Columbus A/S (COLUM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to today's presentation where we have the pleasure to present Columbus. Today's -- the subject of today is here on the front page. It's your financial results for '23 Q4. And of course, also your look to your guidance into '24. We are joined by CEO and President, Soren Knudsen and CFO, Brian Iversen. As always, you're very welcome to ask questions in the box down below. Do it during the presentation or do it after. But I think we will primarily take the questions in the end. But for now, I will hand the word over to you, sir.

Thank you very much, Mike. And yes, welcome to everybody, and thank you for listening in. As Mike said, I'm Soren and I have Brian sitting right next to me here, and we will take you through this short presentation. As Michael also said, we'll go, I'll just take the highlights first of 2023 and Q4. Then Brian will go a bit more into details on financials. We'll cover briefly also some topics around ESG, a little bit of a strategy update and also our guidance for the full year of 2024. All crammed into hopefully, what will be around 25 minutes, so we have time for the question and answers as well. So let's jump into, Michael, just the next slide, please. Yes, disclaimer, forward-looking statements. Take a note to see this. And then let's get into it. And we can go to the next one as well. So -- okay. So the financial highlights for 2023, we've chosen the following remarks to focus on. It was a good year for us in 2023, 11% growth measured in Danish krona. We'll get back to the difference between the organic growth and the reported growth in Danish krona. Essentially, we had a significant currency headwind. So basically, our results were negatively affected by currencies last year, but still, we produced a pretty significant growth of 11%. EBITDA grew as well by 28% to DKK 118 million, a pretty good increase, but as we'll be talking about during this presentation, that's where we see the potential in the coming years and our new strategy to increase that or improve that further. It means that our EBITDA margin, which is also the subject of improvement, grew by 1% to 7.6%. Our recurring revenue grew a little bit less than overall revenue. So that's worth focusing on. So we grew the project side of the business significantly more than the recurring revenue. And what that means is typically that we -- when we get a lot of projects in, then we deliver those and then they go on to service and maintenance agreement. And then we see a lagging effect in terms of our recurring revenue. So we have great focus on strengthening that in the coming year as well. Profit after tax grew by 23%. And I'm also very pleased, and I know Brian is as well to see a strong improvement in our operating cash flow, which basically, I think, bodes well for the operations side of the business, customer satisfaction, et cetera. So very good, also positive developments in our efficiency. Again, efficiency for those that are new to a company like ours, we are essentially a consulting company. So we have knowledge workers that work for customers. They have expertise in different areas. And one of the most important KPIs is, of course, if we manage to bring our employees in front of customers on what is essentially paid project. So this is like our ability to get on contracts for our people, very, very important measurement that we've been improving on steadily for the past 3 years, okay? I'll not say too much about the currency down there in the top -- on the bottom right corner. But as you can see, that these are sort of the differences between reported growth and organic. So deduct the 2% because that was a small acquisition. So that goes out. And then we have a 6% currency effect, mainly from Swedish Norwegian krona that Brian will get back to. Okay, so let's go to the next one and look at the quarter. Always important for us to know whether we finish strong because usually, when we finish strong, we start strong. If you can imagine across a number of customers, and we have very high customer loyalty. So we carry over a lot of activity from 1 year to the next. And we'll get back to how the year has started. But Q4 was a very strong quarter. And as you can see on the numbers here, even surpassed sort of the average of the year. So increase in the quarter of 13% on the revenue side, 34% increase on the EBITDA side. Also, you can see the EBITDA margin is a full percentage point higher than the average of the year in Q4 and also a good performance on efficiency and operating cash flow. What I would say there on the EBITDA margin, does that mean then we've gotten to 9.6% at the end of the year, and we'll then have that? And I just want to say that there is some seasonality in our quarter. So you can't right see it quite like that. But if you compare it against Q4 of last year, which I think is a more relevant comparison, you can see it's a 1.5 percentage point increase compared to last year. Okay. Then it's over to you, Brian. Interesting topic of currencies, which we -- they did a lot in '23 for the first time in Columbus.

