Good morning, everybody. It's 9:00 AM, so I think we will start now. My name is Erik Brandt. I look forward to presenting the Q3 results from Lumi Gruppen. I'm also joined by Martin Prytz, our CFO. As always, we look forward to presenting the results for you guys, and also we'll be available to answer any questions you might have after the presentation. Just a brief recap of Lumi before we start. We are a leading private education provider, and we have two operating segments: Sonans, the market leader in the private candidate market, and ONH, a strong online provider of higher education. Sonans is present in nine campuses across Norway, in addition to a strong online offering. ONH has one campus in Oslo, in addition to a solid online offering. This quarter, the online share of students in Lumi is 62%.
Sonans has an online share of 51, while ONH has an online share of 76, underscoring the strong online position of Lumi. Just a brief summary of the quarter. The operating revenue ended at NOK 103.7 million, compared to NOK 121.5 million last year. EBIT ended at NOK 10.7 million, compared to NOK 20.1 million last year. The EBIT margin fell 6.2 percentage points. As stated in the headline, ONH continues progress, while the market for Sonans is still soft. For ONH, we see strong growth and improved profitability because of strong student growth and a stable cost development. We will start to report Ntech as a part of ONH going forward. We decided to postpone the study start and instead prioritize the resources to develop 12 new vocational programs and integrate the school into ONH.
The reason is to use ONH's existing resources and market capabilities to accelerate the vocational school development from 2024. Also, extremely important, ONH received full score for its quality system as the only college in the group that NOKUT recently audited. I think this is solid evidence to the high quality ONH is offering to the students and is an important part of the success of ONH. The private candidate market, as you all are aware, and as we also communicate before, is still soft, affecting the revenues in Sonans, but the revenue decline is partly explained by stricter credit control measures and accounting effects, indicating underlying revenue decline of around 10% in the quarter. New cost programs are in process, both in Sonans and in the group, to counter effects of weak private candidate market.
At the group level, new board was elected at the EGM, November first. In the same meeting, the proposed rights issue was canceled, and discussions are now ongoing with the company's shareholders to secure NOK 50 million for down payment on the NOK 300 million loan facility. I think Martin will go through the financial results in more details now, before I continue with the operational part of the presentation.
Thank you, Erik. So, on the financials for Q3, and as you started with, Erik, total operating revenue was NOK 103.7 million in the quarter, compared to NOK 121.5 million last year, representing a decline of 14.6%. The decline was, as you mentioned, Erik, as well, driven by the continuing weak private candidate market in Q3, and also, the third quarter last year was boosted by a change in commercial terms for online in Sonans. Further, strict credit control measures have contributed to a lower revenue in the quarter. We do, however, believe that this will have limited impact on profits for the school year 2023-2024. On the other hand, also, Oslo Nye Høyskole continued its uninterrupted growth over the last four years, with close to 23% growth in the third quarter.
This was mainly driven by new and existing online study programs and a higher share of recurring revenues for the multi-year programs like Bachelor. EBIT in the third quarter was NOK 10.7 million, compared to NOK 20.1 million last year. The margin ended at 10.3%, which represents the decline of 6.2 percentage points. The decrease in EBIT and hence the lower margin in the quarter was a result of the net decline in revenues and the mentioned effect on new commercial terms, boosting the revenues in the third quarter last year. The decline has partly been offset by the cost programs implemented in the group, together with the growth in revenue for Oslo Nye Høyskole.
Total operating expenses decreased by NOK 9 million, or 10.2% in the third quarter, and the largest contributor was personal expenses, which decreased by 11.4%. When excluding some items, we see that the gross savings is actually NOK 13 million in the quarter. When we then exclude the sale of a collection portfolio that we did last year in ONH, and that we have Ntech expenses also included in the accounts now from Q3 2023. So excluding those two items, the gross savings was NOK 13 million in the quarter. And again, strong credit control measures have been implemented, and as we can see, it has already yielded a positive effect on expenses.
We see that expenses for bad debt are down by 24%, or close to 35% when we exclude the sale of the collection portfolio last year, influencing the numbers. We also, in the quarter, observed a strong cash flow. Additional cost measures are now under implementation to improve the group's profitability, and we expect this to have limited impact on Lumi's core business. Cost measures are mainly related to lower campus operation cost, renegotiations of lease contracts, subleasing, and changes in the organizational setup for Ntech and group functions. We would also like to highlight that the underlying financial development for Sonans is somewhat better when adjusting for last year's online revenue effect and the stricter credit control measures that we expect to materialize in improved profitability going forward.
On the right-hand, on the presentation, we see that when excluding the accounting effect of new commercial terms, the decline in revenue is 29% compared to the reported 39.2%. We see that a bit on a like for like basis when excluding or including also the online effect this year, we see that the EBIT is closer to NOK 7.8 million, compared to NOK 14.8 million last year. Also making this adjustment for the group, we reported NOK 10.7 million in EBIT for the group, and also making the same adjustment for the group, we see that the underlying EBIT for the group is in line with last year and a more flat development, actually.
And also worth to mention as there as well is the cash flow that we see from the students, that we see a decline of close to around 10% compared to payments received last year, indicating that the underlying decline for Sonans is somewhat lower, and the development is then somewhat better as well. And of course, worth to mention is also that we see that the cost level at ONH has stabilized and reduced compared to the last quarter last year and also year to date last year. And this has led to a marginal expansion for ONH, back to the levels prior to the period, with the ramp-up in OpEx and the expansion of the study programs that started back in 2020, 2021.
