GFT Technologies SE (GFT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the GFT Technologies Preliminary Figures Full Year 2024 and 5-Year Strategy Conference Call and Live Webcast. The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Andreas Herzog, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our today's conference call, and this is a special one. Here with me, our new CEO, Marco Santos; who took over the CEO responsibility since the beginning of the year, and our CFO, Jochen Ruetz. Today, we will present not only our '24 numbers but also our outlook for '25. Today, Marco will also guide you through our newly formed 5-year strategy and the corresponding financial goals behind it. After the presentation, we will have enough room for your questions. As the operator said, this session will be recorded, and we will make it available on our website afterwards. So, without any further ado, I would like to hand over to Marco. Marco, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Andreas. A warm welcome to everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Let's get started on Slide 3. It's very good to share that we delivered our promises. We met our guidance for 2024. Our revenues grew 10% to EUR 871 million, and our adjusted EBT margin improved by 6% to EUR 77 million in 2024. Our 3 largest markets are Brazil, Germany and Spain, which delivered strong growth rates of 18%, 12% and 14%, respectively. In segments, banking generated a strong 12% growth, followed by industry manufacturing and others with 10% growth and insurance with 1% improvement. Those numbers will be presented in detail by Jochen on the next slides.  Let me go through some of the highlights of the quarter. The first highlight is related to 2 new large-scale strategic clients we closed in Q4. We are very happy to share that we won a major digital banking factory at Deutsche, Germany, and we were able to close a strategic core banking modernization program at Banco Actinver, a leading wealth management investment bank in Mexico. This new client was a direct result of the major acquisition of Sophos Solutions in 2024. The next 2 highlights are related to the U.S.A. market. We successfully signed our first contract with one of the top 3 largest retail banks in the United States of America, a truly Tier 1 client for GFT. We also signed 4 new long-term contracts securing 3 years of business for those respective clients in the U.S.A. Those new wins show the recognition of the core skills, capabilities and differentiation of GFT into the U.S.A. market. I must say that I'm very confident with our momentum in the U.S.A.  The fourth highlight is related to our insurance sector. I'm very happy to share that we have been capturing a multimillion euro growth in a Tier 1 insurance company in Brazil in the areas of artificial intelligence and AWS cloud modernization. The next highlight is related to GFT's marketing position, which is a fundamental element of our strategy. GFT received 2 awards from Amazon Web Services: the Global Innovation Partner of the Year and the Financial Services EMEA Partner of the Year. This shows that our core capabilities and differentiators are recognized globally by the #1 hyperscale and cloud provider in the world.  The following highlight is related to our people and culture, which is one of the pillars of our core differentiation. GFT was recognized as one of the top 25 Fortune World's Best Workplace by Great Place to Work. This is a major achievement, which placed GFT among industry leaders like SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, NVIDIA, and Allianz. This outstanding workplace culture reflects our unwavering commitment to fostering an innovative, inclusive and diverse environment where our people can thrive. The final highlight of the quarter is the impressive growth momentum and successful client adoption of GFT Impact, which is our own generative AI product to accelerate and improve productivity in the software development life cycle.  To talk more about that, I will move to the next slide, #4. Our journey with GFT AI Impact started in early 2023 when we established a dedicated product development team to bring generative AI into our core business. The product has been growing since then with more features, a comprehensive pipeline of new functionalities, international team members and dedicated R&D investment. Now, we are very happy to share that we moved from 10 clients in Q3 to 25 clients at the end of Q4, a 150% growth rate quarter-over-quarter, and we jumped from 170 licenses in Q3 to 315 licenses sold in Q4.  GFT AI Impact is the materialization of our strong belief in the potential of AI in our industry, and we are capturing real productivity improvements ranging from 50% to 90%. These are trusted numbers from our clients, which shows that we are bridging the gap of AI adoption in the market. We have a clear goal to equip the whole GFT team with GFT AI Impact, and we are proud to have more than 4,000 engineers already trained on it. And we have the vision to engage all GFT employees to help evolve the features and functionalities of GFT AI Impact. This will be a massive big. GFT AI Impact works integrated with the main large language models of the market, OpenAI, Bedrock and Gemini. It's available at the Microsoft Global Marketplace and the AWS Global Marketplace, and we are now working directly with Microsoft to extend GitHub Copilot and create a plugin for GFT AI Impact. I'm very confident about the growth momentum of our product.  Let's move to the GFT 5-year strategy, #5. I'm very excited to take on the role of Global CEO at GFT in these extraordinary times of major technology change. This is a privileged opportunity and a strong cultural action for me. I remember when I completed my bachelor's degree in computer science in the 1990s, AI was a theoretical exercise in mathematics and statistics constrained by limited computational resource. The world has come a long way since then from deep learning, perception AI transformers, and generative AI up to agentic AI. Today, AI is at the forefront of technology and innovation, driving transformation across industries and unlocking possibilities.  I strongly believe that within just a few years, software development, IT engineering and consulting services, as we know them, will be completely transformed from ideation, design thinking, hand coding, implementation, testing, bug fixing up to support and maintenance, all aspects of this process will have AI in its heart, achieving speed and efficiency is exponentially greater than what we experienced today. The results opportunities are immense for GFT. So let's move to the next slide. Major opportunities. According to McKinsey's 18 areas of Tomorrow Research, industry shaping the future could generate trillions in revenue with AI software and service alone expected to grow from $85 billion today to as much as to $4.6 trillion in 2040. However, realizing the resulting potential of AI is not trivial. The rapid proliferation of AI will intensify competition and redefine the IT industry across the board, including custom software development, data and legacy modernization, independent software vendors, ISVs and AI applications itself. As a result, trusted advisory and AI measurable delivery will become more crucial than ever. The gap between the promise of AI and the realized outcomes for businesses, what I call the AI gap is a challenge we cannot overlook. At GFT, we are committed to bridging this gap through our AI expertise, products, innovation and a relentless focus on delivering results. This is our call to action. This is where we have the core differentiation to lead and be successful. Let's move to the next slide, Andreas. Thank you. Vision and mission. Over the last 6 months, we have invested significant time and resources in developing our new 5-year strategy that will allow GFT to significantly lead and benefit from the AI revolution. Our vision is to be the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world. This is an ambitious vision. However, without setting the bar high for ourselves, we won't be able to fulfill our mission, which is to bring the best responsible AI-centric digital solutions, software development and technology service to every company in the world. Let's move to the next slide, please. Ambition, KPIs ambition. We are confident that within the next 5 years, we will be able to achieve further significant growth in revenue and adjusted EBT. Specifically, we have set ourselves the strategic goals of increasing revenue to around $1.5 billion in 2029 and improving materially the adjusted EBT margin to around 9.5% in the same period. We also defined strategic KPI objectives to improve the percentage of high value-added services to about 50% of our total revenue architecture, including assets, products, technology consulting and independent software vendors, ISCV-related services and to improve the percentage of our Smart shore services, nearshore, offshore and offsite versus client's on-site activities to around 