Itera ASA (ITERA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for the second quarter. I will walk through the same agenda, as you know. We will start with the highlights for the second quarter and then go into the business review section. And then we have Bent Hammer, our Chief Financial Officer, that will walk through the financial review and also the outlook. And there is also a chat that you can also post questions. So we also have a Q&A session at the end where we look at the chat, and we can take and make the answer online or we take it later. So please also stay contact with us, contact either Bent or myself because we always would like to try to solve or answer the questions you have about the company. Okay. Let's start with highlights for the second quarter. In brief, we delivered 23% organic growth in this quarter and an EBIT operating margin of 8.2%. That's the financial figures. But if we look more specifically and start with the market, of course, for Itera's core services, which is actually about sustainable digital transformation, this is still a very attractive market for digital transformation and not at least in terms of, for example, the green shift and not at least also all the interest from Gen AI that we see in the market that also drives the interest for digital transformation. But also, we need to say that the macro environment with the increasing interest and high inflation is also softening in the market for IT spending. And it always is also very connected, what kind of industries we are talking about. For example, banking and finance is still going strong in the Nordics. I know that there are some kind of cases in U.S., but in the Nordics region where most of our services are located for the Nordic clients. Of course, we still see a quite strong market. But if you talk about other sector, of course, there are some kind of some sectors that are really stopping the investments in IT that we saw after the COVID. So there's a lot depending on what kind of market you discuss. If we look at the profitability in Itera for the second quarter, we had some lower utilization in the second quarter compared to the first quarter that have impact on the profitability. We also have some high OpEx and not at least also that we have this kind of cloud application services, which is our economic investment case for transforming Itera into more recurring revenue and managed services. I will come back to talk more about that specific topic. In general, as you know, we have an operation in Ukraine that is more running as usual. So we also have some interest for customers that we would like to invest and support Ukraine, so that's also good to see. The book-to-bill in this quarter was 0.6%, is a little lower than usually, but I'll always look at the 12 months because it has some kind of ratio between the sectors or the quarters. So in general, we have 1.1 for the last 12 months. If we look at the number of employees, we still are growing organically. We have 10 people, increased net employee increase in this quarter and also to 80 people that all represent 12% in the last 12 months. We have a very strong cash flow in this quarter, and it's also always looking at the 12 months rolling cash flow, showing now 80% improved. So we have NOK 104 million in the last 12 months. And we also paid out an ordinary dividend for 2022 of NOK 0.30 per share. And we also have the authorization, the Board of Directors had the authorization to pay a supplementary dividend later. So normal, we have 2 times similar year, we have a dividend payout for the shareholders. So that's, I will say, in brief the second quarter. If we look at the figures, and I always look because we have some kind of number of working days quite important for Itera and it always depends on when you have the Easter. So in the first quarter, it has a lot of number of working days, much less in the second quarter. So that is why I always look at the first half year, showing the 27% in organic growth and we also have had a 12% increase in number of FTEs. And as you see, in average, for the first half year, we had 11.3%. So if you add 27% and 11% is more or less about this kind of 40%. We were talking about where we should be as not only as a consultancy services, but it's also a target for the software companies. So we are more or less in the same range. And that is also some part of the strategic move of Itera that we should also have more industrialized or recurring revenue in our mix. So I think I leave the figures here, and you will have more details when Bent Hammer will deep dive into the financial section. Okay. Let's go into the business review. As you know, we are positioned as a company as a specialist in sustainable digital transformation. We have 13 offices to see, most of the customer are based in the Nordics but have quite global reach where today, more or less delivering services to about 20 countries around the world, and we are using 1 Itera, 1 culture, 1 company and 1 capability that we have called the digital factory at scale because it's extremely important that we're less dependent on people located for each client. We have people located close to the customer, but all the capabilities of Itera are available for all the customer and where they are located. So that's a part