Good morning, everyone, and warm welcome to Ratos' press conference and video conference covering Ratos' divestment of Bisnode. With me today, I have Ratos' CEO, Jonas Wiström, who will provide more information on the announcement and also an update on where Ratos currently stands and our focus going forward. With us via Zoom is also Stephen C. Daffron, President of Dun & Bradstreet, who will provide more information about the transaction. Welcome, Stephen. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A session, and I will start with the ones in the room, but it will also be possible to ask questions via the telephone and also via the web. Now I leave the word over to Jonas.
Thank you, Helene, and good morning, everyone. We are a little bit tired today, but we are very happy and very proud to stand here and present this event. This is really a cornerstone to make the Ratos business group even larger and more profitable. At the same time, we are divesting Bisnode. We are maintaining our position in the data analysis market by this investment. So it's a great day. I would like to put this deal into a context. Therefore, I will talk a little bit about the Ratos transformation, moving over to the divestment of Bisnode itself, go back to our journey coming forward, and then again, I'm happy to say that Stephen Daffron, the President of Dun & Bradstreet, is with us here today.
He will give his view on this deal and on Dun & Bradstreet, and then we will both participate in the Q&A following. Going back to Ratos and going back one year in time when I stand in front of you and talked at the Capital Markets Day, we talked about creating a business group that enables mid-sized companies to excel, to really excel by being part of something larger. This transformation from an investment company into a business group, it's not done in one day. It's actually a transformation journey. And the first step is to improve the EBITDA in our current companies. And that is the only thing we've been doing basically for the last two years. I'm not going to be very detailed here, but improving EBITDA in a company is about three building blocks.
One that is hard, one that is harder, and one that is the hardest one and you can say, well, you can change the structure fairly fast. To make people work in a different way takes a little bit longer time, and to change the culture, that is something that, well, is an ongoing thing and it takes a long time. When it comes to the structure during these two years, we have recruited seven new great CEOs to our companies, to our business groups. We have actually recruited 11 new chairmen of the boards out of our 12 companies. We have created a network for our CEOs in a business council who are actually a part of the future progress of Ratos. We do strongly believe in decentralized P&L. We want to avoid matrices.
We go so far as to say that the majority of an executive team in a company should consist as a majority again with P&L managers. When it comes to processes, we believe that what you measure will get done and it will get done better. I'm not going through all the items here with business reviews, which we have every month with the CEO and the CFO going through the P&L, going through the balance sheet, the cash flow, the leverage, and so on. Forecasting is something that is very important for us, and if you were to describe a good result for a company, we always compare it with its peers, so a great result, a great EBITDA margin is if it's better than the peers in that group, and that goes for growth as well, of course. People and clients are very important for us.
The culture is really about, by the end of the day, what do you think is great? What do you think is good? What do you think is okay? And what do you think is a bad result? And to hire this level, to hire the level on what's acceptable and good is very, very important. We base that on trust and our core values, and we believe much more in execution. Strategy is important, but execution is even more important. Now, we're quite proud also about the results. I said when I joined as CEO that this would take three years to change the trend. I claim we have changed the negative EBITDA trend in Ratos. If we look at the last report, Q2 this year, and look at the rolling 12 months' EBITDA, it's actually up 90% versus one year ago. So we're proud of that.
One might say, well, how has COVID-19 affected you? My answer, very differently. We have companies that have suffered a lot. I couldn't mention Aibel. We actually have companies like Plantasjen who have some tailwind thanks to COVID-19. All in all, our assessment is that the results are up some SEK 40 million-SEK 50 million out of this SEK 1,500 million as a result of the COVID-19. The more important thing is that my first quarter in 2018, we had just three companies, oh, sorry, two companies out of 13 that made a better result than the year before, although there was a good business cycle. The first half year to 2020, we have 11 out of 12 that make a better result. And that's the important thing here. When it comes to our debt position, our leverage has gone dramatically down from 3.3 in 2018 down to 1.5 this year.
So before I go into Bisnode, talk about Bisnode, I want to emphasize the importance that we believe that growth has to be built on stability and profitability. Let me turn to Bisnode. Bisnode has had four great years. A lot of things have happened in Bisnode. The EBITDA margin, the profitability, has actually doubled. The cash conversion has improved. They have done a lot of actions into the company to make it more efficient, to make a better customer offering, and to integrate and position, integrate all the acquisitions that were made during a long time into one company and one brand. And again, we have proof here too. I looked at the Net Promoter Score for customer satisfaction. It's gone up from six in 2016 to 39 in 2020. When it comes to the employees, you know I always say it's all about people.