40% of our overall delivery. Those KPIs ambitions are the North Star of myself, all leaders at GFT and the whole 12,000 employees. We all wake up, work and leave those KPIs ambition every single day. Let's move to the next, please. Strategic goals and objectives. Together with the KPIs ambition, we also established strategic objectives, qualitative driven, which are fundamental goals to support the achievement of the previous KPIs, which are to become a fast learning, adopted innovative organization, it's important that GFT is a company capable to learn new technologies fast, understand technology innovation and adapt itself to leverage over new trends to solutions and platforms. If in 2 years from now, a new company or technology creates a breakthrough in the market and challenge Google, AWS, OpenAI, NVIDIA, we must be capable to adapt and take advantage of that market shift faster than the competition. The second qualitative objective is to be agile, global local agent company. It's key to have all our 12,000 team working in agile, collaborative and efficient way, leveraging global and local distributed teams capable to augment themselves with future AI agents, which are coming to play as an integral part of our teams. The third global AI-centric technology market leader. In order to deliver the vision and mission of our strategy, we want to be recognized by the market as the AI-centric technology powerhouse. Last qualitative objective to democratize AI to the community we operate in. We believe in doing well by doing good. In parallel with our business growth journey, we must bring our knowledge and train people in AI and digital technologies in the countries and communities that we work with. Let's move please to the next slide, #10, Strategic initiatives and respective contribution to the KPI ambition. In order to achieve our 5-year plan goals and objectives, we have just launched a set of strategic initiatives designed to take us from where we are today to where we want to be in the end of 2029. Firstly, we are committed to structurally improve the culture and governance model of GFT from a federated to a high efficient global local model. We still have countries and business units that operate quite independently, and this generates challenge for coordination, collaboration, scalability and efficiency. That current model was successful to take us here. However, it will not support GFT to make $1.5 billion plus of revenues. I believe on strong global alignment and coordination in order to enable autonomy for the countries. We will capture economies of scale, create lots of synergies and leverage over the skills, experience and capabilities of all our countries once we globalize GFT more. This initiative will generate massive positive impact across the board and enable strong growth of revenues, margins and improve our revenue architecture. Second strategic initiative is to transform GFT into an AI-centric software development tech service company. Based upon the major opportunities of AI, the current AI gap in the market, our vision and mission, it is most important to shift our core business and operational model with AI at the center of our delivery and value chain. To do that, we are moving strongly with the GFT AI Impact, which is our house of AI. All clients, projects and services should be leveraged with GFT AI Impact. On top of that, we will leverage over the best AI technologies from the market for software development life cycles such as the GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q and others to make GFT AI a truly AI-centric organization in our core business. Lastly, we also move finance HR market in our corporate services with AI in the center of their functions with AI tools, agents and others. This strategic initiative will create competitive advantage for GFT in the market, and I do believe it will strongly contribute with revenue and margin growth. The third strategic initiative is focused to design and implement a complete new brand and positioning for GFT, aligned with our core offerings, capabilities and differentials in the next-generation technologies. Today, GFT brand is perceived in some markets as a regional player. However, the reality is that we are recognized by the best technology leaders like AWS and many Tier 1 clients as a truly global trusted partner. And we will articulate in a bold way our case studies, project reference, global awards and others. The acceleration of our brand awareness will drive more high value-added pipeline for GFT, which will impact our revenue growth, profitability and better revenue architecture. Final strategic initiative on this slide, we are moving forward with the corporate innovation and asset creation. This strategic initiative is focused to keep refueling the company with innovation, new ISV specialized units, partnerships and creation of assets. We want to incentivize all GFT employees to design new assets as a result of their current projects and activities. A striking example of our ability to innovate is the creation of GFT AI Impact, our generative AI product that I presented before. Now let's move to the second part of the strategic initiatives. The first one on this slide is a complete new global business development platform, connecting all centers of excellence that we have, technology units, local teams, partnerships, presales function, innovation, proposal office and multiple business elements spread across all our countries in order to work in an agile and efficient way to accelerate our key offerings, capabilities and differentials to the markets. We focus again on high value-added offerings, including ISVs, independent software vendors, service-related assets, products and technology consulting. The impact of this strategic initiative will be very positive for GFT, creating differentiation in the market and contributing strongly to revenue growth, higher profitability and an improved revenue architect. The second initiative is to implement a next-generation global delivery platform that efficiently orchestrates the specialized and scalable delivery hubs we have at GFT, creating agility, flexibility and a much more efficient price point to the market, answering to the needs of our clients, especially the big ones with a Smart shore designed to offer optimized long-term nearshore, offshore off-site ratio in the market. This initiative is also responsible to grow India as a new frontier of high scalable and price-efficient delivery for GFT and our clients. The contribution of this initiative will be highly positive in revenue growth potential, improvement of margins and by design, drives a better Smart Shore ratio. The third initiative is the global accounts and Tier 1 clients' expansion program, which focus to improve GFT position and increase the share of our services within major Tier 1 clients and global accounts. This prioritized time, effort, sales, presales and marketing resources in all countries to leverage GFT positioning at a high potential growth clients. Specifically for global clients, we are implementing global account teams with clear governance model and incentives cross borders in order to optimize global coordination to fulfill client needs. This initiative will generate a strong contribution to our revenue growth and to a more efficient Smart shore ratio leveraged by offshore and nearshore. The fourth item in the slide is the M&A expansion program. Focus on -- this is focused on identification, selection and acquisition of high value-added and ISV-related specialized targets. This initiative is an integral part of our overall revenue growth strategy. It will also strongly contribute to acquired technology capabilities and differentiation, which will improve our revenue architecture and margins. Finally, we are launching the gravity program, which is focused on simplify, optimize and rationalize our global footprint of countries, offices and corporate services, creating a streamlined and efficient structure that support the strategic growth of GFT, contributing materially to the bottom line of the company. Now let's move to my final slide. The idea here is to provide you a glimpse about the next-generation technology brand and positioning we are pushing forward for GFT. We used to have our brand claim, our company tagline, big enough to deliver small enough to care. We use that in our client needs and positioning everywhere. We made an extensive assessment of our brand, and we found out that this brand claim is too small enough. It limits GFT to a small place. It does not represent the ambition and expectations of our clients, partners, leadership team and investors. Therefore, we created a complete new brand claim. Let's go beyond. This new impactful brand claim definitely represents the ambition of our 5-year strategy, the ambition of all our stakeholders. Let's go beyond AI. Let's go beyond cloud. Let's go beyond future of finance. Let's go beyond digital banking. Let's go beyond in Germany. Let's go beyond in the United States. Jochen, turn to you now.