I actually hope it's the last quarter, we have this slide on because we do see some kind of stabilization, at least that's what I hear from the experts out there. And also what we see so far, but still, just to close off, '23, it did have a 6% negative impact on our growth. As our largest country, Sweden, the Swedish crown has been evaluated as well as the Norwegian crowns, which is our third largest country. So as Soren also mentioned, it had an impact of 6 percentage points or around DKK 86 million when we translate our countries into our group country DKK. Next slide, I would like just to walk through our different business lines. We measure our business on our business lines, not on country level. But overall, dynamics, as you can see, is by far our biggest business line, and they had a strong year and a strong quarter in terms of growth. And they continue with a very strong partnership with Microsoft and to outgrow the market in basically all the countries we are in, especially in Norwegian -- Nordic region. So we're very happy with that achievement. M3 had a flattish year, slightly growth when we adjust for currency. They're very big in Sweden, but they ended strong in Q4. And they started pretty weak. They want to give that a follow-up during the year. So we are happy to see that there is a slight turnaround and adjustment of both new incoming customers and our consultant pool. The 3 investment areas are upcoming business lines, Digital Commerce, Data & Analytics and CXE, all had a fairly okay growth. Digital Commerce ended slow in Q4, especially linked to Norwegian, which you can see when we look at the countries. But all of them is still looking into strong growth. We see a lot of cross-sales and a lot of interest from our customers on these specific areas within the IT optimization. And we actually also see an extremely strong cross-border collaboration within our new business lines. So it's not a country-based thing. We work a lot cross borders with the strong expertise that we built in the different countries. Last point I might comment on is security. We have to have them on board. It was an integration year. As you remember, we acquired them on 1st of April. And we have spent a lot of time to get them onboarded and align with our setup back office policies and reporting structure, but it's good to have them on board. All right, let's have a look on the next page, Michael, just on the profitability of what we call the business line contribution. Here we look at how good are the different business lines to basically earn money. That's something that we are having even more focus on in our new EBITDA, but for the year, you will see dynamics. They are on a strong level, I can always be higher when you talk about bottom line, but on a strong level and a slight increase from 26 to 27 percentage point -- or percentage on a contribution margin. M3 flat. They're still in the low end. We are working hard on that, and there is, of course, both efficiency, it's pricing, it's the setup of your consulting team, usage of our offshore and nearshore centers. So there's different levers that we work with to improve that. But they had a flat year, but ended quite well again in Q4, and we had some positive signs for the coming years for sure. There are some comments.

I have a question here. Your efficiency went up, but your contribution margin actually didn't improve that much. Was that currency that meant that the contribution margin didn't go up, but your efficiency went up? I thought they would follow a little bit better.

Yes. In theory and in the Excel sheet, they should sort of follow market, you're right. But of course, the efficiency we only reveal or mentioned on a group level, not specific for business line. But you are right in that currency is hitting us. As M3 is a heavy big business line in Sweden, and they do use consultants from Denmark or from Czech or from Poland, that does hit the bottom line and didn't mention it. It's not something that we have spoken a lot about, but the currency do also hit the bottom line, but of course, minor amount. And that is something we work hard with because you cannot just add that and not instantly to the customer. That's a longer discussion. But a fair question.

So if you keep increasing your efficiency, we should also see the contribution margin maybe in a more stable year with our currency fluctuation going on.

Yes, strongly linked. I mean there are -- so let me also just give my words on the currency. Yes, a good way to understand currency fluctuations for us is that it mainly affects our top line because we have the majority of the costs associated with delivering a certain dollar of revenue usually sits in the same currency. However, we do actually have a global model. So we have a lot of import and export of ours between our countries, and it's a very important and integral part of our strategy. So we make use of our centers in Poland, Czech, in India, in Chile and we want to continue to do so. It's a very important thing for us. So we -- and just because we had a little bit of headwind on currency last year, we didn't try to scale that back because that is our future to be very good at that. So what we do work on instead of stopping it just because the currency is against us is we get the currency better reflected in our customer contracts. Simply, it hasn't been a big issue for us to do any currency hedging before. We are more aware of that now. We're building it into our contracts. But as Brian said, we also don't expect it to be as big of an issue every year as it was last year. But we are guarding against it now in the future setup.