of the business model that we established and everything I talk about organic of Itera. If we look at the business model we have, we're talking about the inner circle, which is about the consultancy part of Itera. And everything in Itera is based on growth. So we're talking about the growth of the people because the most important thing that the people of Itera has a learning curve, they would like to grow. And when they grow, our customer grow and also the company grow. So that's the inner circle of Itera. In addition, we have what we call the industrialized and the outer circles in terms of creating more scalability in terms of package offerings and industrialized offerings. So that is also there where we can scale the company with less dependence on each person. We are talking about more recovery. We are talking more managed services as part of that. So we can be really doing more with less because that's a part of Itera. We have the consultancy part, but we are also more and more having more industrialized or I will call it subscription-based revenue or some kind of ISV because that's the combination that we have both because everything is a part, is some kind of core services that we should deliver to the customer. If you come back talk about the AI, is having high attention in the market from everyone, something is really happening. And I really will say that, yes, there's a lot of things happening. I try to explain here is actually, it's a new dimension. It's a platform shift, I will call it, consisting of 2 parts. One is actually the user interface where you can actually have your own language, you can ask the computer or the interface from speech or from the typing, whatever we would like, I need to know, I need to do, I need to meet, whatever. And behind that, there is some kind of reasoning engine that is working on top of all kind of systems that you have in your company or outside the company. So these components together, these dimensions are really making a shift in how we consume and utilize the data we have. It's always about accessing the data. And it has been quite challenging for a long time to get the data with the right quality to support the product or the user in front and we have been using AI for a long time if you're driving a car or you are using Netflix whatever, there is a lot of AI that you are exposed to. What is the new thing is this kind of imagining this is a remarkable technology is really applicable for also the people that are building the application, but also the people that are operating the technology and also not at least the user itself. So these kind of dimension is extremely important that we plug into the platform that we are already running on that extend the functionality and also the ambition of the solution we can deliver to meet the clients out in the market. So if you look at this in some kind of journey, we started with the cloud. That was a game change in the industry itself. You are starting to use cloud computing, and then we move to digital transformation. And I will say AI is the next step. It's a part of this transformation where we are using algorithms and machine learning and you know the computing power to make sure that you have this kind of recent engine where you really can understand the data and how you can apply this kind of technology more efficient and more automatic than in the past. So this is actually also how Itera has moved the company and also establish what we have called the digital factory at scale because we have seen this kind of trend, so this is not new for Itera. It's something that we have been looking for, and it's more and more accessible for the consultants at Itera. So if you start looking at the most successful companies around the world, what are the key criteria for their success. One is actually is a very leader-led transformation, the leaders, the business, the top managements are really involved to look at how they can utilize this kind of technology. They also have very focused on utilizing data and they also have a very strong willingness to change. These are some kind of criteria where you can look at the best players. If I look at our opportunity, it's about digital technology drives the market cap or the growth for the company even more than the people and machinery, right? That is something that has been a new change. If you look at the more successful companies, they are really adopting the technology. They're really maximizing the data and they are really willingness to change the business itself. And if you look at the company in terms of how many companies are really utilizing the data, is only 20%, right? And also, if you look at IT spending, it's only 10% is that spending from the cloud. So it's still early stage. What I will say, that's also a big opportunity. It's early, but also as you see the driver for AI that shows the world what you can achieve even some I'm talking about you might be some threat for the businesses or the society. But I don't think it's a threat at all. You can really solve a lot of the problems in the energy sector or in the health care sector or whatever with this kind of technology. It's really important to have this technology to make a better world for everyone. And that's why it goes back to, yes, you need to have the