Thank you very much, Marco. Let's look now in the next chapter at the preliminary figures 2024, and our outlook, and directly go to Slide #14. So overall, we saw a solid growth trajectory successfully continue. Marco already mentioned the numbers. The revenue came in at nearly EUR 871 million. Our last guidance updated in November was EUR 865 million. So we exceeded the revenue guidance by EUR 6 million. Overall, 10% growth. And obviously, we managed the mandatory time absent issues that we talked about in November far better than we had anticipated, and we saw more traction in the North American markets than initially expected. Looking at the order book, we're up 33%. If we correct for the Sophos numbers, which have not been in last year, it's still a 25% growth, quite strong order book. And as Marco already mentioned, we have far more order book for the years '26 and later generated this time than a year ago.  Looking at EBITDA and EBIT adjusted, up 5% and 6%, respectively. Adjusted EBIT is explained into 2 smaller bullet points on the right side. It is impacted by capacity adjustments, now worth EUR 10.4 million for the whole year.  For those of you who remember when we talked about this at the end of Q3, we stood at EUR 7 million. I indicated we're going to go towards EUR 8.5 million, and now it's EUR 10.4 million, main driver being the separation from a Board member very late in the year pre-Christmas, which pushed the numbers up in the end.  Second small bullet point, FX effects, burning us by EUR 700,000, rather small effect this year. And the third bullet point, just to repeat, we talked about this in the previous quarterly calls, the provision released for fiscal proceedings in Brazil had a net extraordinary positive effect of plus EUR 9.8 million. So the year '24 is impacted by this positive one-off effect. We came in at EUR 77 million, which was our guidance.  So the guidance was met here as well, but including the Brazilian court case effect. EBIT is up 4%. EBT is down 4% as expected. As we always said, we have the big Sophos acquisition in Colombia this year, which drives a lot of M&A effects, amortization, order book adjustments and as we financed the deal more interest cost than in years before. Therefore, the EBT is as expected in minus territory. Net income also minus 4% and earnings per share, again, minus 4%.  Let's move forward to Slide #15 and look at the sectors. Look at the right side of the slide first. We grew our banking sector business by 12% to 75% of the total GFT revenue. This is supported by the Sophos acquisition, a company mostly dedicated to banking clients. Insurance business, plus 1%.  Well, we were in negative territory in our insurance business throughout the quarters 1, 2 and 3. At the end of the 9 months, we stood at minus 3%. So only in Q4, we were able to turn it into a black plus 1%. It's now representing 15% of the overall GFT revenue. And last but not least, industry and other clients growing by 10% to 10% of the total GFT business. I'm looking at the left side of this slide, the well-balanced client portfolio.  The clients above EUR 50 million, as I think everybody in the call probably already knows is Deutsche Bank, only one client. Deutsche Bank revenues were much below '23 at roughly EUR 120 million. And as a side note, if we take out Deutsche, GFT grew by 13%. Including Deutsche, we grew by 10%. So the Deutsche Bank account, very big and important to us.  But on the revenue side, it was somewhat slowing us down. All clients above EUR 10 million, but smaller than EUR 50 million represent 40% of the business, clients bigger than EUR 5 smaller than EUR 10 million is 18%, both numbers mostly unchanged to last year and similar for the smaller clients, 28% representing in the portfolio.  Let's move forward, slide #16, and look at growth acceleration in Q4. Let's start with the revenue side. And first, compare to the Q4 of last year of 2023, we see growth of 11%, primarily driven by the M&A in Colombia. We had 4% organic growth, which was again mostly driven by Brazil. When we compare quarter-over-quarter, Q4 '24 to Q3 '24, we see a 4% growth, and it is mainly coming from Brazil, the 2 North American markets, U.S. and Canada, plus in Europe, Spain and Italy.  When we go to the right side, the adjusted EBIT, we see the number is below the Q4 '23 EBIT adjusted, and it's also below the Q3 '24 EBIT adjusted in both cases, mostly impacted by the capacity adjustments, which were higher in Q4. I already mentioned that we separated from a Board member, and this burdened the Q4 numbers alone by EUR 1.7 million.  Now let's move forward. Slide #17, revenue and earnings by segment. Let's start with revenue and at the top with Continental Europe. Continental Europe grew by 9% overall via good growth in Spain, Italy, France and Poland. And on top, we had 4% growth coming from M&A, 9% organic, total growth for Continental Europe, 13%.  When we look at Americas, U.K. and APAC, we see that organic growth is exactly at 0 and the total growth is at 9%, which is driven by the Sophos acquisition. We saw the turnaround for our organic numbers in Q4 because for the first 9 months, we were negative on organic growth and Q4 kind of saved the day to get to 0. So we saw better traction in the fourth quarter.  Now on the right side, let's look at adjusted EBIT, again, start with Continental Europe. Here, the EBIT adjusted is 7% down versus previous year and again, mostly impacted by higher capacity adjustments and more investments into our offerings.  Similar on the Americas, U.K. and APAC side, it looks like a 10% increase, but let's not forget, it includes the EUR 19.8 million provision release in Brazil. This is extraordinary, will not happen again. It is then offset by capacity adjustments and further investments in our offerings.  Going for Slide #18, revenues by markets. Brazil is the biggest market of GFT. It represents EUR 142 million, which was an 18% growth on euro basis for 2024. The 2 big markets in Europe, Germany and Spain, but also smaller ones like France and Poland were main growth drivers. U.S. and Canada, both in negative territory. But when we compare to previous quarters, we see that in the second half, they have been stabilizing and growing in Q4.  Last but not least, U.K., Asia Pac and Switzerland are below our expectations with U.K. being the biggest market. But let me mention that from the U.K. decline, EUR 10 million were moved to other GFT markets by client demand. Clients demanded the billing to move from U.K. partially to Germany, partially to Poland, partially to the U.S. So that's EUR 10 million less decline, but it's still in negative territory for the U.K. market.  Moving forward on Slide #19. I already talked about the client structure on Slide 15. Therefore, I focus here on the new qualified clients which in the text below is the last bullet point. Qualified clients in our definition are clients with more than EUR 100,000 in revenues for whom we did not work before. And we were able to double that number, for sure, supported by the Sophos acquisition, but also by our own sales teams from 57 in '23 to 116 new qualified clients in the year 2024.  