Good morning and very much welcome to the DNB Carnegie Micro Cap Day. Without further ado, I think we should start the first presentation here. With us today we have Lumi Education with Nina Vesterby and Morten Danielsen. Very much welcome, and the floor is yours.
Thank you so much. Hi, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of Lumi Education Group. I'm Nina Vesterby, Group CEO, and joining me today, Morten Danielsen, who is Managing Director of Oslo Nye Høyskole. I will spend some time on the business case and on the outlook before Morten will take you through a more deep dive on Oslo Nye Høyskole, which is our biggest asset. Who are we? We are an active owner of private educations in Norway, and we have three main businesses today. ONH is our university college. They are delivering programs within psychology, health, social sciences, and business, and they have a main focus on flexible online studies. Last year, ONH delivered NOK 333 million in revenue and 26% EBIT margin. We have Sonans, which is the Norwegian market leader in exam preparations for private candidates.
We help students raise their grades or complete their diploma to get into higher education. Sonans, they delivered NOK 198 million at 18% margin last year. Finally, we have EnkelEksamen, acquired in December. It's a fast-growing digital platform with video-based exam-focused content for education from high school level and up to university. They are still small, but they're growing quickly and at a 31% margin last school year. Together that gives us a group revenue of NOK 549 million. We had 16% growth last year and adjusted margin of 20%. First half of 2026 was the highest we've ever seen at group level. We delivered NOK 277 million with 17% growth. If we exclude EnkelEksamen, our newest acquisition, we had 10% growth, so it's mostly organic. ONH grew 15%, mainly from online programs, and Sonans 2% with continuing volume growth from their digital classroom.
If we take a look at earnings, profitability is growing faster than revenue. Group-adjusted EBITDA came in at NOK 56 million, so it was up 54% from last year, and we had a 20% margin. We grow the top line at double digits while we grow our cost a lot slower. ONH, they contributed with NOK 42 million at 26% margins, and that was driven by sales growth but also scaling internally. Sonans delivered 17% last year, mostly from cost optimization. On cash, we have significantly improved our cash the last year. In H1, we had a free cash flow conversion of 80%. Okay, so to the investment case. I want to point out some reasons why we are a good investment case. Firstly, we have very strong structural tailwinds.
There are far more applicants in Norway than there are public study places available, not as you see in Sweden. Secondly, we are positioned in the fastest-growing part of the market. That is online learning. Thirdly, our students, they get results, and results, that is what drive reputation and referrals. Fourth, as we just went through, we have had double-digit growth. We are expanding our margins. We have cash paid up front, and we do accretive M&A on top. I just want to go a bit through those areas. We are starting with the tailwinds. The demand for education in Norway has been running ahead of supply for 15 years, and the gap is getting wider and not narrower. In 2010, as you can see, there were 106,000 applicants competing for 50,000 study places. This year, 151,000 applicants for 66,000 places.
There is a demand gap growing from 2.1 to 2.3. Also, the political backdrop is very stable. Lånekassen provides student loans, and the recent governmental review confirmed there are no major changes to the private candidate system. Also, within this market, online learning is where the growth is, and that is where our businesses sit. Since 2019, online student numbers have grown 13% a year, while the overall market has been almost flat. ONH is built online first, and that is what is important here. More than 80% of our students, they study online, and it is only 12% in the market in general. We do also have a campus to cater for the younger students, but there is only 20% of our students going to that campus. None of this matters if we do not get the results needed.
I think it is important to say that ONH has been the highest-rated institution in Studiebarometeret four years in a row, and they scored 4.2 last year. Online delivery is not a compromise for our students. That is why they choose us. In Sonans, students come in with an average grade of 3.5, and then they go out with an average grade of 4.5. They increase their grades with a full point. 91% of all Sonans students get into their preferred higher education. Then going into the payment. Our students commit to payment and attendance before each semester, and that means around 90% of next year's revenue is locked in every September. You can see the effects in our forecast. We have an average variance of around 2% in our forecast, while the median in the sector is 17%. Okay, been going through the business case.
