Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session and presentation of the second quarter report of Carasent ASA. My name is Dennis Höjer, and I am the CEO for Carasent. With me today, we have our new recruit, Svein Martin.
Yes. Thank you, Dennis. My name is Svein Martin Bjørnstad, and I'm the new CFO of Carasent. Just to briefly mention my background, I come from DNB Markets, where I've been more than five years, working within investment banking, and focusing primarily on the healthcare sector and the e-health sector as well. I've actually been working with Carasent for quite a while, and been part of several of the transactions that the company has completed during the last year as an advisor. I know the company quite well, and I'm very excited about the future prospects, and really glad and happy to be on board to continue building this company going forward.
That goes both side. It's going to be very exciting to work with you, Svein Martin. The second quarter of Carasent. Some highlights, we had a strong financial quarter. We had an organic growth of 36% for Evimeria and Avans Soma combined. We made a successful acquisition of the Swedish company, Metodika, in May, and we also made a private placing, raising NOK 345 million. We get lots of good and positive response from the customers because we're broadening our offer and are able to offer a more holistic solution for the customers. We also still have an active pipeline of new M&A opportunities on board. Carasent, the business model is continuing to scale, as seen here. We have been growing 68% on the revenue compared to the second quarter last year.
We had a strong organic growth. We successfully executed two acquisitions throughout the year. The business model is continuing to scale. Next slide. I'm on the sixth page now. The acquisition of Metodika in May, why we did that acquisition, of course, it's a good standalone business with a very loyal customer base. We have been able to strengthen our position within the Norwegian market, but also the Danish market. Metodika also got some customers throughout Europe, so we get a small footprint throughout the Nordics as well. They can offer a solution for the smaller private healthcare hospitals. They are very good in their solution to offer a more surgery-heavy solution, which helps Carasent to broaden the offer.
How it looks today, if we look at our different entities and what they offer and to what segment, this is how it looks today. We are continuing to broaden our offering throughout acquisitions, which gives us a more holistic offering, which I said before. It also gives us a very positive response from the customers and the market, where we are able to please more needs of the bigger clients. With this, we also have the aim on fourth to becoming one Carasent to unlock more synergies. The strategic direction on fourth is to combine different platforms to one. Of course, this will give us a significant cost reduction of maintaining only one platform. We can bring out more synergies throughout the entities, which give us more scalability. To go through the different entities.
Within the Evimeria entity, we signed 32 new units during the second quarter, we ended up with 561 active units. We still see a positive demand for Evimeria's services in the market. The amount of units was a growth of 26% compared to the second quarter last year. The revenue, we still see that our integrated service in comparison with the Webdoc license is growing, and we are continuing to expand our ecosystem with different kind of services within Evimeria. We ended up the quarter with a revenue of SEK 21.7 million, which gave us a 32% revenue growth over the quarters. The scalability is still showing. We had an EBIT growth of 54%, and we ended the quarter with a 28% EBIT margin.
For Avans Soma, they signed five new units during the second quarter, and we ended up with 169 units within the Avans Soma business. For the first half year, we have signed 29 new units, including the large contract with Västra Götalandsregionen . As we have been saying before, the biggest growth from this entity won't come from new business, it will come from the existing customers and upsells, which have been very successful. We had a revenue of NOK 8.1 million, which gave us a 48% revenue growth over the quarters within the Avans Soma business. We are continuing to migrate the customers from on-prem solutions to cloud solutions and also some upsells on different kind of services on the existing customers. The business within the Avans Soma is also scaling. We had a quite huge EBIT margin the second quarter, but this is a Norwegian effect of vacations.
If you look at the EBITDA for the first half year, it ended up with a 45%, which is above the guiding we have given of 40%. Slide 17, the financials. I hand over to Svein Martin.
Sure. Thank you, Dennis. If we move to the next page, we see an overview of the quarter on a consolidated group level. As Dennis mentioned, the quarter was strong and the first half year was also strong. In the second quarter, we saw revenue coming in at NOK 32 million, and that's 88% growth compared to NOK 17 million in Q2 2020. Approximately 2/3 of that growth is related to acquisitions, and the remaining is related to our strong organic growth. The margins are also trending positively, again, showing the scalability of the business model. As Dennis mentioned, we see that both Avans Soma and Evimeria is performing well and are tracking in line with the guidance that we have provided for the full year. The acquisition of Metodika only had a one-month effect on these figures.
We expect to see the full run rate of that acquisition going into the third quarter, fueling growth further. If we go to the next page, we can take a closer look at our organic growth. We delivered a year-over-year growth of 36% in the second quarter versus 2020 for Evimeria and Avans Soma combined, and 33% for the first half year. Avans Soma, in particular, had a strong performance, and that was driven by majority, the big contract won in Q1 with the Västra Götalandsregionen and also upsell of modules on the existing customer base. In summary, our existing business has very good momentum, and that's driven by, if we go to the next page, mainly two factors. That's growth on our existing customer base and from winning new customers. Our existing customer base, we continue to see a strong demand for new digital services.
