Okay, time's up for the next presentation. A warm welcome, everyone. Now we have the pleasure of hosting Ework and its CEO, Karin Schreil, and CFO, Johanna Eriksson, who will, for the coming minutes, present the company, and then we will follow up with a shorter Q&A session moderated by me. My name is Simon Granath, for those of you who do not know me, and I am the analyst at ABG covering Ework. With that said, please go ahead with your presentation, Karin and Johanna.
Thank you so much, Simon, and thank you for the opportunity to be here and present today. Thanks for joining our session. Before we start off, it would be interesting to hear from the audience how many of you know about Ework and what we do. Good, thank you. Great to see. I will start off by giving a short introduction to our company. We will then share a view of our ambition, our financial targets, where Johanna will give some more details. We will then give again a short recap of our Q3 results and end up with a summary of why we believe Ework Group is a good investment. So first of all, Ework Group and what we do. So what we do at Ework is that we act as a bridge in the workforce market.
We connect organizations, can be companies, can be public sector organizations, with talent in the market. And that talent can be freelancers, consultants who are interested in being assigned to one of our customers and work in their organization. And the tasks they typically work on are in IT, digitalization, green transition, strategic development. These are a few of the numbers and the facts about Ework that we wanted to share today. You see on the top left side, you see that in Q3 we reported a revenue of SEK 3.2 billion. Our annual revenue for 2023 was SEK 17.2 billion. So that's the magnitude of our company. And it can be translated for Q3 into around 11,500 consultants on assignment. And this is an important indicator for the volumes and the revenue. We manage the pass-through revenue as part of our total revenue.
And of course, in addition to passing through the revenue from consultants on assignment, we also, of course, get revenues from the work that we do with our own resources. That's what we sometimes refer to as service revenue. And service revenue is important because that gives an indication of the profitability of our business. And we are on a path of improving, increasing the profitability of our business. And that's why we like to look at different measures and different KPIs to see that we are actually improving profitability bottom line. So we operate across six markets. We have own organizations and operations in 12 sites. We added Slovakia as the most recent market. It was added this year. And we are now growing and could report in Q3 that we won a new client, which is very interesting for us, Deutsche Telekom, that operates in Slovakia.
But the main reason why we decided to open up operations in Slovakia was that we have existing clients who are asking for our help in Slovakia. It can be existing clients in automotive, in manufacturing, for instance, that typically have demands across multiple geographies. And our ambition is to be that partner to our clients, to be a global partner, to serve them wherever they have a need for talent. So it could also be outside of these six markets. And today we have consultants based in 50 different countries serving our clients with their operations mainly in the six markets where we have operations. But it could also be their subsidiaries in Asia, in North America, as an example. So we are today a very global partner when it comes to providing talent to our clients.
The talent that we bring to our clients, they are part of our Global Talent Network. We do not employ consultants ourselves. We do not employ people that we sell to our clients. We find them in the network. Here is our core skill to build that network, to find and select and do the matching to our client needs. That's our core skill, and that's what Ework has been doing for now almost 25 years. We have long experience and knowledge about the industry. We have long-standing client relationships. We have a strong presence in several of the six markets where we operate. Sweden is our main market, and this is where we are headquartered. This is where we have still the main share of our revenues. We have new markets growing. We have Poland growing, Denmark growing, as we reported in the third quarter.
And that's interesting because we have this mix of markets. We have this mix of clients operating in different industries. And as you can see to the down left, we have clients basically in all industries, public sector, private sector. Automotive was for the first time the biggest sector for us in Q3. Other than that, public sector is big, manufacturing as well, tech telecom also. And as you can understand, it's typically clients who are driving growth and transformation. Growth and transformation that require a lot of skill. In many cases, specialist skills, experts that are rare and difficult for our clients to find, and therefore they need help to find this talent. Or they need expertise and skills that they have, but they need more of it. And they need more at a pace that requires them to get help to find the talent.