I just want to take you a bit through the outlook going forward before Morten goes more into ONH. I think for ONH, we have grown 21% per year. It is really good numbers. They haven't had a single year of decline and are now more than 4,500 students. The revenue quality has improved from year to year. Now they have multi bachelor and master programs with recurring revenue, accounting for around 40% of the revenue. Last Friday, we presented our H1 report, and the outlook shows that this year's intake looks flat. Despite the macro trends that we have been looking at, that points in our favor. We do have a lot of recurring revenue that will offset part of this, and we have some measures on the cost side to offset more.
We're going to come back with a fuller analysis of the intake once it's completed, but there's still a few weeks left. We have some hypotheses on this year's intake. Because most of the growth in the demand gap comes from new programs, and much of those programs are outside our focus. We need to move into new fields, and moving into new fields for us takes time because we have a very slow governmental process in what they call NOKUT. We have applied for institutional accreditation, and we are in the process of an appeal. This would help speed up our program development a lot, because then we don't have to apply for each new individual program. In the previous years, we've hit the market quite well with our new programs, but we're not seeing the same pickup this time.
Might be AI, might be something else, but Morten will come back to NOKUT and program development later. What I would say is that we do believe we have four bachelor programs in our pipeline that will be a big growth driver next year. Also just want to note that our student demographic is a bit different than most schools. Our average student is around 30 years old, and they want to retrain or change their career. Given the uncertainty related to Norwegian economy, we have interest rates more than double what you have in Sweden, which is high. There's a lot of uncertainty also around AI. Many of these students are pausing the reskilling until the economy picks up. But they haven't stopped thinking about it, so they will come back. With this, there are also some opportunities emerging this year.
We see a particularly strong intake around the youngest campus students. This is not an audience that we are targeting, but we do see double-digit growth in those cohorts. That's probably because our brand is better known and also unemployment is very high among the under-25s, so the desire to study grows. We have room to more than double our campus student mass. That's something we are, of course, considering pursuing. I think even though we don't see the same growth rates as before, we do believe we could continue this growth into next school year. Also, for Sonans, the last six years has been very challenging for Sonans. Before 2021, Sonans grew at 12% every year, and margins was peaking at 26%. This was followed by an unusually strong labor market and grade inflation during COVID.
When jobs are easy to get and people don't go back to school. Also, on top of that, a large group of students who usually would not getting their grades in COVID due to absence kept them because they could be home. We've used the last years to rightsize our cost base and move majority of delivery online, and the end market has since then turned and started growing again. This autumn, we are seeing a decline in Sonans, despite the positive macro picture also here. We believe there are two reasons for this. The first is a shift in the mix because we do general study competence, which is falling while trade subjects are rising. Trade subjects are now more than half the market. We have only been present in general study competence, but we are now this year moving into trade subjects.
We already see growth in this area, and we expect it to be a driver going forward. The completion reform in the Norwegian government that came into force last year, it allows 18 to 24-year-olds to go back to their old school to finish their diploma. They cannot improve it, but they can complete it. We see a lot of 18, 19-year-olds going back to their old high school this year, choosing that route. We do not believe the public schools will be able to deliver as good of a product as we are. It is quite expensive for the public sector. I think we are exploring whether we can be part of the solution for the government. It is more of a long-term work.
In the meantime, we do expect these students to come back to us because we do not believe that they failed last year. Why should they not fail this year doing the same thing? We believe they gradually will come back. That was a little bit about the outlook for both Sonans and ONH, our biggest assets. EnkelEksamen, we expect they can continue the double-digit growth that they have been doing over the last years. I think it is time to move on to deep dive on ONH.
