Austriacard Holdings AG (ACAG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Meena, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Austriacard Holdings conference call and live webcast to present and discuss the full year 2024 financial results. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. We are joined today by Mr. Manolis Kontos, Group CEO; and Mr. Markus Kirchmayr, Group CFO. They will take you through the presentation and discuss the full year 2024 results. [Operator Instructions] Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone in this call that we may mention forward-looking statements, and these statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statements to reflect the events that occur after this call. Also, during the course of today's call, the company will be discussing one or more financial measures, including, but not limited to, adjusted revenues, adjusted EBITDA, EBITDA, adjusted margin, adjusted net income that reflect management's view on the performance of the company, and they are reconciled with the IFRS results in the full year 2024 records, which are accessible in our press release and our website. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Manolis Kontos, Group CEO. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for taking the time and giving us the opportunity to share with you our latest results, but also give you a bit of the highlights of what we have been working on and what is our strategy and what is our focus areas going forward. So it will be a combination of the results and also giving us an opportunity to give an update on what Austriacard has been working on during the course of last year and what is the main areas of focus in the future. So as the operator said, I'll try to keep the presentation around half an hour. So that way we have time at the end to answer any questions that you have. So we'll start by summarizing what is Austriacard about. So what the business is about, we are an international identity and payment solutions provider, primarily, this is the biggest part of the business. And we have evolved in the recent years into providing digital transformation technologies, which are empowered by AI. So the company has been showing a quite significant growth in the recent years. So it has grown 35x in terms of revenue and 21x in terms of EBITDA. And this is through both organic and acquisitions that we have implemented in the recent years. So we have head office in Vienna. But as you can see, we have quite a good presence across mainly European markets, but also all the way to U.S. and Middle East and Africa. And this is for us to be able to serve our customers in the markets that we operate. So we'll start with a glance of what was the performance in terms of financials, and then we'll have a section later in the presentation where we can give more behind the numbers, what is behind this performance and these numbers. So we are glad to share with you that we had quite a strong performance also for 2024 full year. So on the key financial metrics, revenue, EBITDA and net income, you see all of them showing double-digit performance with sales at 10% and EBITDA at 11.5% and net income more stronger performance at almost 17%. And this is, as you can see, the trajectory that we have been having in the recent years. So you see that our revenue has grown CAGR-wise at 23% and EBITDA even stronger at 33%, which has been able with this performance to improve significantly our EBITDA margin on sales from the levels of around 10% to 14%, 14.2% in 2024. And more importantly, also the net income from a very low level of EUR 1.5 million back in 2019, we have now managed this year to reach EUR 20 million. And all this keeping debt at a very reasonable level at below EUR 100 million, let's say, our employee base is around 2,400 people and our net debt to EBITDA below 2 at 1.7. So what are we really offering to our clients? And I have categorized this in 3 main areas, but what I want us to keep is that we don't see these solution portfolios as separated offering because in most of the cases, we want to combine our expertise from all these solution verticals in the solutions that we offer to our clients. So in the middle, Identity and Payment Solutions, this continues to be our biggest part of the business. Just to give you a perspective, in 2024, it contributed around 58% of the total revenue of the business. And on the left side, we have the digital technologies, which is growing significantly. Last year, the contribution in revenue was around 4%. This year is 7%. And last but not least, Document Lifecycle Management, which is 35%. I will take a minute to explain a bit what is behind these categories. So starting from the digital technologies. This is the one that we have been focusing and investing in the recent years, either organically or through acquisitions that we have done. And this is practically the internal capabilities and knowledge that we have that we want to use to be able to offer solutions to our clients, mainly in the areas of artificial intelligence and power solutions. So you will see us later on. We have a few use cases that we're going to share with you where you can see how we bring this in practice in the solutions that we offer to the clients. So one is the AI part. The remote KYC and KYB, the know your customer, know your business onboarding, where we are enabling our customers to be able to onboard in their customer base, end customers, not needing to visit branches or any physical shops. We have been investing in the digitalization and data capture technologies. This is a significant, let's say, area of growth that we are seeing from this solution vertical. And we continue doing process and content management intelligence, where it has to do with streamlining operations, cutting costs in the organizations by automating processes and using technology to do so. If we move to the middle part, this, as I said, is the biggest part of our turnover. So it has to do with payment and banking cards. Also, we are evolving now the offering to not just be the actual physical part, but provide what we call card as a service, which is all the complementary service around that from the know your customer from a contract generation, which is electronic from a card issuance to customer, to processing, to analytics. So this is what constitutes what we call here as a Card as a service. And the last 2 there, citizen identity service and enrollment and authentication. These are also very important areas for us going forward. This is practically products like citizen identity or driving licenses where up to the recent history, we have been only focusing in offering the actual products. And now we have moved into offering the whole system from the enrollment of the citizen, taking his biometric, fingerprints or face capture, being able to issue them the identity card with those characteristics embedded in the operating -- in the chip that is used on the actual identity card and that way, being able to offer a more holistic solution and not just the actual citizen identity card that we used to do in the past. And on the last pillar, which is the Document Lifecycle Management, this is the one that we have been evolving also. where we are moving now from what we used to have statements printing. This is mainly for the Greek and Romania market, but now we are offering our capabilities around security, documents and traceability. So this has to do with products like examination papers or elections that we help the governments conduct where we are doing a whole project management of this, let's say, elections or examinations, which involves printing some documents, but also offering the whole technology around it. I will give a few examples later on to get a better flavor. If we move now to our clientele base, you'll see that we have the privilege to be able to serve more than