Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets and our co-host, Harbor Access, we are very pleased you have joined us for our European Growth Conference. Our next presentation of the day is from White Pearl Technology Group . Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Ebrahim Laher, Founder and Strategic Advisor, and Peter Ejemyr, Vice President of Investor Relations of White Pearl Technology Group , which trades on the OTC QX Best Market under the symbol WPTGF and on the Nasdaq First North under the symbol WPTGB. Welcome back, Ebrahim, Peter.
Thanks. Thanks, everybody. It's my pleasure to present our company to you today, a profile of our business, as well as some of the investment business case that we see in the company. A bit about White Pearl. We have 32 subsidiaries. We're based in 20 countries around the globe, across six continents. We currently have over 800 people that work for the group, over 200,000 customers globally. As was said, we're listed in Sweden on the Nasdaq First North market, as well as in the U.S.A. through the OTC markets. In terms of our Board of Directors, Sven Otto Littorin is the Chairman, non-executive, based in Stockholm. Marco Marangoni, our CEO, is based in Uruguay. He's Italian. Two further non-executive board members, Jari Koister, based in London, as well as Arne Nabseth, based in Stockholm as well.
The executive team, senior management, like I said, Marco Marangoni is based in Uruguay. Our Group CFO, Chetan Ottam, Executive VP, Ashley De Klerk, Tony Lydén, VP for the Nordics. Stephen Thorne , our Senior Vice President for Data Science, AI, and Blockchain. Chief Operations Officer, Vikas Gupta, Peter, who's on the call with me, and Hans Häag, who's our CFO for the mother company in Sweden. In terms of the regions, like I said, we are across six continents, primarily in the emerging markets, but now moving into the developed markets as well of Europe, as well as North America. Strategic focus of the group is really across five dimensions. We provide leading-edge digital solutions and technology to our customers from AI enterprise solutions, as well as big data and data-related solutions. Consolidating our regional ICT service providers that we do through strategic acquisitions, as well as startups.
We drive recurring revenue through platforms and managed services across our customer base. We enhance investor value through transparency, scalability, as well as integration of these businesses across the world. We basically bring forward best solutions, best people into markets. Lastly, we focus on using our listing to facilitate both organic as well as inorganic growth. As you'll see from the numbers, the business has been growing pretty nicely. There's three business lines in our business: the traditional IT services and solutions business, which has traditionally been the largest part of our group. However, it has been, in comparison, growing less than the other two parts, which is digital transformation. When we started the business in 2019, our focus was on taking a digital view. We could see that the world of business was changing. More and more, technology was becoming core to organizations as opposed to being an enabler.
Hence, digital transformation and our digital transformation services are at the core of what we do for our customers globally. Lastly, the newest part of our business, which we started over the last year, is called Smart Infrastructure, where we provide solutions to traditional industries such as energy, water, construction, with a very strong bias towards the internet and technology. In terms of our Q2 results, we've just announced it in the last month. Revenue grew 67% year on year, 85% EBITDA growth for us, as well as then a 94% earnings per share growth. I think these numbers really highlight the sustained momentum that we've had in the business. I want to stress that we've been profitable from the first month that we've been in operation. I mean, we've been profitable all the way through, even through COVID.
I think that's basically a testament to the business model we have. Ultimately, we're very proud of these results. In terms of strategic pivot: what we've seen over the last two years is a fundamental shift in our business, where the traditional IT businesses of system integration and managed services are still growing. I have to add, they are still growing. In terms of the profile of business in our group, there are the parts that are growing much faster. The fastest of that is basically digital and emerging technologies, which is our AI, big data offerings, which are becoming more and more mainstream in the work we're doing for customers. People Solutions, BPO, as well, outsourced managed services around people, is growing significantly as well. Like I said, Smart Infrastructure is a new focus in the group and certainly starting to grow.
I think this strategic pivot shows how the business of IT services and solutions is changing globally and how White Pearl Technology Group is positioned and is positioning itself to profit from this change. In terms of Vision 2028, which is basically our path going forward, our strategic intent, where we are aiming by 2028 to have a revenue of SEK 827 million, which is approximately about $85 million, with an ever-increasing EBITDA margin target. I'll explain that now, as well as then a market cap of around $100 million. This year, the target is SEK 470 million. You can see it's quite an aggressive growth target, which we've been following since 2022. We have been hitting those targets. I think we have tremendous confidence in terms of accelerated growth or continue the growth trajectory into the future. Like I was saying, there's a big focus on improving EBITDA.