cloud transformation in all way. You need to have the data, and then you can utilize the technology. So this kind of AI is actually putting a lot of push on the organization that they need to change faster because now the technology already seen that there has been some kind of very interesting for a lot of companies. And for Itera that has been part of the bet we have taken as a company. We existed our data center for a year or whatever. And we started to build this cloud center excellence. It's called now Cloud Community of Excellence, made a lot of investments in that because -- and also the digital factory at scale because that's the strategic direction of Itera that we also need to do more with less on -- it's not only about supplying people or delivering people to the customer because there's a lot of digital capabilities as a part of the toolbox you bring in when we talk with the customer because what is important for the customer is speed and throughput. So we, with these kind of capabilities, believe we can deliver more than 20% to 30% faster and also more throughput than this kind of traditional staff augmentation model, where you only deliver the people. So this is what I call the outer circle of the business where we are taking these bets, we are building these capabilities, and we have a differentiator with the customer, delivering more value, delivering at scale and at speed than you can do with this kind of classical stuff augmentation is only about the people. And also, if you look at the AI in Itera, we are really building a global organization for this. So this is what we call a competence center or a practice at Itera, where we are having everybody in Itera. I'm showing you only the data part of it. So we have everything in terms of the data strategy, data platform, whatever. So that's one part of it. If I can switch to the user design is looking at how they can use this kind of technology from a user designer perspective or I can use it from -- we can use the same technology or the Gen AI also in terms of how we automate more of the operating cloud operation at Itera. So it's something that we are really building and taking the position and not at least also make sure that the data management of the customer is actually taken care of in a very mature way. Just to show you one example. This is from the configuration of Norwegian Enterprise NHO, that we have a project quite recently, where we had some -- ask the customer about some hypothesis they had about their potential use of Gen AI like to ChatGPT as part of it. So we analyzed what are the best use cases that we can start and we managed to do this in 2 directions in order to make sure that the use cases that we discussed also had a value immediately, using get access to the data and also make sure that this interface and also the recent engine is running on top of the data they had. So it was during this quite maybe 6 weeks, we managed to deliver 3 MVP for this kind of organization. And this pattern is really replicable for -- if you're talking with the lawyers or we are talking with the investors, whatever, you always have a lot of data that you need to get access to and then make sure that we have control of the data, so you can start this recent engine to get more and more value of the data you have and combine and train the models with more and more data you have access to. And then you have another response when you're asking for something from your system. So this was a very good example of where we are using Gen AI and also our own. We also have Itera at ChatGPT, as you know. So that is also part of Itera's toolbox that we bring into such a customer. I also just want to mention this is also a case I mentioned several times and doing this because you can see also from the existing clients that are using already our digital factory at scale fully. So in this case, for the directory of direct rate of integration and diversity of Norway, which are implementing integration policies for refugees that are coming to Norway. So we're looking at how could we actually map the resettle relevant information for refugees coming to Norway make the best fit for their resettlement in Norway. So that's also, again, using the customer experience, people, our service designer looking at the process, using their factory itself, so we can deliver faster, more value and more relevant for these kind of refugees that are coming to Norway. Also during my presentation after the invasion in Ukraine, I have already made some kind of update. And what I will say during this quarter, just to make sure that also, we know that despite of the strategy that we see and read in the newspaper also starting actually 12 months ago, a rebuilding a strategy or framework for Ukraine. So in June, I was attending Ukraine recovery conference in London, where the government and private sector from about 29 countries around the world we're looking at the plans for Ukraine's recovery after the war, but also what we can do as long as the war continues, right? So what is happening here is actually that they are looking at the new and modern and clean Ukraine as part of EU. We have heard about Ukraine will become a member who already have a candidate status of EU to become a member. We also heard that it will also be a part