The Net Promoter Score went up from - 16 in 2016 up to 22. Quite an achievement of the management team in Bisnode and, in fact, the entire team in Bisnode. I hope they're very proud today as we are. So Bisnode has done its job. They have their stability. They have a profitability. Now they're set for growth. Well, how do you grow Bisnode in a market that is driven by scale, becoming increasingly global, growth from a consolidation among the suppliers, but also customers wanting or being more global and wanting a single source of contact? Well, for us to invest in Bisnode, to really grow, they need to take part of this consolidation. Bisnode would require a lot of capital into acquisitions and other investments. This is too high risk for Ratos. We would leave the other 11 successful companies out of the game.
We would have no money for them to develop. And we also have to remember that 33%, 1/3 of the business in Bisnode comes from Dun & Bradstreet. We're dependent on Dun & Bradstreet. And now we think it's better, but we want to invest in Dun & Bradstreet and Bisnode, who now are creating synergies, complementing each other. And we think 1 billion, it's a quite big part of our portfolio still, but it's now balanced towards the other companies. This is really a powerful business combination. Dun & Bradstreet and Bisnode have had relations for decades. We have, as I said, complementary geographical footprint and capabilities and synergies. And I believe very much in continued value creation for Ratos to invest and to Bisnode to develop. And not to be polite here with Stephen listening, but I've learned to know Stephen and his team.
I must say I've gained a lot of respect for their capabilities, both their knowledge about this market and also their leadership in Dun & Bradstreet. So coming back to the details of the transaction, in our press release, we said it was an enterprise value of SEK 7.2 billion. Yes, it is. But if you count IFRS 16 and the fact that our leasing debts are not in the equity bridge, we could claim the enterprise value is SEK 7.45 billion. The important thing is that we are getting paid for the shares SEK 3.9 billion. And we will also add to that a dividend in November, I think it is, on SEK 175 million. We have chosen to invest 25% of these in D&B shares, as I alluded to earlier. Of course, this deal, as always, is subject to regulatory clearance.
Back to Ratos and the Ratos journey. Our main focus will still be to grow EBITDA, but not only by margin expansion and organic growth. We want to work also with acquisitional growth. Now it's time to focus on both these items. We have a plan. We have a five-year plan for all our companies in the portfolio. I'm sure you would like to look into the details. I don't want you to do that. I'm not going to allow that. But it's maybe not a coincidence that HL Display is first on this page. HL Display is a company very well run, very stable, has increased their profitability, and has gained a market-leading position in Europe. Our strategy is to invest in companies that are or can become market-leading in their markets. HL is there. Therefore, they can be the consolidator in this market.
Bisnode can't be the consolidator. Dun & Bradstreet can for sure. But we have a number of companies who are on the level of stability and profitability so that we really can start to invest in acquisitive growth. And we have the funding. If we look at our cash position in Ratos after this deal, it's around SEK 4.2 billion-SEK 4.3 billion. Then I include the investment in Dun & Bradstreet. And if we look at. As you know, my only task is to increase shareholder value in a growing Ratos. And this deal is a very important step forward to achieve this. And with this short introduction and presentation, I'm happy to hand over to you, Stephen, to present your view on this and Dun & Bradstreet. Please, Stephen.
Thanks so much, Jonas. I'd like to thank Ratos for Bisnode and for Dun & Bradstreet.
I think this is a remarkably good deal for Ratos, for Bisnode, and for Dun & Bradstreet. We've been working on this for a while now. I met Jonas almost a year ago, and we were talking then about what was happening in the world and why we thought this was a chance for Dun & Bradstreet and Ratos to move this kind of idea forward. It's a successful and highly complementary business, Bisnode, which builds on Dun & Bradstreet's role as a global provider, and everyone there in the room and on the video knows Bisnode well, knows Ratos well, perhaps less so Dun & Bradstreet, but let me just say that Dun & Bradstreet's been around a long time. It's a 179-year-old company. We've been in Sweden for 50 years, across Europe for all of the 60 years.
And for the last 17 years, we've had a partnership with Bisnode and our worldwide network partner. So we're well familiar with what Bisnode is capable of and what it's doing. Jonas and I are talking with you today about why this transaction makes sense, why it's the best strategy for our respective businesses and for our clients. Well, Dun & Bradstreet has been looking at this for a while. We took Dun & Bradstreet private. The consortium led by Bill Foley took Dun & Bradstreet private in February of 2019. We brought it back to the public markets in July of 2020. And as part of that coming back into the public markets, we look for ways to grow the business. And we believe that by bringing Bisnode into their company, it gives us a better chance to serve our clients, including our clients all across Europe.