That will be quick.

All right. Then yes, let's move to the next page, Michael. Just to -- as you mentioned, the efficiency, as you can see here, one of the key KPIs, which we measure on down to each person basically or each consultant, but this is for the group. And we do see improved efficiency and of course, there is also when you have a strong growth, you are -- you should also show a better efficiency, and we are, as Soren mentioned, using our talent pool across the countries where we see the work is improving, so we see an improvement here. Recurring revenue, it's an important area for us to follow. We keep it around the 13 percentage of our total revenue so far, but we have a high focus on our care or our involved contracts with customers where we see a big need of constant service agreement with some of our new contracts and new installments that we are doing. So this is 2 key KPIs that we follow also internally among our business lines. Yes. Then the next page, Michael, is just we continue to show how is it actually going among different markets or countries that we're working in. And as you can see is that Sweden and Denmark is still moving very fast, out beating the market and with strong growth percentages. Norway, which had some very strong years have had a little of a briefing year. They stabilized and have seen a little bit of reduction in activities in some of the business lines, as I mentioned earlier, but although a flat development. And U.K. is also, although we have fairly small, in the bigger U.K. market really growing and we continue to see strong activity over there. So that's super. So a fairly well spread area of growth except Norway and when we're absolutely happy with that development.

Perhaps worth the comment, Brian. I spent the day in Norway yesterday. And I think that it is exactly as you say, Brian, this flattish year followed a sort of a 3-year where they were the growth leaders of our company, and then you sort of have to absorb the growth. And I think now with the early indicators for what we're seeing now is that they're really getting back at it.

Next slide is the ESG update. We have actually manned up a lot during last year on the ESG agenda, preparing for the CSRD compliance, which we need to follow from 2024. And besides working on it internally, although we are not the most polluting industry or business, of course, we are taking that quite seriously. But secondly, we are also having a strong offering to our customers in how, in collecting and managing the data to comply and report on these different new requirements. So we actually also use the data as a benchmark in turn. And then the only point I would like to stress, which is absolutely key in the consulting industry, of course, is that we have a very high eNPS score or employee satisfaction score also growing. And we're happy to see that, and that is a clear reflection of when you win, when you grow, when you get exciting jobs with very good customers and good brand names. Your employee is actually also quite happy and find that interesting to be in a company like Columbus. So that's on the ESG.

Very good. I'm just getting a note that my sound is not going through. Can you hear me, Michael?

You're very low. I think you'll talk to Brian's microphone. So if we can switch, that would be perfect.

That is perfect.

Is that better?

Yes, much better.