Thank you, and thank you for coming. I will walk you through ONH as a case and the trends that I think is the most important and the way they have affected higher education sector over the last five or six years, and how we are going to respond to that. I always start by bragging about our new campus, but that is not the key here today. ONH, well, now we are a private university college, 4,500 students. Political science, psychology, business, health, a broad variety. We are most proud of and most famous for our flexibility. Today, 80% of our students are fully online students. We only bring them into campus when it is absolutely necessary. Sometimes it is, most times you can do it digital.
We have our own technology, which we are extremely proud of, and it is our own technology that enable us to offer a flexibility that you do not see in established institutions. At ONH, students study around their life, not the way around. Usually, you have to change your life to go to school, not with us. When life hits you, we make changes to your study plan. Speed up, slow down, online, campus, or whatever is in between. When we look at the trends, it is so extraordinarily interesting to see. From COVID, there was a huge shift in the expectation of your average student, not in terms of technology, but in terms of flexibility. Today, students expect flexibility in whatever kind of study program they are in.
Doesn't matter if it's a campus or online, they expect it to be a large part to be digital and flexible. in 2022, as you know, all students around the world got access to the greatest one-on-one tutor that will help you solve any problem you might have with ChatGPT and other services like that. At the same time, those same services disrupted long writing or essay as a format, home exam as a format. All the established institution, well, they were kind of, and political management were united in their response, "Get students back to campus because that's the only place you can learn," which we of course strongly disagree.
When we see that flexible study programs now is not only for the adult learners, because the expectation has shifted and cost of living is rising, more students than ever, also the youngest segment, are entering flexible study programs. They study and they work and they shift this. An interesting consequence is that students no longer prioritize going into class. This is a European and U.S. problem. You see it all around the world. They do so because they have to work and they can get their information elsewhere. ONH. If we look at the overall market for flexible education, you can see that all the growth in students in Norway comes from some sort of flexible program. By flexible, I mean everything that is not your classic campus full-time student. It's part-time, online, session-based, anything in between.
28% of all students are now on some sort of flexible program, 28%. The growth in flexible comes from pure online models. 2025 is double the amount of online student as it was in 2019. When we look at the growth in online, if we double-click on Online, and this only shows the public figures which represents more than half of the market. We won't know all the numbers until later this year. All the growth from last year to this year comes from new program. Institutions are developing new online programs within new areas that didn't exist before, and that explains pretty much all the growth. ONH is a digital first institution. We are a digital pioneer. We were the first institution to prioritize online education. We weren't the first to offer it, but we were the first to prioritize it.
We have our own technology, and we have a digital organization that can handle it. This is not your typical description of an institution. I'll give you an example, because when you look at AI, you can think that this will change how students learn, which is true. What you want to do is you want to make an adaptive learning experience, not send them over to ChatGPT. So, what we do, this is just an example, we are developing a session agent that will very pedagogically and socratically discuss with the student. Another agent will assess the discussion, rate the student, and the policy agent will instruct the session agent the next time we log on on how to behave, giving you a tailor-made experience.
The reason for this is that our incentive is to make students learn as much as possible in the shortest time as possible. Whereas the incentives of all the AI services is most likely just to keep the user in the app. Very different. We also think a lot of the flip side of AI. The most important thing is that a degree needs to mean something. So, if digital exams can be cheated, then the degree doesn't mean anything. The way we think of this is to make a portfolio of different assessment formats. We were the first in Norway to launch a digital proctoring tool, meaning it's some sort of surveillance tool or digital overvåkning in Norwegian. It means that you have to share your webcam, your screen and your audio.
What we saw is that it shifts the normal distribution curve, which after launch of ChatGPT leaned heavily towards the best grades, are now leaning back. Towards where it is. When it comes to long writing or a bachelor's assignment or essay format, we can add an oral defense, but oral doesn't really scale, so we try to develop a digital asynchronous oral defense system. This is the way we're going to keep working, developing more and more different assessment tools so that a degree still means something. More technology does not mean less contact with students. This is key. I think this is why students choose ONH, because we are very close to our students. Doesn't matter if you're an online student or a campus student.