just financial institutions, but financial institutions continues to be the biggest part of the business where you can see that there are Austrian banks, Greek banks, Romanian banks, Turkish banks mentioned here, which shows the reach that we have as far as the financial institution is concerned, but we also serve industries like insurance, like energy and telco, like retail and public sector. So we have quite a good spread, and we don't have a dependence on only one sector or one market, which enable us to overcome any challenge that we might face from one market since we have the ability to focus depending on the focus and the potential in other markets. And this is what we have been doing in the recent years. So if we look again at our footprint, just to give you the view that we are quite Europe-centric, as you can see, so we have operating facilities, which means that large organizations that are in the markets like -- markets like obviously, Austria, that is the head office, U.K., Andora, Spain, Poland, you can see them here. So these are all operational sites that we have, but we have quite a few sales offices and these sales offices are enabling us to be closer to the partners and closer to their customers and understand their needs and use our capabilities to address their needs. A few milestones. The company has been around for quite a long period, as you can see. It was first established in 1897 with the foundation of the print shop by Panagiotis Spyropoulos and since then has been growing strongly as we can see from the financial results and has been expanding its footprint and presence through both organic, let's say, expansion, but also through acquisitions, especially on the acquisition part, we have been quite active in the recent years. So since 2019 and onwards, every year, something is happening. So we acquire a company that has to do either getting us into new geographies or getting us in new capabilities. And this is all in the direction that we want to be able to complement more our offering and being able to address the needs that our clients have. So why someone would be interested in a company like Austriacard? So we have put here a few things that we would like to highlight. So first of all, we are diversified into digital solutions portfolio, which is a fast-growing technology segment, and I have a few statistics later on in the presentation to share with you. So this has been a focus in the recent years, and it has been proving that it was the right focus because it already contributes strongly in the results that we see. We have proprietary technologies on the chip operating system. What is this? So we don't just do cards here. We also provide, let's say, the operating system that goes on the chip that is used in those cards. And this operating system is our technology. So it's our -- and this is not only for banking, but for citizen identity solutions. So this is quite an important point and give us a lot of differentiation compared to the competition. We have a proven track record in strategic and accretive acquisitions. So all acquisitions have been financed practically from the company, and they have been able not only to be integrated, but also contribute significantly on both the sales revenue line and the bottom line. We are quite well positioned, as you saw in the map I showed before, in order to be able to serve the clients with a very good SLA level and understanding the needs because we have been very focused in which markets we serve, and we do it in order to be able to offer the right level of service. And this gives us the flexibility and agility and the best-in-time lead times compared to competition. We have a strong R&D team, which is focusing on driving innovation, especially in the digital solutions, where we're using machine learning and AI and data analytics and all this developed in-house and not just open source or taken from the -- this is capability that we have internally. And we have as you saw a couple of slides before, quite a good blue-chip customer base, which they know that whatever we embark on, we're going to do it well, and we're going to make sure that we deliver against their expectations. On the share -- the stock information, you'll see that we have a free float of around 27%. This is just a reminder that the company was not listed through an IPO. It was a cross-border merger that took place in March 2023. But in 2024, in April, the majority shareholder, Mr. Lykos and some other shareholders placed around 50% of the company's shares in the market, and this helped improve the free float reaching this 27%, as you can see here on the chart. We have quite, I would say, international management team. So beyond Mr. Lykos, who is also the main shareholder of the company and myself, we are only Greeks, let's say, in the company. All the rest are international, let's say, management team from Austria, from Norway, from Turkey, from North Africa. So we have made sure that we have quite a diverse team that is able -- that has the capabilities of the industry that we work and also knows quite well the markets that they are responsible for. And this has been a deliberate thing we have done in order to be able to address properly the market and the customer needs. I would like to share a few -- I will not take you through all the projects. The main theme around this and anyway, this information is available for you to have a look at it later on. So -- but the key point I wanted to make with this chart is just to give you a flavor of what type of projects we have been involved in. So you see on the digital technologies part, we have been helping financial institutions, for example, or energy companies into their digital journey, that is involving document digitalization and being able to offer them the right tools then to retrieve information and data and be able to have it easily accessible. So this is a few use cases that you see here or on the payment and identity part, we are enabling the customers that have trusted us, either that is fintechs or large Austrian banks or Romanian banks or European fintechs, either that has to do with regarding or bringing innovation in the market like metal cards or also providing, let's say, governments with driving licenses or vehicle registration and not just in the European market, but you also see we have customers in the Asia market or in the Middle East and Africa. So this complements what I said in the beginning that we are not dependent on one industry and one market, but we have quite a good reach and spread in the key areas that we focus on. And on the last part of the Document Lifecycle, this is the example I was saying before, where we run successfully quite large-scale national examination in the Africa region, which has to do with not only producing the examination papers, but also having personalized this question-and-answer sheets and also collecting all the information, scanning all this information, extracting data from multiple choices and providing the end results. So this is a combination of our printing, let's say, capability, but also our AI capability and the data capture and recognition of documents. Case studies, again, on the artificial intelligence side, we have already -- since we acquired LSTech, which was acquired back in 2024 last year, which has given us additional capabilities that has to do with using the technology on -- which we are integrating on processes that we used to have in the past. So this is exactly why I mentioned this as a case study where we use our AI capability in order to be able to automate document classification and processing, and this is going to be able to give the end customer the ability to achieving time savings, compliance handling of the documents and significantly reducing manual effort and boosting operational efficiency. So these type of use cases, we have quite a few, but I picked a couple of them