Welcome to LINK Mobility's third quarter presentation. My name is Guro, and I hold the position as VP of Global Sales, and I'm here to guide you through this conference. Our CEO, Guillaume Van Gaver, and our CFO, Thomas Berge, will soon share our highlights, financial figures, and our outlook. After, we will have a Q&A session. Please submit all your questions online, written in English. You can submit during the total presentation. I will now hand it over to Guillaume Van Gaver.
Thank you, Guro. Great to be with you today, especially after LINK Mobility went public on the twenty-first of October. We're very happy to present the highlights of this third quarter, twenty twenty. Let me introduce you with some important information and those highlights. First of all, our total number of mobile messaging has grown by 12% year on year for this third quarter, twenty twenty, despite the impact of COVID-19, especially in the latter part of the quarter. We will share some information regarding the impact of COVID-19. We have reported a very strong growth rate of 19% and 15% on an organic basis. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by 14% and 11% on an organic basis. We have been seeing a very strong performance in Northern Europe, as you will see in our segment reporting, and also in our German operation.
This has been driven also by strong growth in logistics and e-commerce, which supports the growth in this third quarter. I'm very happy to report that we have now reached the milestone of 35,000 customers, adding 2,000 customers compared to the previous period, and reaching 117% on the net retention basis, which is a very, very good score. We have seen how successful was our introduction on the twenty-first of October into the stock exchange. Really an important milestone because it will help us grow our ability to execute M&A and invest in our strategy. With this, you would have seen yesterday that we have confirmed the acquisition of WebSMS, which strengthens our position not only in Europe, but especially in the DACH region, giving us a lot of potential going forward.
Potential we have, clearly, because our products and services are on high demand. We can see the tailwind coming from the economic and society digitalization. We know that mobile first is really at the center of communication between brands and consumers. We know that every time there is improvement in the way to communicate, there are also new channels coming in, richer channels. Every company that is working on improving customer experience uses mobile messaging and CPaaS solutions, and we have also the growth coming from certain sectors like health and e-commerce, obviously. These are really important tailwinds that are helping LINK Mobility and the industry as a whole. When we want to go specifically into the COVID impact, I think it's important to look at what has happened in the second quarter and the third quarter.
We have seen a very strong growth in notification regardless of COVID-19, and this is clearly shown in the numbers. But it is also fair to say that for mobile marketing use cases, especially during the lockdown, especially in Southern Europe, we have seen a reduction of the total number of volume. But when society reopened, we were able to see a massive growth, where brands and companies were catching up, investing in mobile messaging marketing initiatives, which really grew significantly during June and July. But it's fair to say that at the end of the quarter, we have seen the beginning of a reduction when the second wave of COVID-19 came in, which also took some sectors with lower volumes, such as retail, and we know that these campaigns have been delayed for the fourth quarter.
We are seeing also a stronger impact in certain countries like Poland, or also certain segments like the small and medium enterprises. In general, we can say that the pluses and the minuses, they compensate each other in this whole COVID-19 situation, but on an underlying way, going forward, we see that there is more and more demand for our product and services, and therefore, as we are getting to implement vaccines in twenty twenty-one, we see that for LINK Mobility, this should continue and boost our growth going forward.
We have especially seen during this third quarter, more and more companies coming to us and say, "Please, roll out these new channels for us." We know that the potential is very significant in terms of number of additional mobile messaging and the fact that it requires an environment, a CPaaS environment, to actually orchestrate and make sure that those mobile messaging reach the customers with rich and powerful messages. We have also, in this third quarter, made significant investments in our CPaaS ecosystem, and you will see, especially on the foundation layers, that we have made important progress regarding our mediation and billing systems, especially in the Northern Europe countries, and these are going to be further implemented at the end of 2020 and in 2021 going forward.
We've also made investments in our omni-channel APIs, which enables us to carry more and more channels for our customers. We have also continued our investment in go-to-market. As we speak, we have, for instance, implemented a new self-signup portal in Sweden. But you can see in twenty twenty-one, in the first half, that a lot of countries will change colors. What does it mean? It means that we are going to implement additional go-to-market channels in most of our countries. If you take examples like Italy, Spain, and France, we are, for instance, going to roll out the partner channel. When you look into Sweden, we're going to even continue our self-signup investments. And you can see that this is going to be directing a lot of further growth, especially going into the second half of twenty twenty-one, and most significantly in twenty twenty-two.