I'll skip the other details because we talked about it. On Slide 15, which brings me to Slide 20, the income statement. Of course, it starts with the same revenue growth. I mentioned the other operating income, which is reflecting the Brazilian court case accrual release. Therefore, we have a strong increase of that operating profit. It is mentioned here with EUR 10.58 million, which is the positive effect, we had lawyer success fees worth roughly EUR 800,000 shown in other operating expenses. So the net effect of the Brazilian court case is 9.8%. Second to mention is bullet point #4. We always compare our personnel cost plus purchase services and compare this to revenue. And the current quota for '24 is 83% the year before in '23, it stood at 81.5%, which means we have lost some efficiencies in the year 2024, which we need to recapture in the coming years. Second to last bullet point, let me mention the financial result. With the financing of Sophos, we for sure had more debt on board in average in 2024. On top, interest rates in '24 were higher than in '23 because of the global market evolution. Therefore, our financial result was far below the '23 numbers. And last but not least, on this Slide, the income tax rate stood at 28.5% versus 28.9% in the year before. We believe it will be between 28% and 29% also in the current year 2025. This brings me to Slide #21, the cash flow analysis. Let me start with the net cash, which in the graph on the left side, you see on the very left, we had a net cash at the beginning of the year of EUR 4.39 million. And we see it on the very right. We had a net cash at the end of the year '24 of minus EUR 42.5 million, so a decline. Overall, the decline is for sure, mostly because of the Sophos acquisition which we had to finance. Now going by cash flow by cash flow. We're very proud of the cash flow from operating activities. It stood at EUR 72.4 million. It was positively impacted by working capital effects. We would have assumed maybe EUR 10 million less for the year, but then payments came in before the New Year's Day. Sometimes this simply only happens in January. So there's always some volatility in working capital, strong operating cash flow in 2024. When we look at the investing activities, it's mostly about the Sophos acquisition, which cost us EUR 79.5 million. And then the financing activities I mentioned as well. Our free cash flow adjusted, which means it ignores investments in M&A, but it includes investments in all other goods and it includes the cash flow financing activities for our office rent. It's shown at EUR 55.6 million, the highest number GFT was yet able to show ever. And this brings me to Slide #22, balance sheet, not much to talk about. The balance sheet total increased because of the Sophos acquisition, the same reasoning as on many other Slides and the noncurrent assets also because of Sophos acquisition. And the equity ratio was pretty much unchanged. It stood at 42% in '24 comparing to 43% in the year before. So let's move to the people Slide #23. Employee number at the end of the year '24 stood at 11,506. That's 20% up versus last year. Our main growth drivers were Colombia via acquisition, Brazil, Italy and Vietnam. But we also had reducing countries. That is why we had those capacity adjustment costs in Poland, Mexico, U.K., Germany and Costa Rica. The number of contractors was pretty much unchanged, a bit up to 1,215. Third bullet point on the bottom, utilization, the graph in the middle in Q4 was at a strong 91.6%. The full year average utilization was 90.7%. Attrition slightly down to 10.7%, but this is more like a statistical glitch. We see attrition rising in the first 2 months of 2025, and we believe it will trend towards 12% in the coming quarters. So this brings me to our guidance on Slide #24. We see the growth trajectory continue. Our earnings expectations are reflecting future investments and higher personnel costs. But let me start with the revenue side. The revenue is predicted at EUR 930 million for 2025. That is a 7% increase versus last year. We believe it will look similar to the 2 previous years. It will be somewhat back-end loaded, weaker first half, a stronger second half of the year. EBIT adjusted is expected to reach EUR 68 million. This compares to the EUR 77 million you see for 2024. If we take out the Brazilian one-off court case, it compares to EUR 67 million for '24, which is more comparable. And now I will go slightly into the EBIT adjusted comments in the bullet points on the right. What is driving EBIT adjusted -- well, first of all, the revenue growth will generate more profits, yes. But at the same time, we have increased investments in high value-added offerings and asset creation in line with the strategy Marco presented. We see increased personnel costs mainly resulting from efficiency measures and social security contributions, which are higher, especially in our Brazilian and Spanish and British markets. So this in total will burden us with roughly EUR 7 million. And then last but not least, we have the onetime effect in Brazil of roughly EUR 10 million, which will not repeat in 2025. We also guide the EBIT. It will be guided at EUR 60 million. Now on Slide #25, with our guidance '25, we add some additional KPIs on our performance. Let's start with the first one, free cash flow adjusted. I already mentioned the number on the cash flow Slide. For '24, it was EUR 55.6 million. For the year 2025, we believe working capital will not be that easily in our favor again. Therefore, our milestone for '25 on free cash flow is EUR 45 million with insecurity surrounding working capital effects. Second KPI is net debt compared to EBITDA. For '24, it stood at 0.4. For 2025, we guide 0.2, could be 0.1 to 0.2. We are assuming no acquisitions in that number, but we have sufficient headroom if attractive targets come along and market opportunities arise. Third KPI is utilization. Last year's number was 90.7%. Last 3 years average was 90.5%. We expect and milestone 90.5% for the coming year, not expecting to be at peak level performance because of some effects we have to do, some efficiency measures we will implement. If you have downloaded this file in the morning, you might have a typo in the utilization 2024. The correct number is on the screen. It's 90.7% and the most accurate version is currently available online. Now this brings me to my last slide, our midterm targets, '29. Marco already mentioned them, just wrapping them up. On this Slide #26, our revenue target for the year 2029 is EUR 1.5 billion in revenue, which represents a CAGR of 11.5%. It will come from organic growth picking up after the market recovery. It will include bolt-on acquisitions and ongoing investments in assets also driving some revenues already in 2029. On the EBIT adjusted side, we guide for 9.5% margin comparing to the '24 margin of 7.7%, excluding the one-off in Brazil. We see our service portfolio trending towards high value-added services at higher margins. We are pushing Smart shore delivery, and this will contribute overall margin improvement. And last but not least, we focus on existing GFT markets, contributing economies of scale. Marco called it the gravity program in the strategy part of the presentation. With this, over to you, Marco, for the final slide.