here to give you a flavor of what we are involved in. A similar one, I would say, Romanian Bank, which has to do with an asset management using an enterprise content management tool, which we are integrating again, technology in order to be able to not only capture the data from the documents, but also then be able to retrieve them and look for them and support the strategic decision-making that needs to be done. On the Greek public sector, because even in previous calls, I have mentioned that this is quite an important part for us. We are using AI-enabled data management platform, which is able to process a large number of documents. For example, in this case, we're talking about 42 million documents that have to be recognized the data that is on them, which is on physical format now and that way be able to get all this information classified, which will accelerate the pension award and helping the Greek government to minimize the backlog in all the spending section -- in the pending pensions. Similarly, on the, again, Greek government part, we have our platform that is being used in order to facilitate fast search and recovery of operations, retrieve data, and we are talking about large-scale documents. And these solutions, we can either provide them on-premise or on the cloud. So we have developed these platforms to be able to work on both using AI in order to be able to recognize and classify properly information and save significant time from people having to manually index these in sitting in front of a desktop in order to do the job. We are using the technology to do this and just have the human factor to do the last verification in case our engines don't recognize the document that's being captured. So with that, I would go to the financial part of the full year 2024. So as we saw in the beginning, it was -- this was quite a strong performance for us. It was in line with the guidance that we had provided. So we managed to reach the 10%, reaching [ EUR 385 million. ] Our main category is digital transformation, as I said, which is the growth -- one of the main growth areas that we are looking to have is growing 70% and the Document Lifecycle is growing 20%. And overall, if we exclude this deprioritization we did on not selling wholesale chip sales, the organic growth of the group would be 16%. On the EBITDA side, we reached EUR 55 million, growing 11.5% and we continue expanding our margin at 14%. If you remember a few slides back, 5 years back, the EBITDA margin was 10%, now we're already at 14%, and we are looking to further improve our portfolio mix and continue this journey of improving the EBITDA margin in the midterm. Net profit, an impressive increase of 17%, reaching EUR 20 million and now the margin on sales being at 5.1% and on the operating cash flow, we showed a significant improvement where we moved to EUR 34 million compared to EUR 9.1 million that was in full year 2023. So in our view, quite a strong performance for 2024. If we look at this, I don't want to repeat myself, but the main point I would like to say here is that you see also on the net income from EUR 17 million, we reached to EUR 20 million. And on the total assets and net debt side, we managed to remain at similar levels, although we still have some working capital pressure, and we are still working on normalizing inventory levels, especially on the chip semiconductor, let's say, stock that we have because of some contracts that we have signed during the COVID period in order to secure the supply. So these contracts are still with us, and we are working on normalizing them, but because of the fact that we don't just depend on this type of business, but we also have the other business lines that are growing the overall net debt position is at a very reasonable level. On the clusters, the geographical segments, as we call them, where Western Europe and Central Eastern Europe and Turkey and Middle East and Africa, you can see that our focus areas has been growing strongly. So we see that Western Europe is growing 13% and 15% on the EBITDA line. And this is the one that is impacted significantly from the wholesale chips that we stopped. So if we were to exclude that from the comparison and look at the organic growth, you will see a 34% growth in the revenue line and 15% growth, as you can see here on the EBITDA line. On Turkey and Middle East and Africa, again, we have quite a strong focus in this region because this is not just for banking, but it's also for government and citizen identity solution. And that's why you see that we are growing strongly in this market. We have reached 35% growth, getting to EUR 72 million. Just for people that don't know the group, for example, in Turkey, we were nonexistent 6, 7 years ago. So Turkey has been a strong contributor up to now. We have reached quite a big, let's say, market share there. But now we are looking into not having the dependence just on the Turkish market. We are looking to expand our presence in the Middle East and Africa, and this has been a focus from 2024 and will continue being a focus in 2025 onwards. CEE that looks flat. Practically, there is quite a strong growth on the digital transformation because the CEE is our focus market for now on the digital transformation services, and it contributed EUR 11 million in the growth. But on the other side, we had this wholesale business that we, as I said, didn't show, we decided to move away from it. So this is explaining, let's say, the flat performance as far as the CEE market is concerned. We also run 2 acquisitions in 2024, both on the technology side. So one was a company that is based in Austria that has to do with providing services, which includes electronic signature, time sales stamps, electronic delivery of services. So this is complementary for us to be able to offer this service, either that has to do with electronic documents like contracts that need to be signed or things like that or even citizen identity solutions like identity cards that have a chip and you want to be able to authenticate yourself and sign documents using that card. So that's why we did this acquisition because it was exactly complementing what we're already offering and instead of outsourcing this, we internalized this. And the other thing very important acquisition for us was the acquisition of 100% of LSTech, which is a U.K.-based research and data analytics company that has people in U.K., Spain and Greece. This has to do with all the investment we are doing behind the AI and how we're using AI in our solutions that we offer. Working capital, we see that we moved -- we managed to keep it below 20% if you had looked in the previous quarters, and we were at a high level. So we managed to maintain it at 19.5% on sales. But still, as I mentioned just before, we still are working in optimizing further our inventory levels. And ideally, we would like to see this improving slightly, but not significantly because even before the COVID time back in 2022, 2023, you see the 7.4% was up normal. This is not the level that we usually are. We were around 15%. So midterm, our direction is to go back to that inventory level. If we now look at the leverage, so we see that our net debt to EBITDA was around 2, and now we managed to get to 1.7 this hike that you see in 2021, it was because some of the acquisitions that we did were financed from debt. Already, this shows exactly that we were able to integrate those acquisitions and also start getting positive contribution from them. That's why our net debt has been maintained at this level despite the fact that we had this pressure on working capital. And on the dividend side, we are planning to give the proposal to the general assembly to distribute EUR 0.11 per share. This is a 10% increase from what we have given last year. And this is in line with what we have communicated in the past that we plan to keep around 20% to 25% of net profit as