Netcompany Group A/S (NETC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Netcompany Capital Markets Day 2020. And I'm certainly glad that so many of you have chosen to sit behind the screens and follow this extremely interesting and fascinating agenda about Netcompany and our road forward during the next years. Unfortunately, we cannot meet up physically. It's a bit of a lonely experience being here. But hopefully, everything works. Technically, you should be able to follow the presentations here. And at the same time also post questions. There should be a box where you can post questions after each attendee, and then we'll be able to and answer the best we can. First of all, let's jump into the presentators today. We have all major leaders from Netcompany from all the business models, business departments and also countries present today. So we will be joined by Claus Jørgensen, Gustaf Löfberg, Kim Clausen, Simon from the U.K.; Geir from Norway, Sander from the Netherlands, and of course, also by our CFO, Thomas Johansen. And looking into the agenda itself, it's going to be introduced by me, status on the Netcompany strategy and where we are and follow-up closely by Claus Jørgensen, our COO, going through our business model. Then we will have an update of the Danish market and then -- done by Gustaf Löfberg, our CEO in Denmark. And then we will talk about the public sector across the group, which Kim is going to head. We will continue updating on each and single market, on the U.K. market, Norwegian market and Dutch market by the CEOs of each country. And then we will also have some really interesting presentations from our customers and partners, Copenhagen airport and ATP. So it's going to be a busy day, a lot of hours behind the screen, but I can assure you that this is going to be interesting, and hopefully, you'll get a lot more information about how we look at our business. Finally, we will end up with an update on financials, which will be around 4 o'clock this afternoon. And jumping into status on Netcompany and the strategy itself. As you know, my name is André Rogaczewski. I'm the CEO of Netcompany, and I will spend the next 14 minutes going through the basics, where we are and open up for some questions after that. So looking into the company as it is right now. We have 10 offices with -- we are actually 3,000 employees in 6 countries. And of those, 4 are markets where we sell our services and 2 of the countries, that is Poland and Vietnam, serving us as countries, where we have a lot of great engineers working on projects and building systems for us together with the projects in the 4 markets. We've grown more than 20% in Q3 when it comes to FTEs. And it is a growth company, as you know. And growth has been a predominant thing in the company since its birth 21 years ago. Jumping into how the company is growing and what our strategy is in regards to that. Since the listing 2.5 years ago, we have had 2 major pillars in our growth. One is to grow organically in Denmark, our original country, where we are having a stronger and stronger position. And further on develop into similar countries that is -- that has been U.K., Norway and the Netherlands, and we're also looking into countries like Sweden and Finland. And why Sweden and Finland would you think, what is the logic behind going into countries like these? Well, basically, Netcompany is looking into countries where you find a mature IT structure, a lot of legacy systems, a public digitization strategy and a place where we can come in and disrupt the existing legacy vendors. We're looking for countries like that. And definitely, Sweden and Finland are on that list and countries that we are primarily interested in. That does not rule out other choices. However, these are 2 countries we are looking extremely interested in. Further on, we are -- when we expand into new territories, we can do that in several ways. The one we've been using the most and mostly described is, of course, acquiring a company that has a cultural fit and has strong IT competencies. What we're looking for is the combination of great engineers, technical skills and a lot of innovation and a strategic mindset to use technology as a driver for changing society. And then we will come in with our machine and our methodology, and I will talk more about that, and change that footprint in that country and make that particular company become a part of the Netcompany family, operating as Netcompany. That has been the approach until now and is still very much the approach. We are using that a lot, we call it, placing a footprint. But we also have some tactical flexibility in order to do other things. We can start-up greenfield if we have customers supporting that. Or we can even, in one country, after having made one acquisition, we can also do bolt-on acquisitions, if necessary. We've actually done -- historically, we've done a bolt-on acquisition in Denmark 10 years ago where we bought ourselves into a software suite and approximately 40, 50 people at that time, where we encompassed a software suite paying out benefits for unemployed people. And that was just one example of a bolt-on acquisition. But the major strategy has been, up till now, going into countries by finding companies smaller size, strong IT competencies and as good as a cultural fit as possible and changing them to become Netcompany, which takes some time from country to country. Going into the market itself, we have -- in Netcompany, as you know, the IT market is a large market. And looking at it, there's a lot of things that we do not do. The total IT service market in our countries is around DKK 480 billion per annum. The addressable market is where we look at applications. Now we're talking the innovative layer, the differentiating layer and the system of records in Gartner's pace layering model. This is where we are working closely with municipalities, governments and private companies. And looking into that very core market of that is actually the large companies and more complex projects. So narrowing it down to what we are actually very best at, addressing larger companies, midsized companies with applications. The core market itself in our 4 countries is around DKK 190 billion. So it's a big market, and there's a lot of opportunities there. Looking into the different -- the 4 markets, the 4 countries that we're addressing at the moment, I think the obvious question here is, is there enough room, ample of room to grow in Denmark because looking at the other countries here on this slide, you see that Netcompany is still a very small player when it comes to market share in the other 3 countries, Norway, U.K. and the Netherlands. In Denmark, we comprise 10% of the market. And the market is growing by 2%, 3%. We do believe that, that market share is still too little. We can definitely grow the business much more, at least for the next 2 or 3 years in the Danish market. We see competitors who have higher market share, and we also see us taking market. So altogether, the market is leaving us ample of room to grow, both in Denmark and 3 other countries. And the way we do it, the footprint approach is actually threefold. First of all, it's very important to think is, as we are actually diluting the company's that we enter, we hire a lot of young outstanding talented people, and we bring them into our career development model. And very fast, as we've seen in the countries we went into, we have diluted the different offices and the representations there with new outstanding talent; introducing our academy, which is something that we are extremely proud of and that we are investing heavily into; and bringing in the culture that way in an organic way. We also bring in our differentiated management model and integrated sales approach. That's the second pillar in going in, where we deliberately exploit the knowledge we have around particular solutions across borders, and where we come in with our very differentiated sales approach where salespeople are IT people. So we have IT people doing the sales and we have IT people doing the delivery. And what you see is what you get. It's the same type of people who are introducing what Netcompany can offer. And these are the same people delivering the solutions later. And that just gives us a great opportunity to deliver quality and stay with customers for a long time so that customers actually reoccur every year and keeps on working together with us. And finally, but not less importantly, the third pillar in going in and putting in that footprint -- solid footprint in the country is very, very important that customers talk to customers. And that we use the same methodology and toolkit across countries, so we have the flexibility to deliver across countries and deliver solutions that are similar across countries, having customers even cooperating across countries. That is extremely important for us, and we work as one company and one group. So when we go in and create a footprint and make that a stronghold over years, these are the 3 pillars that we use, and that's the methodology we use and it's always the same. And looking into the different countries, starting up with Norway, how are we doing? Well, Norway has been the longest footprint now becoming a stronghold in our company. And we're definitely changing things in Norway now going from smaller projects to larger multiyear contracts in both the private and public sector. And coming in, acquiring a company at the time with approximately 100-plus employees. The market presence was not high in Norway. Now a lot of people know about Netcompany, and we are on that list of larger IT companies delivering services to the Norwegian market. We still need some input from Denmark to ensure quality and to deliver some of the larger projects. We are starting on delivering some major projects in Norwegian market, and we will help the Norwegians by putting in Danish resources, management resources and experience with senior resources in order to deliver high quality. We have hired a substantial number of people in the Norwegian market. We still need to add managers and resources with underwriting skills, but things are moving ahead. And the Norwegian office has also been diluted in a sense that many people in Norway nowadays are born and bred in Netcompany. Execution-wise, well, we are using all the technologies that we have in place, the toolkit, the methodology, I just said before. But we still need to run some of the projects we've won recently as well in order to conclude on a Norwegian business. We will see improvement in the Norwegian business with all these things being started and running. We will see improvement in the performance from 2021 and forwards. And going into the U.K. U.K. has been a larger acquisition at the time. And as most of you know, we also had a lot of contractors in the U.K. and smaller projects to start with. Having been hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis, the U.K. market has been suffering, especially smaller private customers are shocked by the crisis. And in some sense, we have also seen some people being sent home directly from projects. So we have been hit in the U.K. by the COVID-19 crisis. However, we have reduced the use of contractors. We've done that over the years. And we have changed the structure and composition of the U.K. office. We have strengthened with much more help on the principal and manager level from Denmark. And we are slowly improving our capability in both selling the right things but also delivering. It's a long haul, but it's -- we're doing all the right things. And the potential in the U.K. market is immense. We have a great potential there. And looking into building up the pipeline for the U.K. market, I am very positive and optimistic. We have -- we are addressing the right things. We're doing it with the right people, some of them coming from Denmark. It is a longer haul. However, we are on the right course. And U.K. will still be dependent on support from Denmark on delivery of projects some years to go. And the integration is larger and more complex than it was the case in Norway. So to some extent, and also because of the COVID-19 crisis, the exchange of contractors into firms, we see 2020, to some extent, as the last year. However, the course is set, and it looks promising when it looks -- when we're looking at the pipeline, the projects that we are winning at the moment and also the composition of resources and how they work together. Going into Netherlands. That's a recent acquisition, recent footprint. It's a much smaller company, doing primarily public sector projects. We've been very successful in integrating that into Netcompany. Things are going a bit faster than we're supposed to, which has been a positive surprise. We've strengthened the principal and manager level there. And the academy is already in place, and we are hiring a lot of new talented Dutch people. We still have to work on winning larger projects. We are -- that is happening concurrently. We have the projects that were there when we acquired the company, has been put into a state now where they're delivering the same type of results as we see in Denmark, And going forward now, I think we can say that 2021 and 2022, we will see the Netherlands moving towards better and better capabilities. And we believe that in 2022 or before, we'll be able to reach targeted financial metrics in the Netherlands. And then 2 possible new markets. Sweden, as we talked about before, Sweden is our neighboring country. We have 100-plus Swedish people working in Denmark. We know the Swedish market very well. We already have some Swedish customers. There are possibilities in Sweden to go in also on a greenfield basis. But that requires, I have to stress, that we have more volume and more Swedish customers coming in. If that happens, we could think of going into Sweden organically and establish a greenfield office in Stockholm in 2021. That is an obvious way to go in instead of acquiring a company. But again, that will mean that we have more Swedish customers that we are addressing with our -- some of our platforms and solutions, and I will come into that. Going into Norway -- no sorry, Sweden, the market is interesting, very similar to the Danish market, structure of society, the welfare society, the government, but also private companies are very similar to Danish neighboring countries, same culture. So it is obvious that we should look into this market. Finland, a very interesting market as well. A different language, a bit of a different culture. However, very, very, very well-developed when it comes to technology. Mature country. Definitely also interesting for us as a Nordic country and not too far away. We don't know for sure, but I think expansion into the Finnish market would probably buy an acquisition of a smaller company. And we're, of course, looking very interested into the Finnish market as well. Looking at the size of the Finnish market, it's a bit smaller than the Danish market when it comes to the core addressable part. However, very, very interesting and finding the right partner there to acquire and go in is also of interest. So those 2 markets are on our radar. And having that said, I'll just touch briefly upon what we've called the platform approach. It's a new trend. We can actually read -- it's something you can read about when you consult the big Gartners or Forrester or whatever. There's a new tech trend happening very much so. And I think we've seen it for quite a few years. The composable enterprise, where instead of buying huge monolithic software products or building something entirely from scratch customer build, you have a composable enterprise and a great amount of components that you combine into solutions. And these solutions will change over time. The agility is extremely important for customers, especially in these times. But at all times, it's just a differentiator nowadays. So IT is not something that you have in the corner, some specific department. IT is your differentiating business. And hence, you need an IT stack and composable components that you can combine and create new solutions faster. And those solutions will live continuously and change according to your business demands. We have embraced this very early on. For the last 4 or 5 years, we have just enhanced our library of components, and we are using it as reusable solutions but also as absolutely reusable components that we can come in and provide the customers with -- from the very start of any project or any engagement. And just showing you the platform approach, as we call it here, we go in and we create an organization within the customer, public or private, where this organization is actually conducting both the business and the technical platform and running that according to the business needs. Of course, we have to find a technical platform to do this on. And we have various components that we install at our customer sites. And you also need an approach that is much more agile than we've seen traditionally in the IT sector. So typically, you have a minimal viable product very fast, and then you move on from there. And you discover your way through what you want to do over the years to come. You're not running with 5 years plans, you may be running with 1- or 2-year plans. Projects are 6, 9, 12 months long. And each and every project is a new release of this platform, growing and enhancing your capabilities as a business. And we will hear more about that when we come into to the presentation this afternoon because everyone will be talking about our platforms and solutions. I will just touch briefly upon something that I know Kim is going to elaborate much more on is on Netcompany govtech framework. You can find it on our web page. It's -- I strongly urge you to do so. It's more than 250 society-critical IT solutions made based on 2,000 components, covering all essential government sectors. And having that framework and having all these solutions and having these components just differentiates us from everyone else because we can address any customer by showing concrete solutions and even becoming with components and part software that is already in place, which gives us a strength, both in the selling situation, but certainly also in delivering. So real government solutions in production. And we also hear about that when we hear Thomas talking about the private sector later on because we are doing the same thing there. Okay. So finishing off, Netcompany as a Northern European market leader. As you can see here, some of you have seen this slide before. When it comes to gaining market share, we will do that organically. We can also do that with bolt-on acquisitions, if necessary. When it comes to exploring the business model, we will expand into the Northern European countries. Sweden could be greenfield. Finland will probably be via an acquisition. And I think very importantly, this is new. We will utilize the platforms as an enabler, as an accelerator, and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to sell, for instance, in Sweden, a project-based on a platform and then going that way and grow organically greenfield there, or even using the platform to go into customers across borders across into the markets that we're addressing. So that's very, very interesting. I think the platform idea is something that is going to be dominant in the way we approach customers in the years to come. And we are one of the companies embracing this and using this more than anyone else. Okay. That's the end of the Netcompany strategy. That's the 21-minute version. And I wish I had 2 hours, but that's not possible. However, we'll have dive in all these areas by the respectable directors. So I'm sure you get more information there as well. Thomas, our CFO, has just joined me here.

Yes. Good morning, André.

Good morning. Good afternoon for some, I guess. And can you -- do you have -- does it work? Can you see any questions coming in or popping in? We have 8 minutes or something.

We have a few questions from the audience. So I'm going to pose them. I am going to pose them to you, André. And we'll start with one question from Eric Elanda, and it goes like, many Swedish companies have been unsuccessful in their Danish expansion due primarily to cultural differences. Why would you be successful in Sweden?

Yes. Well, there's several reasons for that. One is we have many Swedish people working in Denmark already. I mean, if you look at the Danish operation, we are already a midsized Swedish IT vendor. And Gustaf that you will meet later on, he's the CEO in Denmark, he's actually Swedish. So I don't think we have a big cultural difference when it comes to Sweden. We are very much technical people and engineers. And engineers, they collaborate and they ally across boundaries. So I don't think, particularly cultural reasons will stop us in going into Sweden. And with the platform, the platforms in our hand and the solutions that we're talking about, they are very similar to what the suites need. So I'm not too worried about that.

All right. Thanks for that, André. Another question here saying like this. The Dutch integration has been fast and impressive. When would one expect you to enter a new market?

Well, markets are interesting. But when you looked at the market slide I've showed you before, the conclusion was we have a lot of -- we have ample of room to grow. In particular, in the 3 markets we've entered over the last 4 to 5 years. So just walking into a new market just for going in there is not the purpose here. The purpose is to create growth and responsible growth. And of course, growth accompanied by a substantial profitable -- being a profitable business. I think that's the most important thing. So if we win the necessary projects and engagements in the Netherlands or in the U.K. or in Norway, that could be just as well -- that is just as well important for the company than going into, for instance, Sweden. So we have to look at this the right way. The most important thing, I think, also for the investors is, of course, growth and results.

Yes. Thanks. And there's a lot of questions here. So we cannot take all of them, but I'll take one more before we move on in the agenda. And the question goes like this. How have you experienced any -- or if any, impacts from COVID-19 and what have you done to overcome them?

Well, COVID-19, for our business and what we do has been creating a more volatile environment in the sense that some customers are definitely hit by the crisis, and some of them so hard that they have made their engagement with us smaller. But on the other hand, we have seen, in many cases, that customers have been very aggressive in terms of building their IT capabilities faster. So you lose some here but you win some here. And for the whole 2020, definitely, there's been more demand than the loss of customers or loss of projects. So it has been a more volatile environment. However, digitization has been more crucial and more important than ever. And secondly, I would just have to say working across borders for us has been more necessary also across offices. Our people are definitely getting more and more used to working at home across boundaries more than we've imagined, even us as IT people. I mean, sometimes you're together with -- you see a team of 10 people. And they will probably never tell you 1 year ago. If you split us up in 10 different locations, we will still be able to deliver this thing. They are actually able to deliver it. Socially, it is not good. I mean, socially, this is not a good development. And I think most people can agree to that. So let's hope that 2020 will show different development when it comes to COVID-19.

All right. Well, thank you very much, André, for the introduction and update on our strategy. I will then ask you to leave the podium, and then we'll have our...

I don't like that, but, okay.

