Columbus A/S ($COLUM)

Good afternoon, and welcome, everyone, to this webcast with the presentation of the Annual Report 2025 from Columbus that was published this morning. [Operator Instructions] With that said, I'll hand over to Columbus' CEO, Soren Knudsen and CFO, Brian Iversen. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody, to this webcast where we will be presenting our financial results for 2025 and also the Q4 results in isolation. Before we start, I will just present you with a short disclaimer, which I just ask you to briefly look through. As the operator said, I'm Soren Knudsen and joined by Brian Iversen next to me, and we will be presenting to you today, and we will also be answering your questions at the end of the call. So if we start with the financial highlights, Brian will go into a bit more detail later on. Our group revenues declined by 5% in what we would describe as a challenging market. It was primarily driven by setbacks in our largest business unit Dynamics 365 and from a geographical perspective, we saw the headwind coming from the Scandinavian market where we are heavily represented. Our EBITDA declined by 26% compared to 2024. Adjusted for other operating income and expenses, the EBITDA margin improved slightly from 7.4% in 2024 to 7.6% in 2025. Our profit before tax decreased by 19% year-on-year, in line with the EBITDA development, and although we would like to emphasize our financial expenses continue to decrease. And we again delivered a positive cash flow from operations, which was at DKK 77 million. This is lower than in 2024, and that is mainly due to the lower operating profit, but also some changes in working capital and I think also not in a small part due to some taxes paid as well. So that's the financial highlights. Just to expand a little bit on point one, what we describe as a challenging market. What does that actually contain? We saw relatively quickly in 2025, the -- what we could describe as the tariff turmoil, which has probably been one of the bigger geopolitical factors affecting us this year. It did affect many of our customers and also those who are not directly affected or ended up not being very affected briefly or for longer periods, waited to or opted to wait and assess their situation. So -- and this cautious behavior is something that we have seen throughout the year, which means that we have longer sales cycle than normal. And when we complete the sales cycle, typically, we work with very large customers, and they tend to be large contracts. There is a risk until the very end that some of these contracts will get postponed without any sort of further questions to us as the supplier or even the company's own technology department. It may just be that the Board wants to reassess the situation and that drives a waiting time. The positive, which we choose to see in this, is that most of them or many of them actually come back without -- sometimes we've already negotiated all terms and conditions. We have negotiated all commercial terms. We know what to do. The scope has been decided. The project plan has been made. And then after perhaps 1 or 2 Board meetings, the customer comes back and is ready to start that project. And so there is a bit of a catch-up effect, which we saw some of in Q4 last year. So that describes a lot of the customer behavior. I think what is also important to mention is that we -- in the meantime, in the waiting time, there is no standstill in terms of dialogue and planning between us and these customers. They're often customers that we've had for years, some of them even decades. And at the moment, there is heavy planning work going on between us and them, which mainly is concentrated on how to phase in new AI-driven technologies beyond what we are seeing today, which is obviously sort of the LLM chat assisted worker, but much deeper integrated assistance, I would say, Coworker's assistance, but perhaps even more interesting, the Agentic workforce, which I've mentioned before, which is the fully autonomous Coworker, which once set up, perhaps for a while, will run with a human in the loop, but ultimately is meant to be able to handle a workflow independently of a human being, unless we need to reconfigure it or change some parameters around it. So despite that we have slightly lower activity from a revenue perspective, our time spent with customers to define the future is higher than ever before. Just continue on to the next one here. Four points for you and then a brief update on the actual efficiency. So as I just said, the market headwinds did persist. We also informed in Q4 that we saw a lot of our big contracts, which, as mentioned before, had been postponed or had taken a long time to negotiate came through to fruition in Q4, and we did win some very large ones in November. And particularly, we