of NATO after the war. So that is enormous change in this country. And I think what was said in this conference, the world is really united from a governance perspective, but also the private sector because the private sector will be the key player to invest in the country when the war is over. So this kind of planning has already started and Itera has part to one of the selected companies from Norway that was attending this together with about 500 older companies around the world to look at what is happening, but also what are the plans and how we can contribute from a private sector. And just want to talk about the energy because that's a part of one of Itera's key capabilities or key sector. What they are saying in this conference and what I think is really remarkable because Ukraine when -- we are talking about Ukraine in 2050. So that's a long-term vision. But the plan is to make Ukraine as the green energy and digital hub for Europe. The Ukraine will be the European flagship in the green energy transition. And we're talking about the green energy, all over the place, renewables. And you see that the installed capacities for renewables, mostly solar and wind, but also storage. They have green hydrogen. They also have some nuclear, but not that much. So the main focus is actually to establish a lot of wind farms and solar farms. So we totally -- and also green hydrogen that is also part of the energy mix. So we talked about 360 gigawatt which is about 40% will be utilized in Europe. And we're not also talking about the energy, but we're also talking about the supply chain. So they have ambition within wind and solar to produce 90% of the equipment in Ukraine. And the last but not least, also, if you look at the digitization part, you have seen how they are utilizing digital technology in the world, whatever. They are also digitizing the society. And we might heard about Estonia as a world leader in the digitization of the public sector. And Estonia has been working with Ukraine since 2019. And Estonia is saying that Ukraine is at the same level. And in 2025, we'll be even more professional in digitizing the society. So they have a large pool of talents and they also believe that in 2026, they will be the large digital pool in Europe because today, it's actually Poland, but they believe that in 2026, something like that, they really have a larger pool of capacity in digitalization than Poland. So this is just to show you some of the potential. We have been in Ukraine for 15 years, and we are really also looking for this great opportunity when the war is finished in some way or the other. Yes. And we also have some kind of local conference in Norway, so the politician and the private sector and meeting, I have a lot of discussions. So this is more in the Norwegian perspective. But of course, we brought these 2 topics. We are talking about today about the AI transformation and also this kind of how do we mobilize the private sector, not at least the energy sector in Norway, in the Nordics because we will also, as a region also have a lot of competencies from the renewables energy sector. So this is quite important also to drive this kind of social responsibility I will say, we all are no more and more about the private sector because it's a private sector that need to rebuild Ukraine after the war. So that's also, of course, a big, big investment opportunity as a market when the work is finished, but we also need to do something in between as long as the worries continue. There's a lot of services we can provide. What Itera has done in terms of the IT, and we really would like to involve even more customers or businesses that can see the opportunity by utilizing people from Ukraine. They really appreciate the existing customer we have today in Itera using our great employees in U.K. We also have, during this quarter, moved into a new location. So I'm actually having my presentation in our new facilities in the Central Oslo. So I'm happy to invite you if you are coming by, you just make a phone call to Bent or myself, and we will really like to show you our facilities very established for hybrid work space, attractive for our talents, available for our customers and also looking at the sustainability. We are also taking responsibilities, as you see, 97% of all the furniture that we had on the previous head office is actually reused in this new building. So really important for Itera for this circle economy as a part of the culture and the part of the drive for sustainability. We are also a good example by ourselves. So please welcome, and we will show you the new office. And I also just want to mention, we also have 2 new board members, Helge Baastad has actually been the CEO of one of the most successful insurance company in the Nordics, Gjensidige, but he also has a very strong skills in the banking and insurance, but he is also coming from the brand building industries like Orkla or Lilleborg, whatever. So he also has a lot of industry competence and interesting competencies from his experience as a very successful manager or executive in the market. And the second one is actually Ashild Hanne Larsen. She's coming from the energy sector. She has been in many different positions in Equinor, the flagship of the energy of Norway, and she is also recognized