No, I know. But we have a packed agenda. We'll get back to questions also in the end of the day. Introduce our Chief Operating Officer; and also Co-Founder together with André, Claus Jørgensen, who will talk us through the Netcompany business model. Claus, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, André. As Thomas just said, I will speak about our business model, and this is not the first time. So for the good people who have never had previously an introduction to our unique business model, I'll give you a short introduction to the major elements. To all those people who are already familiar with the business model, I'm sorry to say there will be no surprises here. And that's probably an important point because we've been running Netcompany and all our projects through this business model for 20 years now. And we don't need surprises in deliveries. The business model is all about delivery excellence. So we need consistency and predictability in everything we do every day on all projects. Because we are a people business. So the more we can institutionalize the way we work across every single project, we limit the risk of failing to deliver. And if we don't fail, we don't have to waste expensive time in cleaning up and getting back on track. And that is why we are able to deliver higher growth and better margins than most competitors. So the business model, as you will see on this slide, has 3 major elements. It's about our people, attracting and developing the best people in the industry; it's about a management model, we call IT people, leading IT people; and it's about execution. So pragmatic, deliverable driven methodology. And none of this, if you build IT systems, none of this is really difficult. But a lot of it is very different from the way that other and most IT service companies are run traditionally. So let's have a look at the different elements. IT people leading IT people, that is very central. We believe that highly skilled IT people are the best people at selling IT projects, and they're also the best people at managing and leading other IT people. Nothing beats first-hand experience. You lead by example. You know what you do. More than 90% of our senior managers are IT professionals. So we hire young, talented people into the business, and then we let them learn and grow through hands-on experience. So our project managers, they have been consultants and seniors on our projects, and they know how to analyze, they know how to design, how to code, build tests. So they can do the actual work themselves. So they know what they're talking about. They can challenge and ask the right questions, and they can also help people if they run into problems. So IT people leading IT people. Over the years, that has led to high win rates of more than 65%. Very precise scoping and estimation of all our projects. So you actually understand what you are to deliver and an unprecedented or unmatched 100% track record in delivering on-time and on-budget, complex IT systems. And that track record is really the ultimate proof that this business model is working. And of course, we're sometimes late on a deadline. And of course, we sometimes have to postpone minor functionality, but we never fail to manage to deliver to the overall objectives and in time on budget and at a high quality. So that deep understanding of IT delivery in the entire organization is very important when we scope and estimate our projects. So when we price projects, it's based on a comprehensive 2-way approach. We do bottom-up and we do top-down. So first, we start by modeling and decomposing the entire solution into only individual components that are necessary to build that solution. And then we calculate an overall estimate based on every single component. So purely bottom-up, and that requires deep insight and hands-on experience. Then we do a top down approach. So we look at similar projects with similar characteristics, and we draw up the entire project organization that we know by experience is necessary to deliver this project. And then we translate that into an overall resource estimation. And then we can compare the 2. And that top-down approach really requires IT managers and project managers who know what they're doing. So the only way to achieve this is working with a team of highly experienced IT people. And these people, as Andre was saying earlier, they're not just estimating and pricing and bidding for projects. They're actually the same team delivering -- being responsible for delivery to their clients. That is a very different approach from what you will see in most places. Another area that differs is our sourcing model. We have established sourcing offices in Poland, Warsaw and in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, 2 cities or 2 countries that has very large resource pools of highly educated IT people. And those are sourcing centers. They're not outsourcing factories as you see a lot of times. So we don't believe in traditional outsourcing when it comes to delivering something as complex as what we do. Then margins are often lost on too many handovers, miscommunication, misunderstandings. So we have a different approach. What we do is have the same project resources participating throughout the entire project life cycle. So we work with mixed teams of people from different offices in different countries, and we staff the projects with the best available resources from any country. And we've been running this and fine-tuning this model since 2005 when we started in Warsaw. And it scales nicely. Actually, we've been running the same model across offices in Denmark for many years as well. So right now, we are able to source 15% to 20% of our people from outside our domestic markets. And that gives us great flexibility when we're staffing new projects. Right. Let's have a look at how we hire and build our people. We don't hire specialists. We don't fancy specialists too much. We hire mainly young talented IT people. So 80% of the people we hire straight out of University. In 2019, we hired almost 1,000 people. This year, we will hire more than 1,000 people. And that is a lot of young people, and it's a lot of recruiting. So it goes without saying that we have an extremely efficient recruiting process. Our recruiters, they connect to and they funnel students for years until they graduate. And they only invite the best people with top grades for interviews. Candidates, they go through 2 to 3 interviews, but they only spend 1 week from the initial interview until they sign a contract. And all the candidates are interviewed by managers from the business, people who deliver our projects, not by HR. And it's extremely important that the candidates are able to ask questions to someone who is doing the actual work that you're supposed to do. And at the same time that builds the best quality control really into the recruitment process because our managers ultimately will have to ask themselves, do I want this person on my project on Monday because that's the risk that I'm running. Right. Once we have the right people on board, it becomes about accelerating people development. So the faster the individual growth, the better we become as a company, simple as that. The key element in this is to get people out on a project as fast as possible. And to us, that's on the very first day. So on their first day, everybody participates in a brief introduction. It's just a half day, and then they're being picked up by the project managers that they are to work with. And then on that project as soon as they arrive, they will receive all the relevant introduction, training support they need in order to do their job. And they will be placed next to someone senior, who's doing similar tasks. So they have someone they can ask for help and support. And this person will follow them for their first 6 months in the organization. So all this helps to create a sense of belonging and a really strong common culture. And as a result, these people become utilized and productive and chargeable from the very first day. All our people are placed in this career model. Our career model is pretty classy or out merit-based consultancy model. There are no surprises here. New recruits straight out of university, they will start as consultants, then they will progress to senior consultants, managers, principals and eventually partners as they develop, if they have the skills. Each and every role in the career model is described in detail, and that's in order to ensure that career goals and career progression is clearly defined and common to everybody. And this way, everybody knows exactly what is expected of them and everybody knows exactly what to expect from other people they meet with different grades and titles. So highly institutionalized and very important in order to scale. To accelerate the individual personnel development, everybody is evaluated at least twice a year. So they receive a written appraisal from the person that they've been working for over the past 5, 6 months, not from HR, but the person they've actually been working for. And this is very structured feedback in a fixed format. And that ensures that it's detailed and relevant, and it also ensures that all people are evaluated against the same criteria. It has a huge effect, again, on creating that common culture, and, of course, for personal growth as well. And twice a year, we band or we score all our people. So we identify the best, the ones that are ready for promotions. And then we identify the ones that need extra time and extra attention in order to develop or the ones that need to find another job outside Netcompany. But we score everybody. And that is used as input to salary and promotion decisions. People will be promoted as soon as they are ready. Top performers usually get promoted from consultant to seniors after 2 years and then from senior to manager after 2, 3 -- another 2, 3 years. And that means that we will have quite young project managers running large IT projects with 20, 30 or more people, people with only 4, 5 years of experience. And ultimately, that means we get a younger and smarter and more productive workforce than most competitors. We also serve at a lower cost because they are younger, and that leads to better margins. And as you will see on this slide, our people love the business model, not just us, but our people, they all love the business model. They won't tell you that they believe that Netcompany is the best place to work, and they will tell everybody on their friends. We scored 42% on our employee NPS, which is completely out of range with the market and the industry in general and especially the competition. And it -- really, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We have the youngest workforce in the industry. They love to work with and learn from other young people. They develop and grow faster than anywhere else in the industry. And that allows us to continue to deliver high quality and to grow, to attract more customers and to recruit more people. So a virtuous cycle. Highly sustainable. It's been running for 20 years now, scales nicely, and our people love it. Attrition rates, as you see on the slide, are stable at around 18%, which is low compared to the industry, but it's healthy in order to trim the organization for low performance, which you have to do. So that much about people. Let me just talk a bit about methodology, right? In essence, our methodology is just about ensuring consistency and predictability in all deliveries. You don't want surprises when you deliver. So consistency and predictability. And having a methodology is not unique in itself. Everybody has that. What differentiates our methodology is that it's developed, and it's being maintained every day by practitioners, not by evangelists or missionaries, not by think tanks. But by the people. Every day, day-to-day project managers and architects constantly feed into the methodology to keep it practical and up-to-date and populate it with best practices. And that makes it relevant and it makes it pragmatic. And then, of course, it's used by everyone. Every day, across all projects, everybody knows and understands the methodology and the tools that comes with it. And it's central part of our academy training. So everybody works the same way, which is -- really makes staffing extremely flexible and scalable. Our development approach combines the best of agile and waterfall. Well, André was talking about agile principles earlier on, and we recognize, of course, and so does the methodology that we need to demonstrate quick wins and short term to market. Those are the characteristics of agile development. But we also use all the classic controls from traditional waterfall to control large-scale and fixed-price projects. So in short, we break down solutions and build by agile principles, but we never forget the overall plan, the overall scope, the change control, the sign-offs to ensure successful delivery, on-time delivery, on budget. In addition, we have an extremely, what we call, transparent project management approach. Unlike most companies, we strongly believe in sharing all results, all plans, even detailed plans and progress reports with our customers at all times. And we do so in our toolkit, which is online and where all our customers on a project have access with us, same kind of access. So we need that full transparency to get full commitment from customers. So there are no secrets and lies. So let me just round off by explaining a few things about this project management toolkit. It's really the thing that ties everything together. It's used by old people. And as I said, by all client personnel as well at all our projects. So when a project manager creates a new toolkit for a new project, it comes with all the templates from the methodology, comes with all the guidelines you need, the checklists as well as best practices from similar projects. It's used to control and manage changes, issues, risks, work packages, tenders, what have you. And it serves as a repository for all the documentations that have been approved or the minutes the steering committee reports, et cetera. So it's fully transparent. And as a result, the toolkit actually enforces the methodology and the transparent management approach across all projects. So it ties it all together and makes the methodology extremely scalable. So that's a 15-, 20-minute version of the methodology. So just to summarize, you've heard about the force of IT people leading IT people, unique sourcing model, how we use -- how we attract and develop our people, the best people in the industry and pragmatic, agile and transparent methodology. So I hope that gives you an idea of how proven and institutionalized it is, and how difficult it is to copy for any incumbent company. And how it's able to generate superior margins. So that's it. Thank you. And now Thomas has joined me.

Thank you, Claus, and thank you for that walk-through of the business model. Questions are coming in fast. So I'll post a few of them here. I'll start with one that goes on this. What is, if any, the weakness of the Netcompany model? And where can you improve the most?

Wise. Tempting to say there are no weaknesses. But the weakness is that it is an up and out model. And you have to like it, and you have to fancy it, and you want -- you need to be a certain kind of person who wants to develop and wants to grow and wants to take responsibility. If you do that, if you want to be part of something which is interesting, and you want to develop as a person, then the model is great. If not, it's probably the best place that you can earn some credit and find another job, use that on your CV as well. And then there was a question as well on how can it be improved? Well, it's being improved all the time. And I know I told this story quite a few times now. So it sounds as if it never improves, but we are constantly improving the way we work. We are constantly improving our academy. In fact, we -- at the moment, we're building next generation of our Academy. So coming from an academy that has suited a smaller business, it was one-size-fits-all. So everybody was attending the same training courses at fixed points in their career. Now we're decomposing the academy to make it much more flexible and modulized. And having a broader range of training courses that fits the broader business we are now compared to 15 years ago. So there's a lot more flexibility going into that. And then, at the same time, we are making academy international. So where we, earlier on, have had local versions of all our training courses, we now have all new central versions of training courses. So we actually have people flying in from everywhere to attend the same training course to build that common culture and a common view on the company.

All right. I have another question here, which follows, I think, nicely in that line class. And it goes like, why don't other IT companies just copy your business model if it is so superior?

Because they can't. That's the beauty. But as I started by saying it's not really difficult but it's difficult to copy. We had the advantage of starting from scratch. So one of the things we did when we set up Netcompany was to sit down and say, so why are large IT projects failing? So what can we take out of the equation if we want to run a company where you don't fail. One is we want to work with young people. We want to work with IT people and have IT people leading IT people. And that's a pretty good example. If you enter into a very large existing IT organization, that is probably going to be, if not impossible, that near impossible because you will see much -- a lot of companies where you have finance people or business people leading IT people, and that would mean a complete transition where you would have to transition your existing management without IT skills out of business and then grow your own IT leaders in the business. So that's just one example. It's a very difficult transition. And that's 1 of the reasons we don't buy big companies when we enter into new markets. We want small companies because they have to go through that transition.

Thank you for that, Claus. Another question here. A little long one, but we'll go here.

I will give the answer.

Yes. Sure. You are a long-term user of agile development processes. Many competitors, old as new, moving in the same direction. How do you see your position versus peers? Are they catching up? Or are you keeping the distance?

Well, there's a lot of religion in methodology. I think what is important to understand here is we are not very religious. We pick and choose from different methodologies. And as same way as we are agnostic when it comes to technologies. We'll build on technologies that our customers are asking us to build on. And we'll use different parts from different methodologies. And that's why it's important to say that we still use waterfall elements in our methodology because it's very important. When you build a big system, you don't want to get lost in agile where you just start building and you lose track of where you are and what the overall scope is. So you want to keep that overall scope in mind all the time, and then you start breaking up. And you always go back and say, so where are we according to the original plan, according to the original scope and the original budget. And then you keep eating your way into the scope.

Another question here. An often question raised is about scalability. Does the model also work in case you were 10,000 or more consultants in multiple countries?

Yes. It does. And I -- well, I think the best way to answer is that we were running the same model as when we were 100 people in 2005. And we've grown to 1,700 people in Denmark running this exact same model. We've seen it work in Norway. We're seeing it work in Holland. We're seeing it starting to work in the U.K. as well. So it's really as long as you can recruit the young people, you transition them into our development program, career model, it keeps scaling. Of course, we need a certain level of attrition because we need people to leave if they don't fit the model over time, but it will scale.

And a question a little bit in that line, Claus, is, you've previously said that there potentially will be talent limits for the -- available talent limits for the growth in Denmark. Yet your level of sourcing is relatively low. Why not increase the use of sourcing and increase growth by taking on more projects?

Yes. There's resistance in the model. It cannot just explode because it's on-site, hands-on training. So as I was telling earlier, when we onboard new people, they have to grow at a certain pace. So they -- that's the IT people leading IT people mantra. So they start by coding, they start by designing and testing and then they move on to become team leads and they manage small teams. Then they move on to become project managers and manage larger teams. So there's a latency in the model. And we've seen that it grows nicely at 20% every year. We've seen that it works on 20%, even 25%, even 30%. It will not work if you double every year, simply too many people to onboard and train in the model. So it works at a certain pace, but then it works forever.

And another question relating to the employee side of it, Claus, goes, what is the NPS score outside of Denmark?

It varies a bit. But not a lot. It's very enthusiastic in Vietnam for some reason, I don't know exactly why. We are at level in Poland, bit below in Norway and in the U.K., but it's only 1 or 2 percentage points. And then we are somewhat behind in Holland. But that's a trend we've seen with only acquisitions. There's a time for change. And some people don't like the Netcompany model when we acquire a company. And some people will leave. And that's probably half of the people over the first 2, 3 years, and then we supplement that by new people who has never known anything else, and they love the model. So it's just as you would expect.

Thank you, Claus. And then one last question before we move on. And it is -- how would you differentiate your business model to the ones that seems closest of peers, namely Globant and EPAM?

I think they are different companies. Without knowing them too much in detail, so you probably need to help me here, Thomas. But I think they are more software companies than we are. So they're not as dependent on growing people as we are. They are more hiring specialists in different areas, whereas we need the generalists to serve, define and build the projects.

Yes. And I'll just add to that, Claus, that one of the great differentiators between us and those 2 peers is that while we have around, as Claus mentioned, 15%, 20% of our employee base in talent source centers, Poland and Vietnam. EPAM, Globant will have 80% or so of their workforce in outright outsourcing centers either in Belarus or in Argentina. So there's a significant differently delivery model on those companies also compared to Netcompany. So with that, sorry to say, but there's a lot of questions still in the roller, but we are on a fairly tight agenda. So I'll thank you, Claus, for your walk-through of our business model.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot. And then I will invite Gustaf to take the floor. And Gustaf will be talking through the Danish part of Netcompany. Gustaf is the Country Managing Partner of Netcompany, Denmark. Gustaf?