If there's any signal that Dun & Bradstreet is sending by acquiring Bisnode, it's that we recognize the growth that we want to have across the international marketplace and our need to serve those international marketplaces with more finance and risk and sales and marketing solutions than they currently have. And to do that, we need to expand the breadth and depth, the data and analytics capabilities that we have in those solutions. That means capitalizing on growth. That means growing into Europe via Bisnode. Look at the slide on the screen for a moment. Let's just give you both sides. Bisnode on one side, Dun & Bradstreet on the other. The middle is so much more powerful. And it's not new. 33%, as Jonas said, 33% of Bisnode's solutions are performing well, especially in Germany, in Switzerland, in Austria. That's where the dramatic growth is coming from.
In those markets, it's actually coming from the existing Dun & Bradstreet solutions that we can actually link to Bisnode. It's our ambition to bring more of those products to clients all across Europe, across Sweden, across all Scandinavia, and to expand our international business, benefiting from the timely cross-sector that's happening now in digitalization and the robust economic landscape across the continent. Now, you say it's COVID-19. What do you mean robust economic landscape? Well, to be candid, it's a robust economic landscape when what you're doing is selling digitization. What you're doing is selling data. What you're doing is selling analytics. This is a unique market condition that's forcing digitization across all of disciplines, all sectors, including and most especially the technology and the business services sector. Look at what we're doing this morning. I would love to be there in Europe.
I would love to be sitting there in Stockholm with you in person, but I'm doing it by video. The majority of the people who are listening to me right now aren't in the boardroom with Jonas. They're actually listening to me on their screens. That's an indication of just how fast and intensely digitization is happening, and to be a company that can actually make digitization work, the European clients and existing global clients are all around the world, means they need more data. They need better analytics. They need more ability to see how this works across the globe. Dun & Bradstreet sees that. That's one of the reasons our consortium bought Dun & Bradstreet in the first place. That's one of the reasons that even though we went public back in July, the members of the consortium still own the vast majority of the shares.
We're seeing relative strength in the majority of the companies in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and across the parts of Europe because they see the need to grow in their digital framework, in the digital marketplace. They see the need for data. You sometimes hear the phrase now, "Data is the new oil." Well, I don't like it because oil gets used up. Data doesn't. Data gets constantly reused. And the analytics that go with them make that data all the more relevant to solving the client's use cases in an environment, in an economic environment that requires more and more absorption and effective use of data. Recession, COVID-19, yep, it's happening. But it's not happening as much across those particular economies.
Frankly, in those particular economies, the companies that are going to grow, that are still growing, are the companies that are absorbing and dealing with the need for additional data and additional analytics. We're working with the World Bank's Doing Business Report. We're working with the World Economic Forum. We're working with the Federal Reserve Bank. We're working with a lot of the best economic minds and academia to understand how to bring more of the data to bear, to make data a part of the solution for how companies across all the region deal with not just COVID-19, although that's a big part of it, but also the recession that in some places will derive from it. This is not new. Jonas saw it last year.
When I was in Stockholm almost a year ago now, and we talked about this, we saw this as something that Dun & Bradstreet wanted to do, and Jonas, to his credit and to his team's credit, saw it as something that they would want to do and to grow, but they didn't have the ability to scale for Bisnode. Dun & Bradstreet does. The size and shape of the assets we have, if there are roughly 400 million companies around the world, Dun & Bradstreet is currently carrying the data on about 360 million of them. We have the ability to scale across Europe now, even on a much greater level, because we will have access to the carefully curated data that Bisnode has put together. Jonas identified the need to grow with scale.
We identified the need to grow with a strategic partner across Europe who has knowledge of those particular marketplaces. Candidly, one of the reasons we're asking Jonas to not only invest with us, and he, Ratos, will now be one of our major investors, but also asking Jonas to join our advisory board is because we recognize that to grow in those marketplaces, we need the kind of depth of expertise that helps us get not just into the global players, and we will have 90% of the Global 500, including those in Europe when we bring Bisnode's large clients on board, but more importantly, to my mind, we also get access to the details of the local markets in Sweden, in Denmark, in Germany, in Austria. Why? Well, because data has to have a local feel to it. It may be globally sourced.
It may be globally scaled, but it has to always feel as though it's domestically curated, which means we need and we want to have that kind of link into Bisnode. Why? Because the growth that comes from this comes from better service to our customers. The clients who are across Europe now, who are going to read about this in the newspapers this morning, are going to say, "What does this mean for me?" What it means is clients get access to more and better global data. The company that recognizes the need to deliver that data in a local and highly customized curation for those local markets. It means better service for our clients. We took this all into consideration.