We serve and act as a partner to clients who are in need of talent. This is a way of illustrating our business. We act, as I said, as a bridge, a bridge between our clients on one end, partners and professionals in the labor market on the other end. As I said, we have 170,000 consultants now in our Global Talent Network, and we have around 25,000 partners. And the partners in our network are typically consulting companies, could be small consulting companies or bigger consulting companies that we turn to to find the talent that we provide to our clients. As I said, our core services are in what we call acquisition here, finding consultants, finding talent, and matching that to our client needs. We also have a relatively big share of our business in what we call management here.
It means that the client, they decide to outsource the management of their contingent workforce to us. That's in a way a type of outsourcing engagement, managed service provider. This is where we can help them crawl the entire market, manage all their partners on their behalf, and we can also manage their spend and analyze data to provide them with the insights on how they can best optimize their contingent workforce. Now, lately, we've moved that into what we call total talent management or total talent solutions, and what we mean by that is that we are not just supporting them with contingent workforce, but also with permanent requirements, permanent recruitments, people they need for the longer term in their company, and total talent refers to all types of talent that you might be in need of in an organization to fulfill your targets and objectives.
So we are gradually moving into more recruitment activities and guiding our clients when it comes to how they should plan and optimize their entire workforce. And this plays very well into some of the mega trends we see in the market today, which is really about a need for agile workforces, where the skills and the expertise are at the heart of talent management rather than the engagement form. So we look at the skills and the abilities that talent needs to be able to contribute in an organization rather than whether a talent is employed or a contingent employee, such as a freelancer or a consultant. We see also several trends impacting our clients when it comes to talent and the labor market.
We see new legislation coming into the European countries, but also Norway, as we have reported in our interim reports, meaning that our clients, they need to source and manage their contingent workforce in a way that does not make them look like they are using external workforce, using contingent workforce instead of employing them. Now, we have in our portfolio that I just showed you, we have a number of solutions and services to help them manage that, to find the way they could source and manage their workforce to be compliant with the legislation. And that's why we also now refer to total talent, because this is about managing the total workforce in a way that is compliant with legislation.
We also see that on the worker side, more and more people, talent in the market, are interested in, from time to time, being able to freelance, meaning that they can self-choose when they want to work, where they want to work, who they want to work for. Their core and their key is their skill and their ability. And this is what we want to enable. We want to enable people who have that ambition to really be able to work on exciting engagements for organizations in need of support. And again, digitalization, green transition, strategic development drives the need for skills. And there is a shortage of skills in these areas. And we want to help and manage that as the bridge. So a few words about our ambition as a company. So we aim to be the leading talent solutions partner in the market.
And again, we operate across six markets, but many of our clients are global, and we want to be a global partner to them. We want to be acknowledged as leading in the market, meaning that we define the solutions and ways of working in our industry. And with the long experience that we have, we were founded in 2000. We have almost 25 years of experience. We know what this is about. And we want to use that knowledge to create value for our clients, but also for our partners, professionals, and ourselves. And we are on a journey, as I said before, of gradually increasing the value that we create, but also the value, of course, that we retain in our company and thereby the value of our entire company. With that, Johanna, a few words about our financial targets.
Yes, thank you, Karin.
Ework has set some really ambitious financial targets. Our aim is, of course, not to only create value for our clients, but also for our shareholders, and as you can see, we aim to grow faster than the market, and looking back historically over the 25 years, Ework has been really successful in its growth. It's an organic growth, and it's a profitable growth, and this has been achieved through strong client relationships. Our service portfolio gives us the opportunity to create partnerships with our clients over time, and we are now very happy to start our expansion into Europe, Poland, Slovakia. This will continue over the years, and we will continue to expand. As Karin mentioned, we are on a journey. We want to increase our margins. Our focus area is, of course, creating better margins in our contracts.