Much better. Okay. Thank you very much. Yes. So ESG done here from Brian. It's obviously a very, very big topic that we can't do justice in such a short session as here. It involves also a lot of potential in terms of what we do for our customers. But as you can see, we have improvement points where we really need to bring up our gender distribution equality. We need to report '24 under the CSRD directive. For the first time, it's a lot of work, which Brian and team are leading, and we're in good shape for that. So we can't go into the details here, but it's a very big agenda for us. Let's go to the next one where we can go into the strategy. We call it New Heights. Just a wording for why is it called New Heights. It's because it's a momentum strategy. That's the important thing to say upfront. This is not a turnaround strategy. It's not so that the diversification strategy very much. It has mostly elements that are momentum and accelerators and builds on a very successful strategy that we left behind now. So it has some new element, but it's very much a momentum and acceleration strategy, which is why we chose the name New Heights. Let's go to the next one, yes. Just the goal. Let's go into the financial goals first, given that it's that type of call, I guess, we've set ourselves a target of, I would say maintaining or staying above a 10% you say CAGR or a compounded annual growth rate here. And at the end of the 3-year period, we want to achieve a 15% EBITDA margin on our business, and that journey obviously starts now, as I said before. These numbers just -- let's just put them into reference, 10% is lower than we're currently performing at. So that reflects that we are obviously observing very closely how the market develops at the moment, how geopolitic develops, how macroeconomics develop and how that affects our customers. So we've not pushed the envelope too much in terms of increasing growth further. Also, if we go to the second one, the 15% EBITDA margin, we have to be a little bit more selective about the projects we do and not just win on price where we can just to get activity. We want to be a little bit more selective and that also has an effect on the top line growth, of course. So we can grow faster than 10% surely, but we want to develop positively on the EBITDA margin side as well. I think that's it for the first slide. So 4 strategic bets, which are -- will create some level of understanding. If we start with number one, it's about expanding and investing further into our service portfolio. This can be in several different ways. I think the first and most certain way, which we do every day and will continue to do is the organic build-out of our service teams and the depth of them, the breadth of all of these teams, which we can surely and will surely expand on. Then there is an area which is about building new and adjacent areas. We're going to do that, but only very selectively. We have some plans for it, but I think it's safe to say that the growth potential we see in our current areas will easily support the growth we need. So it's more about having a strategic completeness from a customer perspective if we build it. And that was the reason also for security and the current build-out of that one. In this bucket, we also have acquisitions. We see acquisitions as a much more meaningful way of growing now, although we continue to be very selective. So for those that have followed us for a time -- or over time, we haven't acquired a lot in the past 3 years. We've been cleaning up. We've been streamlining. We thought the valuations was too high on many of the targets we saw. So we've improved our own financial engine. The cash flow we talked about before. So we basically -- we run with low debt levels, stronger cash flow. We see it as a more attractive tool going forward. Second one is about adding a fourth industry vertical to the 3 we already had, which is the life science, which is the private sector part of life science. And I would be even more specific, it's sort of the mid-tier pharma med tech, which has proven to be a very successful area for us to be in. We already have won a lot of customers. We need to learn some new things, but it's not too far from some of our other sectors. So we see great expansion and possibilities there. Three is about the recurring revenue we talked about before. So once we've done delivering these bigger implementation efforts on our side, we have a very successful setup with many of our customers where they are on a service type of agreement with us, recurring revenue base for maintenance work for strategic development. And it basically is a very important area for us to constantly stay in tune with our customers, understand strategic developments and be quick to help deliver on new possibilities. So it's both sort of a successful business unit on its own, but it's also a unit that sets us up for future success in all other business units. And then the fourth one, the EBITDA 15 program is -- in simple terms, we know exactly what to do. We have all the levers defined, but if we take some of the main buckets that will deliver this, Michael, you have mentioned efficiency before. We've improved a lot on that. We can go a little bit further, but it's actually not too bad, what we're delivering. We also see that we have a very, very senior-heavy organization. So we have an expert-heavy organization compared to having junior talent on board. We want to maintain that. We see that as a strategic strength, but we want to slightly tweak it because it's also a very, very expensive way of delivering, but it delivers the highest level of quality, a little bit of tweaking. The same thing goes for all our delivery centers that I just mentioned before. We have a relatively low delivery percentage compared to what we deliver from the markets themselves. And we want to stay in that end of the pool, but we want to increase it slightly compared to where we are today. So those are some of the levers and then there's a whole lot of other aspects to it that we're going to fine-tune on in the coming time.