Traditional IT services businesses tend to produce margins of the order of 9%- 11%, 9%- 12%. Why are we targeting such higher margins and why are we seeing such improved margins? It's basically we're selling more and more our own IP, our own solutions, AI, big data technology of our own. Hence, the margin pressure, which traditionally has existed in the IT services business, is for us slightly different. I think hence this very aggressive EBITDA growth targets that we have, which we have already started delivering on if you have to look at our results. In terms of a bit of a deep dive around the investment case for WPTG, White Pearl Technology Group, emerging market volatility is some of the risk which has been identified.
The reality of where we are in the world today, given the various geopolitical situations, is that the emerging market earnings, and especially the countries which we expose to, which are South Africa, Egypt, India, these countries have been, Saudi Arabia, these countries have been really, really stable in terms of both political as well as from an earnings perspective. It actually has been a significant shock absorber through to the various crises which are currently happening throughout the world. I think the geographic diversification that we have, where we are across 20 countries, actually helps the investment case tremendously. I think integration challenges, basically the question we get is how do we manage all these diverse subsidiaries? I think we have very strong local leadership in each of the countries we're in. We have an office, we have people, at least one office.
We have our own people, we have salespeople, we have solutions in-country localization. I think in that way, we have a very empowered entrepreneurial management team, which ultimately is able to take from a cultural perspective, take local expertise as well as local culture, and then embody it into a heterogeneous White Pearl Technology Group culture. In terms of competitive pressure, obviously, like I said, there's tremendous competition for technology services and technology service providers. We have our own IP, we have our own solutions, significant focus on AI, significant focus on big data, predictive analytics as well. I think that's certainly driving our business. Obviously, we have a very conservative balance sheet as well. We've been profitable, like I said, from day one. A lot of the acquisitions that we've done have been through our own cash, which we've been generating out of the business.
We don't have any debt in the group besides a founder's loan at the beginning of the business. I think that fundamentally creates a stability. The main point here is that we've been profitable from the beginning. Vision 2028, which I spoke to you about, obviously comes across as being very ambitious. I think we're halfway through it now, and I mean we are very much on track. I mean we believe the mix of diversification product as well as our people ultimately puts us in a strong position to be able to meet these objectives. Acquisitions is a part of our culture, part of our group. We have a specific playbook in terms of what we follow in terms of acquiring businesses. The model is an earnout-based acquisition model where it's performance linked.
In this way, we're able to de-risk transactions for the shareholder as well as for the group. The payout mix is a combination of cash and shares, which I mean fundamentally allows us from an earnings per share perspective to obviously maintain an accurate kind of model as opposed to dilutive. We also then, through the shares, align the sellers to WPTG. Like I said, entrepreneurship is at the heart of our organization. It's very important that our people remain at the center, and hence an alignment to the greater group is what we aim to achieve. We have a strict valuation discipline where we generally look to acquire businesses under 6x EBITDA. Like I said, EBIT accurate is what we do. We try and enhance investor value through the acquisitions. Like I said, EPS is what we absolutely focus on.
Lastly, we also only acquire businesses that we can grow. We generally don't acquire the end product. We definitely try and look for businesses that add to gaps in our offering or certainly areas which we see as an opportunity going forward. We believe that WPTG is a rare tech opportunity, a hidden gem. Yes, our share price has moved tremendously recently. However, there's still significant undervalued potential given our earnings portfolio, given our history, as well as the products, the solutions, the infrastructure we have, which is across the world. I think the diversification to a high-tech play across these countries is pretty rare to find. I think we absolutely believe that we are well set for further growth into the future. We are an organic growth machine.
The business continues to grow aggressively, organically on top of the acquisitions and of the startups that we've done and continue to do. We believe that adds significant value to the group. That's basically it from my side, from a presentation perspective. Peter, over to you.