Thank you, Jochen. I would like to finish our presentation saying that I'm very excited to be here today as the new global CEO of GFT, facing these extraordinary times of major technology shifts. We delivered our promise in 2024 and we do have the core capabilities and differentiation for an ambitious growth. There is a clear major opportunity for GFT as the AI software and service market is expected to grow massively over the next years. We have a comprehensive 5-year strategy with 4-prong vision, clear goals, objectives and strong strategic initiatives focused on execution. Our new journey starts now. I'm confident about our future, and it's a must to invest on it. Let's go beyond. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Andreas Wolf with Warburg Research.

Congratulations on the return to growth in Q4. I have the following questions. So the first one is the obvious one. If we look at the medium-term targets, what would be the organic growth portion of the achievement of the EUR 1.5 billion? Then if we look at the investments that you plan for 2025, do you expect those to already pay off in 2026? Shall we expect any special investment quarters during '25 or will this be a gradual process? And then if we look at the offshore capacity, I guess India will be an important part of the offshore delivery going forward, at least according to one of the slides. How quickly do you believe can you ramp up the region to make it a meaningful service delivery region for GFT? And then the last one, and then I'll go back into the queue for the time being. So the last one is on the order backlog. If I adjusted for Sophos, I still calculate a 25% increase year-on-year. Is this an indicator of a very dynamic development or am I missing something?