Okay. Let's go to the next one. So we have some time for questions. Endless Gain. I'll do this really quick is an example of a very specific acquisition we did. It's within the area of Digital Commerce. So the basically, the e-commerce tools that both business-to-business use, business-to-consumer, when you purchase something. What they do is they specialize in a subsector of this, which is the click rate optimization, it's sort of very user experience, focused end of how to optimize the portals, if you will, that people are serving themselves through. We didn't have that in-house. We saw that as a big opportunity, and we purchased Endless Gain, mainly U.K.-based also India, very successful company. We're now rolling their capabilities and services out to Scandinavia and of course, also to our own U.K. subsidiary. Let's go to the next one. I'm just cautious of time. I think I comment on life science. The industry expertise deserves just a quick mention. So this has been a cornerstone of our success to focus on industries to become really, really good at understanding the ins and outs of the customer industry, let's say, heavy manufacturing, know the business processes, know the regulations, know the competitors, know the technology landscape. Now we are further building that out. That's not easy to do, and we need to do that globally. We can't do that in each market. So there's a huge investment going into that as well. I think I'll skip the rest of this one. So we have just a little bit for -- yes, let me cover the outlook. Go to the next one, please. So our outlook for 2024 is as follows: the organic growth on the revenue side, 8% to 10% and the EBITDA margin is 9% to 10%. And obviously, we guide as we see. And there can be a question of sort of now we are well into March, obviously, we guide for the full year. The start to the year has been strong. So we start as we left off last year, but we still guide for the full year. So this is our outlook on the full year, I would say, yes.

So you haven't seen anything in your business. As you mentioned, Q4 is a good indicator, and that was the highest growth you had. So that is still what you see, but there is some uncertainties that you also need to take into consideration looking in the full year. Is that how we should look at your guidance?

Yes. We have a very keen eye on the outside world at the moment. And yes, as all of you will know, there are many contradicting messages every day to relate to from analysts but obviously, we focus on running our business. But yes, we feel like we need to keep an extra eye, I would say, on macroeconomics and geopolitical developments at the moment. Okay. And I think that's what we had. And if we should have some questions.

In which areas of your business segments and to your gap receives, are you looking to expand to M&A? Is there any special zone target of your business that you want to expand your M&A?

So I'm going to really try not to give a politician's answer to this one, but it's going to be a little bit -- so the clearest thing I can say, do we have to enter new countries, new geographies to meet our growth ambitions? No, not at all. It's not like we've exhausted market potential. So but does that mean that we won't do any geographical expansion? We can't say for sure, but it's at least not a geographical expansion strategy. Then I see 2 more, very obvious place for us, where we are already very, very strong, we might acquire more for capacity reasons. That could be in the area of dynamics or M3 not because we don't have the capability, but simply because we want more of it. And the second one is and that's also a very likely one is if we have a very strong business unit in one country or maybe 2 of our countries, but we have a little bit of a white spot in the third one. But we know the market, we know the type of customers. We know the software vendor behind it. We might acquire to give ourselves a head start and not go through a very slow organic growth phase in that. So I think that, that covers at least a big part of what we're looking at.

Perfect. Then there's a question. Do we have the people hired for the current expectations in '24? You're going to grow 8% to 10%. So do you have those people on board to do that? Or do we also need to hire more people in '24?

Yes. Yes, 2 aspects of an answer. One is that obviously, we hire all the time. But our attrition is very low, also going back to what Brian said, we have a very high employee satisfaction score. And there's a little bit of production capacity left in the current size of organization we have. So we can deliver some more revenue without growing materially on the staffing side. In terms of getting to 2026 without staff growth, that's not possible. So you should expect us to start and we have started slowly growing. Again, after 2023 was a flattish year, I would say, in headcount development. But we are trying to be cautious and prudent. This is not the time to do huge intakes of people and then just hope for the best. So we're trying to be yes, very selective and have very solid plans for deployment of those people, but we continue to run graduate intake programs. We will do that next year as well. We have absolutely no hiring freeze at all. So we grow, yes.

Perfect. Then there's a question here. Of course, it's difficult to include effect from currency and budgets. But do you expect better years ahead, we are going to ask you to guess a little bit on the currency side, but your intelligence is that telling you that at least it will be a more maybe stable environment. And the second part is, which geographies are you going to grow most of the growth come from in '24 secondly?