Thank you, Thomas. And thank you for the previous presentations. I will now run you through the Danish side of the operations. And as you heard before, my name is Gustaf, and I'm the Country Managing Partner for Denmark. Actually got the right age here and my birthday this Monday. So I'm happy to have updated slides, Thomas. I'll start off with the people side. As Claus talked about, obviously, it's very important that we have the right team. On the slide here is a highlight of 22 partners, fantastic, strong team. But it goes for the whole organization. So we have, all the way from the partner down to the newly hired people, an extremely strong team. And you probably hear all CEOs standing up and saying, we have a fantastic team. But I can have -- I have a deep dive in that in the terms of the model that Claus was talking to that we -- each year, we run through the whole organization. So we'll run through the each individual employee. We'll talk about their development points. We'll talk about their strengths. And we'll make sure that we develop each individual to their fullest potential. And we just concluded this round. Actually, yesterday was the last session for this half-year round. I sit in on every session because we really take this seriously. So I can stand here and say that we have a fantastic team because we've been through them all, and we are in really good shape. And talking to the team, as you can see here, we're 1,466 employees in Denmark, then obviously supported by a very strong team in Poland and Vietnam as well. The turnover for the first 9 months of this year was DKK 1,596 million, up from DKK 1,314 million last year. And we're also having a good EBITDA of DKK 500 million in the same period, up from DKK 381 million. So what is the market that we're operating in? Well, obviously, Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in the world. I'm proud to say, I think we have contributed to that with the solutions we're building. And we have proven, actually, in Denmark, that you can retire an old legacy system, something that maybe was deemed impossible previously. But we've proven that you can actually do it and that you could do it risk-free, and that you can come over to a new world, which is digitized and where you're building on modern core systems. And I actually think we have actually turned the momentum in Denmark from previously maybe if you ventured into retiring an old mainframe system that was an adventure that was sometimes successful and mostly not successful. And I would turn the tide to this is something that you actually should do. If you are a public leader in Denmark, you're expected to engage in an ambitious digitization and modernization agenda. And in the private sector, we can see that most companies now are pursuing the same agenda, and they're actually looking across to the public sector to get inspiration, which obviously suits us very well. And we can see that many of the private sector projects run as the same characteristics as the public sector. Looking into the projects, taking a little deep dive into the project portfolio. When I look down through our portfolio, I'm very happy with the customers we're having. This is just a few of them mentioned on this slide. They're all strategic. They're all of high importance to our customers. And I think that's proven by the resilience we showed during the lockdown times of COVID-19 when most projects kept ongoing. They're also impacting the daily life of Danish citizens. Just take you through a few examples, and I'll jump a little bit back and forth here between private and public sector. And starting off with Topdanmark. We have been talking on Topdanmark before. It's obviously one of our strategic private customers, where we're engaged in actually doing this thing I talked about before, retiring an old mainframe, getting over to a new system stack with an agile back end where you can quickly define new products. And then front end, which is digitized and customer-focused. I think it'd actually be a little bit interesting to talk about how we win this kind of project. And in Topdanmark's case, we were actually competing and we were measured on 3 parameters. So we were measured on our knowledge of the core insurance platform that Topdanmark had chosen. We were measured on our domain knowledge of insurance, and we were measured on our ability to execute large programs. And I think we had quite a transparent discussions around, yes, we actually did not have any experience with this product from before. We did not have deep down domain knowledge from insurance, but we had a track record of how to deliver really big projects. And we actually engaged some specialists from the public side, and we actually talked to tax, and we had some references from public sector to show how you can run an effective but very large-scale agile program. And I think that was the proof point. And now the program is running really, really well. We're actually looking to accelerate the time line even further. You probably also noted our partnership with Copenhagen Airport, which we are very proud of and which we'll double click on a little bit later in the agenda. So we'll return to that. Looking to the public sector. Well, we continue to run a large stack of big projects. One of the examples here, family benefits, which actually is the payment out platform of child benefits, paying out DKK 17 billion yearly. And a project that went live a couple of years ago, but where we continue to work on legislation and changes. Family benefits in its turn, actually built on the experiences from the unions world, where we've handled the benefits for many years, and where we're currently handling over 1.4 billion -- million members and paying out DKK 22 billion yearly. And where we're supporting an agenda of innovation and continuous development for our customers. During 2020, we also went live with a sister project of family benefits, the social pension project where we actually support the state pension for all of Denmark. And we're paying out DKK 120 billion yearly to more than 1 million retired people of Denmark. This was actually the live -- the go-live was just before the lockdown and the first monthly payout was during the lockdown in end of March. So this is the thing where you -- normally, you gather all the resources in a war room and then you make sure that you have everything under control. Well, this was a virtual war room distributed out in the kitchen and living rooms of all our employees. It was fantastic to see and everyone got together and actually managed to handle out the payment of more than DKK 10 billion precisely and well timed, so great success. Since then, we're actually ramping up on the social pension project to continue to develop in terms of legislation. And obviously, this is a hot political agenda that we're supporting. We now have 6 projects running on the same platform as family benefits. So we have 3 projects at ATP. We have 2 at KOMBIT. And we're also now doing a full circle back to the private sector, where it's all started in unions. And supporting a new customer called Sygeforsikringen "danmark", national health care insurer on the same platform. And to round this off, we have the AULA platform, which went live a year ago, but which really stood its test in March when the countries and the schools locked down. And this is the school communication platform from parents -- teachers to parents to kids, and it actually supported the whole home schooling transition during a few days in March. So just a few examples. Going over to the delivery model. And as you can see, I think many people see the public projects world and the privates world as 2 very different sectors. We don't see it that way. For us, it's the same delivery model that Claus talked about that is underneath them both. From internally, you can't really see a difference on the projects. And we've seen that we can actually utilize the experiences both ways from public to private and from private to public. And there's no doubt that private sector has had a great 2020 and to a large extent by leveraging experiences from the public world, as I talked about with Topdanmark and with Sygeforsikringen "danmark". In both sectors, we win because we have an ability to innovate and to find the right solution with our customers, but also to deliver it robustly and with an agile delivery. And I think there's a change since the IPO in 2018, where now our brand is a public brand, and we're well known, and there's an ownership structure, which is public. And actually they probably created a little bit more credibility, so we definitely see some benefit from that. Looking to the private sector and the competitive landscape in the private sector. We have -- we actually have some competitors. And it's same kind of competitors. We see some competitors being more adapting to the new world, but we definitely see ourselves as the sole ones having this dual agenda of being innovative and, at the same time, being able to robustly deliver projects. Many companies, I think, want to do the same thing as we do, and we had a question on that before that it is really hard to copy. Because we're utilizing here a 20-year track record of having this model in place and a 20-year track record of delivering projects. And that's the most time when we are out selling projects. We actually talk about our previous experiences and extrapolate from that. And that is really, really hard to copy. So I think we're the only players in this sector, which is the next-generation player, and that has the ability to scale. The size of the market. Well, we have a core market of DKK 11 billion. If we extend across to a little bit outside the sweet spot, there's an additional DKK 4 billion. So there's plenty of market space in this one. Market is growing, and I think there's no doubt that we have ample room to grow in this market. A few weeks back, we set a strategy on what we want to do in the private sector. It goes on 3 pillars. It's about focusing in on our core customers, make sure that we have a few large customers rather than a broad base of smaller customers. I'm proud to say that we have done that. If you look at the private portfolio now, it's solely consisting of strategic large customers. We also said we want to grow the existing customers and win a few new ones. Don't need a lot of new wins. And we're definitely well underway. We are having a great retention of existing customers, where we jointly innovate with the customers to figure out what the next steps are and continue with new releases and a more ambitious digitization agenda. And we're also winning quite significant new customers in this market. And the third pillar is to go deeper down in the organization. And rather than delivering on one step, we're actually taking the full digital journey, and it goes from Topdanmark to actually a digital agenda with the front end and the digital experience towards customers, but also go down in the core and changing the core systems, and we support this. And we do this at more and more customers. So I'm happy to say that I think we're there in terms of all 3, but it definitely just continue going in the same direction. And essentially over to the public sector. Well, it's a market of roughly the same size, DKK 11 billion. We see the same kind of agenda. The market might be growing a little bit slower than in private sector, but that's definitely an ambitious digitization and modernization agenda, and it will continue to grow strong for many years, and we have plenty of room in this market. We had the added benefit in the public sector compared to the private sector of a lot of transparency. We know what's coming for many years ahead. We can see tenders now, at least for the next 2 years to '22 of DKK 10 billion. And on top of that, there's DKK 2 billion extra on customs, where we're very well positioned. And on top of that, there is the modernization of the tax agency, which is estimated at over DKK 10 billion and will run over the next 10 to 15 years. I think it's fair to say that a few of these projects or tenders are obviously retenders of our own projects that comes out of a retender, and that goes with an increase in market share. We can see that when that happens, we have a very strong win rate in regaining those contracts. And whereas when it comes to contracts that are currently owned by competitors, we benefit from a generally lower NPS at the competitors, and we have a very strong win rate when it comes to those kind of tenders. The competition landscape. Well, it's sort of the usual 7 competitors we meet at -- in most tenders. They are the more agile players, and they are the -- what we call the incumbents. Looking at the more agile competitors, they tend to be focusing more and more on some niches and some products. And those niches are with little overlap to our offerings. So we actually meet them less and less in the market, which leaves the competition to the old incumbents and where we definitely see an advantage in that they tend to struggle with the new digital agenda, and they also tend to struggle with the modernization and the robust delivery of agile new projects. So in public sector, we will continue much of the same as we did over the many years. We'll continue to focus on core customers. We'll continue to be the disruptor that disrupts the status quo. We'll continue to be the very strong partner when it comes to large and complex projects. We'll continue to serve the existing customers and make sure that we develop those engagements. And then that we regain those engagements when retendered as we have great success with. And obviously, we'll focus on winning new contracts, but we'll definitely focus on being still very picky and make sure that we go for the contracts that really suits us. So with that, I'm happy to open up for some questions, Thomas.

Thank you, Gustaf, and thank you for that presentation of the Danish market. Questions are coming in fast here on the roller. So I'll start with one here. It goes like, are there any specific industry verticals that you are focusing on in the private sector?

Yes, we have a very strong industry focus. Obviously, it goes with the companies that have a very digital agenda and a strong focus on IT. We definitely see success in the industries where we have been for many years. It's been a lot of finance customers. There's been a lot of telco, and there's been a lot of service companies. But we see a broader spectrum. And we see that the solutions we're developing are generally in terms that they fulfill a need that is generic across industries. So we don't see a focus where we need to do exact pinpoint industry solutions. We see a broad application. I think looking back maybe on Topdanmark as a case for that. We're selling that on the digital agenda and the ability to execute projects rather than being niche-focused on insurance knowledge. And that's definitely an advantage of what's coming into newer -- new customers and maybe new industries. So there are some industries where there tend to be the more ambitious agendas. We are there, but we're not locked in, so to speak.

Thank you, Gustaf. And another question goes here. Can you elaborate a little bit on the tender process for the large public projects?

Yes. So that's probably -- I think Kim will come into that later on. But that definitely is -- it's very well-structured process. I think we're probably mastering it. That's -- it goes to say, we take these tendering processes as a mini project. So we actually roll out the full layering model as we do on a project. We do the same kind of processes. We run very well structured. We have not a bid team that is people just working on tenders. We take it in from the full organization with the integrated sales and delivery model. So it will be the same people. It will be the people that when we then win the project, they will come Monday morning and deliver it. So it's same kind of model, but it's like a mini project. Yes.

There's another question here, Gustaf. And a little bit of a personal one, I guess. It says here, being a Swedish national, how do you think of the differences between Denmark and Sweden as markets?

Yes. And I get this question a lot. I tend to think that there is maybe less difference between countries and more differences between companies, company cultures. I think there's a big difference between a company culture in Denmark, in different sectors and between us and some of our competitors. And the same in Sweden. Obviously, there might be some general differences. And I think in terms of Sweden, and as Claus talked about it before, maybe we in Denmark are a little bit ahead in terms of the digitization agenda and modernization agenda. And as a Swedish, obviously, I'd like to think that Sweden is always ahead. But we're looking at especially the public sector, Denmark has been more ambitious over the years and has had greater success. So -- and if that's a cultural thing or if it's just a matter of who's driving the market and what's happening, I don't know, but I think it's a fact. So there's plenty of things to do in Sweden.

Well, thanks, Gustaf. You can always beat us in hockey, right? So another question here. How much of the DKK 12 billion market in the public area is regarding retenders for existing customers. Is it possible to say anything about?

I actually don't have the number, but it's -- we can definitely see a trend that we've been gathering speed in the public sector and we're getting market share. And typically, the contracts are 6 to 8 years. So obviously, the things that happened 6 or 8 years ago, it's now coming in retender. But obviously, since we picked up even more speed during last few years, that's going to be way ahead before we reach that. But that said, it's -- we don't see that as a problem. It's not something we are focused on. We are focused on having a really strong customer relationship and make sure that when they are retendered, we're well positioned, and we are confident that we will win.

Yes a question goes here on the general market, Gustaf, and that is, have you seen any significant change in the competitive environment? And do you expect it to stay or change going forward?

Yes. Actually, the competitive environment, both in private and public has been rather stable for many years. And we don't see any big trends going either way. So no, it's -- we don't see anything happening.

Another question here on the market, and that goes along, what is the target/possible market growth to be reached in Denmark in the future?

Yes. We're looking -- as Claus mentioned, we're looking for this -- the stable responsible growth that we've been having for many years. We know the model can handle it, and we know there's plenty of room in the markets. We know that, that is good for the organization. So definitely, no major changes in that respect.

All right. And I'll just urge people to continue to write questions on the roller. Another question here, Gustaf, goes to what is the average age in the company?

That's tricky question. You probably know the answer. To me, they all seem very young, but I think I'm young myself, so that's probably not a good judgment. You probably have a number.

The average age is 33. It was not a tricky question. It was actually in here.

They're probably a little bit young.

In terms of another question goes here, it goes back a little bit to the different industry verticals, especially in the private sector, and it goes, are there any increased activities in, for instance, financial services or banking?

Yes, we definitely see that as a very interesting industry. We see a digital agenda in financial services in general and obviously, insurance, where we're strong and pension where we're strong and also banking. So yes, that's an interesting area for us.

Another question that goes on the public side, is there a different segmentation in the public? Or is it all just one big pot?

We have a very elaborate segregation. So obviously, we have the public sector being the state of the central government. And you have the local municipalities, and you have the national municipality solutions as run by ATP and KOMBIT. And also within those, we have a segmentation. So we're focusing on -- for example, tax, we're focusing on public safety, we're focusing on citizen-centric solutions. So yes, we have an elaborate structure within and everyone knows who's responsible for what.

Another question here goes, the current government in Denmark is facing some criticism for not being as ambitious on digitalization as its predecessors. Do you see that as impacting future tender volumes?

We don't see an impact as of now. And I think there's -- we can see things happening out in the agencies, and there's a lot of innovation. So I wouldn't see any impact of that.

Another question here. Are there any specific local names or companies that illustrate how Netcompany is taking full ownership of the digital journey at large-cap private companies?

Well, we have mentioned Topdanmark as one example, where it's a strategic partnership, and it's actually a steering committee of the corporate directors that are included every week, and I take part of that. So it's definitely a very close strategic partnership. That's just one example.

Yes. And then we have one of our customer's partners presenting later on in the afternoon with the airport, which is also a quite significant partnership trading where Netcompany takes full responsibility. So I'll have one last question here before we let you off the hook, Gustaf. And that is, how much of the public sector growth is expected to be driven by market share gains versus underlying growth of the market?