This is done partly by our add-on services, as we call them. We are in parallel also working with our internal processes and our operational model. We do that through investments in our new digital platform, which is also partly based on AI, in order to be more efficient, lower our internal costs, and in that way, increase our profitability. We set a very ambitious EPS growth target, as you might have seen, of 30%. We have not managed to achieve that. Those targets were set with another expected market condition than we see today. Of course, the recession has been much longer than we expected, and that is creating some challenges. With that said, the next year, we will look into our strategy again and naturally review our financial targets for the upcoming three to five years.
On the positive side, we have a dividend policy that says 75% of our net profit. Looking back over the years, we have been able to pay out above that target, and we have a very strong financial position. We have low debt. We have a positive cash flow, and we see this continuing in the future. So that's a bit about the financial targets.
Thank you, Johanna. Thank you. So I will briefly continue to give a recap of the Q3 performance that we reported in October. So first of all, we were happy to report increased order intake and also continuously higher margins in the order intake and in our business as such. And these margins come from the core business and, as Johanna said, also from add-on services that contribute to our margins.
We were happy also to report, as I said before, some highlights in the market, Slovakia, a new client there, but also new solutions that we are implementing with existing clients. And one of them we refer to as a type of managed service provider that we call a PMO, Program Management Office, which is something we are taking now to more clients. But we were happy to be able to report progress on our service portfolio development as well. And we could also report, in addition to the higher order intake for the quarter, a net sales that was down compared to the third quarter 2023 for reasons that you mentioned, Johanna, a recession that, of course, is impacting all of our clients in private and public sectors, and thereby also the number of consultants on assignment, which is driving a big part of our revenue here.
But on the other hand, we saw a good contribution from our increased margins down to the EBIT, and if we compare our EBIT operating profit in the third quarter to the operating profit third quarter 2023, adjusted, it was an increase by 3.1%, so moving in the right direction, as we said, although not quite achieving the 30% growth of the earnings per share. Looking at our different markets, as I said before, we had a good development in the automotive segment, and we're really happy to see that, driven very much by the digitalization and electrification in the automotive industry taking place, and where we, again, can be a strong and a good partner in finding the right skills for them. We also looked into the distribution, of course, across our different markets, and as I said before, Sweden is our biggest market.
You can see that, to the down right, with 67% of our service revenues. Poland growing, Denmark growing nicely. Norway has been challenged by the legislation that took place and was implemented in 2023, where again, we need to find new ways to serve our clients with the talent they need. And that has an impact on our service revenue. We are confident that with the development we're doing in the service offering, that we will be able to grow that nicely going forward. So finally, Ework Group as an investment. I think some of the things you see here, we've said before. We have an interesting and an innovative business model, meaning that we are agile. We can quickly ramp up. We can ramp down as needed, depending on client needs. We have strong client relationships, long-standing client relationships, and good ones.
So we have a good base to work from when it comes to growing and developing our business. We also have a vast network of partners and professionals with really good and strong relationships. We continue to grow our network by around 10,000 consultants every quarter. And we see that continuing going forward as well. We are in a path of scaling our business, as we said, but also expanding. So we are looking into more geographies to expand our business, and that will be driven by client demand. We have a strong financial position. We have a healthy balance sheet, as we said, low debt and headroom for future investments. And finally, we are running a responsible business here, and that's important to us. We work on sustainability. We have clients with high demands when it comes to responsible business and corporate responsibility.
That's the company we are and will be in the future as well. So with that, thank you so much.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, both Johanna and Karin. Much appreciated. So let's continue with a couple of questions. And you did talk about the new operating model that you recently implemented. Can you go a little bit deeper on what that means in concrete terms? Perhaps give us an example and what has been the initial feedback, both from employees and from your customers?
Yeah. So this year, we spent quite a lot of time implementing a future-proof operating model, which is global. It enabled us to scale our business at a much faster pace than we've done in the past. We came from an operating model that was very much based on each country, each market working on its own, and then gathering some supporting functions centrally.