Yes. And the first question is, no, unfortunately, we can't really see into the future on the currency development. But at least when I get the reports from the banks, the wise guys, they say it should be fairly stable. So we don't expect any major bump up or down, of course, for the coming year on that one. The growth, in which areas?

Which geographies?

Yes. So I think the easiest way to answer that is if you look at the growth from this year. You saw Denmark growing very strongly. U.K. growing very strongly. You saw Sweden growing. Especially if you look at local currency, Sweden was very strong year '23 and the way our business works is when it has momentum, it doesn't disappear that quickly. So I would expect good growth from these geographies also going forward. And then I would say that the change opportunity, which we'll have to see by the end of the first quarter is that we -- that Norway returns to a bit more of a growth journey. Yes. So in that sense, we're not sort of -- we're not betting on one horse is that this country will have to deliver. It's pretty broadly founded.

There's a question here, and you don't have a very wide guidance range. But what should succeed in '24 to bring you to the top of the expectation, both 10% on the growth and maybe 10% on the margin? If you could talk a little bit about what is included in the intervals. So what should really succeed? Is that the growth really comes in higher than we expect?

I think some of the areas that are important now is that we -- as when we went through the numbers, you can see our biggest -- 2 biggest business units are now really running, and that gives us a very stable foundation. So in order to -- you said, I think, achieved the higher end of it, there's an element -- of efficiency, of course, across the business. And perhaps sort of the more -- the one that's a little bit more difficult to anticipate on is that we have these investment units underneath and we know how to do them when we launch them in countries, but we can't exactly establish how quickly they gather pace. So to get to the higher end, it's probably because something works very well if it works against us, it takes us a little bit longer to have breakthroughs in certain areas. But I think the difference to last year is really that the major business lines are very, very solidly founded. So it feels more like we have a gas and a brake pedal for Brian and myself to those, I'm not sure that's the right word.

Then do you expect to continue the growth rates in U.K., how is the IT infrastructure there? So a little bit about the U.K. market that you had very high growth rates this year. Do you expect to continue a little bit about how is the IT infrastructure there. I guess maybe compared to Germany, to get it or maybe the question is regarding how is your infrastructure over there your business, I'm not sure, but can you give a little bit comment on the U.K. market?

Yes. So the U.K. market, and it's, again, one of these things where we can look at the market reports and going all the way back to Brexit and all of the predictions, we develop very positively. But can we sustain the growth rates of last year? I think we can sustain a really high level of growth rate, but it should be said that last year, we had both. Our normal business was really performing well in many, many aspects, but we also had some very big customers that perhaps could be seen a slightly extraordinary. So yes, what kind of an answer is that. We expect growth rate -- not just growth rate due to that because those were exceptional. I believe there were 49% -- was it 49%? I believe they were 49%. That is very high. I think expecting a 49% growth rate every year is probably not realistic in a 3-year strategy period.

And then there's a question, how did -- how you manage to get price increases to customers in '23. But were you able to increase prices? The question is here to kind of take a little bit away the inflationary pressure you must have seen on the salary side also.

Yes, of course.

No, no. I mean, it's a good question, and trust me, it's really high on our agenda. I think number one is we do deliver good quality. We do make good projects and that we have happy customers. One thing you can see is that they basically pay on time. And when you have that, you are also able to have a good talk with inflation days, wage increases, et cetera, and most of them understand that. But we, of course, run very, very tight to look at our customers and to get and implement different price increases. So the short answer is, yes, we were able. If you ask me as a CFO, it could always be better, but that is also part of our EBITDA 15 strategy to be more commercial -- a stronger commercial in each corner of the business. And that there's both a mindset. It's a culture. It's to have the right systems as we have today to be able to measure that on project level, on a consultant level. And I actually think we have a strong foundation spread across and now we need to be -- to fine-tune that this machine rule.