key speaker and a leader quite recently when she won the award as the European Digital Leader. In 2023, [indiscernible] 2023, whatever. So if you go to her CV or LinkedIn profile, she has a very impressive background, very important for energy, as we talked about, is extremely important for Itera. In addition to the all the members that we have in Itera and our employees, you can go to our website, and we will look more about the Board of Directors. What I think just to mention for you guys, the Board of Director of Itera is also very modern, I will say. We are talking about business development. So with the skills we also have in Itera, a lot of the discussion we had at the Board level is also about how to enter new markets, enter new customer, whatever. That's extremely important, so for the culture and how we develop the company as an organic company in this sector. If I look at the order intake, as I mentioned quite early in the presentation, we had 0.6 average 12 months 1.1. Some new customers and some existing ones. Just to comment, I see that the pipe of new customer is really increasing. So we have more dialogue with new customers and I really hope that some of these dialogues will start to materialize into projects and that is what we have seen historically from Itera. When you start to engage with the customer, the customer continues with Itera for 5 plus 10, some customers have been there for 20 years. So this is how we are building this kind of very customer-centric model for onboarding more and more customer to Itera. If I look at the existing customer for this quarter, it was about 23%. It was accounted and these are the customer we had -- the new customer is the customer that we achieved during the last 12 months. So most of the customer is some kind of continuation and we also would like to have more and more share coming from new customers that we have achieved or started work for the last 12 months. And in general, we have quite good visibility of the customer because we are not only doing this kind of fancy stuff. We are doing this core part of the business processes. So that is also creating some robustness in the revenue model despite that the macro environment and maybe the investment can soft a little. So that's more like in the natural cycles. But for as long as you also as a part of the core business, you always have more robustness in your business model when there are changes in the market. So I think I'm very happy with the visibility that we have because of the customer mix in Itera. And also, as we talked about, a number of employees, it was 741 is up by 80. And also I just want to mention that about 60% of the new people coming to Itera has been in the Nordics because we have doing this kind of shift from Ukraine to Central Eastern Europe. So while that transformation has been happening established 3 offices, we have also started to onboard more people in the Nordic region. So that's good. But I think we will come back now is about 50%, 53% of what we call the national share, the share of Itera located in Central and Eastern Europe. And going further, I think there will be, as we have planned, we might hire 1 person in the Nordic and maybe 3 person in the Central and Eastern Europe setup, I will say, near ratio will, in that case, also maybe about 70% in a more long-term perspective. So I think that was everything I will say in the business review section. So then I hand over to Bent, so going through the financial part.

Thank you, and good morning to everybody. As Arne mentioned, we have had 23% growth in this quarter and 27% for the first half year and this marks actually our sixth consecutive quarter of more than 20% growth. And we've also had an average growth of more than 20% over the last 3 years or so. So we're on a very good growth trajectory. This quarter, our growth was somewhat fueled by the depreciation of the Norwegian kroner against some of the other currencies that we trade in, like euro, USD and Danish kroner predominantly. So our underlying growth was a bit weaker than we had anticipated due to some utilization softness that we saw towards the end of the quarter. This foreign exchange effect also impacts our cost base, of course. So we see that our personnel expenses are up by 29% in the quarter, which is partly explained by this. And moreover, we have, of course, seen a very high level of inflation rates in Europe over the last 12 to 18 months. And this has also been triggering some higher salary adjustments than we have previously been used to. And in particular, this has been very high in the Central and Eastern Europe countries where we've experienced double-digit growth in the inflation rates lately. Luckily coming down now, so hopefully, we've seen the worst of it. In terms of other operating expenses, we also have a significant increase there. Part of this is sort of a post-COVID return to normal activities and also some, I would say, pent-up demand for certain activities to have more on-site training and meet colleagues to develop a neutral relationships. So in Q2, in particular, we have had several high item events that have added to the cost. And also, as Arne mentioned, we relocated to a new headquarters in Oslo this summer so that there are some one-off effects on the OpEx side on that as