We see this in the satisfaction, like Nina mentioned, we have very high satisfaction rate and also the one in between, 4.3 in assessment format out of a scale of five. This is skyrocketing after we launched the digital proctoring tool, meaning that the students agree with us that the most important thing we do is to make sure that a degree still means something. The growth of ONH is driven by not only student satisfaction, but also program development. If you look at this graph on the top, you see that of the programs launched after 2022, it accounts for three quarters of all the growth, when it comes to 2025. So, program development is key to growth. I would add, ONH is still a fairly unknown school. We are very well known for those interested in flexible education, but overall, we have a low brand awareness.
This creates a great potential for us going forward. Just keep what we do brick by brick, building our brand and be more known for what we are good at. What we have been really good at historically is program development. However, like Nina mentioned, we have to apply for each program. When we apply, we have to wait for the public deadline, then wait for the public assessment, and then wait for the next intake. Usually takes one to two years. If you asked me a year ago, I would say it would take one to three years. So, things are actually improving, but still, one to two years is a very long time. If we qualify for an institutional accreditation or when we do, we take control of the process ourself.
It's the same laws and regulations, but we are in control of the process and the timing. Dramatically reduces time to market. Also, we can adjust existing portfolio. Today, we have to apply if we want to make change to something that we launched that didn't really fit with the market. This we can also do internally. It's important to say that for us, we do not only program development and education, we also do research. By being an institutionally accredited school, we can apply for research grants at the Norwegian research institutions, and we are eligible for more application for the EU Horizon funding, opening up a whole new area for us. We are doing excellent in research as it is, but we want to do more. Like I mentioned, program development will also speed up. We did apply in 2025. We got rejection in 2026.
We have filed the appeal. This is where the process is now. But when I say that institutional accreditation is the unlock, I mean the unlock for acceleration of growth. Because we do have quite a lot of bachelor's program that we did apply for last year in the pipeline, expected to be finished this year. We will keep sending applications to make sure that we have an interesting pipeline, enable us to keep growing regardless of how long time it will take before we get the accreditation. I wish I could keep going all day, but okay, I'll wrap it up. The online market is unserved. ONH is extremely well-positioned to take our share of the growth that will come within the sector of flexible education. We do have a brand-new campus in central Oslo.
So, if campus student segment is increasing in demand, we can meet that demand as well. Finally, the three things that will keep us grow is program development, building our brand, and keep student satisfaction as high as possible. That's it.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Nina and Morten. Now we have three different polls for questions and eight minutes to go. If you're online, which I hope we have quite a few, if you have a question just put it in the small box there and I'll get it here and be able to ask them. If you have a question here in the auditorium, Tove is going to be running around with the microphones, so happy for you to ask it. The last poll is, I have a good list of questions myself as well. If you first start looking at, you added EnkelEksamen during the year. How did that fit into your portfolio?
Well, I think it is a great fit. It broadens our portfolio quite nicely. I think what you see, they are digital native, so they bring ed tech possibilities to the existing businesses as well. They work in the same environment as all of our schools do. So, it is a good match.
You also have a pending acquisition, Bjørknes Privatskole. How will that fit in and extend your portfolio?
Yeah. So, I think Bjørknes is an Oslo-based campus driven private exam prep school. So, it will fit very nicely with Sonans. This is, as you heard, not a fast-growing market. It is quite standing still, meaning to consolidate those businesses makes a lot of sense in the market to continue to serve the students as good as possibly we can.
Yeah, that brings us over to the outlook for the current year and what you see on the revenue, obviously ONH flat and Sonans decline. How does that compare to what you see in the underlying market?
Well, I do not have all of the intel from all of our competitors, so it is difficult to say. I do not have the full answer. What we see, and we have talked to a lot of our competitors, and it looks the same around, so it is not us delivering worse than the market. I think we deliver quite on par with the market, especially at least for the private prep area. As you heard from ONH, it is also a program development issue at the moment. I am not sure if you have anything more on the intel on the competitors.