have mentioned a big contract in Norway, the biggest yet in our history, which also marks a change for our Norwegian operating company performance because it's large enough to have that effect. We saw that pretty much across the board. However, in the U.S., and I guess that goes back to the effect of the tariffs, we did not see this disturbance on the market, and we've had a very positive development of our U.S. market, which we continue to try to harvest momentum on, but also the U.K. market developed quite positively for us. Not as strong as in our best years but still positive development. So in that sense, the portfolio of countries and business units we have has helped us offset this weaker performance of the Nordics. Also, we did very significant investments in our Data and AI unit. We employed a lot of new people despite that we had to do capacity adjustment last year in some areas of the business, we've also grown in other areas of the business. And we continue to see them growing and they lead many of these new customer dialogues that I was elaborating on before. Third point, we have been very disciplined around our execution. We have exercised strong cost discipline. We -- Brian and I and others have discussed what is the most viable option for us. Should we just power through and continue investing at normal pace? But we have chosen to introduce a strong approach to cost discipline. We've also used the time productively to even further strengthen this global delivery. We have where we can deliver across borders that gives us a very good capacity leveling out ability. So instead of having excess capacity in two markets or -- and then not enough in others, we basically have a global workforce that we deploy. It also makes it more feasible for us to employ very niche-focused experts, which we don't need in every country, but where we can have one that then serves all our markets. And with that, we have focused on margin preservation, I would say, and balancing that with positioning for future growth of revenue. And to be perhaps even more clear, could we have driven out a little bit more revenue at the cost of margin? That would probably have been possible, but we chose this balance. Again, the pipeline has presented us with some large wins. As we notified you and the market about, they came late. We saw a lot of them coming in November, even into December. And as such, they did not have an effect on 2025, which is the year we present to you now. But we could see a little bit of influence on the efficiency on the fourth quarter. And you can see here to your right, that following a very weak performance on efficiency in Q3, we jumped up by 4 percentage points again in Q4. A lot of this was driven by post November closings of these deals. Obviously, our projects run, all of them almost, for at least a year, most of them several years and therefore, it's a momentum that we can carry with us into Q1 of 2026. Okay. Then I will just share with you some highlights again on what we have done in terms of our strategy implementation. And it is focused on some of the important areas, as you would expect. The industry leadership, which is very, very core to our strategic competitive edge, but also, of course, from a technology perspective, the adoption of AI. So just to -- on the -- I think the AI one is fairly clear to everybody, but the industry leadership, I will just try to explain in a bit more detail. Some of the work we do will find use in every industry, public sector, private sector, financial services, pharmaceutical, manufacturing. And from that perspective, you could say why have -- why be so industry-specific as we are, where we choose only 4 private sector industries, which all have that in common that they produce and distribute physical goods? And that is for the reason that in order to do what we do well, you have to fully understand the operating model of the customer, and that is not an easy task. Just imagine your own industry. There's a lot of tricks of the trade. There is an industry. There is 1,000 business processes and role descriptions and competitive scenario, understanding the value chain up and down stream, which obviously is comprehensive task. If you master that, you are much able to engage in a strategic dialogue with the customer and not just be a supplier of IT services that doesn't really understand how the business works. And that is what gives us a large part of our competitive edge. So we continue to invest in that. Good. So starting from the left. We did merge two of our business units. CXE is a customer experience which we merged with our core Dynamics business line. So the reason here is where CXE is much more front-end focused, so that could be CRM, but also ExtraNet, to use an old word, solution, field service solutions would be in here, technicians