As our portfolio or ecosystem of products and services grows, in addition to a strong underlying market and low churn, we have seen net retention rates of 115%-120% historically. In addition, we win new customers, and our market position continues to improve as we add new products and services to our portfolio. As we have touched upon, the margins are trending positively with both improving EBITDA and EBIT margins. It's worth mentioning that there's some seasonality effects in the Avans Soma margins for Q2, given their handling of the vacation pay in Norway. A strong quarter even with that considered. Moving to the next page, we have a breakdown of the EBIT on the group level. As you can see on the far right bar, we reported EBIT of NOK 3.7 million in the quarter, and we had the non-recurring cost of NOK 3.3 million.
That's mainly related to the acquisition of Metodika that happened during the quarter, but also some smaller costs related to one-time license fee and recruitment costs. That means that adjusted EBIT came in at NOK 7 million. Our cash balance is robust with NOK 487 million as per Q2. We also completed a private placement in July of NOK 420 million. That's not included in the cash balance in Q2. We are very well capitalized to pursue the growth opportunities we have identified going forward. Moving on, I won't go into details on this page. I will leave the word back to you, Dennis.
Yeah. Thank you, Svein Martin. The outlooks, we still see a huge demand for the digitalization within the healthcare sector, whereas one component of succeeding with this is the availability to integrate different services to each other to share data. Our opinion is that Carasent is well-positioned here with their ecosystem, with the open ecosystem, so that we can offer a more holistic solution to the healthcare sector. We also see that the latest acquisition combined with the Avans Soma acquisition has given us a good position to speak with larger customers that have a more broad care offer to the patients. The different solutions combined gives us a strong position on wards. As Svein Martin said, we are well-positioned to execute on our M&A strategy. We have identified a broad range of different opportunities, both in short-term and also in long-term.
With that, I open up for some Q&A, and I say thank you for listening.
Yes, Dennis, I see that we have gotten a few questions here. I think the first one you can handle. That's, Evimeria's customer intake has been higher two quarters in a row. What has changed, and is this level new normal?
Yeah. What's changing, and we have been talking a little bit about this before, but as we are growing, our market is growing, and this business, we sell mostly on the word of mouth. When we get more customers, we also get more customers that helps us sell our offer. Also our ecosystem, which we are expanding with new vendors. With that, we also get more sales personnel out there. Of course, we continue to invest, and we continue to develop our offer to be able to address more different kind of segments, and it's also our results that gives us a higher income. Our internal goals is to try to reach the 30% customer base growth year-over-year.
Great. Next question. Avans Soma's growth and especially profitability were exceptional. Could you give some flavor to the standout margins and the ongoing SaaS transformations? How come the business is able to show such margins so fast? Maybe I can comment on the margin first, and then you can comment on the growth. In terms of margins, we are very happy to see that the margins are at the level we see. However, there are, as I mentioned in the presentation, some seasonality effects there. Even though the margins are at 45% as per first half of the year, we maintain our guidance of 40% margins in the Avans Soma.
Yeah. For the revenue growth, we have been guiding for 35% this year. Over the year, we don't think that Avans Soma will keep up the pace with Evimeria. Over the years on fourth, it might slow down a little bit, but we don't have any prognosis of this more exactly than that for now.
Next question, how will the One Carasent platform look like practically? How will the timeline look like, more or less?
Yeah. This is more of a strategic vision. It will take time. One of the reasons why we acquired Metodika, for example, is to be able to transform the customer base into parts of the Webdoc, the Evimeria platform, and continue to develop to reach the goal of one platform. It will take many years, but the strategic direction of becoming one Carasent and one platform will give us synergies in both short-term and also long-term. There is no exact timeline to give at this point.
Great. Next question. With your recent capital raise, do you expect that you have to look outside the Nordics for acquisition targets to be able to deploy the capital? I can take that one. Of course, we actively work with our pipeline, and the pipeline is quite long, both within the Nordics, but with both long-term and short-term opportunities. Of course, as we grow, we will look to expand in new markets as well. In the near term, I would say that the main focus will be on Nordic targets. Next question. Evimeria growth is slightly behind guidance for the full year. Do you expect revenues to come up in the second half?
As of today, we have no reason to change the guidance. We see that the market remains strong, and we have a good income of new customers within the Evimeria business. We still withhold the guidance of the entities.
What was the net retention rate of Avans Soma and Evimeria separately? As you saw in the presentation, we showed the net retention rate of Evimeria, because that's been part of our group for many years, and the customers' development, we show since 2018. We are starting to track that for Avans Soma as well. As we said, we expect the majority of the 35% growth to come from the existing customer base. That should give you an indication of how that retention rate is trending. Metodika had an occupational software program ready for Q2 2021. Will this be integrated with Evimeria's occupational offering, or will the two be separated?
First of all, we won't address the same customer with different kind of solutions. This is something we are looking into at the moment. When we target a market, we won't compete within the group. We are a customer demand-driven company, so we will offer what the customer need, and we will create our offer in line with the needs and the demands of the market. With that said, it's to be seen which solution is the better.
Okay. I think that's it. Thank you all for listening, and if you want to wrap up, Dennis.
Yeah. Thank you very much. I look forward to complete the year, and I look forward to work with you, Svein Martin. Welcome aboard.
Thank you.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us after this session. With that, I say thank you again. Bye bye.
Bye bye.