We have shared with you also the fact that we are observing that countries that are lagging behind, and we gave two strong example here with Germany and Spain, are catching up with the most advanced countries. And the system that we have put in place enables us to push our solutions to more and more customers and grow the use cases. And we have seen, for instance, in the third quarter, very significant growth in Germany as an example. In the third quarter, we were very happy to sign a large number of new customers. Eika is a group of banks in the Nordics. They sign up to our messaging gateway for a variety of use cases. We've also signed with Thales and Coventry Building Society, a very advanced account takeover protection system.
We've been able to sign marketing use cases with, for instance, INNO, Rue du Commerce. With RCS, we've been able to also implement some attractive solutions in the protection, SIM swap protection with banks, and you have other examples in gaming, in software, HR software systems that you can see in this slide. Clearly, a good momentum for us in the customer new intake. I would like to give this example of Groupe BPCE, which is a very large bank in France, where simply looking at 2020 results versus 2019, we see 100% growth. They touch 30 million customers, and we have been implementing in 2020, some new services and also pushing the protections and the password for new mobile banking activities.
And when you look at going forward, there are still a lot of units within BPCE and the group of BPCE, which will consume our new services, so we can still expect strong growth. That's how we are able to actually maintain and grow our net retention rate, which is going to be presented in more details by Thomas. So clearly, very strong results from our existing case, but I would like to finish by saying that we're very happy to have announced yesterday, the signing, but also the closing of the acquisition of WebSMS, which is a leader in Austria, covering a large set of customers with an underlying last twelve months Adjusted EBITDA of EUR 15.1 million.
And this will enable us to take not only a even stronger position in Austria, but also in the DACH region, because with the German-speaking languages, we can expand not only in Germany, but also in, Switzerland, as well as Austria. There are, very strong managers in place in WebSMS, very experienced team, and we are going to be able to deliver synergies, as Thomas is going to explain in more details. Talking about Thomas, I'm now going to hand over to Thomas Berge, our CFO, for presenting more details in our financial results. Thank you. Over to you, Thomas.
Thank you, Guillaume. Starting with the highlights then on slide fourteen, you will see that LINK had another good quarter despite the pandemic. Reported revenue growth of 19%, organic growth, 15% for revenue. When you look at the mobile messaging area, we will see a organic growth of 18%, higher than total revenue. This is due to the fact that we have declining revenue on some legacy products, like direct carrier billing. We will come back to that, when we are looking on Central Europe. Fairly stable gross margin development, a slight reduction, mainly due to the fact, that we have a higher mix of aggregator revenue in Global Messaging.
And also in Northern Europe, we'll see a larger portion of the volumes coming from high-volume clients, which have higher negotiation power due to their volumes, and then therefore, a lower margin also when you compare it to the average client. Strong growth in Adjusted EBITDA, 14%. NOK 9 million comes from organic growth, NOK 2 million comes from acquisitions. Moving over to the KPI section, you see that we have 35,000 customer accounts, an increase of 2,000 compared to the last quarter, of which 1,500 comes from the self-signup solution and 500 clients from the enterprise segment. Net retention on the enterprise segment is 117%, so a strong growth on existing clients minus churn. On total group, we have 115%.
On the bottom right, you see some unit economics, price per message, an increase of 3 øre or 10%. It's driven by price increases on existing clients, a more favorable product mix, meaning that we have a higher growth on more advanced products. We have higher profitability, but also, effects from customer mix, country mix, and currency effects. Over to the next slide, we see the P&L, over 2.5 billion NOK in year-to-date revenue, a growth of 25% year to date, whereof 19% is organic growth. Gross margin year to date of 636 million NOK. A year-to-date growth of 19%, of which 14% is organic growth. Adjusted EBITDA of 271 million NOK year to date.