using that. We merged that with the core ERP offerings. And the main driver is that that's how the customer perspective is on this. They perceive this to be embedded in the same solution. Technically, we see that slightly different, but we let the customers view on this and define that design, and that has worked well for us. We did exercise a capacity adjustment last year, 86 individuals affected, unfortunate but necessary for us to do. We reorganized our whole marketing department to be more fit for purpose and for what we need to communicate in the future. We did a lot of work on what we referred to as on target, and that is the project delivery model and engagement model that we use across all our business units every time we have large engagements. And again, this is a competitive -- if not a competitive edge, it's a competitive must to compete in this segment we are with the large international corporations. If you cannot display a solid and proven project methodology tool set, you're simply not invited to the party. Then we have continued the build-out of our Data and AI team. All countries have worked on this, but in particular, in Denmark, close to our headquarter function, I think they have doubled the size of the experts or the size of the team in 1 year and have really been truly driving both customer dialogues on the sales, but also some of the agent in a day initiatives that we've been driving across the country several times. Needless to say, they had a lot of strategic hiring, but also in the second point, they had strategic hiring in other select areas and positions as well. Norway, perhaps also deserves a mention here because some of the big wins we had up there really meant that we can now look at upgrading on some of our positions and expanding that. We chose to do an acquisition almost simultaneously in Norway with the big win. The customer was in -- is in the food and beverage sector, and we chose to take on board a company that gave us a little bit more capacity in Norway, which we needed. But actually, we deliver from India, we deliver from Sweden and Denmark, but of course, also Norway on this customer. But they also were highly specialized in this industry vertical. So going back to what I said, they know the business model, the processes, the regulations, so we were able to onboard them for that. We worked a lot on this agentic framework. I think I have tried to explain it as well as I can in a short session like this, but agentic, again, think about the fully autonomous Coworker, which can oversee high frequency, but still relatively low complexity tasks. Obviously, the complexity level will continue to increase over the years. This is where we see the potential that needs to be realized for our customers coming from in the short to midterm. And as you can see from very -- I saw something from Boston Consulting Group coming out yesterday. Most of customers asked about this despite spending a lot of time on this, having a lot of interest, still see -- I think the study said about 5% of them are only seeing significant savings coming from this, which is, I would say, borderline disappointing. So the technology has a great potential and has been matured. But I think we all need to recognize that the rubber needs to meet the road and that is not so much about technology, mainly driven by ability to execute, ability by organizations to adapt, adopt this technology. Refine organizational design, role description, business processes, security, quality, ethics around this. It's very heavy work. And it's obviously very good work for us to be involved in and a big part of what we are preparing right now. Finally, I think on this one, I just want to mention that we did also do a full restructuring of our digital commerce partnerships to all the technical partners we work with, but also the way we've organized ourselves. They were also part of this capacity adjustment or downsizing and we have also hired a different kind of talent into this. So we consider that to be a much more future-proof setup that we have established there. And overall, we've done everything we can to sharpen our commercial focus, improve this operational resilience, which is necessary for us because we continue to see some shocks through the system. Now we have some -- an oil price, which is fluctuating a little bit. It doesn't hit us directly, but some of our customers get a little bit nervous, and we need to be able to absorb that into our operating model. And with that, we have positioned ourselves for what we expect to be a gradual improvement, not abrupt or very fast improvement, but we do see in our sales pipeline, a gradual improvement, which started there late Q4 and which we take with us into Q1. And then I will hand over to Brian for a little bit more detailed breakdown of the financials.