On the last part of the financials, we have the cash flow, and as we state, there is a strong cash flow from operation, despite the decline in revenue in the quarter. Also, when we exclude the tax repayment we received in the quarter, there are more comments on this tax repayment in the report. Total liquidity reserve, including the revolving credit facility, was NOK 197 million in the third quarter, and net interest-bearing debt was NOK 173 million. Lumi Gruppen has agreed with this bank on the updated and amended terms for its financing. However, this agreement requires a repayment of NOK 50 million on the existing loan facility of the NOK 300 million.
As Erik mentioned in the introduction, since the rights issue was not resolved at the EGM, first of November, discussions are now ongoing with the company's shareholders to secure the repayment of NOK 50 million on the existing NOK 300 million facility. The progress on this will be announced in due course. I think that concludes the financials part, Erik, and I then hand over to you on the strategy and operations.
Thanks, Martin. I think this section will be quite brief and nice and sweet. The following highlights will focus on the two segments in Lumi Gruppen. I think when I look at this slide here, for Sonans, I think a strong labor market post-COVID has had negative impact on student volume. Recently published figures from Utdanningsdirektoratet, which I will show a little bit later, shows that Sonans has followed the market decline or the decline in number of private candidates. We will obviously continue to adapt the cost base and operations to the current market conditions.
When the market recovers, I think margins will rapidly improve, because the underlying demand for education, I think, is still strong, and we expect that the private candidate market will, over time, recover, pending the labor market and other macro drivers. Also worth noticing, the government will present its proposal for new admission rules in first half 2024. We have no new indication of the outcome, but expect modifications based on the result from the consultation process, as we have also informed previously. When looking at the ONH higher education business, it continues to perform better than the overall market and I think demonstrates its position as a leading online player in the higher education market.
ONH has developed a solid education platform with solid growth, prospects, strong intake for this school year, with an expected growth of +20% in the second half 2023. Attractive growth, organic growth opportunities ahead, and ONH is well positioned to continue the journey that they are currently on. The vocational school is now being a part of ONH to take advantage of the education platform ONH has developed. It has 12 new programs in process with NOKUT, and a broader launch is planned, pending timing of the NOKUT process. I think we could go briefly into the Sonans segment first. As said, autumn intake ended around 30% below last year, as we have previously informed. New statistics from Utdanningsdirektoratet, as you can see on the right here, has been published.
And as you can see, the number of exams, which is the number of exam students have signed up to, fell by 36.5% from 2020-2021 school year to 2022-2023 school year. And the Sonans sales fell by 35.2% in the same period. The statistics are published in November each year, including the previous school year. So the statistics show that Sonans has developed in line with the market. I think it's therefore likely that if the market improves, Sonans will also follow the market and grow accordingly. For this school year, 2023-2024, the statistics will be published in November 2024, so it's still quite a long time until we have full visibility of the market development this school year. So, but Sonans's market position is still strong.
has maintained its market position as the market leader in the private candidate market. We expect a market recovery, but are uncertain of the timing. Volume growth will be driven by reintroduction of high school exam, a softer labor market, and other macro drivers as well, leading to more young people choosing to become students instead of working. So the overall market fundamentals and need for education is still strong, and we regard the market outlook to be positive for the private candidate business in the medium to long term. Then let's go to ONH. When you look at the overall market for higher education, and we have also informed about this previously, it's been quite stable compared to last year, with only 1% growth in applicants through sommer- og høstterminen on Samordna opptak.
But ONH has outperformed the market, with 24% growth in applicants. I think it's fair to say that ONH is in a strong position. When looking at actual student growth in signed contract, this means new students for this school year, ONH ended at almost 22% growth, and the revenue growth in the quarter is 22.5% and driven by online growth of 42.3%. ONH launched 8 new programs this year, which was a key driver for the successful student intake. I think ONH now has a very strong program portfolio, especially online, securing flexibility in the delivery model and significant growth potential going forward.
I think it's fair to say that the most important growth driver for ONH is to continue to develop new, relevant and attractive high-quality programs, which has proven to be the most important criteria for success over the last couple of years. In addition, ONH will develop trade school programs and has integrated the vocational school, or is in process of integrating the vocational school and Ntech. So we have one program approved now and 12 in process, and we aspire towards a broad portfolio of attractive vocational programs to build student volume. ONH has a flexible and profitable model for operating high-quality college programs, and we will also utilize this model to develop the vocational business on the same platform. Okay, I think that leave it for me, Martin.
We'll go through the outlook, and then we can answer the questions that you might have later on.
Yes, thank you, Erik. Just to conclude the presentation for today, I think, as we have stated previously as well, Lumi's business model has been transformed during the last year, and we have now a more flexible and scalable business model with a relatively lower share of fixed cost. We are also continuing to work on cost measures to further improve the profitability of the group. We are happy to see that for ONH, the trend is positive, with online student growth leading to improved return on investment made and the profitability of the business. However, for Sonans, the profitability is expected to be weak in the coming school year, while ONH is expected to improve during the school year.
As previously announced in the trading update sent out as well, we estimate revenues for Sonans for the coming school year to be in the area of NOK 170 million-NOK 175 million, and ONH in the area of NOK 227 million-NOK 232 million. I think by that, we close the presentation for now, and we are open for questions from the audience. Okay, I don't think there are any questions for today, but we are obviously happy to answer any of your question by sending an email to IR@lumigruppen.no, or just reach out directly by email. So, thanks for joining the presentation for today, and have a nice day, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.