dividend. So this is equivalent to around EUR 4 million that we see here as an absolute number. I would like to take a few minutes to share with you some industry overview as we call it, just to give you an external view of the industry that we are operating in and how this supports our performance and our forward-looking view as far as the business is concerned. So I will start with the card business. This is banking card business. So -- and I would say, if you look at here, I've been talking about Challenger Bank and fintechs. And why is that? Because as you can see from this chart, the whole number of banking cards that were issued in 2023, obviously, I don't have 2024 numbers yet, were 500 million cards. From those, 62 million were issued by the Challenger and fintechs. So it's 12%. So just a reminder, the fintechs, the Challengers were nonexistent 6, 7 years ago. So our organization saw the potential and started servicing them early in the process. And that's why we are managing now to have 51% of the European Challenger Bank market share, and we issued 32 million cards for this fintechs. And as you will see in the next slide, this is a segment that will continue growing. A similar situation is in the North American market, where still their penetration and market share is low. It's 6% on the total, let's say, number of cards that are issued in 2023. in the North American market. And still there, even with our recent entry, we are managing to have 10% market share on that part. Why we are focusing on this segment? Because this is the one that has the highest potential for growth. So this is external information. You'll see that the projection from 2024 to 2033 is calling for a 16% growth. So you can understand that if we are managing to maintain our market shares and if you see on the right side of the slide, where we show the 5 top, let's say, European challenger banks in terms of customers, you see Revolut, which started in 2017. It has now 50 million customers, and we are serving Revolut on a global scale. So just these are Austriacard clients that are being served, and these are the ones that are driving this growth, as you can imagine. Of course, someone will tell me the fintechs, some of them don't stand, they will disappear. But there are a few fintechs that not only stand, but now are becoming a reference for the larger banks and see why that we've been able to be successful and a lot of the systemic banks, let's call them, are now looking to innovate. They are looking to improve their systems that they are using the offering that they have because they see that the fintech has been successful in this. And we being there serving the fintechs, we are also being able to benefit from the growth and the market share that they are gaining. The other part that we have been focusing is the digital transformation. Again, external information. You see that the global projection is 21%. So this is behind, let's say, all this buzz that is being discussed on how all organizations are transforming themselves and they're offering and we are there to support them in certain parts of this transformation. On the parts that have to do with all this data management with using AI in the day-to-day operations. So we are positioned in order to be able to serve them in the adoption and scaling of these digital initiatives. I would like to close with some key highlights on our strategy, just as we are consistent on this. So this is something that we have set a few years -- a couple of years back, and we're already seeing the results of implementing this strategy. So we have 3 main areas that we are looking at. One has to do with the geographic expansion. So we are continuing to focus into new for us market, let's call it. Of course, they're not new markets. They're not new territories. But for our group, we were under-indexed, underrepresented. So that's why you see markets like U.K., France and Middle East and Africa. These are markets for us that we are looking to offer both not only, let's say, banking cards, but government and IT solutions and digital solutions. So these are markets that you will be hearing more from us as far as their contribution in the coming years. We continue wanting to have a leadership position in market segments like the fintech and the challenger banks and obviously maintaining our long-standing relationship with the Central Eastern Europe banks that we have been serving them for a large number of years. We are looking into increasing our market share, and we have changed also our way we are organized in having a corporate structure that is behind geographical clusters, and we are reporting as such. And the reason we did this is in order to be able to do cross-selling and upselling of our -- and providing a whole portfolio in the existing customers that we have. And we are always qualifying M&A targets that have to do with complementing our portfolio solutions and offering, especially in the new technological areas and potentially also geographical footprint that we will see fit in order to expand our reach and footprint because our strategy is that we enter a market, we establish ourselves and then with a base offering of base product and then we go and offer the rest of our solutions and services on top. On the product and services portfolio, again, we are looking into getting this payment and banking solution as a service, so which, as I said before, from the remote KYC of the customer to the contract generation, which is signed electronically with an electronic archive of it, issuing the card and offering also the whole analytics around the usage of these services from the end customer. We continue looking at product innovation, that is metal cards, biometric cards or eco-friendly cards. So this is something that is ongoing over the course of the years, investing behind digital technologies, AI, Gen AI, machine learning. So this is a very key area of focus for us and supporting the public sector wherever we can with our -- mainly with our platforms and our digital technologies in their journey also to become more, let's say, friendly for the end citizen. And last but not least, what I call here holistic citizen authentication solutions. So this is moving from just offering an identity card into offering the whole system from enrolling that citizen, capturing his biometric either his fingerprint or image or iris and then issuing the card, which has a -- it is a chip card. It has an operating system on it. You can use it not just to identify yourself, but also to transact with the public and then also do the support afterward in the end market. So this is what we call system sales of citizen authentication solutions and not just the citizen card sales that we used to do in the past. And I would like to close with some key takeaways. So why we believe that we have potential because our group revenue growth trajectory continues because of this focus that we have done in the portfolio enhancement and the market share acquisition in greenfield, as I call them for us markets like the ones I mentioned before. This increased scale and geographical reach is enabling us also to have better operational efficiencies, which is supporting the margin expansion. We will continue investing, obviously behind our R&D and doing selected and targeted M&As that will complement our capabilities, especially in the next-gen digital solutions. And the way we are organized now with group product solution teams is enabling us to better support our clients in the markets and have a more robust go-to-market commercialization. And obviously, we continue being committed in the dividend policy and providing long-term value to our shareholders. So this is from my side. Thank you for the attention and taking the time. And now we can open it for questions that you might have.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Bourazanis Marios with Eurobank Equities.