So the question was around '23, and then I might ask you, '24, is it still -- do we also expect to maybe get some of the increases you didn't get in '23? Will there be some lag effect is it lying in your contracts or how should we look at is some of the growth you're guiding coming from price increases?

So I can take that one, Brian. So that's a very clear, yes. And we don't publish the numbers for the price increases, but that's very clear, yes. And I think maybe also a good way of understanding how our business works is that 85% of our revenue in any given year comes from customers that were already on board the year before, not necessarily known projects, but -- so there are strategic partnerships. So we have framework agreements with these customers, and they last for years. And they also actually have closes that means we can regulate the prices. But obviously, as Brian is probably trying to kick me over the chin, if we don't call the customers just to increase their prices, they don't at least. But if we deliver good services, we can have a very positive dialogue with them. And we've gotten a lot better adapt over the last years. And I feel we are now at a reasonable level where we have good dialogue with the customers. It has to be valued. They have to see the value in it. And so there's also a level of acceptance, of course, that has to be there from the customer side, and it seems a good balance.

Perfect. And then the last question, we can't have an IT call without AI. So luckily, we got a question in here. With AI Copilot, the Microsoft Copilot and you being a big Microsoft partner. Would that give you -- will that be a catalyst for growth with your Microsoft partnership is rolling out of their AI product, Copilot?

So it's definitely a catalyst for growth, but it's -- so for me, it's more about understanding sort of how profound is this. And I would say the easiest way of understanding it, which is not very far from where we are today is that Copilot is now being rolled out across businesses. We're doing it internally as well. We are testing. We are -- all the things that are being debated all the time. How do we balance productivity gains with ethical issues, with security issues and what are the pros and cons of running on a closed circuit to open models, et cetera, et cetera? So that's being debated widely. Our customers have this issue, and they're struggling to make use of the functionality, which is now available to them in the short term. And I think a lot of debate is on sort of the longer-term scenarios. We have a job right now in simply just coming up with rollout and the implementation, how to make use of them, setting up the guidelines, making short-term plans. That's for sure. Then the longer-term game is harder to predict because this can change business models altogether. This can change the workforce composition of our customers. And that's a very long and intricate answer you will have to give to this. There's some balancing talks between productivity gains, but also, I would say, more automation and business process automation, which is sort of a very old word, but it's still very relevant to set up the rails going forward. So in either way, it's a growth driver. It's still a little bit hard to predict, I would say, exactly how it pans out in the longer term. The short term is easy, but the longer term is difficult.

Sitting as a consultant, I would also like to hear. Do you feel that the customers are more unsecure on how to do that and they actually need some spine partner and that gives you an advantage as a consultant at least might not be indirectly growth right now, but you get closer to your customers and be more used as a spine partner, and that should give you in time, may be possibilities to also sell something in or sell them the solution on how to really get the efficiency out of this new product or technology, yes?

It certainly gives us great opportunity to have this sparing or dialogue and how we see it. But I don't see -- so I recognize that there's a completely new aspect of the potential here. But there are some aspects that are kind of the same in terms of the last wave of AI, which is this -- I feel like struggle to remember who said the long -- even the longest journey starts with the first steps. And I think that's where many of our customers are. It's like there's a lot of strategic planning. There's a lot of potential assessments on sort of how will this affect the longer term. But we probably turn a little bit of our attention right now to, okay, what's going to happen right now. So how do we get started? Where does it all start? So that aspect, I felt was also missing last time around, and that leads to disappointment at some point because you -- the expectation matching is difficult then to handle. And then there is definitely progress every day. But if you're expecting like a seismic shift of everything in a few months, which is sort of the newspaper version of it, you get a little bit disappointed after 2 or 3 months, but progress is being made. So yes.

Yes. But I guess that's what the stock market is structuring right now. So I guess it's okay that you also are talking with the time frame for these events. That was the last question. Thank you very much to Soren and Brian and thank you very much for your questions. And may everybody, have a nice day.

Thank you.