So let me start with the midterm target. The organic piece is 8% to 8.5% per year CAGR. And then we will see M&A supporting this. And there's a bit coming from innovation still happening. Investments '25 pay off in '26. Yes, we believe we will do some efficiency measures in '25, which, a, will pay off during '25, but we will not really see it yet, but in '26 and therefore, also the cost base will be higher in the first half because some of the efficiency measures simply have to happen in the first half of the year, and we will have a similar trajectory as in the last 2 years, a weaker first half profitability and then come back in the second half. We will see it similar as in 2024 and as it already was in 2023. Last one, order backlog, which I take plus 25%. Yes, that is correct, the number, right, 25%. As I stated, it includes more pipeline sorry, order book beyond '25. So '26, '27, '28 than in years before, especially in the U.S., we have been very successful in prolonging deals with known clients for a couple of years, not only for 12 months. And that was pushing it. If you take that out, it's still a strong order book. It's probably 12% ahead of the previous year, but more is long term than it usually is at the GFT standard.

Let me take -- Andreas, let me take the question regarding offshore engine. And yes, it is a strategic element of our growth, and it's an important element for our global delivery platform. And we are targeting to have about 200 FTEs. I know that's a small number compared to our total team until the end of the year, 2025. We have been investing on that start-up of India. But I must say that the backlog that we have today is better than we expected, okay? So I have more positions than we expected when we created the plan. So I'm confident to reach the 200 and I hope to overachieve that in the end of the year. And so that's -- obviously, that's a start-up for the new operation nodes. And the idea on the 5-year horizon is that this will scale up.

The next question is from Simon Keller with HAIB.

Firstly, could you please again explain to me what the AI licenses really are that you have sold in Q3 and Q4 that you had presented on one slide. What's your exact value add? And how is the outlook for this product or product category? And secondly, on the strategic investments you plan for '25, what are they exactly? Are they CapEx? Are they OpEx? And basically, maybe also as an explanation, are these servers you are renting out? Are these new products you need to license or are these development costs? How should we think about this? And maybe lastly, on the general market environment, how do you view pricing at the moment? Are there any changes compared to '24? And what's your plan to your position in this market? I remember from the past that you always aim to protect margins. Would you say this has changed or are you still rather focusing on margins when looking at new projects?

Let me pick up the financial question first, the strategic investments. We always talk about the word investments, and you're absolutely right to question that because they are not investments, right? This is all P&L we're talking about. This is cost for implementing people working on new offerings, be it ISVs that Marco mentioned in the software vendors, specialization, which we bring to a global level to make it available in all GFT markets, be it investing into AI impact, which we also don't amortize. So it is people cost for future growth coming from asset development, business development initiatives. Therefore, it's mostly development cost, people cost and sometimes a bit of partnering cost, but that is the minimum. Nothing is amortized. It's all going through the P&L. And maybe a quick one on market environment. Yes, margin protection, but we are thinking in '25, '26, '27, we're thinking margin protection more on the 3-year scale, which drives efficiency programs that we will work on. So we see some of the GFT markets, we need to transform to a blueprint that we have already implemented in some of the more Americas markets also coming to Europe and this will simply lead to some efficiency costs to get those measures and that means '25 will be burdened by these costs, and we will see the benefit in '26 and years after and that's currently the focus. That's why we guided as we guided, we will use the '25 year as kind of a transitional year, building the base and the foundation for the 5-year plan that was presented.

So let me talk about the -- your question regarding the GFK impact in license and the like. So the price of our license today, they are ranging from $10 per head to $15 per head per month, okay, which is, by the way, in line with other marketing tools that we see in the arena. So when we talk about 300 license that we sold, so we are talking about around 300 to $4,000 per month, which annualized it in $45,000, $50,000 per year, okay? So that's the annualized ARR, okay? But the second element of the GFT impact is not the license -- the direct license of GFT impact, which is strong profits. The most important for us is what we are calling the influential revenue. So all the proposals, new clients, and services that we won because we delivered GFTI Impact as a technology differentiator, generative AI, the technology differentiator now proposed and that number was EUR 7.6 million that we sold in 2024. It's a pretty important and relevant number that we sold last year in fixed-price proposals to clients considering GFT Impact as the technology to create differentiation. So this is, for us, a massive success. You also -- and another topic, we are bringing new functionalities to GFT Impact, more sophisticated and complex functionalities that we are going to charge enterprise license. So the current license I mentioned that's $10 to $15 per head per month, and we are bringing the enterprise license with new functionalities. For example, legacy transformer, that's our expectation is to charge $100 per head per month to utilize that enterprise license. So we have a clear strategy to improve the licensing model of GFT Impact. But again, the most important thing are the new clients and projects that we are winning with GFT AI Impact as the differentiation technology. Your final question was related to the market environment. We are -- we see a constant approach of the Tier 1 clients and major clients to look for optimizations and cost reductions. This is happening across the board. And on that regard, we are number one, deploying GFT Impact, deploying generative AI in order to get more competitiveness and tackle these movements, number one. And number two, we are also launching the global delivery platform and scaling up Colombia, scaling up Brazil, and now India in order to be more capable to deliver better proposals, better, let's say, prices for our -- for the demand of our clients. And final note, I think that we've been successful on that. Over the last quarter, we were able to secure a super-strategic new clients and new contracts with one of the three largest retail banks in the United States of America.