Now, we have implemented a model that means that we are delivering our services as a joint team. So we have a service delivery team that spans across all geographies, meaning that when we add another market, we can use the same team to also serve another market and another market beyond that. We can scale in a different way, faster and more cost-efficiently. As part of this new operating model, we also moved in talent acquisition from allocating our talent providers to specific clients to allocating them to the skill areas where we operate. So we have a team, for instance, of experts in ERP, in AI, as an example, who can respond to any requests in a very fast and quick way with high levels of expertise in that specific skill domain.
We specialize our talent partners in different skills in a way that we haven't quite done in the past. We're deepening the knowledge about our network, our skill areas, and can also then be better at providing that swiftly to our clients. A number of benefits is coming out of this model, as you can hear. It has been well received by many of our clients because this means that we can be faster in serving them. We can help them grow and expand at a faster pace. We are looking at, for instance, how fast we can provide a response to a client on a specific request. We see that in the skill areas where we now have a focus, we can do that faster than we did before. Internally, employees also asked, of course, this is a big change.
This is a big transformation, and it requires a lot to do that while you keep on working, so it's like we are flying a plane and we are changing the engines while we do that, so that's, of course, a challenge and additional hard work for many people to do that. So really, really appreciate all the work that our organization is doing to be able to get this into place. We still have work to do. We are not finished, but we are moving in the right direction.
Very good. I think that was clear for everyone in here, and then now we've been talking a lot about that you're poised for scalability once demand recovers, but still, you are a large player in the market that has seen headwinds for quite some time now.
But my feeling, speaking to other companies and looking at what trends we are seeing, your Q3 results, for example, is that we are seeing some green shoots here. Going into 2025, how do you think the market will develop? Are there any specific industries you are more positive about or more lukewarm about? How do you think about growth?
Yeah, that's a really good question. Wish we would know. But of course, we see some patterns and we have some insights. We look at our data and can at least do some judgments here. We reported also in Q3, we saw some positive signs with our retail clients. And our retail clients were the first ones to sort of pull the brake back in 2023. So seeing some growth there is, of course, an indication.
But we've also seen that demand goes back and forth a bit, has done so during the last months. So we are not ready to say it is a light in the tunnel, but at least a glimpse in the tunnel, I think we dare to say. But we see there is a very high underlying demand across all industries for talent, for expertise, to drive digitalization, to drive AI projects, to drive the green transition. There is a need for talent. So now everybody's basically holding back on investments and projects and things they need to do. But at some point in time, that will not be possible anymore. So we are confident it will be a high demand going forward. Question is just when and how will the ramp up be? That's the difficult question, I think.
Yeah, of course.
And it's not in your hands to manage that, of course. What you can manage, however, is expansion into new geographies, which you mentioned here today. You recently expanded into Slovakia. What does this mean? Does it mean that you put foot on the ground? Does it entail lots of costs? I'm leading into our leading question here, but can you talk a little bit about expansion into new geographies?
Yeah, so we have applied a quite, I would say, lean way of expanding into Slovakia, meaning that we took part of our team in Poland and used them to be feet on the ground. We know, by the way, that Polish as a language works in certain parts of Slovakia, which helps.
Now, having done that and now having a number of requests, both for contingent talent, but also for recruitment, we need now to have feet on the ground. So we are now recruiting people locally to be on the ground, supported by our team in Poland. And as I said before, our global service delivery team that is there to support any country. So that's how we've done it in Slovakia. Now that we look into more geographies, we see that in some countries, it might be that we need more feet on the ground from day one. So it will be an individual plan for each country depending on the needs and also the legislation and the circumstances in each country. But the methodology that we have applied, so to speak, for expanding into Slovakia is something we can reuse now as we move into more countries.
And we're really proud of that. And winning new clients is, of course, also an ambition as we move into more countries, as well as building a stronger network in these countries. So it's really exciting.
Really much so. Thank you so much. We are unfortunately running out of time. So we'll go for a short break before the next presentation starts. So with that said, thank you all for attending here today.
Thank you.