Net finance, you can see is net negative, and it's significantly more negative than the same period last year, and this is due to unrealized currency effects on debt of NOK 221 million. Then we have the acquisition of WebSMS that Guillaume mentioned. A very good company located in Austria. Highly profitable unit with CPaaS capabilities, which will significantly increase LINK's adjusted EBITDA with approximately EUR 5.1 million or close to EUR 5.8 million after synergies. This acquisition will materially improve our presence in the DACH countries, and we will see that it's going to contribute positively to organic growth levels going forward in that regions.
Pro forma revenue, including WebSMS, for the full nine months of 2020, the revenue will be close to NOK 2.7 billion and adjusted EBITDA of NOK 311 million. Over to the regions. Northern Europe, strong organic growth of 20% on revenue. We see, as I said, a strong momentum on high-volume clients with, somewhat lower margins, which is also then reflected in the declining gross margin , but we in the Nordics, we see a very scalable business model. We can add a lot of revenue and gross profit with very little OpEx. So the adjusted EBITDA is actually growing more than our revenue at 21%. This is driven by the gross margin to EBITDA conversion. It's 68%, an eight percentage point increase from the third quarter of 2019.
The next slide shows Central Europe, and as Guillaume mentioned, we are still observing negative effects from COVID in Central Europe, especially within the direct carrier billing products and smaller retail segments. Organic revenue growth is at 8%, and it has been negatively impacted by the decline in direct carrier billing. As the pandemic resulted in stores being closed and restrictions on people, people's movement, LINK observed a decline, especially in the revenue from parking in Eastern Europe. On the other side, logistics and e-commerce are expanding their volumes and revenue. A 9% EBITDA growth, which we view as good in the quarter, where we are still negatively impacted by COVID in Central Europe. In Western Europe, we are seeing a normalization in the third quarter after societies are reopening and an organic growth rate of 17% on revenue.
On the EBITDA, we are seeing a very high growth rate, 15%, and that is coming from the scalable business model. We see a gross margin to adjusted EBITDA conversion of 41%, an eight percentage point increase, and we are also having synergies impacting the profitability positively. Global Messaging. Here we are seeing a growth of 14%, 103 million NOK in revenue. We have an improvement in gross margin as we're consciously moving away from highly competitive routes and re-focusing on gross margin conversion. We are also seeing a healthy growth in the global OTP traffic, which is password traffic, and there we have good margins. Cash flow, some metrics there. Net cash from operating activities at NOK 65 million, CapEx at NOK 18 million, and we see a cash EBITDA of NOK 44 million.
We have a large interest payment due early in October, which will then impact cash EBITDA in the fourth quarter, but in the third quarter, it's very, very strong. We are expecting a 50% reduction in interest costs going forward due to the partial down payment of debt in connection with the IPO. Slide 23 then is the balance sheet. Debt and leverage ratio will be materially improved by the IPO, so the balance sheet that you will see by the fourth quarter, it's more relevant going forward. Just want to mention then, we expect cash deposit post-IPO at around 1 billion NOK. Net interest-bearing debt, around 730 million NOK post-IPO, and the leverage to be around two times EBITDA after the IPO. We want to reiterate the guidance given in connection with the IPO.
We expect for the full year of 2020, revenues between NOK 3.5 billion and NOK 3.6 billion, and an adjusted EBITDA between NOK 360 million and NOK 370 million. Then the acquired entity in Austria will come on top of this outlook. That's it for me. Now over to Q&A.
Okay, thank you. We have a question here from Øystein Lodgaard. "Can you give some flavor to the reason behind the high gross margin in WebSMS?
Yes, Øystein, this is a very good question, of course. So it's related to the fact that WebSMS has a MNO, mobile network operator, status, in Austria, and that enables higher gross margin than what you would typically see in other geographies in Europe for us. Thank you for the question, Øystein.
Then I can see from the online tool here that we don't have any more questions coming in.
Very good. So thank you very much for attending this quarterly earning presentations and the questions we have received. We are very happy to continue our journey through the acquisition of WebSMS that you have seen yesterday evening, and also a strong Q3 results. So we look forward to seeing you during the next quarterly earnings. And indeed, stay tuned and have a safe end of the year. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.