We don't split it up like that. So for us, it's going for the right contracts, and it's, for us, going at the growth rate that is good for us. We definitely believe that there's plenty of room. Whether it comes from one or the other, doesn't really matter.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Gustaf, for the presentations market. I'll let you leave the floor, and then I will welcome Kim Clausen to the podium, and Kim will be presenting -- when he's up here. Kim will be presenting our approach to public sector across the group and will expand on some of what Gustaf has said, but also on some of what André has been talking on -- early on in his presentation on the govtech framework. So Kim, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Thomas. I'm going to take you through a quick glance of our govtech framework and our approach to the public sector throughout the group. Of course, André has touched on a lot of it, and Gustaf has dived into the Danish part of it. I will probably also dive a little into the Danish part, but also, of course, in the other countries. First of all, our approach to the public sector now is, of course, we're going to keep our focus on this. We're going to look into what has worked in Denmark over the last 2 surveys from UN, which covers the last 4 years. Denmark has been ranked #1 in the world in public sector, in digital public sector. And of course, as Gustaf says, we take some pride in this because these are -- in the last 4 or 5 years has been a lot of the solutions that we have delivered to the public sector. So we're looking into how can we take these things and package these things into platforms, which is in the govtech Framework. We have -- virtually right now, I think we have 14 platforms within the govtech framework. We have 2,000-plus components in there, and based on the 250 different references that we have from customers. And these, we can leverage across everywhere and across Northern Europe. Therefore, we're also going to go for the largest projects and the most complex ones. And -- there we go. Just have to change the slides. When we have these great references that we do have in Denmark, these are transferable to other countries. And this is what we're seeing right now is that what we're doing in Denmark is pushing the limit on the kind of contracts that we can take on in both U.K., Norway and in Holland. And I think we have the largest wins in both -- in all 3 countries this year, reigning from the MOD to the Medicine Registry in Norway. And which we can build on, on the very platforms that we built here in Denmark. So we're also looking to then take what's ever been built in these countries and take them back into Denmark, so we can re-innovate here in Denmark. So that is the first part of it that we're going to take the govtech and then we're going to use this throughout Northern Europe. This also means with the govtech framework that we have in place now with the place that Denmark have in the digital UN reports, means that we actually can address the top executives everywhere in Europe, and they are willing to see what is really happening in Denmark, and how can we do the same thing in our own country. The second thing that we're looking for in our tender process and in the public sector, is that we go for the right projects. We need to go for the projects that is society critical. The ones that really means something for the countries. We're not afraid of trying to address the large complex solutions as we've done here in Denmark and it takes some guts and some courage to venture into these things. And it takes some belief in ourselves that we actually can do this. But with the proven delivery model that we have, we are really not that afraid of it because we can move our people across borders. And especially here under COVID-19, we've seen that working distributed has created an even tighter bond between the countries than we are. And this might also be why we are looking into higher win rates in the other countries as of the last Qs this year. And of course, in order for us to do this, in order for us to address the market, we also need to heighten our quality in the tenders because that has been one of the key things that we've done here in Denmark is actually being able to understand the customer from the get-go, from when we start writing the tenders, that it is the real thing that we will deliver. It's going to be delivered by the people that actually knows about these things. The ones that write the tender will also deliver afterwards. And that trust in our people gives us great value. It also gives us a head start when we are delivering our solutions. This also means that we also have to staff it correctly, making sure that we have the right team structure. We don't -- we will also use people fresh out of school to help us write these tenders because this is the way we do. We do have this way of working where we have -- where we can adopt young people into writing very high-quality in our solution, which also means that our sales muscle is so much larger than anybody else in the market because we do not have this skilled, small sales team that travels around the world and when some of the tenders, we actually utilize the entire company in order for us to deliver on the tenders and also deliver on the projects afterwards. And of course, the way to do this is, of course, spreading the knowledge around the govtech framework. This has been key this year for us to make sure that we have the platform. So we can actually have that accelerated start when we enter in to our customers and can deliver on time and actually on a on a faster pace than anybody else. This also has been meaning that we have to look into the academy. And as Claus said, we've focused a lot of our academy also on the training on the tender -- tendering methodology in our sales approach, how do we make sure that we are in the right position in order for us to win the upcoming tenders all over Europe. So if we look at the track record in Denmark, I don't think it has been any surprise to anybody that, that has been going quite well over the last -- over the last years. We had a huge year in 2017, which meant that what we were addressing after this year was after that yield might be a little smaller, but the market was also tendering a little less. We still kept our win rate quite high, and we're keeping our win rate to this plus 70% right now. And of course, this means that we have to look for the right tenders, not to bid on everything, but the ones that actually is core to the Danish society, to the Danish citizens, to the Danish case workers in the public sector. And we see this still continuing over the next years because we know in Denmark that we are #1. Right now, we still have to renew everything because there is a big legacy burden. In Denmark, I think, Gustaf, he touched upon the tax that has a huge legacy challenge right now, that has to look into how do they renew these things. And everything that has moved Denmark up to #1 have to be renewed and be re-innovated. And this is the spot we really want to be in, where we go in and re innovate on top of what's already built. And how do we succeed in digitizing the governments? A lot of this is in the framework, but the framework itself does not cover it all because it's an entire approach. We have to have the right people in place. We have to have IT people, leading IT people. We have to have IT people understanding the business so they can sell to our customers. We have to deliver on the way that Claus went through on the control, agile delivery model because we want to sit very close to our customers. So we know when we deliver a solution after 6, 9 months, it's the exact solution that the customer wants in that moment. And of course, we need to build competency, and we do this also with our customers, for our customers and building them by sitting on-site with them, working on teams, joint company and customer people to making sure that we can deliver these things together. It is us putting our hand on the hot plate and the customer putting their hand on the hot plate. And in partnership, we are lifting the solutions that we're delivering to the customers. And then, of course, right now, the big push that we have is the govtech that we're pushing out. So compared to competitors who are either selling a lot of people, a lot of hours or selling software. We're actually coming in, and we're handing over some of the IP that we have with us. So we can get a head start, and there is nothing in between the lines. It's very transparent to our customers. It's a huge accelerator, and it gives us a big advantage on selling on our platforms and on our approach. And how is -- how do we do this with the govtech framework? And of course, this is drawn up a little naively, but, basically, what we're doing here is that we're coming from the old cut solution, the old mainframe legacy solutions. The old solutions where you actually have mishandled your SAP or your mainframe solution in order for it to encapsulate everything. And when we're moving into that we have to get everything into smaller pieces that can actually always change and move the new public sector, the new government, the new private company, faster into a changing world. We've seen this also in the last 6 months during COVID-19, where we have to change for compensation plans for the Danish business authority, to make sure that you can actually pay the compensation to the companies in order for them to keep on flowing. And that has to be done quite fast. And this is the approach that we have where we've gotten everything into components, and then we can build new solutions on top of this very, very fast. And we can take these things, we can move them to another country and deliver them there. This is what we're doing in Norway right now. I think the last 4 wins that we had in Norway over the last 3 months have all been based on our govtech framework, on platforms that we've been building in Denmark before. Finally, I'll take you -- very, very short run-through of our portfolio of platforms. I'm not going to touch up all of them. You can actually read about them or see the videos on netcompany.com to see what are we thinking around the govtech framework. But to take a small dive in some of the solutions that we are building is, for example, the modulus brand platform. And that company has been building brand solutions in both in Denmark, Norway and Holland. And now we've combined these into one common platform. So we have a solution that fits basically everything within the brand management. We've got our first win of this year in Norway. And we're looking into a great pipeline that we can utilize what we built here and adding on in Norway and re-innovating for the next solutions that will come up in Denmark, Holland and Norway and U.K. on this. If we look into our modules case platform, which is basically was built over the last 2 years. I think we've expanded this across 9 different customers right now over the last year. Taking a solution to make it the case working. See it in a new flexible way, seeing it in a data-driven manner in order for a case manager to do their jobs a lot more efficiently, not focusing on a document heavy approach, but the core case work or for any kind of case work. And this could be from the Dutch finance ministry to handling troubled children or doing work in municipality or for handling troubled adults also. So the platform thinking that we have here is very, very reproducible. And we see that that the tenders that we have is that we can actually get a huge advantage, both on quality, but also on the time to deliver these things. We can deliver very, very fast, which is the key right now in order for to deliver to the public sector anywhere. If we look into 2 other things and other journeys that we are looking very heavily into, especially, I guess, outside of Denmark is there a lot of the cloud migration. A lot of the cloud migration that we're doing right now has been built up on the accelerators that we're building in U.K. It's been an excellent journey that we've now packaged into how do we move into very, very secure cloud environments in order for us to handle actually also public safety customers within with this cloud environment.

All right. Thank you very much. Well, thank you for that, Kim, and thank you for that exciting run-through of the govtech framework. A few questions here. And like before, keep on adding the questions to the roller, so we can take them. First question goes like this. During the presentation, it was mentioned that the govtech framework can address markets in Northern Europe. Does that mean that you are planning to tender for specific projects outside your current markets?

If it really fits, it could be, but we're looking into the markets that Andre had touched upon, and we will look at this very opportunistically. If it fits, and we have the right relations in there, it's not impossible, but it's not the key thing that we're looking for. We are looking in our own markets right now, there is plenty of room to grow. As you've seen, we are quite big in Denmark. There is plenty of room to grow in both Norway, Holland and U.K.

Thanks, so another question here. And it goes, there are many software companies that have tried to sell standard solutions of public of public services to different countries, but have failed. Why is the govtech framework different?

I think because what they've tried to do before has been too ambitious, they haven't taken the local legislation and seeing that as a factor and actually selling this as software. Whereas we're selling these as a solution that we do with our customer. We can take what we have, and we can decompose this and construct it so it fits better for another country. A benefit, a welfare scheme in Denmark does not fit exactly the same welfare scheme as in Sweden, Norway or anywhere else. But if we can deconstruct it and actually have a legislation, a rules engine on top of this, we can actually do a lot.

And another question here. It goes, Impressive framework. Can you please give us a sense for the investment levels in the past, future mobilized to develop that platform? Is it looked at as an ongoing operation cost? Or is this something that is reflected in capital expenditure?

Well, the thing -- the way we're doing these things is actually we're doing these things with our customers. So we are building solutions that, once we identify them, we're talking to the customer saying, these can't be reused and actually utilized somewhere else. So a lot of or all of innovation is customer-driven. So it's the market that drives us the way that we -- the govtech framework is going. We are not -- I don't think we are the wisest on doing a government or a public sector. I think -- I hope that the civil service are the ones that are doing their part of it, but we can actually decompose what we have to build those solutions and actually help it drive it in the right way.

Another question here, Kim, could you please comment on the cost synergies from the govtech platform framework when you apply the components to other markets?

The cost?

Synergies? So are there any savings and the like.

There is -- this is also -- this is how you look at it competitively when we enter a market. How are we going to price these things? How is it going to affect the way that we're running? But most of all, are the key driver for us on this is that the ability to deliver, that we can actually have something that is proven somewhere else and make sure that we can deliver on time.

Another question here. Thanks. Another question. How long have you been working on this govtech framework?

A long time. I think it has been coined this year, but we have actually identified these things over the last 5 or 6 years. We were looking into how can we utilize whatever we've done elsewhere in some of the other countries? So basically, since the acquisition in Norway, we've been looking into how can we migrate what we done in Denmark elsewhere?

I have another question here. Goes a little bit in that direction. It goes, you have a strong brand name in Denmark. How are you attacking go-to-market for public clients outside of Denmark?

Well, we know we have a strong brand. And of course, we are looking into how can we use the brand of Denmark in addressing the other markets. It is highly interesting to see what is done in Denmark when you digitize a society that has to offer the same services in a larger country. And how can you actually deliver these with, I guess, quite a few Danish kroner? If you look at the budgets that are used in U.K. on similar solutions, there is a lot to be saved by the British government in the public sector on these kind of solutions.

Another question a little bit in that line. You say that Denmark is rated as the most digitized country in the world. Will there be continued investment in digitalization in Denmark?

Yes. This is what we're seeing right now. And I know there was a question before, if we were worried about that this government in Denmark is actually cutting down on digitalization. I think that was a starting point. But I think the investment is turning now, and you'll see that digitization will come into the strategies also in Denmark. I think if you look at the COVID-19 situation, you will see that digitization will be key in order for a country like Denmark to actually handle the challenges that lies ahead. I don't think that we can that we can achieve the goals that any government is setting in Denmark without increased spendings in or investments in digitization.

And the last question we have here, Kim, on the roller goes, is there any difference in the different countries outside of Denmark in terms of their readiness for digitalization?

Well, of course, there is -- this is why we're looking in the countries that Andre, he touched upon, we're looking into the countries that has this high level of digitalization because this is where we can really do innovation on top of what they already are. So there will be differences. And there is plenty of market space where we are right now. And if we add maybe 1 or 2 countries over the next few years, there will be even more for us to grow in. So for the markets that we're looking into, I think they're quite similar and which gives us a good starting point.

Okay. I think that's pretty much sums it up, Kim. Thank you very much for the walk-through of how we look at the govtech and public across the different geographies where we operate. We will break now until 01:30 p.m. So we'll give each of you on the other side of the screen an opportunity to go and have your lunch, and then we'll reconvene at 01:30 p.m. (sic) [ 02:30 p.m. ] Thank you very much. [Break]

Good afternoon, and welcome back to the second part of our Capital Markets Day. We will now turn over to a fully digital setting and have 3 of our Country Managing Partners present their respective countries. We'll start in the U.K. where Simon is ready. So I will leave the digital platform for you, Simon. Here you go.

Thank you, Thomas. Thank you very much, and thank you for having me on to talk through the U.K. So as Thomas has alluded to, I'm Simon Seymour-Perry, Country Managing Partner for Netcompany here in the U.K. So this all seems pretty normal now presenting over video conferencing, but let's hope that the next time we can be together in the same room. I've actually been part of the U.K. business since 2015, but incredibly proud to be driving our integration and ongoing expansion within the group there in the U.K. I'm supported by 7 partners, who have the responsibility for our team, the delivery to our clients and growing the U.K. business. And this year, we've welcomed 2 new partners, Jack and Prahlad, into our partner group, who are bringing with them a huge amount of experience in the public sector arena, not only from a delivery perspective, but also growth and bringing with them over sort of 30 years' experience in doing that. So we've -- very warm welcome to them this year. And we're also strengthening the principal and management layer within the U.K. business, so -- obviously to maintain our strong delivery track record, but also to support the future growth that we're having, which we'll talk a little bit more about in subsequent slides. So given the level of transformation we're still going through in the U.K., and as André said, we're getting a huge amount of -- and great support from Denmark basically to help with the transition that we're going through to mature the U.K. organization, but also to align to the Netcompany model, which is going very well. And considering we're kind of doing that in a year where we're all sort of based in our own respective countries and doing it virtually has been a fantastic task. So 2020 obviously isn't quite the year that we thought it would be for many reasons. I don't think we ever anticipated implementing a complete business continuity plan overnight across our 3 locations. But it's kind of really demonstrated not only that we can implement it, but to our clients about how kind of resilient we are to these sort of scenarios and how we've managed to maintain a level of sort of strong and resilient delivery to our clients. So although it's been an interesting time, it's really sort of proven just how credible we are. And where many organizations have really struggled during that, we pretty much switched to it overnight, which was a fantastic effort by everybody. We can see from the financial performance. This has been affected by COVID. So we have had a number of stalled projects, particularly as sort of COVID hit at the end of March. There's also been a level of delayed procurement decisions across the public and private sector. And we did also see obviously a contraction of new tenders coming out during that period. I would say now actually coming into the sort of back end of this year that we are starting to see more of those tenders coming through, which is great and will obviously help transition into 2021. But the key thing has been to maintain strong relationships with our clients, and we've really achieved that even though kind of everybody has been working remotely. So as I say, I think the clients have really sort of seen that what we talk about in terms of being agile and flexible and being able to partner and deal with any situation, we've clearly been able to do that. And the other thing is, as Gustaf mentioned earlier, we've recently been through our kind of employee reviews. And it's amazing to see just how well our people are progressing even under these current circumstances and how much our new employees that we've brought on board really feel a part of Netcompany are really enjoying the journey. So next slide, please. So 2020 has always been planned as a further sort of transformational year. We've made big changes in the mix between contractors and permanent here in the U.K. to make sure we can sort of go out and build a strong and dedicated workforce with a total employee FTE of over 400 now. As you can see, we have reduced the level of contractors, down from 52% to 17%, and there'll be further reductions sort of planned going into next year. That's particularly because the IR35 tax changes that were supposed to be implemented this year, they'll be moved to next year, will obviously come into force. But we will continue sort of changing the mix and building a stronger permanent workforce. And so as you can see from the chart between September '19 and September '20, we've recruited 174 permanent people into the U.K., and that's obviously to strengthen our delivery and technical capability. And it's been across a wide range of skills and experience to build the structure that we need of permanent people in the business. So it has been fantastic to see just so many faces coming into the business, obviously, virtually at present. But everybody is really energized, excited to be on board in their journey with -- and their career with Netcompany here in the U.K. But now -- and it's been obviously both an experience for us and for them. Many were interviewed and sort of onboarded virtually, and obviously, many of which are still working from home as well. So I think it's -- again, it's a testament to the team that we've managed to keep people motivated. We've kept them engaged during the lockdown period. We've held a lot of sort of after-dark activities to make everybody sure that they're kind of bonding together. And I think everybody is genuinely looking forward to returning to the offices at some point, and obviously, we'll have an opportunity to meet them more face-to-face as well, which will be great. And we've also probably been quite standout in terms of making our offices -- between the lockdown periods, making sure that we're COVID secure. And actually leaving them open during those periods to give people an opportunity to have a break from working at home and coming in the office. And it's been really encouraging to see that people are very keen to get back in the office and very keen to be interacting with each other. So one of the things -- as obviously part of that recruitment process, we have hired a lot of permanent people. So we have had a duplicity of roles between contractors and permanent people. So we did have some availability, certainly during the sort of initial part of the lockdown period, and that has ultimately affected our margins. But ultimately, it's all necessary to support our sort of objectives as we move into 2021. So I think as I've mentioned as well, I think it's been a huge, great message to clients as well. I think that they're quite astounded that we've managed to kind of transform the business in this period, especially what's gone on this year. But most importantly, that we're attracting the best talent and we're quickly and efficiently onboarding them and moving them on to projects. So it really is demonstrating our agility to sort of scale to achieve what we need to achieve and also to deal with the sort of larger projects that we're bidding to win next year. So -- and I think also and one thing we are making a thing of, we're generally investing in the U.K. We're making a big investment to help close the digital skills gap. We're not an organization full of contractors anymore. We have a strong permanent workforce, and I think that's a really solid message to the U.K. marketplace. Next slide, please. So obviously, the U.K. market -- as André has alluded to, the U.K. market continues to be a significant opportunity for Netcompany, particularly because of the kind of breadth and depth of IT services that we're delivering to existing clients. But also aligned to that core market, which as we can see, is over DKK 125 billion. So it's a very, very large market for us still to go after, and we have a very small percentage of that so far. Our focus really remains on expanding our footprint, central and local government, defense, health care and education, in particular, and also large to medium-size enterprises. So we've already got a good foothold in many of those areas already. A lot of it is about expansion of that footprint, but equally, looking at sort of other areas and other sectors, and particularly in the private sector as it comes out of sort of lockdown in COVID period and being able to identify where those opportunities are. Clearly, post-COVID, organizations need to differentiate themselves with new digital services. That's absolutely key. I think it's been a period of stability this year. But next year, I think we will see a lot of kind of transformation requirements, including in the private sector as well, but we have to wait and sort of see what those are as next year progresses. And also a lot of them have been sort of left with large legacy systems that haven't worked particularly well during the sort of lockdown period. So there's a real opportunity there to sort of build around those legacy systems, provide more transformational services and also provide, obviously, a better customer experience than probably a lot of customers have experienced this year. So we basically sort of built a fantastic capability to win and deliver larger, complex projects going forward with our permanent team. Next slide, please. So as anticipated, in a large market, there's clearly a lot of competitors in there. We kind of consider them in 3 main buckets. Clearly, the incumbents are generally those larger providers who have held long-term contracts with clients, but aren't necessarily delivering the agility. They're not really kind of focused on the relationship that really the clients are now expecting. They expect a different level of service from IT suppliers. So you have the kind of bucket of those in incumbents. You have got those organizations that are adapting and they are acquiring some of those legacy contracts. They're providing ongoing support and maintenance services, but they're not necessarily focused or motivated in improving the client experience or improving the level of service that's being delivered and then the services that are also being delivered as well. So I think this is where, from a U.K. perspective, Netcompany really stands out. I think we've already demonstrated we're different. Our messaging is very clear, IT people leading IT people. We're very delivery focused. We have a very kind of simple structure and a high performing structure within the teams. And also, we've proven that we've -- what we say we'll do, we have achieved. We've got great delivery experience. And we've always got that intent to partner with organizations. And I think I think André and Kim mentioned, it's putting our hands on the hot plate. It is about recognizing that it's all about strong delivery. And in order to achieve that, you have to build really good relationships and do the right thing. So I think all of that and also the kind of knowledge sharing as well. I think that very often, we find that a lot of organizations have aspirations, but they don't necessarily have the kind of skills or experience. So that's something we're bringing to them and helping them sort of adapt to sort of current situations and particularly around agile delivery, for example. So we can really bring a sort of different flavor to how we're supporting our clients. And we have to have some specific examples where we have migrated -- helped organizations migrate services from the larger incumbent suppliers and provide a more sort of quick and efficient and agile platform for those services to be delivered on. And then on from that is obviously on the transformation of those services as we go forward over the next couple of years. So -- and I think through that, it's genuinely creating a really interesting sort of message in the marketplace, and it's definitely leading to new opportunities because of the way that we're engaging and delivering services better than many of our competitors. Next slide, please. So just a little bit on -- obviously, we're heavily involved in the kind of citizens' community within the U.K. and delivering services both across the sort of public and private sector. Obviously, the slide shows some examples there of where we're working, 3 particular ones in the public sector. So we've been working with the Home Office for over 2 years now. And obviously, sort of some of the key projects that we were doing was to enable their over 30,000 employees from a technology perspective, from a unified coms perspective. And this was prior to COVID hitting. Obviously, when COVID hit, everything changed. And obviously, a lot of the environments we're working in are secure as well. So some of the ask was for us to be able to transition, not only continue to deliver the projects we were doing, but also help transition these organizations to be able to work remotely. And so we've certainly received a sort of high level of phrase from most -- from these 3 organizations for our ability to adapt and transition, and particularly where we were asked -- still working in secure environments, how we've kind of adapted our working practices to be able to achieve that. And we're seeing a continued -- because of the work that we're doing, we're starting to see more and more new opportunities now, particularly around the sort of data space, which is clearly a huge, complex area in the Home Office. So that's something that, through our approach, is opening up new opportunities. Similarly, with Highways England, they've been a really, really key client for us. And obviously, their transition to homeworking, but actually still keeping the control centers up and running even with our teams remotely dispersed has been a really sort of key challenge for us. And it's also obviously made sure that goods are still flowing across the U.K. motorway infrastructure. But it's also helping Highways to establish themselves, particularly as they progress with their sort of very large road investment strategy across England and Wales. So -- And on the MOD side, I probably can't say too much about some of the projects that we're doing with MOD because of their sensitivity. But I think Kim mentioned it earlier, we're carrying out a lot of work around and supporting them from a legacy applications perspective and migrating those applications to more flexible and agile cloud hosting platforms. We're also responsible for a large data center rationalization project as well, which is part of their ongoing sort of cost reduction programs. And we've actually managed successfully to transfer 2 of the services already over the last month, which have been relatively large, complex services and literally transitioned overnight, Monday morning, you've got 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 users all logging back in again. So it's been a real testament to the team and our ability to respond even in the current circumstances. And we're also providing a wide range of development services as well across those clients. Obviously, we'll -- and MOD is obviously particularly important. If anybody's seen the news this morning, the Prime Minister has announced GBP 16.5 billion into the defense sector, and a lot of that will be around technology and digital services. So we feel we're really well placed to achieve that. The private sector is slightly different. Obviously, it has been hit hard by COVID. And we continue to work in sort of manufacturing service-based companies and also across the energy sector, in particular, our work as a systems integrator for the smart metering program. So that's continuing to be developed, and we're going through a level of integration testing at the moment. So the team are working hard to continue achieving that program. So I think there remains good opportunity across those other sectors and in the private sector. But obviously, 2021 and how that shapes up will determine which areas of the marketplace that we focus on. So the next slide, please. So as we suggested through this, the public sector remains a sort of key focus for us in the U.K. We've established a really, really good position in what we've achieved so far. We're working with some of the biggest government departments already. So it will be about extending our ability to deliver more projects within those clients, but also look at sort of extending those services across other government departments as well. And as Kim mentioned and went through, the govtech framework is really proving to be very successful in opening up conversations with U.K. government departments, in particular, because they can see that, one, we have a level of experience of delivering large-scale transformation, and this isn't necessarily something they have really achieved so far. A lot of the U.K. government digitization has been around sort of point services as opposed to large scale sort of legacy platform replacement, which is really where the big work is required. And we can demonstrate through the govtech framework, we have a really good story there about how we can achieve them. And also because it can act as an accelerator as well. Very often, some of the solutions that we've developed can be utilized even within the U.K. government. The scale is different, but actually, the technologies and the underlying solution is really something that they can use. And we had a recent conversation with a large government department. We had over 30 of their seniors on that call, and all of them were -- there was a lot of nodding going on in terms of if we could only have some of these solutions. So it is resonating very well. It's allowing us to open doors very well and to sort of share our stories, particularly where we're innovating. And as I say, we can act as an accelerator to their digital transformation. Brexit, obviously, clearly remains a large opportunity. If we can find out what actually it will look like from January 1, that would be even better, but we're already in sort of initial discussions about what the impact of those are, and we know the departments that will be the most affected by that. So there's a real opportunity to provide new digital services to support the Brexit agenda and the policy changes, et cetera. So overall, there clearly continues to be major challenges within U.K. government. We have the scale to be able to help them, and it's going to be a key target for us next year. Next slide. Thanks. So as I mentioned, the private sector, I think this year, they've been focused on sort of surviving as much as they can, putting cost measures in place, providing continuity of service to their customers. But obviously, we've got the effects of the furlough scheme coming up at the end of March. And so what we know is we just have to keep monitoring the private sector. We're already working in a number of areas, and we are providing innovation and proof of concepts into quite a few of the private sectors, but it will be their ability to kind of spin up investment and make decisions going into 2021. So we'll leverage, obviously, our current sector experience, but also be able to sort of determine where we can leverage projects that have gone on in Denmark or Norway or Netherlands and be able to sort of share those over here as well as well as sort of innovating new services. Okay. So that's a quick run through in terms of the U.K. business. I hope that has been helpful. I guess the summary is that it's been a challenging but transformative year. We clearly made a significant investment in our U.K. permanent workforce, and it's been great to see so many coming on board and how energized they are. We've really sort of strengthened our relationships with our existing clients during the COVID period, and I think that will stand us in good stead for new projects with them going into 2021 and obviously identifying new opportunities. Core focus will be to extend across the public sector, as I mentioned, central, local government, defense, health care, education, et cetera. And we're already making good progress on that. And then obviously, anticipating what might happen within the private sector and see how we can sort of help out, particularly around the kind of innovation space and storyboarding new ideas and coming up with sort of prototypes to kind of help them discover what the [ art of the possible might be ]. So thanks very much for listening. I guess I just hand over for questions, Thomas.