Yes, thank you, Ebrahim, for that presentation. I remind the ladies and gentlemen listening to us that you are welcome to write questions in the Q&A section of the screen in front of you. We will start off by a great question from Mr. Alex Fuhrman, if I pronounced that correctly, that asks us to discuss your sales channels, partners, and what a typical sales cycle looks like.
Yeah, I mean, great question, as you said, Alex. For us, our sales channels are fundamentally in our businesses. I mean, we own our own sales channels. Like I said, we operate in emerging markets fundamentally, like it's a large part of our business, almost 60%- 70%, well, 65% of our revenue comes from emerging markets. Hence, we do have our own sales engines in our businesses in each country. We don't tend to use partners for the sales activity. We do our demand generation ourselves. We've got, like I said, our own army of salespeople. Typical sales cycle, I mean, generally we start from bidding. We tend to only sell to large enterprise customers. Typically, it's sometimes we respond to bids on the one side.
On the other side, basically, it's a full sales cycle from creating the demand, presenting to customers, creating the need, all the way to us putting through proposals, walking the customer through that, demos, and then hopefully ultimately to, I mean, closing the sales cycle.
Thank you. Next question comes from Sergey Arinin, I guess, from PKM, asks us to please provide a little bit more color on the Nexus AI platform. What is client feedback on the product? How many clients already use the platform and how many is planned for the future? Can you answer that from the top of your head or do we have to get back?
I'm happy, but I think we just missed the question. There's somebody asking about...
I'll take it in a little random order.
Okay, so in terms of the AI platform that we have, Nexus , I think it's basically a fascinating piece of code. It basically allows you to, from an enterprise perspective, command your computer to run specific programs and commands. What that does is that's a proper AI solution in terms of being able to, via a machine, execute functions which enterprises would need. As an example, if I wanted to command my computer to open up an Excel spreadsheet and I'm in column A, cell one, start putting data down and then doing a sum at the end of it, we'd basically be able to do that with Nexus . Now, that's a very simplistic example I'm giving you, but ultimately talks through what Nexus does.
Client feedback on the product, I think the ones where we have implemented it, and I think we're doing a whole scale of solutions with customers from very smaller customers to very, very large customers. For example, in South Africa, we're using the AI platform for fraud management at a utility where we're basically detecting patterns of fraud where people have been tampering with meters in terms of electricity consumption. We've basically used the AI platform there, or we're currently using it there, to now pick up patterns of tampering of the data. In terms of how many clients are using this, I think in total it's now about 15 clients throughout our geographies. Quite a few customers in India that are currently using this, various industries as well, some financial services customers, banking, and quite a few public sector customers using this specifically in Africa.
In terms of the future, I think very much so, our sales pipeline is full of prospects where we're trying to sell this platform, where we're enhancing this platform. As you know, AI is about use cases, and I think the more we use this at customers, the more use cases that we are developing, the more advanced the solution is becoming.
Thank you. Skip Mauer has wrote a question. Impressive H1 performance. Are you expecting the same growth for H2?
Yeah, I mean, I think we've put out some press releases in terms of the numbers we expect. I think the business is very much on track. Demand is still very, very good across the group. Yeah, we're actually seeing significant growth in many of the areas which I mean we're currently delivering. Yes, expecting the same.
To that, we should add that we have given a full-year guidance for revenue, and that is sort of our base case that we are sticking to, of course. From Matt Peam, we have the question, how has the business segment mix changed since fiscal year 2023, particularly in areas like System Integration, Managed Services, and People Solutions/BPO? I'm taking the liberty to skip back to a slide a little bit earlier because here's the starting point for that discussion, I assume.
Sure. I mean, System Integration and Managed Services still makes up approximately 50% of the revenue of the group, as you can see, and it has been growing year on year. The thing is that our focus has been moving away, like I was saying, to Digital & Emerging Technologies, to our People Solutions BPO. We did make a very big acquisition in People Solutions, which has obviously contributed as well to some of the growth that you are seeing there. We are seeing the trend of people. I think through the years, you see it actually moves in a cycle where, I mean, large companies start insourcing jobs, and then they start, or they start outsourcing jobs. What we're seeing through the emerging markets, and in fact, even in the Nordics, is that jobs are being outsourced again. Hence, we're seeing an increase in demand for People Solutions and BPO.