Thank you, Soren. Let's start briefly with Q4, where we ended the year with an 8% decline in revenue. You might remember that we had 2%, 4% and 7% decline in Q1, 2 and 3, but we also start to see that now it's -- we reached the bottom also based on what Soren mentioned on new bigger contract came in end of 2025. Again, it's mainly our Swedish and Danish marketplace that is still seeing some challenges or postponement or hesitations in committing to new bigger projects and it's within the Dynamics area. On the other side, we actually start to see also in Q4 some good signs in M3 and also in our Digital and Data and AI business line, which we invested heavily in during last year and that is very encouraging to see. EBITDA ended on basically same level as last year, DKK 3 million below, but percentage-wise, 9% of revenue. Profit before tax, same level, DKK 18 million as last year and a cash flow of DKK 34 million, which, again, is a key parameter for us that we basically earn money on what we do, and we have a strong and solid balance sheet and continue to have that in this still slight turbulent period. So that's how Q4 ended, but let's jump into some of the full year numbers more specific. And I would like to start with the business line revenue. Soren has mentioned a few of them, but during 2025, we saw that especially our Dynamics 365 business line decreased with 8%, and as they are covering around 65-ish percent of our combined revenue in Columbus, it does hit us heavily. It's also Dynamics with having some of the biggest projects and where the companies are a bit more hesitant to jump out in major and big investments. And of course, that does mean that we see some postponement and hesitations and chopping off projects in smaller bites. M3 ended with a flat development. They had a strong Q1, then they finished off some projects and is now gradually moving into some new bigger ones, a few were announced end of the year, and they will continue to come in during 2026. Digital Commerce, minus 4%. As you remember, we did a major restructuring back in 2024, still working on it, but we start to see a turnaround. But that has been a tough year or a bit more in this business line, but we gradually start to see some improvement. And then we have a new, call it, small business line, EIM, Enterprise Information Management, that we -- in the last year, we called it other revenue but today, it's only revenue from this small business line that we have driven a bit on the side. And as you can see, there is a decline of minus 12%, but actually EIM has an increase of 40% in 2025. In 2024, the number was -- the revenue number was diluted by some other income that was ended up in this area. And it's important to say that the revenue might be small, but they have a very strong contribution margin as you see on the next slide. So they are starting to be an important area that we also would like to focus on and share with you how it's going. At the end of the day or end of the slide here, I just mentioned that our product sales actually increased with 5% to DKK 70 million. A few years back, we actually expected that to decline. So it will probably be wrong to say it is as expected, it's probably a bit more better and that is something that we, of course, are looking into how we can gain most possible for this from this area. So that's a little positive or ending up on 2 positive trends with our EIM and our product sales. If we look at the contribution margin, Dynamics, which, again, as I mentioned, is biggest, went down 2 percentage points. This is mainly because when you have project delays, you have people sitting a bit longer on the bench. As Soren mentioned, efficiency was in the low end of what we would expect and what we are aiming at. And of course, that will hit the business line contribution margin. M3 saw a slight improvement, which is good. We had some strong project management, and we see a continuous upward trend. We would have loved it to be faster, no doubt, and we still have some positive trends that we look into for 2026. Digital Commerce, big jump, still a low number of 12% contribution margin in 2025 but after the restructuring, it's good to see that they are moving backwards and -- forwards. And then at the end of our Data and AI a drop of 5%. It's a smaller amount, as you can see, around DKK 5 million down. This is mainly due to investment in new capabilities. It takes time before they start running and get out there and especially end of '25, we had some good intake of new employees around in our countries. And we already now see and I'm happy to see that here the first month of Q1 to see that is slowly paying off and that is a very important investment, so that's good. EIM, briefly mentioned on the revenue side, as you can see here, the number that they actually make in profit, DKK 16 million, if I read it DKK 16 million, I think it is, yes, in 2025 or 44%, it is a very profitable business in our terms and something that we constantly push so we can see some strong growth and increased margin here. So that's why we are reporting it on a stand-alone from 2026 and just, let's say, warming up here at end of 2025 numbers. Good. Then let's move to the overview of our revenue per market unit. And again, as you can see, the Scandinavian market, Sweden, Denmark and Norway is down with 5% in Sweden, 11% in Denmark and 14% in Norway. And that is also as mentioned by Soren, where we have seen some of the -- where we typically have run some our major projects where we see some hesitation and some abrupt stop of projects, not that we lose them, but they're still postponed, and we see some of them coming back already during this year. U.K. delivered a 2% growth. I think it's worth mentioning it, it's on the back of 38% last year in 2024, but they continue the growth path and that is to get people in, to get them out there, to get them trained, but the business is certainly there. And it's also a profitable market. And although if you read all the news from there, you shouldn't really think it's more difficult, but it's also fair to say we are still a pretty small player in a huge market, and we definitely see some good trends there. U.S. came out after a few years with some slow or even decreasing revenue. We start to get some kind of a foothold if you can say it, in U.S. it's big. And especially M3, it's about 50% of the revenue in 2025. We've seen some very positive progress. But also the Dynamics is starting and we saw that at end of 2025. So that's good to see that there is some different baskets that we can chip into in a challenging market. Good, that was all about figures. Any questions you can pass them on as was mentioned in the beginning. I still want to spend 1 slide -- 2 slides actually on sustainability. The ones of you who have been reading our annual account, we still have 59 pages in there about sustainability and what we do. This year, it's a second year that we reported it, we have it audited, et cetera. And we mainly do it and keep doing it even though we are out of scope now after the change in the Omnibus in the EU is that some of our major customers still require that we are keeping good record in these terms. And I think more important, we have established a very solid automated setup. So it's a very limited investment for us to do. And the biggest area for us is basically people, it is the social and S in the ESG and that we would do anyhow because this is basically what we live up. So we have 1 slide on that, in this connection that Soren just would like to...