Yes. Thank you for that, Simon. And I have a few questions for you here from the roller. So I'm just going to pose them, and we'll take them one at a time. First question goes, you have maintained a number of independent consultants despite a lower utilization. Why is that?

Some of those contractors do have specialist skills. I think there'll be generally a need where we still need to maintain some of that in particularly existing clients and some of the existing projects. They're people with a level of knowledge and experience in those clients. So they've been important to maintain the delivery with those clients.

All right. Thanks, Simon. I have another question for you here from the roller. To get from where you are today to winning large multiyear complex projects, what needs to happen?

So I think the U.K. market, in particular, the public sector is interesting. They've clearly gone through sort of transition period of large outsourcing deals and really gone to kind of much smaller targeted approaches in terms of how they're going to develop new services. I think what we're seeing is that there's an element of testing the marketplace, testing the suppliers with that approach, but I think genuinely to achieve the level of transformation that's required. And we are starting to see it. As I said, there's been a quiet period this year with some of the tenders. We're actually starting to see much larger tenders come through now. And our ability to bid for those things with our experience and combining that with all the work we've done across the other countries, I think stands us in good stead to be able to be able to bid for those larger deals.

All right. Thanks, Simon. And a little bit in line of that answer, did you bid on the NHS track and trace (sic) [ Test and Trace ] contract in the spring?

Yes. That's an interesting one. So obviously, we've been instrumental in providing the app for Denmark, and we did share quite a lot of that technology with the NHS in the U.K. We have been party to some of the contracts that have been part of track and trace (sic) [ Test and Trace ]. But one of the things that is worth mentioning is that -- and probably during that existing customer base, but during COVID, we have been helping the health care sector, which obviously is sort of spread, particularly in the Joint Biosecurity Centre. So we've had a number of people in there helping with some of the track and trace (sic) [ Test and Trace ]. And we've also got -- I'm not sure we can talk about it right now, but we have bid and we're part -- or going through the procurement process for some of the next phase of COVID. So we're very well aligned to what's going on, what the kind of next phases of sort of the COVID vaccination program and what are the sort of testing program, et cetera. So although I can't say much at the moment, we are involved in that currently.

All right. Thanks, Simon. Another question here. Has the significant change from contractors to perms right from university led to lots of competencies and/or client relations?

Not quite sure I can answer the question. I think we've got a -- so we've got a -- obviously, a strong workforce we've built. The -- I mentioned that we've employed people with different skills and experience. So that has been -- we've obviously done a lot kind of graduate hiring this year, but we've also done some experienced hires as well to sort of create the structure that we need going forward. I think if your question is around the graduates and their ability to deliver versus the contractors, I think what we've seen is just completely the opposite. They've absolutely shined in many, many ways. I think the engagement that we've created, given the level of experience and particularly the skill sets they're coming with from their university degrees, where clients might have been slightly reserved, they've suddenly realized just how competent and how brilliant they are. So I think it's been really, let's say, transformational from that perspective. But to see how well the new graduates have come on board and how the new people have come on board and adapted very quickly and just delivering great services has been fantastic.

Thanks, Simon. And another question here. What type of projects and sizes are you tendering for?

So I guess that varies dependent on what each government department is tendering for to a degree. I mentioned that there are very small tenders, which are initially sort of discovery phases to help public sector clients test the theory of some of the services that they want to offer. But there are also larger tenders that we're seeing coming through, predominantly sort of phrased as framework contracts, where either one or multiple suppliers will be part of. But it ranges. It ranges from, to be honest, in the initial stages, sort of a GBP 50,000 piece of work up to GBP 50 million, GBP 60 million sort of framework contracts. So it does vary, depends on each department of how they're structuring, what they want to achieve and particularly where they are within their current incumbent suppliers and their current contracts, because they will be changing the approach they take and some of that is about disaggregation. But I think that plays to our favor much better. I think we're much more able to deliver a wider range of projects within the U.K. marketplace. So it really varies. It varies dramatically if you see the new tenders out. It isn't similar, I think, to the kind of OG process that we see in other countries. There are bigger tenders coming through, but there are also lots of smaller ones. So we have to be agile in terms of being able to respond to those and win those new clients through that new business.

Sure. And then I guess the last question here before we let you off the hook, Simon. It goes a little bit in connection with what you just said. So are there many other Netcompany-sized lookalikes in the market or do you see yourself as unique?

It's a very good question. So I think as we said earlier, it is a very large marketplace and there are a lot of competitors. I think what we have seen, I mean, to give you some sort of scale, within some of the government frameworks, there are over sort of 2,000 suppliers on those frameworks. But you consistently see there is a smaller number of suppliers that actually bid for these things, and we're one of them. So I think the messaging helps us differentiate. I think the investment we're making in the U.K. in terms of digital skills is really helping. So I and the rest of the team actually consider we've got a unique approach. I don't think we tend to consider that we've got many main competitors. We feel that what we've achieved so far is going to stand us in really good stead going forward. So yes. And obviously, we've proven that with, in a relatively short period of time, the acquisition of very large clients that we've had.

All right. Thanks, Simon. We'll break here. Lots of questions coming in. So we'll do a recap with questions offline. But thanks for sharing your view and the update on the U.K., Simon.

And we'll now try to see if we can get Geir in from Oslo.

Yes.

Hey, Geir. Great to have you. And I'd like to introduce you to the day-to-day here, right? So our next presenter is Geir, who is a Country Managing Partner in Norway.

Thank you, Thomas. First of all, thank you for having me. I'm very humbled and not at least very, very proud to representing both Netcompany and Norway in this Capital Markets Day. My name is Geir Olsen. I am in my ninth month in Netcompany, together, as you see on this page, with 4 other partners. We are an organization that counts about 233 consultants as we are speaking. And you see on the figures on the right-hand side, you see that we are a little bit above last year first 9 months when it comes to revenue, but also quite behind on the EBITA for the first 9 months. That comes primarily from the effect of building the organizations for the cases and projects that we have planned for and also be able to entering the new market space we are looking for in Norway. And I can already now say that we know for sure that we have a very positive effect of that strategy. As we speak, there are nearly none of the new recruitments from this year that is not assigned to any kind -- one kind or another project. So if you look to the next slide, there are 3 new partners in Norway. Together with myself, we have Thomas, who started only a few -- half year ago; and Atle, who started in the beginning of the year. We have recruited 33 consultants, 11 senior consultants and 12 managers. We have strengthened the management team for the work ahead of us. And what we are looking for is also the ability to maneuver into the market we are looking for. I can -- we tend to say that when the competition starts, we try to lead 2-0 when the tender process starts. And if you look to the next slide, you will see that we have a market -- core market of DKK 8 billion per annum. And when we address the tenders and looking for advantages for us, we are basically focusing in 2 parts: one, having done the pre-tender process together with the client; and secondly, we have utilized the govtech framework, as you have been presented for earlier today, with its references, technical components and so forth. We address basically large governments and large, medium-sized companies as well as the large municipalities in Norway. We're also looking for large, complex projects with requiring dedicated teams, and we have won a few of them over the last few months. So what I'm trying to explain to you is that the govtech framework and the strategy of being ready for the new projects are working. From the COVID side, we also see that some part of the private industry is obviously struggling in the service area, for instance. But in Norway, we also see that public sector is somewhat driving the market, taking the responsibility to continue their plans and projects. If you look on the next slide, the market, as we see it, we divide into 3 competitive areas. We have the incumbent, as you see, the big, large players. I'm from one of those. They have been in the market for several, several years. They are focused on large and probably more simple projects. If you look at what they have won recently, it's very much operations, it's a little bit workplace, but they also have quite a big market share. On the other hand, we also have Accenture or Visma, the other companies, who are more adapting to do the new way of doing business. They have legacy, obviously, but they are closing the gap between running and growing. Netcompany, we have placed ourselves somewhat in between these 2 areas. We bring to Norway both the competence, the framework from Denmark, and that give us a quite good advantage when it comes to how to compete in the market. One positive effect in Norway as well is that the Norwegian authorities are very well looking into the neighbors. They're looking to how things are being done in other close countries to us and especially Denmark. So when we open the doors and tell them that we have done similar work in other business areas around the countries, we are met very, very positively. So we look into the next slide. Over the last few months, we have won quite a few contracts. The bigger one is the Norwegian Medicine Agency. It's a platform that helps them on their daily work basis. It's a contract lasting for 8 years, defined as a partnership. It's also a contract based on what we have done for the similar agency in Denmark. And it's a contract where we also, on all quality areas, was better -- just to be better than the incumbent supplier they had. So this is a project we are very, very proud of, and it's given us a tremendous insight in not only this client, but also the clients or customers alongside them. The second contract we mention is Ferde. Ferde is one of the toll companies in Norway. There are 5 of those toll companies in Norway. Ferde is a contract in around NOK 40 million. It's also the second one we won this year. As part of this contract, there is an option for 2 other of the toll companies in Norway. So completing this contract, we will have 4 of 5 toll companies as our customers by, hopefully, end of next year or the beginning of 2022. Another contract we recently won is the COVID app for Norway. The COVID app in Norway stands on the shoulders from what we have done in Denmark. So we have a team now working closely with the health authorities, and we will have the app launched just before Christmas. The progress is very well. We reuse the competence from what we have done in Denmark. We have a cross-country team working on this. And this app alone and this contract alone have given us a tremendous, I'm looking for the word, not insight, but attention in the Norwegian market. And it's fair to say that with these wins, Norway experienced Netcompany from a totally new side. They see the company as both a little bit new coming from a more anonymous side, but also a little bit more experienced because we are using the govtech framework from Denmark and is perceived today as the new experienced kid in the block, basically. And not only that, yesterday, we signed a new contract with the Directorate for Integration and Diversity in Norway. So we are recently signed up and started today a project within grant management. And grant management is very interesting for us because we know of at least 4 or 5 other opportunities in public sector within the same business area. So with this contract from yesterday, we believe that we are well positioned for other opportunities going into 2021. So we look at the next slide. These are a few of the contracts that we are working on, on a daily basis, the projects we have. I mentioned Fjellinjen and Fjellinjen was the first of now 4 opportunities out of 5. It's a project that is based on the govtech framework, and the same is Statens legmiddelverk or the medicine agency coming next. And on the agency, the medicine agency, we already see that there are expansion opportunities on the table and in discussions with the clients. When talking to COVID, Oslo City, as the third one on the public sector, it's been hit more than most areas in Norway. But only recently, we received feedback that they are very, very satisfied with the deliverables from Netcompany. And even though COVID also give them some struggling -- struggles when it comes to the budget for 2021, they are fairly optimistic that we keep the same level of engagement or slightly above what we have had recently. Going over to the private sector. We are working on DNB, which is one of the, if not the, biggest bank and insurance company in Norway. We are creating, together with them, a platform that will comply with the new pension savings regulations that starts from 1st of January. We are also in close contact with them and looking into other business areas that might be opportunities for the -- to be closed in the months ahead. Another client of us is Møller Mobility Group, the largest importer of cars in Norway, been a client with us for several, several years. And last week, we signed a new contract where we are maintaining their software as an add-on to already client relations. So we will look into an expanded team for already for Møller in -- already from next week of. OBOS, one of the bigger facility companies in the Oslo area. We are working on a digital platform, connecting neighbors. And it's been very popular in this COVID eras, where we can in the neighborhood, send messaging to each other, request for help, support, whatever is needed in the neighborhood. And we are working closely with OBOS also into new tenders for 2021. So what I'm trying to say is that we are in a transformation in Norway, moving from -- or into the govtech framework. To reuse the competence, to reuse the references from other countries in Netcompany and to reuse the methodology that is build up over the last years gives us an advantage in the competition as we see it. It also -- when asked who is your competitors, as we discussed a few pages ago, there are a lot of competitors in the tenders, but there are quite few who can do what we are doing. There is not easy way for others to mitigate with a reference case base library as we have from Denmark but also from other countries and use it in a similar, very simple market as Norway. And I believe that, that is the success factor, together with our business development work and pre-tender work, in the Norwegian market and also the reason I can say that my last 9 months -- or first 9 months in Netcompany has been the most fun I have had in several, several years. So with that, Thomas, I went through the -- my slide package.