The next question is from Wolfgang Specht.

Yes, good afternoon. Three additional ones from my end. First, on the topic in-sourcing, you managed in past calls that some of your especially banking customers were active in in-sourcing formerly external capacities. Is this trend continuing? Can you give us some insight here? And then also the last 2 years, there was not a single presentation without mentioning projects coming in with Thought Machine. I guess it's not mentioned in the current presentation. Is it not a hot topic any longer or is it still very important for you? And then also may be related to Thought Machine, you talked about the chance to start some your neobank projects last year. Has this happened already or are you awaiting project starts here?

Okay. Thank you. Thanks for your question. So specifically for our core banking, Thought Machine, we've been working very strongly with Thought Machine, and it's an underlying element of our core banking strategy. And I must say that we are very, very excited that we closed the largest project of our core banking with Thought Machine in the market last year, which was the Bancolombia, by the way, that we got approval from the client to announce that, and we mentioned that in Q3. And we won Bancolombia, the largest bank of Colombia, 40 million clients with Thought Machine project, quite strategic for us. It's quite strategic for Thought Machine. So that represents the success of our partnership and our strategic approach with them. We also delivered some other projects with Thought Machine last year. So again, very strategic and it's a next-generation core banking part of our overarching strategy.  I must highlight that with the incorporation of the acquisition of Sophos Solutions last year, Sophos brought, I would say, a very powerful and strong capabilities in other core banking, Oracle, Flexcube and Finacle and other elements. And we were able to increase considerably our units, our business units of core banking. So now we are talking about next-generation core banking with Fought Machine, Mumbo and also, say, traditional core banking like Oracle, Flexcube, and others. And this brought us to, I would say, a quite solid position as a global leader in core banking, okay? So that's the answer for Fought Machine and extend a little bit more.  In terms of in-sourcing, you asked also about in-sourcing. We saw, say, a strong trend of in-sourcing last year. Yes, we mentioned that. But at this point of time, we are not seeing so much of a pressure of in-sourcing. There is in sourcing here and there, it's part of the business model, right, in many countries and some key clients. But we do not see at this point of time, a big threat on in-sourcing as we discussed it in the past.

And was the third question? Honestly, I did not understand it. Maybe you could repeat.

Yes, sure. It was on you talked neobanks projects, let's say, at the sideline for a couple of years after we saw a hike in interest rates. But there was the option to start some new projects this year. Did that happen? Or are you awaiting new projects?

Thank you very much to clarify. Yes, so the neobanking that we are calling that digital banks, okay, including neobanks. Our pipeline is strong, and we are now starting a new project with a complete new implementation of a neobank in APAC. So we are starting one now in this quarter. We have another one very strong with a high potential on the final stage of negotiation in another region. So this is an important area on our strategy, digital banking and neobanks.

The next question is from with Sven Sauer Kepler Cheuvreux.

My first would be on your 2029 EBIT target. If I insert the numbers for the guidance in front of the target, this would imply a 20% EBIT CAGR over '25, '29. And if I remember correctly, over the last years, the previous target was to grow the margin per year by 0.3% to 0.5% on the back of increasing the Smart Shore workforce. And then this didn't materialize in '23 and '24 due to other reasons. But now this new guidance implies a 0.5% margin increase every year, driven by AI projects where the commercialization is not really even clear yet. Nobody in the industry knows where AI is going to be in 2, 3 years. So what makes you so sure that you will reach this ambitious target?

Let me start with one piece and then Marco kicks in for the business side. The margin we achieved this year, the 7.7% if we take out the one-off Brazilian court case is roughly 1 point below where we have been, right? So first of all, we want to return to where we have been. We need to get the utilization up to the normal levels, which we probably will see in '26. That is our target. And then we want to see economies of scale kicking in. As you always said, we need a high single-digit volume growth on the revenue side to achieve those economies of scale, not to achieve the Smart shore, ideally, yes, too. But for the economies of scale, we need volume growth, and we have not seen the volume growth in the last 2 years.  It mostly happened via the acquisitions we have done. And on the Smart shore side, we need to now really push for that. We have acquired 2 companies, 23 in Germany, Targens, 24 in Colombia, Sophos, both in that moment in time, pure onshore companies. So we have pushed back our offshore ratio, sorry, we have increased our onshore ratio. And now without adding new markets, we will push for more Smart shore offshore business. So these are the main drivers for the margin improvement. The AI piece has a role, but it is not the driver for the next 5 years, probably the 5 years after where we really see the margins improve.