Yes. So this is the employee engagement score, which you can see has developed positively in -- from '23 to '24 and again to '25. Obviously, something we focus a lot on, and it's always important to us. In '25, we've been particularly paying attention to this number for several reasons. The first and easiest one to explain is that we've done capacity adjustments, and we've done some reorganizations and restructurings where we found it needed. And we know that this often, if not explained well to the organization, will cause a decrease in the score. So it's a test of management's ability to explain why we need to take some necessary measures. The second one, which is -- it's a little bit more difficult is to understand the impact on all of our consultants of today's business environment. So they work very, very hard. They are looking forward to starting -- to start working for a new customer. They're all riled up about it. And when that gets postponed, it's not just from an overall financial perspective, it has an effect on us. It's really felt on a personal level by those consultants because they've been looking forward to working. And that requires that we are able to pick each other up, find the positives that we can take with us and understand that it might come back, but then we have to move on without declaring a full victory, which is not something we are very accustomed to and not something we like to do. But we think that the 85 score is an indicator of very resilient workforce within Columbus, and we are very proud of how they've handled the year that we have now put past us.

Good. Good, thank you, Soren. Then last point before we open for questions, is the outlook. And I'm sure many of you have looked into that as well. First, I would like to just mention, as we also announced the 27th of January, that end of the year, we will come up with a new strategy. As you know, our old strategy is old, it's a few years back. It is ending this year, and we had ambitious -- some financial ambitions, a 10% organic growth and a 15% EBITDA margin. It's important to remember these were made before the major change in the macroeconomics after the election in U.S. and whatever happened. And -- but it's also important for us to say it's not that we don't have these ambitions anymore. But we also realized that they will be impossible to reach in 2026, the last year of the current strategy, new heights. So this year, we end up with a guidance with an organic growth from 0% to 5% coming from a minus 5% last year. So back in growth that is very important for us and something we are working hard on and we strongly believe in. And secondly, we report or we have an outlook on our EBITDA margin of 8% to 10% coming from 7.2% this year in 2025. And it's also key for us that we can show that we can continue to improve our bottom line when we are back in growth. Obviously, that is pretty hard in the consulting business where the growth is negative, after all, we managed to keep the margin on a solid level last year. But we would like to see or be sure we can see some improvement for next year. That's why we increased it now to 8% to 10% EBITDA margin. Good. Then it's time for questions and I will hand over to you, operator.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Yiwei Zhou from SEB.

It's Yiwei from SEB. I have three questions to start, and I will do one at a time. And firstly, a question on agentic AI. We have seen some studies showing that this new technology will reshape the ERP system significantly. Today it is more static, but then going forward, it would be more automatic. Do you foresee how it will impact your business, given you are very much exposed to the implementation of the ERP systems?

Great. Thank you, Yiwei, and thank you for dialing in. I think I would start with saying that in terms of the agentic workforce, which we are just about to infuse with our human workforce everywhere, I don't see a super specific agenda for ERP. I see it on all core systems where -- but let's do the ERP specific. Like any ERP system, the human workers working within the system, there's a lot of tasks that they are doing, which is just time-consuming for them and they're not really using their analytical skills or -- so they're basically just clogging up their day, and we expect pretty great breakthroughs within that. From a -- if you look 5 years plus forward or 3 to 5 years plus forward, that could have an effect also on how the systems need to be set up, and I'm sure that will be reshaped. But we are very focused on the first wave right now, which is just about enabling that workforce. And despite of all the media pressure and I think we all have to recognize that the actual booked efficiency gains, effectiveness gains are still quite minute. And we need to help our customers create some progress. Last year brought a lot of technology progress, maturing of the technology platforms. And now I think we are left with what is more classical, which is sort of an adoption, which is -- is getting your head around how do you do it? How do you govern it? How do you run an HR organization which consists both of human employees, but each of these human employees might oversee a number of autonomous agents? Who has responsibility? How do we keep it secure? And all of these things.