All right. Thank you very much, Geir, for that update on the Norwegian market. Not surprisingly, there are a few questions for you. So I'm just going to read them out loud here. The first one is, you've talked about winning some new contracts in Q4 '20. Can you give some more details around these that you've just been through? How big? How complex? And are there any more in the pipeline?

We have more in the pipeline. So hopefully, there will be new contracts to be won. The last one we signed yesterday is a contract for nearly NOK 48 million -- excuse me, NOK 26 million. There are quite a few contracts that are going on now. But NOK 26 million, based on Modulus Case system, where we are handling grant management, which is a big part of several public agencies in Norway. And that was a competition with 12 other competitors. We came out best on quality on all areas. And when discussing it with the client yesterday, they said that our understanding of public sector and the references from other public agencies we have been handling in other similar countries make us special from day 1 when they opened the tender. And they have heard the same from Fjellinjen. They have heard the same from the medicine agency. They're quite complex. They go cross municipalities. They go cross public sector. And this is a part of the business area that still will have a quite few contracts in the future.

Thanks, Geir. You actually just answered a follow-up question on the trigger points for winning these deals. So we'll skip to the next question. And it goes like, to what extent would you say that these projects you've won in the last few months mark an inflection point in Norway?

If -- I'm not sure I understand that question entirely. But...

So the question is, Geir, to which extent has the contracts we have won in Norway over the last couple of months, to which extent do they make a turning point, inflection point in the Norwegian market for Netcompany?

It's obviously a turning point. We have had more media coverage the last 2 months than I believe we have had in several years. The media coverage has been very interesting, curious about the company and very positive about the company. So as I tried to explain earlier on, for most -- for many people, for many customers in Norway, we are moving from something they know about but don't understand to something that really understand and now we know more of that.

All right. So another question for you here, Geir. Given the new contracts revealed today, how do you assess your current capacity and utilization for the immediate future?

We front loaded quite extensively from June, July, recruitment in Norway. So it was a bet. It's a bet that worked quite well because they are now staffed into these projects. And the second one, we are working very closely with Poland, especially Denmark, and also utilize with the other countries to make sure that we are capable of delivering all these contracts. And the COVID, if nothing else, it helped us work virtually with all clients cross-borders. So the effect of the way we are doing business today also helps the work cross-borders for us.

Sure. So another question here. It goes, very clear emphasis on the govtech framework and strong Danish public sector experiences driving differentiation into the Norwegian public sector. How do you see then expansion into the private sector in Norway, where Netcompany have -- may have less proven industry solutions to bring from Denmark?

I believe we still have quite good opportunities in Norway. We see some of the references in Denmark, for instance, in retail, to be utilized in retail in Norway. We see it in insurance to insurance in Norway. We see that the feedback at least from DNB when it comes to supplier satisfaction towards Netcompany is a good starting point within finance. So without giving any figures, we are optimistic that there are market to be gained also in private sector.

Very glad to hear that you're not giving out any figures, Geir, on that one. So the next question goes as follows, as far as I understand, clients in Norway tend to buy CVs rather than projects. That is, no matter how good Netcompany are, they are -- the buying process among the clients inhibit you to win the tenders. Has that changed? Or how do you view this situation?

It's a very good question. And obviously, that is a factor. So what we are doing in the pre-tender process with the clients is try to emphasize that there are other ways of fulfilling their goals. There are frameworks to be utilized, and therefore, also possibilities to gain the same without having a consulting process. So it's on the hard work to change the market.

Thanks for that, Geir. And another question here. Historically, you've been awarded a second or third place when participating for public tenders in Norway. What has been the main problem? And what has changed since we are now starting to win large projects?

The major contribution is to embrace a group policy in business development, to utilize the experience across borders, to use the methodology that's been tested several and several times. And not try to -- or try to prove that you alone can do this. This is a team effort across Netcompany, and that's the major part of the winning success over the last few months in Norway.

And another question for you here, Geir. Are you planning to step up your hiring in Norway?

We have a hiring plan that is on line with the previous year. So we will step up. We have been seen as quite aggressive in hiring in Norway, and we are not planning to go beyond that, not at all. But it will follow the contracts.

Sure. Another question for you here, Geir. You joined Netcompany 9 months ago. What was attracting for you to join Netcompany given your long previous record with EVRY?

I needed a climate change. That's my personal view on it. And the climate change is to move from a large, complex system. And I had so many good colleagues from that period, friends of mine. But over to an agile, speedy, noncomplex organization that everyone supports everyone. And I really feel that in Norway, I have a supporting hand from all countries, and that makes it easier to convince the client that we are their preferred supplier in the future. So this is still the same industry, but it's quite a different way of doing business, and I love it.

Another question here. Can you elaborate a little bit on the project with the medicines agency?

Yes. The project is both implementing a new solution for them as well as we alongside maintain and later on remove their old legacy system. It's based on [ specialty dynamics ], and we have a team working on all areas now. We are in the beginning of the project, where all the details are set, and we have a very good dialogue with the client. And just to bring it from the other question, the bigger difference from my position today from my previous work is that we are very, very much more close to the client. The dialogue is more direct. And when we say IT people leading IT people, it is experience on a daily basis.

All right. Thanks, Geir. Here's a question that will challenge your natural humbleness. So since you joined Netcompany, what issues have you helped address?

I hope that we have together addressed both the business development side, the importance of pre-work with the clients, the need to work with the clients in beforehand. And that is not -- this is no I in this, this is a team effort across all departments, all the countries. Secondly is to embrace their methodology. There's no reason for Norwegians to do it their own way if it works on a more scalable way across countries. And those 2 effort is what we have set focus on.

Thanks, Geir. And the last question for you before I'll let you off the hook. Netcompany has a high brand recognition among students in Denmark. How is that in Norway?

It's -- from a quite new guy in the company, it's fairly good. We support the student organization at higher education as well as we support both bachelors and masters programs and have student projects. So despite the size of the company in Norway, we are quite well recognized among the student organizations. So -- and we have a dedicated team working on this alone.

All right. Thanks, Geir. We are done with the questions. So thank you very much for the presentation of the Norwegian part of Netcompany, and have a great time up there. I'll leave you from the presentation.

Thank you.

And that then leads us to our third presentation from our markets outside of Denmark. Happy to welcome our Country Managing Partner from Holland, Sander Kluin. Are you with us, Sander?

I am. I hope you hear me correctly.

The floor is all your, Sander.

Okay. Thanks, Thomas. Well, very pleased to be here in my first Capital Markets Day. And my name is Sander Kluin. Pronounced it very correctly, Thomas, very good. I've been the Managing Partner in the Netherlands since 2010. And since we became part of Netcompany last year, quite a lot of things happened at the organization, as you all can already see within the numbers. But first of all, something about the people. We have 6 partners within the company, and it's a very good mixture of knowledge and experience. And we have been strengthening these partners -- partner group last -- this year also with the introduction of Hein Franken. He's been focusing on business development. He has a very rich experience within the government sector, which we are trying to get to be more well known. So very good partner group, and we have been performing quite well last year. We had an initial transition, of course, in 2019. It was quite an intense period. We speeded up the transition quite fast. So we are embracing on all our new projects, the methodology, of course, introducing the academy, all the key elements all my previous presenters have been talking about. But also -- well, we had a sort of a slow start in the beginning of the year. That's also because of, well, the final part, the piece of the transition. But then it kicked in, and we were able to win multiple tenders and grow at the same time with a lot of new colleagues this year. As you can see, the numbers in terms of revenue and adjusted EBITDA have been increasing quite well. So we experienced a very good year, although we still are implementing some of the key elements of Netcompany in terms of educating everybody within the methodology and transforming all other processes which are being used within the group. Our share is still small. It's only -- last year, it was really small with that 1%, but it grew a little bit bigger this year. And so I'm pleased to see that. And on average, we are -- we were having 120 FTEs in 2020, but the head count so far has surpassed 160. So that's very good. Next slide, please. So the landscape we are in is that we are a full focus on the public sector. And we see a lot of competition over there, but mainly from the bigger organizations, like the incumbents you see in this slide. So we -- in every tender we're in, we're competing with the really big ones. And there's actually a big marketplace going on there, but there is ample room for new competitors like Netcompany. And there was one of the previous questions, if there were more companies like us with our size, competing with public tenders. And actually, there are very limited number of companies our size. So between 100 and 200 people competing for the bigger projects. And that's a true chance for us, a really good opportunity since we bring a new message and a new way of working and a very -- being very sharp and focused on winning the tenders. So there's a lot of market share to gain for Netcompany within the Netherlands. Also, within the Netherlands, there's a huge market for replacing legacy systems. Maybe we can shift to another slide again. There's a huge market there. Next slide, please. Yes, I was expecting another one. It doesn't matter. So there's a huge market within the Netherlands for winning tenders and replacing -- exactly, thank you, replacing legacy systems. As you can see, the core market for Netcompany is about DKK 34 billion. And it's really a large market with a government which is very ambitious. We are behind the Danish story here. And the government within the Netherlands is expressing a true ambition to move up the ladder and to digitize the society more and better. With certain parts within the ministries and government agencies, there's a huge, well, legacy story there and where they are, well, afraid of replacing those legacy systems and solutions. And there where Netcompany fits in quite good, also with all the platforms and experiences we are gathering within the group. So there's also -- despite already being big in terms of market, there's an increase of this market share expected in following months -- years. And with my talks with the ministries, I truly sense an urgency to increase speed on digitization, especially during -- as a result of the current crisis, but truly move forward with digitization within the government agencies. So the core markets we are experiencing is quite large, complex projects, which are turning more to a results-driven procurement way of working instead of hiring in CVs and a person-based service focus. And that's where we step in because our organization is fully focused on delivering projects. We do not deliver CVs, but we do deliver a way of working and we deliver results. And there is a true fit between the Danish story here and Netcompany in Netherlands. Next slide, please. So the market focus we are having is that we have a continuous focus on our core customers and agencies. We have not -- do not have a lot of customers, but we try to focus on a few customers and increase our service level over there, and we are trying to increase that size at our current customers. We're already also serving recently won tenders. We go back to the slide in a moment. But we have won quite a few tenders in recent months, and we are executing those tenders, which are typically 1-, 2-year projects with a maintenance contract from 4, 6 to 10 years plus contract. So we expect a lot of them as well. We are in quite a number of tenders right now, and we are very carefully to select the right tenders as stated within the slide. But we are putting in the potential of the Netcompany Group at a number of these tenders. So the possibilities we have within the Netherlands are quite big, and we are very well known, of course, within all the platforms and the components the govtech framework is delivering. And we are having a lot of talks with ministries and with top level management to tell the Netcompany story, and they are quite open for it. Even in these times, we are managing to tell the story and people are very open for it. So well, we expect that story to be told further on and well, to see the benefit from that within the tenders. And maybe go back a few slides to the one wins -- to the wins of 2020. We have been growing quite fast this year, and that has been the direct result of a number of tenders we won. First of all, the replacement and participation funds. These are funds -- they're quite big funds. They are in by law for all the primary schools within the Netherlands. And what we are doing there with quite a large team is to modernize their solution environment over there. And to change regulations, they are -- they have to change regulations, and therefore, put them in all the solutions they already have. This is besides development projects, also maintenance projects. There's a multiyear maintenance project, and this is actually 1 of the 2 biggest projects we are working on right now. Next one is Ministry of Finance. It's a new customer for us as well within the Netherlands. And this quite interesting story there is that we have been able to win the tender as 1 of 9 suppliers. We won the tender mainly to our sharp focus on the tender itself and our mixture between the platform we are delivering, namely Modulus Case, and limits the size of the custom-made software within this project. And this project has started as of -- [ 6th ] of May. And this is also for us a true example to put in the methodology and working also within an international environment. We have colleagues from Vietnam and Poland and Denmark as well. So this is a true group effort in delivering this solution within a fixed time frame, fixed budget frame and a fixed scope frame as well. This is a very good project, an example for the Netcompany Group as well. And it will give us a great deal of leverage also towards other ministries and especially towards the Tax Ministry within the Netherlands, where there's a huge workload ahead in the next coming of years. Third one on the list is the Netherlands Gambling Authority. That's where we develop -- further develop a register, which is in place by the gambling authority to limit online gambling addiction. We have been putting this solution within our operations procedures, and the register will open up beginning of next year. So we expect, well, continuous work for this registry as well. Final one is the Ministry of Education. This is a long-time customer for Netcompany Netherlands. And we were able to win a tender for developing, designing an app, which is platform independent and which provides all kind of daily news for policymakers or employees within the ministry and associated organizations, focusing on education, culture and science. Okay. These are the major wins from 2020. In terms of delivery, and it's -- one project I would like to mention is that we delivered the national donor registry. And it's actually quite a large project we were providing for CIBG and the executive organization within the Ministry of Health. And that was quite a successful project, which was a high-profile project within the Netherlands. A lot of marketing budgets needed to communicate with the entire population. And there have been a timely delivery and very well received by our customer. And it has been audited as well by the Software Improvement Group. And as a result, it was also awarded with the Legacy Modernizer award 2020, which is very nice to see since we are very keen on delivering the right quality and delivering on time. So this project has all these aspects well accomplished. So we're very proud on that one as well. Okay. I think maybe I'm a bit quick, but we can move on to questions. I'm sure there's some around for me.

Thank you very much for that, Sander. And I have a few questions for you here from the roller. So I'm just going to shoot off here. How have the number of wins that you've had since the beginning of October compared to July and August?

The tender wins?

Yes.

Well, the wins I just expressed were before October. So we're quite busy on that. And there were only smaller wins within October with current customers. So no tender wins in October. But -- yes, I think that's the answer to the question.

Great. And then another question for you, Sander. It goes like this, since Netcompany has taken over QDelft in Holland, the FTE has more than doubled. How has that impacted the culture of the Dutch operation? And can you continue to grow at that pace?

Yes. Well, good question. Of course, the organization is somewhat changing, but what remains is that we are able to select, well, high-skilled technical people as all other countries here are doing. So that has not changed. What does have changed is that we are able to win larger projects. And the way of working, the processes which are in place to really structure projects, that has changed. So the culture in itself has not changed, although we grow bigger. And therefore, we need to -- we have implemented also the social activities, which were, well, unfortunately, quite limited due to the crisis, but we are making sure everybody still knows each other and keep interacting. But in a sense, the change, what has happened is that we are clearly more business focused, more focused on structure and methodology and providing good insight in the development of the projects and that everybody is involved within that process. And that has changed.

All right. Thanks, Sander. And another question here. Given all the contracts you're currently working on, do you have any plans to step up hiring further?

Yes, we do. We are continuing to grow. And we are working on multiple tenders, of course, but the market share, which has -- can be gained is quite big. And we're situated in Delft. As you all know, it's right beside technical university, and we are keep on attracting the right people. So we keep focus on recruitment there as well.

All right. Thanks, Sander. And then a question here. The performance of the Dutch operation has improved significantly since 2019. What has been the main driver of that?

I must say that, of course, we invested a lot of 2019 within the methodology and to getting to know the Netcompany family as well as all the platforms which has been developed. And what really has changed is that our focus shifted to even larger contracts. The wins we had this year was mainly because of the Netcompany platforms, we are able to put it within the tenders, and that changed. So we are able to focus on bigger projects due to the platforms which are available within the group and make them part of the suggested or proposed solution. As well as Netcompany is way bigger, therefore, we are more into side of our customers. And we are also able to deliver the bigger project. So our focus has passed on to bigger tenders, and that has happened faster than I would have imagined to a year ago.

Thanks, Sander. Another question here. How have win rates changed now versus before Netcompany were involved?

Right. We had fairly high win rates before Netcompany, but that was also due to very select -- we were very selective on the tenders and full focusing on that one. I think the win rate has dropped a little bit, but it's also because we are going on more tenders. So we see a lot of possibilities there, and there's a fierce competition going on. But well, the win rate is -- has dropped a bit, but we are putting in more tenders.

And another question for you, Sander. How is the public sector in the Netherlands responding to the govtech framework?

I must say very good. We have been -- we have multiple discussions and meeting with a lot of new people responsible for digitization within the government. And well, they were actually overenthusiastic. They see a lot of possibility there in implementing the platforms we are providing and the components we are suggesting because there's a tendency also to do it all themselves and to design and to build from the bottom up again, which -- and there, they experience failures as well. So we have a lot of conversation in the last couple of months, and they're very open for meeting us and hearing the Danish story. So they have received Netcompany and all it provides within the govtech very positively.

Thanks a lot, Sander. I think that's actually through the roller of questions here. So I'll let you off the hook, and thank you very much for giving an update on Netcompany in the Netherlands. And with...