No. You can add that what we have experienced this year is that we have increased competition in our existing areas, and other institutions have opened up new areas within flexible education where we are not present, bringing us back to the one-to-two-year time-to-market problem. This will happen occasionally, but we will get back because we have a very interesting pipeline of programs. So, I hope that we will see that coming back to the shift, the normal growth curve, after January.
Yeah.
I noticed that when you talked about it, you also talked about potential cost measures that could compensate a little on the cost lines for the lower revenue lines, so to say. Is that meaningful numbers, or where are your sources? Where do you have the flexibility?
Yeah. So, we are both working on cost and income measures. It is important to look at revenue measures as well. As I said, trade subjects is an area where we are going into, which is important for us. But yeah, we have, I think, significant cost measures, but we do not want to do anything that makes. We want to be on the same growth path. So, it is important for us to not let that be in conflicting with the growth. But yeah. We do not want to say too much, but we have significant numbers.
When you look at it, obviously, we had AcadeMedia, the Swedish group, presenting this morning, and they have taken a move into your framework also business, acquiring K2 Kompetanse. Is the competitive dynamics changing in the Norwegian market to some degree, or is there any major things happening?
No, but I think they are moving into a market, meaning that they see an interest in our market, which I think is also good that they do. K2 is a very interesting company, and as I said, we are moving into trade subjects. We are in position to do so. We have the biggest brand in Norway in terms of private prep exams, and we have nine campuses all across Norway. So, we should be in position to do that by ourselves. So, I think it is good to see our competitors wanting to get into the market because that means it is a good market.
Looking at the whole. We have a question in the back here, so.
Hello? Can you hear me? I have a question regarding the application that was rejected. What was the reason, since you said that is one of the key for your growth?
Thank you. It's a really good question, which has an extremely long answer. We disagree with the. Or the committee argues that our faculty level of competence is not at the level it should be to be institutionally accredited, meaning that we do not have enough professor or associate professors, which is a number one can argue. Also, they said that our quantitative numbers for publications, the number of research publication that we publish, is too low, which might have been true a couple of years ago, but this year, or 2025, ONH is number 11 out of all institutions in Norway, including universities, which is at a whole different level. So, one cannot make that argument anymore. We have made an appeal, I think it's very strong, just stating the obvious, that this is the numbers that ONH has.
This is the bar for being institutionally accredited, and we will see how the public authorities will handle this.
Yeah.
One question then. Is there a risk of increasing cost if you need to have further lectures or high educated teachers?
Yeah. We have taken all this into account. We are operating at the level of an institutionally accredited school. Yes, there's always a risk that we can have further demands from the public to increase something, but I don't think this will be very significant, if so.
Well, we talked a lot about Norway, but looking at your model, a lot of the component feels like it could have an exportability and scalability outside the Norwegian window. How do you see that, and what would be the most interesting things to pursue if that possibly came across?
Well, so far, we have been working within Norway because we see there is still big potential in the market in Norway. As you saw, ONH is a small institution. It is a big market. There is a lot of possibilities. We want to address that. Of course, we do sometimes look outside our borders. I think especially with EnkelEksamen, which we bought last year, there are some big possibilities because it is fully all digital and they are sort of digitally native. I think they are able to export their product to other countries. We are going to continue to explore it. It is important for us to get as much growth out of where we are also at the moment. I think within the next two to three years, there might be some good possibilities outside of Norway.
Excellent. One final, I see we are coming up to the end here. If you look at the next 12 months, what would you see is the biggest opportunity for the group and the biggest risk?
I think the biggest opportunity is if we get the NOKUT accreditation. I think the biggest risk probably is if we do not get it. Maybe not short term, but longer term. We will get it eventually, anyway. We will continue to apply if we do not get it. That will be ONH is our biggest asset, and we are expecting continued growth anyways, but it can accelerate our growth a lot if we get the accreditation.
Thank you very much, Nina and Morten, and all the best out there.
Thank you.