Let me start here. So first, in terms of Smart shore movement, as I mentioned, on the strategic initiative. So we are strongly focused to push the company in order to leverage over more high efficient and scalable delivery hubs on our global delivery platform. They are Colombia that we brought from the acquisition that is very modern, very reliable, and they are now, say, scaling up with several demands that we are bringing to them. The other one is India that I also mentioned in the call. So it's a new horizon for us, and we have very good demand for that, and we are pushing that. So we are moving and the company in order to have a much better ratio of offshore nearshore, Smart shore compared to on-site.  This will create a quite positive impact on our margins. It's not going to happen next quarter. It's not going to happen overnight, but it's something that we believe that is going to happen in a horizon of our 5-year plan, okay? That's number one. Number two, we are also committed with the KPI to improve the percentage of our high value-added services offerings. So offerings that we have that are not simply custom traditional development. So GFT has a big part of the business with customer development, and traditional software development. And we've been moving that journey.  Now we created a strategic initiative to accelerate that process to have to improve the revenue architecture and have more services related to ICVs. We mean Salesforce, we mean ServiceNow, all the hyperscales, the RSVs, so all the projects that we do with AWS, with Google, with Microsoft, and with the core banking, with Thought Machine, more digital banks, more core banking.  So moving the company towards a higher value-added service offering by design, we are going to have better profitability, better margins. So that's a second element of our strategy, a strategic initiative for that, that we believe that's going to move the needle in terms of margin in a horizon of 5 years.  You also asked and comments about AI. AI, I agree with you that there is a lot of buzz in the market regarding AI. I mentioned, that I call the AI gap because companies, talk, but they are struggling. It's not trivial to materialize. But that is our right to differentiate because I must say that we've been delivering very good results with AI. Right now, GFT. We got 23 clients that we are pushing massively GFTI Impact. With the GFT Impact, we are creating 50% to 90% of improvements on the software development life cycle. Those are not numbers that I'm simply bringing from the market. Those are real numbers from our clients.  This is generating a competitive advantage for GFT, and we won in the second half of last year, I mentioned EUR 7.6 million of new projects based on AI technology. If we do not have AI technology, someone else would have captured those opportunities. And this is strong. And I think that's an important element for us because we are talking to the market and the market is recognizing GFT as someone that can help the clients to bridge the gap of AI in terms of expectations to reality. And we've been having several good agendas in the market. And moving forward, I'm very confident because we know what we are doing with AI and generating results, okay, material results.

That was very helpful actually. I just have two very trivial follow-up questions. The first one is, am I mistaken? Or why are you not treating the provision release as an adjustment for EBIT? It may be the incremental change to 2025 would look a bit better. And the second very small question is this 2029 strategy, is this something that you developed internally? Or did you hire some external consultants for this?

I only start with the last one. I hope that you like it, right, with your question. But no, actually, we have developed. It did not come overnight the strategy. We've been working with the top leadership of GFT over the last 6 months. So since I started as the co-CEO on the 1st of July, our first action was thinking on the long-term strategy of the company once I assumed as the new CEO, and we started a strong process, right, to evaluate all the company, make the assessment and then design the 2b for ourselves, understand our capabilities. And it was a collective job from all the Boards of GFT, all the top management.  I think we did a pretty good job, right, Johan, including the key leaders, right, the country managers, and it's not came overnight. It was a result of really, say, 6 months, 7 months of work. And we are very proud of that and very confident with that, okay? So that's for the outside spending to get that. Exactly, for that.

And let me answer your question on the provision release and our definition of EBIT adjusted because you are spot on. It is something we are looking into. Usually, we don't change it during the year, and now we ended the year. But for the Q1 for '25, we rethink our adjusted definition and stuff like this one-off accrual from Brazil, but also restructuring costs are 2 elements we might adjust from '25 onwards and of course, give all backdated numbers to go along with it.  Please wait for the Q1 report. We're looking into that because we're doing ourselves a favor by being more accurate in that respect because all our peers are usually also adjusting for those 2 elements.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from Andreas Wolf with Warburg Research.

I have 2 quick follow-ups, if I may. So the first one is on the higher social security costs. Is it possible to pass those on? And if yes, I assume it's still a drag on the margin. Is this right? And the second is for Marco. So apart from AI are the organizational measures that you're implementing for the group? Have you implemented them already in a similar way in Brazil? I'm just trying to get a feeling of how bullish I might get going forward.

Let me start with the social security costs. Well, for sure, it is our aim to pass them on. But in both cases, Brazil and Spain, they have been extraordinarily high, and the adjustment of the research and development subsidies in the U.K., is the same. Therefore, yes, we will try, and we are working on that, but we are afraid we will not fully achieve it. And therefore, it is a burden on this year's guidance. So partially, yes, partially not.

Andreas, thanks for the question. Regarding my previous experience, right, implementing that in Brazil or in other markets. I must say that if you look at my profile, so I started GFT in 2011. So 14 years ago, and I must say that I created the Americas, right, for GFT. So we created a Brazil, Latin America, and North America, we moved it strongly and also integrated the whole thing in the Americas.  And yes, we implemented similar strategic initiatives there in that region in the whole Americas, it was not only in Brazil. And we implemented elements, for example, the efficient delivery hub delivery platform in that subregion. We also implemented business development that we created a regional business development in the region. So the answer is yes.  I implemented some of those ideas in the Americas region, not only in Brazil, so much bigger. And they've been, let's say, very successful, very successful to harmonize the company, regionalize the company more, and giving autonomy to the countries. And now I am, let's say, taking advantage of that template of that experience and integrating Europe and APAC, let's say, into the model. And it's been so far a great experience, and we are very confident that we're going to unleash lots of potential.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I'd like to turn the conference back over to the management for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you very much, operator. As it seems there are really no more questions at the moment. Thank you very much for your attendance. Thank you very much for your questions, very we discussion. Thank you very much, Marco and Jochen. In case you might have further questions later, do not hesitate to contact me or the IR team. So from our side, have a nice day, and goodbye. Bye.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.