I mean, this morning, when we signed the stock purchase agreement and kicked it off, it really was the last phase of a conversation that Jonas and I have been having really for a year. And we paused during the IPO, taking Dun & Bradstreet public because, frankly, I couldn't have the bandwidth to do both. But as soon as we could, we got back to it because we recognized the marketplace was asking for this, that our clients are asking for this. Why? Because our clients want to grow too.
As we bring our firms together, the leadership on our teams are focused on ensuring that Bisnode's clients across all the markets that they currently serve, and all of our clients, all the current Dun & Bradstreet clients across all those markets, are going to have better service and better support because that's what will enable our growth, which is exactly what we're aiming for. Thank you. Jonas, I think that covers it. Back to you, sir.
Thank you very much, Stephen. So we will have a Q&A session, and we will have questions both via phone and via web. But I will start to ask if we have any questions here in the room today. Crystal clear. Okay. So I'm going to ask the operator if we have any questions via phone.
Thank you. If you wish to ask an audio question via phone, you may do so by pressing zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Again, it's zero one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. Okay. There appears to be no questions on this end.
Okay. So I have received some questions via the web, and two of them are to you, Stephen. You can see me on the screen again. Can you see me? Yes, we can see you. And you covered this briefly, but please could you summarize? So why is Dun & Bradstreet a good long-term investment and partner for Ratos? Someone has asked.
Okay. Well, let me answer the question as an investor myself.
So when we took Dun & Bradstreet private in February 2019, we did it deliberately, thinking that Dun & Bradstreet was an underutilized asset. Part of my funds investment in Dun & Bradstreet was a function of my having been a client of Dun & Bradstreet for 25+ years and my various functions at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and across the other data companies I've run. It's because Dun & Bradstreet has a tremendous amount of outstanding access to the data that powers the way business works these days. Jonas and I had this conversation a year ago where we talked about the underlying value, but the value hadn't been recognized and, frankly, hadn't been utilized in the way it could be.
Under Bill Foley's leadership, who's our chairman and our largest investor, we invested in Dun & Bradstreet, and we began to turn it around, not unlike in the way that Ratos had been investing in Bisnode, but if you might say that we've done it on a bigger scale, we're now investing this year more than $120 million more into capital investments inside Dun & Bradstreet. Why? Well, because to be the engine that powers data and analytics globally, you need to have the best technology. You need to be able to acquire data from all over the world and bring it in and ingest it and curate it in a way that makes it available to clients all over the world. Jonas saw that. When we had the conversation a year ago, he saw that.
He saw that Dun & Bradstreet had the ability to grow and to become already one of the largest players in the B2B space and to become the dominant player, and I'm not supposed to say the word dominant. The lawyers will come back at me. Okay, to be a predominant player in the B2B space, and we're doing it now. We've invested. We're growing. Thinking domestically, in the U.S. for a moment, one of the big pushes in the U.S. is we're the company that's providing all the data for the U.S. government's distribution of relief funds for the COVID-19. We've launched 31 new products that are based on the COVID-19 index. We have the ability to bring data to bear to help solve major problems like hurricanes and wildfires.
We want to bring data to bear to help people solve things like climate change, foot traffic data, data on the Internet of Things. How about if we can show you all the places, the factories in China who have their air conditioners running and those that don't, and tie that to supply chains and show you which companies and which factories are actually shipping and which ones aren't? All the data that you need to make businesses run together. Why is it a good long-term investment? Because data is a good long-term investment, and the analytics that make that data work for companies adds dramatically to our contribution margin. Do I think it's a great investment? I've invested. My company's invested. My grandkids' trusts have invested. That tells you about a good investment I think it is and why I think it's a good investment for Ratos. Thank you. Long answer for a question.
Thank you very much, Stephen, and I have one question from Derek Laliberte from ABG. It's directed to you, Jonas. In which of Ratos' holdings do you see the biggest investment needs in light of the strength and balance sheet and your comments about accelerating growth through add-ons as well as completely new acquisitions?
Thank you, Derek. I hope you're on the line. I mentioned HL, but there are other companies. I don't want to go through them all and disclose all our investment plans, but you may have noticed that Diab has invested quite a lot in machinery the last year. We will need to invest more in Diab . We also see structural deals as a great possibility for Diab , and the list goes on, basically.
Okay, so many exciting opportunities ahead.
A bsolutely.
And before we take the next question from the web, I think we have a question here in the room. Stefan.