Yes. And just want to follow up on this. I mean we have seen that Microsoft, they also introduced those agents function. And in your business over the last 1 to 3 months, are you getting more sort of concrete requests and projects on the sort of implementation on those agents for your customers?

Absolutely. And I think that's the big change from '24 to '25. We already knew about the agent approach in '24, of course, but in '25, we saw it maturing, but we also saw the interfaces being -- so Copilot Studio becoming available. And a lot of the customer activities we have right now are very, very specific. So sitting down for an entire day and -- with these customers basically setting up agents, so that they know how to do this. And so you take everything that's abstract out of it and because for many people, it's still quite abstract, it doesn't have to be anymore because it works. So a lot of our customer activities are talking about the -- first, we talk about what can be done and all of that, which tends still to be abstract and then you basically just sit down and you pick a workflow apart and you say, okay, that one is not value creating and it's very stable in terms of the decision tree. It doesn't -- very -- if you express it in old automation language, very few of them would be kicked out from manual handling. That's a good way to understand it. That's a good place to start. So high frequency, low complexity, few of them getting kicked out from manual handling. That's where you start and then you set up an automated workflow through from there. You learn how to then refine it. But there's other things that are involved here. What does it actually cost? Because it drives the cost. So you also have to have business casing around it and all of that. And that's what we're doing with the customers now.

Okay. And you have talked about the hesitancy of your customers over the last few quarters. Initially, you mentioned that there was this geopolitical tensions, uncertainties postponing the projects initiation. And I was just wondering over the last 3 months, and you also mentioned there's still geopolitical tensions, uncertainty postponing the decision making. But based on that, are you also seeing that the delay in the projects or the pipeline are moving more towards that the customer wants to know or evaluate the new technology because of the agentic AI?

Can you rephrase that, Yiwei? Whether the customer...

Yes, the reason for postponing the projects or, let's say, hesitancy in the investment, was it still mainly because the -- there's geopolitical tensions or macro uncertainties? Or you're also seeing that the reason it is delayed being sort of -- they want to evaluate the new technology?

Yes. All right. Great question. So I think there's this broad blanket of geopolitical, trade policy, macroeconomic uncertainty. And it's important to say that actually not all of our customers have been heavily affected, but some of them just don't know and that means that they tend to pause for 6 months, and then sometimes they come back stronger. Some of them are actually hit and it just drives this hesitancy. So that's -- I think that's broad and it's in our sector, certainly, maybe not so much in the public sector, but where we work, it's across the board. Then we come to the -- and that also had an effect on AI and agentic investments, as you say. But I think it's a good question because I still think we have to take responsibility for and the industry we are part of and also the customers themselves that extra hesitancy is driven out of -- we need to become better to the top management teams of our customers to show them a clear path. So -- and it has to be less technology explained and much more, this is how we approach the organizational and operating model transformation of this customer. This is what we propose. This is where we start. This is how we break it down. This is how we organize because there are some investments for any customer that have to be group-wide, and then there is something where we can approach them on a division-by-division level. And I think it's fair to say that, that has also not been as good as it can get. And that has probably been on top of the geo, macro turmoil. So a good challenge, Yiwei.

Okay. Very clear. And you also mentioned that you made some big investments in AI. Could you be a bit more specific on this? And what have you have invested in exactly?