well. So the resulting EBITDA was NOK 26.4 million versus NOK 28.8 million of last year and NOK 67.2 million for first half, which is about NOK 5 million higher than last year and EBIT, NOK 18.4 million versus NOK 21.5 million. But on the first half as a whole, we have NOK 51.6 million in EBIT versus NOK 47.6 million. So overall, a pretty strong first half, I would say. But a bit lower on the margins than we anticipated and had ambitions for. Our cash flow from operations, though, were very, very strong at NOK 33 million in the quarter in isolation, but also almost NOK 41 million for the first half year compared to NOK 12.6 million of last year. So that gives us an ending cash balance of NOK 52 million at 30 June. Head count grew by 80 people year-over-year and 10% sequentially from last quarter, and we will continue to see growth in the number of employees in Q3 as we, among other things, have a gratuity intake in Norway where we add to our organization with the latest learning from the universities. And we know from, for example, this summer student project that we ran this summer that they have really, really relevant skills going into this workplace. They are of course, very much up-to-date on what's happening on AI, among other things. So we look forward to having them on board. They just started this week or last week. So that's exciting. So just a brief look at the sequential development, Obviously, we have a strong impact from the number of working days, not only the calendar days as such, but also in terms of when people take vacations. Q2 had more or less the same number of working days as Q2 of last year. And we've now measured it as the weighted average across our locations to get a more precise view on this. But even a 0.1 workday means maybe NOK 0.5 million in terms of revenue and any EBIT effect because it flows straight through. Second quarter, we had, of course, Easter holidays in our markets where people would take some vacations related to that. And also in May, there are typically a lot of holidays in between. So people also take some days off in connection with that. Still, our trend, as I mentioned, we've had 6 quarters consecutively with growth of more than 20% and 24% over the last couple of years, and we've averaged an EBIT margin of 10.8%, which is quite strong. If I bridge the Q2 margin of last year to this one, we can see that we lost [3.5] points this year. And we have singled out sort of 3 different unusual items, if you like, to give you a better understanding of the margin development. So one is the support we're giving to our Ukrainian colleagues and organization. So most of this relates to some voluntary salaries that we give to employees of ours that have been drafted into the military service. But we also have some costs related to safeguard our operations in terms of connectivity and power supply, should there be any outages on the regular supply. In Sweden, we started up in Q4 of last year, so that's going to be building up gradually. We won't have a large investment there in terms of building a sizable organization, but we will have some lead people who will then utilize the global delivery model that we have. And lastly, the investment into cloud and application services that Arne also was discussing. Year-over-year, this had a positive contribution now in Q2 in terms of the margin, but it's still a significant investment case until we have reached a critical business volume to support this rig of competence pools that we need to have in place in order to service these type of customers and large customers as such as well. So that is the residual regular business, as we have on the left side there, had a decrease of 3.1 points. So that's partially then due to lower utilization and partially due to the increase in personnel and other operating costs, of which some can be regarded as more or less one-off. I mentioned that I was also very pleased with our cash flow performance. If you look at the graph on the right side, we have generated NOK 104 million out of our operating activities compared to NOK 58 million in the previous 12-month period and NOK 76 million the year before that. So that's a very strong conversion of our EBITDA to cash of 91% over the last 12 months. Investments have been more or less the same as the year before of less than the NOK 4 million per quarter. And we have some investments, of course, related to our facilities now, but no huge investments that are needed to support our business. On the financing side, it's predominantly the distribution of dividends to our shareholders. So that also like almost NOK 25 million this year compared to NOK 16 million of last year. So as we end-up with NOK 52 million in cash balance compared to NOK 27 million of last year, so that's a good starting point come second half of 2023. And as you know, we're not a company that really utilizes a lot of liquidity. So we aim to redistribute all the surplus liquidity to our shareholders as soon as possible, so to speak. That's why we've had a tradition over the last several years to do the dividend payments twice a year. So as Arne mentioned, we have also this year have been granted an authorization from the general assembly to distribute a further dividend payment later this year. So we'll get back to that, of