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Sander. And with that, we have 15 minutes break. We will start again at 3 o'clock, where we will welcome 2 of our customers. It's the Copenhagen Airport, represented by Thomas Woldbye; and it's ATP, represented by Hans Christian Jelstrup. So tune back in at 3 o'clock. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back from the break. I hope you have found the day so far very inspiring. And I can promise you, it's going to be even more exciting now. Here, we're going to go through some of our customers, and that is actually not true in this case because Copenhagen Airport is much more than a customer. It was a customer once, and then it became a partnership. And today, I'm happy to say that we also have a company together driving business together. So we are in the most extreme sense of a partnership that you can be. And thank you so much, Thomas Woldbye, CEO of Copenhagen Airports, for showing up here today and introducing what we do together and the whole idea about Smarter Airports. So please, Thomas, the floor is yours.

Thank you, André. Yes, good afternoon, everyone. My name is, as André said, Thomas Woldbye. I'm the CEO of Copenhagen Airports, which I've been for soon 10 years. Before that, I had a career with A.P. Moller - Maersk, the biggest shipping company in the world. As André said, we have an exciting partnership ahead of us between Netcompany and Copenhagen Airports. Before I get to that, I'll just give you a little bit of background of what kind of company are we. We are sort of between the -- in the top 15 airports in Europe. We have a company history which dates back to 1925. So one of the oldest airports in Europe and in the world. We are a privately held company. We are partly state owned, but a majority privately owned and listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. I just brought some numbers that you see in front of you. I'm not going to go through all of them. But in 2019, we had 30 million passengers through the airport. And I'll come back to on a later slide what has COVID-19 meant to that and how we look at that in the future, but these are the numbers that you see. We have consistently been rated one of the most effective airports in the world and also one of the more innovative. And the reason I mentioned that in all hopefulness is that it has a bearing on what we're doing with -- together with Netcompany. So I'll come back to that as well. We have grown from 20 million passengers in 2011 to 30 million passengers in 2019. So quite a steep growth curve. We are the -- sort of the major hub of Scandinavia and one of the major hubs in Northern Europe where our -- with a transfer traffic of around 25%. So that's enough about Copenhagen Airports itself. In our strategy -- and I won't make it a long story about our strategy, but that also has a bearing as to how we ended up partnering with the Netcompany in a more serious way. You can see our 6 sort of main strategy work streams ahead of you. It has to do our role in society. It's a normal thing for any airport to make sure that the society we serve also like what we do. It has a climate bearing, which is extremely important currently. We are and have been for a long time a data and digitally driven airport. We are probably one of the most digitized airports in the world. We have a very high people cost. So we do anything we can to digitalize anything possible, both in our running of the infrastructure, our operations and our customer interface. We have a strong focus on the capabilities we need for the future. Also, that has a strong digitalization component in it because we need to take all of our blue collars and turn them into much more than that. And we focus consistently on our retail, which is our main source of income actually. By far the biggest part of our profit is made in our 125 shops and restaurants, our 2 hotels and our parking. And we pride ourselves of having one of the best customer services in the world. Then we have a strong focus on investments. I should say, that has been a huge debate over the last 6 months, but at least until a few months ago, that was -- we were expanding the airport quite rapidly. And then -- and finally, what we call build new revenue streams. I would say, all over the world, airport revenues are under pressure. And we have been trying to find ways to say how can we convert the capabilities we have into revenue streams outside of our sort of core airport area. We've been looking at various things. We have looked at investing in other airport, which is currently very low margin also before COVID-19 and sort of deselected that. And we ended up with saying how can we actually take a lot of the capabilities that we built over time, which is fast queuing, queue management, high level of retail management and high level of spending, our baggage system and other things. There are so many things that we can -- where we have developed individual competencies that we haven't really sort of packaged in a way that we could spread them out. But that is an ambition because many, many airports are looking to what we are doing and implementing it in their area. So that's been one of the areas we looked at, and that's really the one I'll leave the slide with saying we were looking at this area. And then what happened was we realized -- sorry, backtrack a second there. I'll go back to that. Anyway, this is what COVID has meant to our volumes. And I'm not going to spend a long time on that really, other than to say, of course, we are in the same situation as most other airports in the world with a dramatic drop in our passenger volumes. But we are quite confident now, particularly with a vaccine coming on, that we will come back to very sustainable levels, both of passengers and income, within the next couple of years. What happened was that when we started looking around and saying what is it, what capabilities do we have that we can actually sell to other airport with success and some sort of profit. We look at many various areas, but we also started looking at partnering because we said we may have the core capabilities to help other airport. We have done that. We have our own consultancy already. But how do we actually package that in an IT frame that will make it implementable in other areas? And we were quite conscious from the start that we would not have the capability to do that, and we would have to look for a partner. We have looked at other partners, I should say, but ended up with a Netcompany with whom we have had a very successful cooperation over a long time. As you can see on the slide, there are many of our systems that Netcompany have been involved in for a very long time and very successfully. We've worked with Netcompany for at least 10 years. So that's as long as I've been around and can remember seeing the cars around the airport. So at least for that long. And together with Netcompany, we built some of the first AI, artificial intelligence, steering of our cargo -- sorry, of our baggage system of any airport in the world and implemented it and up and running, I think, in 2018 already before most others in our operational setting, which had a huge effect on our efficiency and speed in our baggage delivery. So we've started spreading that out elsewhere. So when we were looking at packaging all of these capabilities into a strong IT platform that we could go to market with, Netcompany came out as a very natural, and as it turned out, a very inspiring partner. So that is really what we have been working on over the last -- well, since the beginning of this year to say how does a partnership like that look? How do we make sure that we are both fully committed to making this a success? And the conclusion was that -- 2 things really. On the structure side that we created a joint venture with a 50-50 ownership, which means that we are both equally committed. We are both in the strong belief that by building a joint venture where we both own 50%, we'll be able to build a cake that is bigger than any of us would be able to do individually in the market that we're in. I mean, theoretically, we could build an IT system and theoretically, Netcompany could build an IT system that would serve airports, but neither of us have the right capabilities. But together, we can make a cake that is definitely bigger than we could individually. The main focus will be actually on the -- at least initially on the core running of the airport. It's called the AODB, which is the airport operational database. And that's the core system that actually runs all of the main functions of an airport, i.e., which aircraft gets to which gate, how do we communicate to the passengers, all the information you see, but also a lot of what happens behind the scene, which is incredible important. So that's sort of the first step because many airports are in the need of new AODBs. They also are in a need of further digitalization, and this product will offer that. And then in time, it's an ambition to build on that with more functionalities that will be able to make airports optimize their business in the way that many, many airports want and then many airports need. You might then ask what then about COVID-19? Is it really true now that we have a 90% drop in air passenger volumes around the world? In my world, absolutely, the answer is yes because for many airports, efficiency and digitalization is the way out of the crisis. And this system will give them a, if not exactly, plug-and-play, but definitely a very professional and very well worked through solution to do just that. And I think many airports will find that highly attractive rather than having to develop it themselves. And there are really no standard solutions in the market that you can just plug-in. Also each individual airport is different, and we have built -- or are building the platform with that particular challenge in mind. So that when we get to an airport, we can configure the system. So it fits to the various individual airports, which are quite different and much more different than, for example, airlines are. So that's sort of a little bit of the background. We look at this with huge optimism. We think there's really a market out there. There's a bit of an empty market. There are not many providers. The biggest provider we know of in this market has about 8% market share. So this market is really characterized by a lot of small, local providers that built systems 10, 20 years ago, but that very few will be able to build the kind of system that airports are looking for today and that we are now able to build with the delivery model of Netcompany. So the idea is really to sort of leapfrog a little bit from where most airports are now what we would call airport 2.0 kind of level and then bring the future customers of smarter airport into airport 4.0. So they sort of leapfrog the level that, for example, Copenhagen Airport is at today and many other -- a number of other good airports, particularly in Europe and Asia, which is sort of airport 3.0. So optimized, but not with an integrated system that can run this -- that can run and optimize particularly this whole airport operation. So that's sort of the idea that I'm quite confident that it will be attractive to quite a lot of airports around the world. Yes. And I think it's important just to maybe end off on the note that we have now been working close together for 10 years, as I said, but really close together also on the top management level with Netcompany for the last year. And I think we have only become more enthusiastic about what this can bring us and there's a really good chemistry. We have the benefit that we are very close to each other also geographically, which means that developing the system, solving problems and so on gets done really, really fast. And our people are already sitting together so that we get sort of one company feeling in the company that we are now building together and that we hope will grow successfully. And definitely, it's part of our strategy to become our -- maybe third leg in our business. That's a aeronautical part running the airport. It's a commercial part running all the commercial areas that we have around the airport. And then the third would be instead of buying other airports and actually getting into other airports and profit -- and gaining profit on that via rather an IT system, which I think will be a lot more efficient. So I think that was really the main story here. Is there anything left? No. I'll just leave it there, and we can open up for questions, I guess.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Thomas, for sharing that. And I have a few questions here from the audience on the roller. And the first one is, you mentioned that there is differences between different airports. How much of the platform can be reused? And how much will have to be made for the individual airports that you might target subsequently?

I think the whole idea has been using the knowledge that we have and also that we have about other airports. And we have run other airports before. And what we know is that most individual airports are different from each other. They have a different setup. The reason for that if you compare to airlines is that airlines work globally and their operating model will tend to converge towards one being the most efficient model. That doesn't happen for airports. So the question is very relevant. But the whole idea is that we build the system so we don't need to rebuild it, but we need to configure it so that we have taken care of most of the variations that we know of and be able to configure the system. So there's no rebuilding, but there will definitely be local adaptation, and we know that, and we are trying to make that as efficient as we can, but there's no rebuild.

You said that you are confident that Smarter Airports will be attractive to airports globally. What gives you this confidence? Have airports you've spoken with indicated that they would buy the solution?

Well, first of all, I have a lot of cooperation with other airports. I also sit on the Board of ACI, which is the global airport organization, [ interest ] organization. And from my talks with them, we can see that many airports are at this stage that Copenhagen were at when we started looking around, i.e., that our current legacy systems are just running out based on age. Many of our -- similar airports around the world have similarly old systems that need to be replaced and many have the same utilization and efficiency ambitions as we have. And that's why we think that there will be people -- I know for certain there are people looking for this. And we have spoken to airports, both in United States, in India, in Asia in general and also Europe, and know that there are definitely airports who are looking for this. It's clear that we have only made this official, so we've not been able to go in depth. But I have little -- I'm not concerned about the interest for this. Of course, we have to make it sufficiently attractive.

What size of market do you assess that you are approaching?

I think that's difficult to say, but I would say it's definitely more than -- if you take it in Europe, in euros, I would say it's more than EUR 2 billion on our addressable market. I'm sure the global market is bigger, but we're not addressing very small airports, and we may not be addressing the biggest airports, at least not initially because they would tend to build their own systems.

Another question goes here, Thomas. What kind of potential savings would an airport yield if on this digital platform?

That's a very difficult question. But of course, the whole -- the question is relevant because the whole idea of this system is for airports exactly to do that. And if you look at the efficiencies that we have achieved in a number of areas like security, like in check-in, like in baggage, on implementing solutions like the one we are now going to spread out but build more bespoke for Copenhagen, they range typically between 20% and 40%. I don't think an airport would get that across the board, but there are definitely individual key processes where we have seen that kind of efficiency gain over the last 5 years, quite documentable. So I would say easily 20% across the board.

Okay. A few more questions coming in here. We'll take the next one here. I hope you can create this innovative system. Can I expect Netcompany or the joint venture to sell this latest system to other airport operators?

Yes, that's the idea. But I mean, it's the joint venture selling it, I think we should be clear on that. That's how we have structured it.

Exactly. Another question here, Thomas. How will you be positioned relative to the other competitors in the market, for instance, Amadeus?

I think what we are building is -- has the benefit of 2 companies that are basing ourselves on our core competencies, so Netcompany on the IT side and Copenhagen Airport on the airport side. You can say a company like Amadeus is an excellent company in many ways, but they don't have that sort of benefit of having in their partnership and in their ownership, the -- one of the more advanced customers that they could seek to sell to. So that's clearly one of the benefits. The other one is that we are basing it on Netcompany's proven development model, which is fast and also based on the latest technology. Most of the technology out there is a little bit outdated, some more than others. I'm not going to comment on specific competitors. But it's a bit outdated, whereas we'll come with the system, which is much more modern and based on the latest technology.

And then another question here. What is the plan from here in terms of the Smarter Airport organization, i.e., the JV, marketing, sales team, establishment and so forth?

Well, as a deal principle, we try to keep the company as lean as we can in the beginning and drawing on the resources of the 2 ownership companies, so we don't get too much cost in the company. So we can really focus on the core -- of the core job of that company, which is, one, to develop the system; and two, to then, as also mentioned, sell it. And we are now building up the sales and marketing organization, not with a big army of people, but some very key people both from CPH and from Netcompany who have a strong international service experience.

And a question here also a little bit on the market size kind of indirectly, Thomas. It goes, how much is an airport of a size of Copenhagen, without being specific, spending annually on operations, just to get an impression of the potential?

Question was in operations or operational IT? But if we say operational IT, that easily comes to EUR 10 million, if not more.

All right. And a question here. As you build a software solution for airport operations, do you have a sense for the upfront investment required to have a piece of software that then only needs to be configured for each client?

I haven't got...

So I think the question is more, one thing is to build the solution. How much is then needed to build the various add-ons that will work locally?

Okay. I think that's a little bit early to say, and it will be quite individual for each airport. But I would say that's -- compared to the total investment that an airport will have to have to make, my best estimate, but that would be in the range of 10% to 20%, maybe more 20%, but that kind of range, which is not unusual. I mean imagine most airports today build their own systems from scratch.

And another question here. Can you say anything about how big Smarter Airport could be in the next 3 to 5 years?

I think it's a little bit too early to make that kind of prediction.

I would agree.

But also, we have to, of course, stick to the rules there of the market. But I think it can become very interesting if we gain the kind of market traction that we hope for.

And a question more on the cultural side here. How is the joint venture organization working together, different people from Copenhagen Airport and Netcompany?

That's a very interesting question, and it's also a good question. In as much as when we started, I think you can say the synergy and the understanding between the management teams was actually very, very good. But we also realized that as we got out through the system in the organizations, there are different cultures. I mean an airport is very much characterized by long-term planning on the aeronautical side, which this system, it relates to take sort of -- it feels at least to the Netcompany, people like we take slow decisions, but that's because we have -- we are dealing with aircraft in the air. Everything has to be redundant, if not triple redundant, then tested and everything before we take it into operation. And the Netcompany people were used to a faster sort of decision-making and so on. But I think we found ourselves now in a very good way in terms of focusing. So what is it this system has to solve, and that's our side. And then we are learning from Netcompany as a company on the faster, more agile sort of development methodology and so on. And I think Netcompany is learning a lot about airports. And I think that is really hugely important because when we get to other airports, it's the same kind of people that we're going to sell to. They're going to be very meticulous. They're going to be a bit slow. They're going to be very careful. And we -- I think the Netcompany organization has had to learn that a little bit. But we are definitely getting to the right place. That's my clear feeling. And people are now sitting together and working for this one target.

And the final question here, Thomas, on the roller. When do you expect to go live on this new platform?

Well, the first customer will be CPH, so Copenhagen Airports, and we expect to go live, I think, November '21. We need to develop the system first. We expect to go -- have a running model, I think, in July, August. But as I mentioned before, we are meticulous people. So it has to run in parallel for at least 3 months before we take it into operation. So that's when we will take another operation. Of course, sales to other airports, particularly if you can find early partners to help us with this, will happen already in spring.

All right. Then one final question, and that's probably more to me, I guess, because it says, how important to -- how important to Netcompany is CPH? And I'll say, it's very important. And then...

Well, we hope it's very important.

So with that, thank you very much for sharing your experiences with the digital airport, Thomas. It's been a great pleasure to have you here. And I'll let André come up and say formally goodbye, introduce our next speaker.

Yes. Thank you so much, Thomas. And yes, we're in the middle of a crisis in the airport industry, one can say, for sure, but we are seizing the moment and building an entire new system. So yes, looking forward to do that, and thank you so much for showing up.

You're welcome.

Yes. Thank you. And going from one society-critical real-time challenge when it comes to digitizing, we go into something that is just as society-critical. Through many years customer, where we've been paying out and serving people in Denmark, citizens in Denmark, ATP. And I know Hans Christian Jelstrup, who is the Director of Digitalization there, will tell us much more about that. I think we talked in March together, just after the Prime Minister closed the country, and we were about to pay out some checks for the elderly in Denmark, their pensions, without even being able to meet and look at the system. So hopefully, he will mention that as well. But welcome to...

I will mention that as well. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks. Screen is yours.