Yes. So I think we can just limit it to two buckets. One is new skills represented by people. So this is the area where we have basically been -- even though I said we've been sort of margin protecting overall in 2025, that area has been given fairly free reins to recruit what they need, which drives an investment from our side because we cannot avoid when we have big intakes that the efficiency will drop, and that basically has affected their contribution margin. So that's the first bucket. And the other bucket is -- well, okay, perhaps three buckets. Then the other bucket is tooling. So there are some new tools, which we are investing in, which we need for our consultants to be productive. It goes across the board, but specifically, it goes for the more technical part of our community that need access to that. And the third part is development work, which we undertake ourselves. We are no longer a software company, but we are starting to see some perspective in developing some IP ourselves, which we believe is necessary for a successful implementation with our customers. So they are the three buckets.

And what kind of IP you are talking about? Can you elaborate a bit?

That could be a few examples. It could be something we -- something we need for integration. So in terms of integration setups and making sure customer's platforms are fully integrated. We can see some holes in the chain where we can provide that. There can be things around the agentic if we take that one from before where we can basically produce something which makes -- which does a lot of pre and ground work for the customers, so it's easier to implement. Because with all our knowledge of the business processes, we can -- we can come -- if we call it a strawman setup or a blueprint setup, which is sort of preconfigured, I think that's a good way of understanding it.

Okay. So those are sort of the AI embedded solutions? Is it fair to understand?

Yes, some of them.

Okay. And then on top of whether you are building up or integrating for your customers?

A lot of it -- I mean a lot of it is driven by customer-specific scenarios. And then we can see, okay, this one is bound to come up again and again, and then we choose to have a little bit more -- we might as well approach it perfectly from the first time. So we have a tool set which we can reuse.

Yes. Okay, clear. And last question from my side. I recall that you have quite a lot of time and material contracts with the customer. Are you seeing any price pressure on those contracts? I think the -- a lot of people in industry stakeholders talk about the AI will negatively impact the hourly based consulting.

So I think I have two viewpoints that go in opposite directions. So we -- our hourly rates continue to develop positively, not dramatically positively, but they develop positively year-on-year in line with plan we made, which considers things like salary pressure and inflation. So from -- so we have certainly not lowered our hourly rates. And the other perspective is, is there more competitive pressure on the industry? I think we see a bit of that certainly in market like Sweden has had some of a little -- there's always price competition, but perhaps it's been a little bit more fierce than in previous years.

Yes. But then how could you justify your premium price or price increase when your competitors are bidding down?

Yes. And that -- so the way we justify that has not changed actually as part of what we've experienced in '25. So some of the major drivers we use to justify our premium is -- the most important thing is the track record. Having a huge catalog of previous implementations with customers that are in the same industry, that are about the same size, that had about the same set of challenges and having worked successfully through that is a very important part of being able to charge any kind of premium. Well, I wouldn't say it's a premium. It's just to show that you belong in that segment because there are others with us. It's just differentiating yourselves from the lower cost segment. I would say another important part I go back to this work we did on our delivery methodology, being able to accurately plan the work, absorb changes to the project plan, which always occurs. So how do you early detect that the plan is -- this sounds negatively, but it's always the reality that the first plan will never survive. So how do you have a good methodology for continuously monitoring where you have plan deviations, make contingencies for that, agree that with the customers? And basically, just until you go live and the customer has their expected value, how do you drive that? That's -- I know methodology sounds like a small thing, but it's a very big task, which needs to be embedded with every one of our consultants. The industry knowledge I talked about, I think is a big part of it. There's also something about size. If you're only present in one geography, you are not able to command the same price because you basically -- your customer, if they are international customers, will then have to contract with different partners everywhere, which brings a big onus on them. And when they contract with somebody like us who are represented in hopefully all of their countries and if there's somewhere we're not, we have sub suppliers that we've worked with again and again. So we take the contractual ownership of it. So yes, these are some of the things that we work with to put us in the -- I wouldn't say we have -- we belong in a certain segment, and yes, okay.

And if I may ask one more question here?

We only have 6 minutes left, so just to leave some of the others a chance also to ask questions. That would be -- and then I'm happy to take another one off-line from you.

Okay. Then I jump back to the queue and if there's no more question, I will come back.

We do not have any more questions in the dial-in, but we do have some in the written part, so we will move into that part now. There is a question which asks, do you expect to make acquisitions in 2026? Or will there be any distribution to shareholders?