course, most likely in connection with the third quarter results. Our share price has had a favorable development over the last 12 months. So if you include the dividend payments as well, we have returned 22% to our shareholders in terms of share appreciation and dividends. We currently hold about 950,000 owned shares, so now valued at around NOK 14 million, which is sitting as a negative element in our equity in the balance sheet that I will show you in a second. Again, we aim to have consistent tight distribution of earnings and on the retain whatever we need to support the low extra working capital requirements that we have from growing the business. So on the financial position, we have had a rather large increase in the total balance this quarter of NOK 88 million, up to NOK 318 million in total. About half of that is due to the capitalization of this new office lease, which is a 7-year lease. So that adds NOK 42 million on the balance sheet, on both sides, I should say, so both the right-of-use assets on the one side and the future lease payments on the liability side. We have a healthy equity ratio of 24% at June 30 and 6% higher if you don't include this right-of-use assets. Yes. So that's pretty much what I was going to say about the Q2 and half year results. Just a quick look at our outlook. We don't guide specifically, as you may know, on our financial performance. And this outlook is pretty much the same as we presented a quarter ago, although perhaps the market outlook as such with some softening of demand has gone from some signals to be a bit more materialized. So we saw that at the end of our own quarter in Q2, and we can see it in the beginning of this quarter that there is some sluggishness in the sales cycles taking a bit longer. But we do have a strong belief that is the need to transform with digital means, we'll just continue in high tempo because it's a tool to realize savings and also to open-up new business opportunities. So it's not really an option for businesses to not invest in this area of digitalization. And for most industries, they're just in the initial phases of this transformation. So there's very much to do in terms of transforming from legacy systems to the cloud and utilizing all the functionality that comes with that, including all these new AI stuff, which would open-up a lot of more transformations. So that will apply to all parts of the business. Personally, I'm looking forward to applying elements of this into my own finance organization as well. So exciting times ahead and Itera is very well positioned to help our customers and indeed our internal operations by utilizing these new tools. So I'm not sure if there are any questions raised online that we could.

Actually 4 questions. They are all from Jack White. First, your Top 10 customers account for about half of your revenue. Can you please give some details on average? How long have you had these large customer relationships for? And what is the churn rate?

Yes, I can talk about that. All these 10 customer, I will say maybe 80% are more than 5 years, some 10 years plus. So we have some new customer that has become a Top 10 within yes, 18 to 20 months, whatever. So that's some pattern that you see that these Top 20 customers really have a very long visibility and we are not even replaced by other vendors. We had one situation maybe for thinking about the insurance company for 4, 5, 6 years ago, something like that, which was one of our larger customers where we were placed by a large vendor, a global vendor. And this reduction, we had maybe 50 people working for that client. And during 18 months, we were replaced by another one, but that didn't have a big impact on the revenue with Itera. So this kind of -- if we lose a customer because there's a big bid, it takes a lot of time to downscale, but we also have other opportunities to upscale, right? So for me, this kind of top 10, top 20, top 30 is quite some kind of robustness of the business model itself. But what we are also pushing in order to continue this growth, talking about 20%, 30%, we need to also have more customers. So for me, it's very good to see amongst the top 10, we have 2 of them coming from the last maybe 18 to 24 months, whatever. So I think we have the robustness. We have planned for that some of the top might be less, but we also plan for some newcomers that should be a part of our top 10, but also top 20 and top 30 of Itera.

I would say we occasionally get new customers that provide, say, NOK 20 million or so in a first year revenue because it's a tender process and there's a defined projects that we ramp-up. But typically, we enter with small scale and then build over years to have -- and then we have very solid relationship and the customers and our partnership will grow in strength over-time. And as Arne mentioned, whenever they do vendor shift, we're not easily replaceable. So it takes a long time to off-board us, and then we have a time to grow on other customers in the same time. So it's quite visible in that sense. And then by nature, customer demand on any given customer will fluctuate a bit over-time.

It seems like there is still spare capacity in the Central European offices. What are the main barriers stopping you to getting to your annual growth rate target of 200 to 350 FTEs?