Okay. Stefan Wård from Pareto Securities. I have a question to Dun & Bradstreet. If you're not that familiar with your company, unfortunately, not yet at least, if you could give us an example of your financial targets in terms of growth and margins, where you see the company a few years ahead, maybe very briefly on your biggest competitors and how you typically reward your shareholders. Thank you. Okay.
Dun & Bradstreet hadn't made any money in about 10 years. When we took them public, we took them private in February of 2019. For the last 10 years, they've been basically flat down. We began the change in February of 2019 because we built a plan and executed it.
And we started the change dramatically by driving up EBITDA dramatically and driving up revenue growth. Our third quarter of last year was 8.5% growth, although I think that was an aberration. It will come out to about just north of 4% for the year. And now the first quarter was good. Second quarter was a little slow, but as COVID took over, third quarter looks good, and fourth quarter will be great. We'll have about an overall growth for this year of something like 2%, 2+ %. Why? Because we're spending most of the money and the time preparing ourselves for further growth. Taking the company public in July of 2019 was a deliberate action. It's pretty rapid. You take a company private in February of 2019 and come back in July of 2020 and take it public, why did you go so quickly?
Because we wanted to drive down the debt we were carrying, drive down the overall leverage, drive up the cash flow, drive up the cash flow that improves our ability to continue to invest in the company. As I said, we're going to invest about $120 million this year in the company and free up cash for acquisitions. We've done three acquisitions already in the last year, all smaller than Bisnode. Bisnode is the fourth. I think the way to think about this is we are setting ourselves up for growth in 2021 and 2022 and 2023. Don't get fussed. I'm sorry. That's probably not a good way to translate into Swedish. Don't get too worried about the growth right now. We don't. We focus on growth in the long term. We'll come out at 2+% this year. We'll grow more than that next year.
It'll be mid-single digits, is about where a company like this will grow. I've run data companies before, and I've turned them around before. And I see the biggest aspects of this are going to be in both fixing the data architecture, bringing on data architecture across the globe, bringing the technology up to speed, and then that will create growth. What does that mean for competitors? Well, to be perfectly frank, there aren't many one-on-one competitors in the B2B space. In Europe, there are some BvD that does a good job. They're much smaller. They have some growth in Europe. One of the reasons we were so interested in Bisnode is because we think Bisnode, with our ability to bring more of our products to bear in Bisnode, could take BvD on more directly.
I think you'll see that we have consciously focused on what we're doing in the long run. This is about this acquisition and this conversation today is about how well this acquisition fits into our overall growth. We had five things we said we were going to do. We said we were going to expand existing client relationships, which we're doing. We said we're going to form new client relationships, add new logos, which we are doing. We said we're going to innovate new products, which we're doing, as I mentioned, with the COVID-19 and lots of other new products, foot traffic products, innovative products on helping people understand how supply chains work. We talked about international expansion. And finally, we talked about M&A opportunities. All those are still happening. What does that mean for investors? It means we are going to grow.
Is that a long enough answer for you?
Very good, Stephen. Thank you very much. And we have another question from SEB, Mathias Lundberg. It's for you, Jonas. And it goes, "Congratulations on a successful deal. Given that Ratos' balance sheet is considerably improved following the divestment, now with a net cash position, could you elaborate on what profile a potential desired acquisition target or addition to the portfolio would have?"
Thank you for that question. I'll take the question if we're not into add-on acquisitions here, which is what I prefer, basically, because it's about synergies like this deal. But if we look outside that, what are we looking for kind of companies? Well, again, a company that is market-leading or can become, a company that has best-in-class profitability or can have, good cash generation, platformed; it itself should constitute a platform for add-on acquisitions.
Strong brands we like, and of course, take part of the benefits from the Ratos network. So that's my answer on that question.
And when I have you here on stage, we have another question from Derek Laliberte at ABG. Will any part of the proceeds received from the transaction be used to pay down debt in your other holdings?
Yes. I mean, we have a very good leverage now in the group, and we will look into I mean, some of our companies are even today, before this transaction, having a, you can say, too strong cash position. The current model is that every company bears its own debt. We might even look into this system to the future to have a balanced leverage position in the entire portfolio. So that's my answer.
Thank you very much. I don't have any further questions via mail. Do we have any other questions on the telephone conference? I take that as a no. So would you like to do any final remarks here, Jonas, on this big day for Ratos?
Thank you, Helene, and thank you, Stephen. I take it it's around 4:00 A.M. your time. So you look very, very fresh, Stephen. Thank you for joining us. And good work. And thank you to all of you. I saw there's a long list on the web of participants, and thank you for you who dared to come here in spite of the pandemic. We're taking all the precautions. Thank you again, and I wish you a great day. Thank you.
Good day.