I was just wondering if you could please provide some more color on the outlook for your Payment Solutions vertical and especially in the U.K. and U.S. markets for 2025. This is my first question. And also a follow-up, if I may. I just wanted to also ask, given the large number of African countries scheduled to hold elections within the year, if we should expect any inflows from any election-related contracts? These are my 2 questions.

Okay. Thank you for 2 questions. So on the first part, on the -- you asked about the new markets for us like U.S. and U.K., right? This was the part. So I cannot give forward-looking statements. We will be giving some more information as far as forward-looking and projection later in the year when we publish also the first quarter results. But what I can tell you is that we are quite optimistic that we expect those markets to continue contributing on the Identity and Payment Solutions part, because a lot of those markets, our focus clients is not -- is fintechs, and we are also getting in the traditional banks. So by adding more clients as targets in those markets, we anticipate that we will have an even stronger contribution from those markets going forward. Now on the second part on the African region, yes, this is a focused market for us. We have started with elections. We moved in examination projects. And -- but that doesn't mean that we are not looking also on elections that might be coming up. We have now created a name, and we are recognized as a key player in that field of expertise. So we do anticipate that there will be some opportunities coming in the course of '25 and '26, even on the election side. But we are not just focusing on election. We are looking also to offer more holistic security document projects in that region.