Okay. So we certainly have the ability to do acquisitions in 2026. We have what we perceive to be a very low debt burden of the company. I think the net interest-bearing debt is...

Almost 0.

Almost 0, thank you. And the cash flow is as Brian was alluding to before. So there's a debt capacity, which is currently unused. That being said, we don't -- we will only do things that make sense to us at the correct price point. It -- we know that if we do acquisitions in this industry, it's not easy, and we have to give it a lot of management attention. So it's not something we do lightly, especially not if it's big. So I'd be surprised if there's nothing. I certainly think there will be some smaller acquisitions. And we will see if there's anything bigger, which makes sense to us. And I believe we have, yes, the dividend, so I'm just looking at the confirmation here. The dividend policy will be in line with last year's dividend.

Great. We have another question here. It's translated from Danish, it says, it is disappointing that there is such large deviations in the previously communicated 2026 plan. And there is a thin guidance for 2026 on revenue and a bit the targets. What is the most central thing for you to recover from in 2027 to 2029, growth or profitability?

All right. Thank you. Yes, obviously, it goes without saying from both, Brian and me, we would have loved to deliver on our 2026 end goal as well. What's the most central to restore in '27 to '29? So in terms of the top line, we have produced 10% organic growth before. And I think all we need is a little bit of normalization to return to that level. Again, we have -- we know how to do that. And in any kind of normalized -- we've also been above that. And in any kind of normalized market, we will be able to do that. And when it comes to the EBITDA margin, it is hard for us to get up there to the 15% in a year where we have to do capacity adjustments. We've designed our enabling functions to support a certain level of revenue. So our enabling function can support -- the engine we've built to run the company can support a lot more revenue that we have on it now. We have been very cost conscious of that, and we've also tuned it, but we don't want to take it out of commission because we do believe that we will have the growth coming back again. And so the most central to -- yes, and this is where the politician answer comes in. We are trying to have a very balanced approach. So we are definitely not going gung-ho for growth, and just letting our profitability drop like a stone in this market. We want to preserve margins. So you will see the same kind of approach probably as in 2025. The difference being that we have to be very good at when we start to see positive signs and that we can't wait out too long, then we have to be prepared to go on the gas pedal again, and this is something that we are very mindful of. But with the current outlook, where we're still not -- we don't think we have sufficient clarity to see that full demand will be restored in the market, we will be a little bit balanced in our approach. And then you should expect when we see some sunshine, we see some momentum in the market, which is more systemic and not just 1 month or 2 months or 1 quarter, well, maybe a quarter, then you have to start being a little bit more forward-leaning in terms of what we hire and how we approach the markets.

Great. We're almost out of time. We have one last written question about AI, which I know you've spoken a lot about. It says, the AI segment grew 3% in 2025. Is there any AI-related hidden revenue in the other business areas?

Yes, absolutely, and I was kind of expecting this. So it's a clear yes to that. Obviously, it's not just the AI segment that works with AI. It's a big part of our Dynamics area. It's becoming a big part of M3. It's a big part of Commerce. Without throwing you under the bus, Brian, I think we are working on a way of finding a meaningful way of reporting on AI-driven revenue. But we do want to make sure that once we present you with a model, everything can be relabeled to AI these days, so it has to be in a meaningful way, that truly describes what has changed in our business model. And as with everything we introduced to you, we want to ensure it has some sort of longevity to it because if we report on it one time and then we find another way, which is more meaningful, it doesn't really have value to you. We need to report in the same way over time, so you can track our progress. So -- but yes, good call out.

Great. I see the time is also 2:00, and we are out of time. We seem to be mostly through the questions, so I will pass back to management for final remarks.

Well, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you for joining. Yes, there's -- there are more questions, but we will make sure to pick them up next time. Thank you for joining. Thank you for the interest shown. Brian and I, you can be very sure we'll continue to pursue this. We have a good plan. It will be interesting to see what we can achieve in 2026. Thank you.

Thank you.