that. I think we will leave it at that. We are welcoming any one-to-one meetings that you might want to have to discuss further Itera as an investment case. Feel free to contact either Arne or myself to set up some meetings.
You will find our contact information on both the report packages and also on our website, itera.com. We're looking forward to hearing from you, and/or seeing you back for the Q2 presentation on August the 19th. Until then, have a very nice day and stay safe. Thank you very much.