The next question is from the line of Thompson Katherine with Edison Group.

I've got a couple of questions. The first one is on the African security printing projects that you had this year -- sorry, in 2024. If I can understand correctly, that was the examination papers contract? And is that recurring in nature? And then the second question is, I know you're not at the point yet to give very specific guidance for 2025. But from what I understand, you're expecting further revenue growth in '25. Should we expect you to at least maintain the EBITDA margin that you achieved in 2024, if not expand it?

So thank you for your question. On the first part, on the African security document. Yes, it was examination papers that was about. And yes, the answer is that we are looking to continue having this as recurring because that's the difference with the elections because elections come every 4, 5 years. But if you embark in offering this type of projects, these are happening annually. And we're looking to qualify more projects like this, so we can retain an annual recurring revenue from this type of projects, especially in that part of the world. On the second part that has to do with the 2025 performance, we are looking into continue having the EBITDA level, as you said, at this level that we have this year and even expanding it. But as I said, this is something that we will give a bit more flavor and clarity towards the Q2 -- in the Q2 of this year. But obviously, our intention is to sustain and grow the margin level that we have.

The next question is from the line of Aravani Evangelia with Euroxx Securities.

Congratulations on the results. My question is if you could provide some color on the growth outlook in terms of revenue for 2025, as well as the performance for the 3 key categories?

I understand that everyone is looking for us to give a forward-looking guidance. Unfortunately, I would not want to go and provide these numbers at this stage, at least at this call. But what I can tell you as far as the key categories are concerned, we have strong confidence on the digital technology part that this will continue to show a strong performance. And this one because we already -- on the digital technology part, I say that we expect a strong performance because this is behind contracts that we have concluded and we are implementing. So this is a given that we will have a strong performance on the digital services side. And on the identity and payment side, we have quite a few prospects that we have already and we are almost finalizing, especially on the citizen identity part, we have quite a strong confidence that we will be able to materialize in the course of 2025 a few important projects. And also on the Payment Solutions side, we also have good progress in most of the markets as far as the order intake is concerned. But on the other side, we also had some challenges, and I can say this from the Turkish market because of the fact that we have reached a certain, let's say, level of performance. We don't expect the Turkish market to continue contributing in the growth. And that's why we are focusing into having other markets, let's say, offset what the Turkish market has been contributing up to now. On the Document Lifecycle part, we have this focus in the African region. So if these projects that we are qualifying and we're almost concluding materialize, then we will be able to have a good performance also on that part. So in a nutshell, Digital Technologies and Document Lifecycle, we have a few things that make us look that we are able to continue this trajectory. And on the Payment Solution part, there is a few things we need to be able to address in order to be able to continue the growth part, especially in the Turkish market.

Ms. Aravani, are you done with your questions?

Yes.

[Operator Instructions] Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now pass the floor over to Mr. Kontos for any closing comments. Thank you.

So thank you very much for taking the time and giving us the opportunity to share with you the latest results and also some highlights of what we have been working on the recent period. We are always available for any follow-up questions you might have after we digest the results, please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you, everybody, and have a great afternoon.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a good afternoon.