The point is that System Integration and Managed Services, the traditional breadth of the company, continues to grow and does impressively. However, the other areas of Digital & Emerging Technologies, Smart Infrastructure, as well as People Solutions, are growing faster. Hence, we're seeing this business mix change. We expect these trends to continue in the future, whereby specifically Digital & Emerging Technologies and Smart Infrastructure, we expect will continue to increase on a ratio perspective compared to the traditional fields of IT.
Thank you. Next question from James Thornton about risks. What are the main risks facing WPTG as it executes its Vision 2028? How is the company mitigating these risks across all its subsidiaries?
Sure. Very good question. I think that, James, the geopolitical situation and hence the economics, which I mean sit behind it fundamentally, is our biggest risk. Like I said earlier, I mean, we tend to work with only large enterprise customers or mostly large enterprise customers. I think that basically creates a significant risk as we see slowdowns in some countries if there's some geopolitical thing. The mitigation strategy is really across the 20 countries, across our subsidiaries. I think generally, a lot of the industries we're in, a lot of the countries we're in are not correlated. Hence, we're across six continents.
I think what we've seen through the past, because we have dealt with some geopolitical situations in some of the countries we are in, like there was a depreciation in Egypt around 2022, or I mean COVID, which I mean was significant throughout all of our geographies, we were able to come out of it relatively unscathed because of our diversification, because of the kind of contracting we have where we've got long-term managed services customers, three to five-year contracts. Ultimately, that helps us as well to mitigate the risk.
Thank you. Paul Cheng asks, what are our growth drivers and milestones over the next 12 months?
AI, big data, that's basically our growth drivers, right? I mean, added to that would be our acquisition strategy in terms of being able to also add growth to the group. In terms of milestones, I mean, we expect obviously our quarterly results as a significant milestone in terms of seeing the progress, how we're doing according to these elements. Internally, there are other targets such as the number of customers, for example, using our AI platforms like Nexus , et cetera. I think that's basically a view over the next 12 months.
Thank you. Maybe the last question is from Jonathan Parella. Why does WPTG believe it's a rare Nordic tech opportunity? How does its valuation compare to regional peers? Before turning that over to you, Ebrahim, I think it's a good time to point out that in recent weeks, there have been two analyst reports published on our company. One is from corporate finance bank Carlsquare, and it's commissioned by us. One is from Simply Wall Street, and it's not commissioned by us. Both these reports can be found linked from the press release that we sent out to this event. If you send me an email, I will, of course, send you the links immediately. With that, Ebrahim, why do we believe that we are a rare Nordic tech opportunity? How do we compare to regional peers in valuation?
Absolutely. I mean, look, I think traditionally Nordic companies have tended to stick to Nordic markets, and there isn't much diversification or heterogeneous kind of earnings flavor to it. From our side, we have the heterogeneous earnings flavor with a very strong emerging market mix in there. I think that's why we believe it's a rare Nordic tech opportunity. Valuation according to regional peers, in the Swedish markets and in the Nordic markets, there is a discount factor placed on companies that have earnings across the emerging markets. This is why we further believe that it is a great opportunity. It's a hidden gem because ultimately the valuation is significantly at a discount because our home market sees the kind of earnings we have as a basis to create a discount of between 20% to 40% as analysts have been telling us.
Thank you. Further to discuss these issues, the two analyst reports are excellent reading, very good research. With four minutes to go, maybe last questions. Kevin Mavrakis wonders what role recurring contracts and managed services play in stabilizing our revenue streams during periods of economic uncertainty. Another great question.
Absolutely. I think that's really one of our secret sources. Absolutely, recurring contracts, managed services, where we entered the traditionally between three to five-year agreements with our customers, absolutely creates a strong revenue base as well as then allows us to plan, to forecast, to actually invest in our technology platforms, in our people. I think it's absolutely central. It may sound boring, it may sound not very exciting, but ultimately it drives the ability for White Pearl to, month after month, reporting period after reporting period, deliver profitable results.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, who listened to this presentation and specifically you who have put up great questions. You are always welcome to contact me. My email address is on the screen, and my phone number can easily be found in recent press releases. If you have further questions or requests for setting up meetings with Ebrahim or someone else in our team, we will do our very best to accommodate you. Over to you, final words, Ebrahim.
Yes, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate your time and your interest in our company.