Yes. I will say today, it's more a demand side than the supply side. The supply we have very good control. We have HR or the routines building new offices. So it's more driven by demand. So that's why I'm talking about some of the larger customers are -- we are growing in the larger customer maybe 20%, something like that, but we're also looking for new customers to create this kind of demand. So what we have done is actually because we have seen some softening in the market. So we have stopped -- we don't onboard people just to put into our available pool of resource talent. We were looking at what are the demand we see in the market. So that we have been a little more -- the softening of market has also been that we also -- we have a push-on on the supply because we are awaiting the demand side. But what I will say is actually, if we look at the size of Itera's customer, some of these customers, if you onboard 1 or 2 or more international customer, we can really grow a lot. Having a customer for Itera with 100 FTEs is not a problem, it could be 150 FTEs also. So you get some of these new customers, international customer, 150, 200 is not a big problem for Itera to scale- up. And then if you get on more and more of these international customers, you can really grow like we talked about this 200 and 350 FTEs annually, right? But for the time being, we are seeing a little softening of the demand side. That's why we are not pushing that hard on the growth of the employees actually [indiscernible].

Could you talk more about the SaaS solutions from Cicero Consulting and Compendia. How big a part of the business is this? And do you see it becoming a bigger part of the business?

Yes. In terms of the Cicero to SaaS solution, that is a solution that we are not actively investing in at the moment or we have no intention to actively pursue that because it's based on some legacy, yes, middleware, I would say that we won't pursue in the future. It constitutes NOK 20 million or something of our revenue today, I think. In terms of Compendia, that's a different story. That's something that we will continue to drive growth in. I think it's run in terms of the software solution itself. It's probably NOK 40 million annually. And then you have some surrounding services to it as well.

Just want to add that both Cicero and Compendia as part of Itera is also contributing to Itera's growth, right? So they're not leaving in some kind of isolation. Cicero is actually having the deep knowledge about the banking insurance, that also we bring into Sweden and Denmark. So these are the R&D or the analysis part of Itera to really understand the needs of the customer in sector. So now they have some kind of front-runners of Itera's growth in energy, in the banking and insurance and also the same with Compendia, we also see that the digitalization is much wider than the focus of Compendia. So that is also part of the strategy we're looking at, how could we actually get more value from Itera into Compendia and from Compendia into Itera. And a lot of the -- also the services that this technology that Compendia is using is actually from Itera, so they are actually using people from other locations for Itera. So the growth path of Compendia is not also limited of how many people we are in Compendia as such.

Last question from Jack White hear. Do you foresee Itera starting to generate revenue from Eastern Europe in the near future? Or is the focus still on the Nordics?

We will be a part of the large market in Ukraine after the war. So today, we haven't done any kind of domestic stuff in Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine. That's a part of the policy, and we have also announced to all of you that we are always only exporting services. We are looking at domestic opportunities. So we started the process to look at these kind of domestic opportunities as part of the rebuilding of Ukraine, where Ukraine will be part of EU, part of NATO. So that's a different business agenda. So that's a part of the discussion we have with the Board as such today to look at when should we enter this domestic market, it's a large market in Ukraine. I will say the most -- our focus is actually to work with international players that go into Ukraine, right? So that is what is our ordinary business model, but we also started to look at if we should go into the more domestic business, how do we protect the investments in terms of corruption that we know has been in the market or are in the market. So that is something that we have started to investigate and do it very smart, very case by case and look our framework itself how we really take care of the interest of the governance model that we have established in Itera.

And that was all the questions, and we thank you, Jack White, for great questions.

Yes. Okay. Brilliant. So if anybody has questions to us, then feel free to reach out, probably contact me first, and I'll bring Arne along if needed. But we're very happy to have one-on-one either physically or digital. And if not, we'll see you back on October 27, I hope, for our Q3 presentation. Thanks for coming.

Yes. Bye-bye. Thank you.