Thanks. Yes, my name is Hans Christian Jelstrup, not Anderson. I work for ATP. But today, here, I primarily is going to talk about Payment Denmark or UDK, which we take it from there. And I will take you through some facts and how we have worked with Netcompany over the last 5, 6, 7 years as a supplier. And as André mentioned here, the last of the things I've been responsible for went into production early this year right after COVID-19 hit us. And we actually launched that system sitting from home, all of us, and that is very, very good. I will come back to it, but that system pays out 1.3 million payments a month, DKK 13 billion a month. So it's significant. It's people's salary every month for those who are on pension. But I'll get back to that. So first, I'll go through some facts about UDK or Udbetaling Danmark, Payment Denmark, some of the strategic projects we have had with Netcompany over the last 5, 6 years, some observations on Netcompany as a partner and what about the digital agenda from here, which, of course, means something for us as customers and Netcompany as a supplier. Payment Denmark, UDK, is a self-governing institution and authority with its own Board. It was established in 2012. The line Ministry of Udbetaling Danmark is the Ministry of Employment. And the Danish Agency for Labor Market is our -- and Recruitment is the supervisory authority, meaning those who controls of [ during ]. But because we are self-governing institution, we are on arm's length of the government, which is exactly the structure that the government has wanted to have. So we are out there administering. UDK, Payment Denmark, was established as a centralization of administration of a number of welfare benefits, which previously was managed by the individual municipalities, which we have 98 of in Denmark; and some work from the state as well at the same time. The benefits initially at least or the majority of them are still granted based on objective criteria, which is an excellent start when you want to digitize and ensuring uniform case handling and economics of scale, which is what we do at Payment Denmark. ATP is the group who delivers the technical administrative to support to UDK, meaning Payment Denmark. So all employees are employed by ATP, but it's -- we work towards the self-governing institution, and that's a little special, but that's the way it is. We settle payments that we pay out directly with the municipalities and the state. We have about 870 customer advisers, along with development people and other support functions who work with Payment Denmark. They are all employed, as I said, in ATP. We have 5 centers spread out over the country in Denmark. It's a small country, but still located out there. And that's a political decision. So the government of Denmark decided where to place the centers so that we spread out the workforce across the country. The annual payments out of Payment Denmark is DKK 230 billion a year to 2.4 million citizens. We are only 5.6 million citizens in Denmark. So it's quite a bit of those people who gets payments out of Payment Denmark. We do as well collect about DKK 3 billion annually. And that's mostly because sometimes we pay out a little too much or a little too little because people's salary change or they are in job, without a job, they move into a bigger apartment or other changes. So not mistakes, but changes in behind. Of course, there are some small mistakes sometimes, but anyway, that's not the majority of that. We have a high level of automation, digitization and self-service. That's the only way you can manage this amount of payments. The entire IT foundation of Payment Denmark has been changed, and we went into production between 2017 and 2020. So we started the work back in '13 -- 2013, '14 by public tenders, et cetera, to go there. But went into production with all the systems. The last one here in March this year, which was the pension system, which I mentioned before. We have had 3 -- we actually have 4 because we have another project running right now. But for Payment Denmark, we have had 3 strategic projects with the Netcompany over the last years, which is the one I'm going to mention here today. It's family benefits, it's housing benefits and its pension benefits, which is today, 2/3 of all public benefits measured in krone, meaning money, monetary, and they are, therefore, a key infrastructural components of the country, very, very essential. These 3 systems pay out DKK 200 billion of the DKK 230 billion we pay out every year to the eligible citizens, many of whom it's their salary. So pensions, that's salary. Some of the others are more supplemental, but the biggest part of this money, they are pensions. We have -- for these systems, the 3 systems here, we have 600 caseworkers working with them -- on them day in and day out. They are built on the same Netcompany built platform. And the same platform, some of our colleagues in another site of the Danish community, 2 more work -- or 1 are in production and the other 1 is going to be in production shortly. So now we are 5 using the same core to this kind of administration. And we are, hence, leveraging about the experience we have had and the improvements across these different applications, and we learn from each other, and we work with ourselves and Netcompany. One of the other things you could say about these systems, they are not -- they are big solutions, but they are very connected. Some of the solutions have like 50 integrations to other systems. We work with central registers in Denmark. We work with central components in Denmark. We work with statistics out of the systems to the community and Denmark in total. So many integrations. And it's a big IT model that we have, where these are very central in terms of these payments. It's full solutions. So it's the full stack. It's the software and everything needed to operate them, which is the agreements we have on these. They are acquired by public tender, all of them, individual acquirement and very good. And we are -- have been now by March, putting the pension system live, finished with this total system change for Payment Denmark with its very significant without any big mistakes, which means that it's -- in general public is really not known that we have changed this huge central infrastructure without a lot of people noticing at all, which is really something. Netcompany as a partner to go around that. I find that that's a mutual and strong professional collaboration. We have a lot of skills in towards public administration. How do we manage with the laws that surrounds us and the surrounding laws like GDPR, security, all other things? So we are good at some things. Netcompany are very good at other things. And partnering up, making this happening with like a consultancy way of coming in and learning fast, understanding what we are doing. And from there, learn from the first of the systems, the family benefits; over to housing benefits; and the end, pension. Netcompany learned very fast what it is to make administration based on these types of laws and regulations, which we are found on based on with everybody wanting to control our work. And it needs to be accurate. And it needs to be in time because, again, it's salary. It's like if somebody else didn't get their salary at the right time, and sometimes it's 00:00 that people check that the check or the account was filled up for this month. And if we don't meet the dates and the time, they will react. So it's crucial that we are on time, and we have been. And it's been a very strong partnership. And as little as we [ heard ] before, yes, it is different cultures that meet. And we say we want to make a risk-based test, Netcompany says as well. But it's not exactly the same, but we meet and we find a way. And some things we are very strong on and some things Netcompany are very strong on, and then we mix it and find a way through it. We have had a quite pragmatic approach to the whole thing. Of course, it was a fixed price, fixed time, everything deal, but it was made in a not agile, but still incremental development together, where we build up trust first and then have full trust and manage to come forward. And again, this type of area, the lawmakers don't sit on their hands for a period of 3 years, which means that we on the way have had to have significant changes to the requirements from us in terms of the system. And we have managed to manage the change together, both commercially and in terms of delivering, which has been very good. For an organization like us, not like in an airport, but still stable and secure operation is critical. It's critical because, as I said, we pay out money, which is a salary. And for some family, it's very essential money for them, and we, of course, need to be careful about that. So the capability of both make stable and secure operation, and at the same time, being able to continuously develop the solution because of changes in the surrounding things or change in the way we look at, for instance, GDPR or security is essential for us because things do change all the time, not from second to second, but over time. And we have had an agreement, which is one of the next points that we discuss what needs to be done. And even though we are not in full agreement about time and money all the time, but mostly time is fixed by the lawmakers. Then it's like fix first and then set later. And until now, we have managed to do that, and that's part of being in a partnership that we want to fix and make stable and secure operation. And that capability is essentially in a partnership, you have to trust each other. And we have managed it in a very good way. Netcompany has a very strong delivery method. They have people who are well trained coming in with an approach. We have an approach as well. But as we said when we made the deal that we will follow your approach because it's you who need to build the system. And then we need to follow what you -- and then we, of course, try to influence it on the way. But we found the way, and I think that's essential for a long-term partnership that we need to find each other with the cultures and the methods used there. And quality is vital on the long term, of course, because we need a stable cost development in the applications as a total, which both parties are fully aware of. The digital agenda. Denmark is a very digitized community, and it's not -- it will not stop. Right now, the central government with others do work on the next digitization strategy for Denmark for the next 2 to 5 years. And we are giving our input as a major administration house. And I know that the IT community do give their input. I've seen André say something from time to time on that agenda as well. And I'm saying this because there is a lot of basis for further development. But some of it leans on how far we can go within the frame of the different registers and different portals and public components and as well, the legal things around everything we do in terms of protecting citizens and protecting companies. Now these applications are mostly for citizens, but of course, there are applications as well for a lot of companies. So I think that's very good. And I would say we will contribute to going further with digitization, but we need strong strategic partners like Netcompany to influence as well. And I know that Netcompany does that, and I'm happy about that. So we will continue with that. And I basically think that we will just continue as we've done over the last years. And it does not stop. Like we went into the air with the pension system in March. And right now, we are planning because the lawmakers want to change something further. And the next big project is actually being planned right now because there are is a change in legislation. So I think we continually need to both influence and work with it. And I do think that when we have public trust and we make sure that we have transparency, then they will trust us to go further with digitization, as we have done until now. There's a very large trust in Denmark in general in terms of digitization and public components in terms of that. So I think it will continue. I think that was all from me. I lost track of time.

It's fine.

Fine. Okay.

Thank you very much, Hans Christian.

You're welcome.

And not surprisingly, there's also a few questions on the roller for you, and I'll kick off with the first one. And it goes like, in your view, what in Netcompany's delivery model reduces the risk of a failed IT development project, which the history is full of?

Focus on the target, focus on the goals, focus on working together. A very strict and with -- very strict way of going into all the requirements, ensuring that we get around all of it, which is essential in terms of not missing anything, again, when it's so legislators at these areas.

Great. And another question. How critical has Netcompany and ATP been to the Danish public sector's success in digitalization?

In terms of, you could say, the overall public infrastructure, we are a part of it, administering some very essential laws, so very. In terms of the actual basis we stand on, which is the registers and other components, I know that Netcompany is delivering some of them, but that's outside Payment Denmark. But I'm using it, so I know how essential that is as well.

Another question here, Hans Christian. Compared to other IT vendors, what is most appealing with Netcompany? And is there anything you would like Netcompany to improve?

The very appealing thing with Netcompany is the both wish to partner up, the wish to deliver and the capability to actually doing it with the customer. A lot of us want to do that as well, and some are successful with us as well. But Netcompany has been very good with us for this, which is totally essential. What you could improve? There's always things to improve, which we work with, make it better, cheaper, more secure, maintaining the same quality all the way or even better. And of course, we will and we do discuss that on a regular basis, but that's to the benefit of both parties.

Another question here, Hans Christian. It seems like a lot of system portfolio has been already digitized. How much remains? And when will the systems that has been delivered from the period '17 to 2020 have to be renewed? That's quite of a long question, but...

It's quite a long question and different questions. Let's say the digitization in Denmark is huge. And it's correct that we are highly digitized now. We're actually right now working in another project with Netcompany at ATP, serving another big sector part, where -- I can't even translate that today. So there's a lot of digitization out there. And some of the other ministries and parts of the public Denmark still have quite a long way and still have a lot of legacy left. So yes. And again, legislators don't sit still. And the areas we support for housing benefit and family benefit and pension, which is perhaps the area that changed a little, but right now, they changed it quite a bit. But the other area is actually of interest for the politicians, so they do change quite all the time.

Thank you for that, Hans Christian. And there's a few more questions here. So I'll take one more here, and it says, how much of an improvement in efficiency have you seen in Udbetaling Danmark?

First, we did it just by working more, what I say, evenly in the same way, and we took 30% of the cost there. Since we have worked with the systems as well, and we have taken, I would say, another 5% to 10%. And we expect to take at least further 5%, 10%, 15% when we learn to use the systems, but we have a learning curve as well.

That's great. There's one more question here, and then I'll let you off the hook and let André conclude the customer presentation. It goes, how far ahead of competitors in Denmark do you think Netcompany's delivery model is?

It's a very strong delivery model that we have had and have seen. We have seen the success of Netcompany the recent years, and that talks for itself. I think it's very strong. Not the same as that we haven't delivered with others as well, but it is a very strong model.

Sure. Thank you very much. Hans Christian. I'll let André conclude. So if you come up here and conclude with Hans Christian, André.

Thanks a lot, Hans Christian.

You're welcome.

And -- yes. Well, we are paying out every month. That's the most important thing, and caseworkers are doing their job. And I'm looking forward to continue the close cooperation. So thanks a lot.

You're welcome. We will. Thanks.

Yes. And I think that line -- that summarizes very well what we're doing with -- when we talk about society-critical solutions, extremely important for society, but also why we are so thrilled with working with those solutions. And that's also why our employees are so happy to be working so closely with customers and actually making a difference in society. I think we've planned some financial walk-throughs now. So I think that's probably where I give you the stage, Thomas. We are a bit before schedule, but...

Well, I don't know, André, maybe you can do it. So...

No, I'll watch you do it and talk to the customers meanwhile.

Exactly. So we have financial planned for 4 o'clock. So we'll do a quick short break, and then we'll reconvene at 4 o'clock. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back, everybody, for this last session of our Capital Markets Day. So it's 30 minutes on some overall financial principles. And then I'll do a little bit of a catch-up on some of the questions that has been asked throughout the day that we haven't had the time to answer so far. But I'll start with having a look at our margin expansion and margin outlook through the quarters of the year because there are some variations in the quarters. Generally, what you see with Netcompany is that margins tend to be fluctuating from quarter-to-quarter, and they tend to be highest in a quarter in Q3. And there are some reasons for that. But as you can see here, over the last 8 quarters, that has been the pattern. And if we look further back another 3, 4, 5 years, you'll see the same pattern. The reason for that is mainly depicted here, there are some differences within the quarter. If we look into Q1, what is really always having a dilutive impact on margin in Q1 is that in January of the year, we do a salary adjustment for all of our employees. And since the vast majority of all of our projects are on a fixed fee basis, then that naturally has a negative impact on our margins in the month where we do the adjustment, and of course, also during Q1 in general. Then there is, in Q1 or Q2, always a negative impact in terms of when the Easter is occurring. So in the years where the Easter occurs in Q1, that has a negative impact on margins compared to quarters where Easter occur in Q2 and vice versa. And the reason why it has a negative impact is that in conjunction with the Easter, typically, there's also a number of holiday days taken. And that means that there are less working days being used for billable work. So the amount of days might be the same, but in conjunction with Eastern, a lot of our employees also take 1 or 2 or 3 days off. And that clearly had an impact on our top line since we have the same cost and that has a follow-on effect on our margins. Now if we then move on to Q3, there is a positive impact typically in Q3 in a year, and that is that Q3 is by far the quarter where we have the most new employees entering into Netcompany. That's where we hire a lot of our graduates and that have a positive impact on the average cost per employee since they are coming in, in the lowest part of the salary gap. And clearly, of course, that is then evened out through the year, but that's the main impact on why Q3 has a positive margin. Also sometimes what we see -- and I say sometimes because in 2020, it's been difficult -- or different. But what we see in Q3 is also that we have some holidays taken in connection with the summer holiday, which have a dilutive impact on margins, again, because people are working less, and thereby, we will generate fewer hours, which will have a negative impact on margins. Now for 2020, what we've seen is a more stretched [ use ] obligation following the COVID-19 impact, and therefore, the impact on vacation has not been as big in Q3 as it has been in the previous years. A part of that is spilling into Q4. Q4, then, of course, what we see on a positive note is that all the new employees that we have hired in Q3 are now having a fuller impact into Q4. That is positive to margins. And what is then contracting margins a little bit is that in Q4, we have another big public holiday, which is Christmas. And in connection with Christmas, there is also typically a number of holidays taken, depending on when the Christmas is falling. Is it during weekends? Is it in workdays? And that has an impact on how many days we "lose" from a production capacity in Q4. But overall, it has a [ mixed ] impact. And that's why we see those changes in the margins throughout the year. It has nothing really to do with pricing per se, but it has to do with what kind of capacity we have available and then when do we do the salary adjustment for our employees. Another thing which is important to understand with our financials is how a big part of our balance sheet is accounted for and how that has an impact on our P&L. For 2/3 of all of our projects, we use a contract term, which is a fixed fee, a fixed fee with a fixed scope. And to account for that, we use the principle called percentage of completion. What percentage of completion accounting means is that on an ongoing basis, which is actually every month, we view all of the projects on a fixed fee term. We view them as to how many hours have we used on this project? How much have we produced in terms of functionality? How much are we then assessing that we need to conclude that project? And then we compare that with how many hours we have left on the project to go for the remaining part of the period. And if there is a discrepancy in there, so that means if we have more work to do compared to how many hours we have left, then we will make an adjustment to the project, whereby we add more resources, more hours into the fixed fee project sum. And if there's no change request associated with that change, then that has a negative impact on revenue and also on margins for the period up until the adjustment is made. What it means is that all of our projects are always 100% accounted for to the latest estimate as to what do we think it takes to complete them. And therefore, you can say that we make a full and detailed assessment of all of our projects from a risk perspective on a monthly basis, and that is always embedded in the numbers. So we will not have projects where we will go for 12, 15 months without doing an assessment as to are we on track in terms of the money or not. We will do that on a monthly basis, and you will see -- if any impact, you'll see that on a quarterly basis. The fixed fee projects also have another implication on our books, and that's on the balance sheet. And that is what we call work in progress. So basically, there are 2 different ways -- and now we move away from the P&L side and over to the balance sheet. So there are 2 different ways that a contract can impact our balance sheet. And that has to do with the invoicing patterns that are embedded in the contracts. If we talk about the 1/3 that is straight time and material, well, that's easy to handle that because a lot of that is just basically how many hours have we spent and how much have we agreed to spend, and then we invoice that on a month basis. Now a good part of the larger projects that are multiyear, they have what we call a payment plan associated with them. So the payment plan is a part of the contract that tells how Netcompany, how we will be able to invoice for the work that we're doing compared to different milestones in the project. So the payment plan has nothing to do with the ongoing income recognition of the profit on the project on the P&L side, which was the slide before on percentage of completion. The payment plan is purely an impact on how does the project look from a balance sheet perspective. And when do we get the ability to invoice, and thereby, subsequently turn the project into cash? So clearly, it has an impact on our cash flow generation. And over the last couple of years, what we have seen is that the amount of work in progress has increased from levels that back in '16, '17 was around 10%, 11% and now it's more to the tune of 12%, 13%, 14%. In these numbers here, I have adjusted for the prepayment of customers basically because they fluctuate a lot. And historically, we had a number of large public contracts where the prepayment part was fairly large, and they are being delivered. And the new contracts that we're doing do not have the same level of prepayment. Also, what we've seen in the last 18 months or so is a larger proportion of large private sector contracts that has the same sort of contract characteristics as the public sector contract, which means that they are longer in duration, they are multiyear, and they also have a little bit of a payment plan associated to them, which means that we are also now starting to see work in progress for private sector contracts, which back in 2017, we did not so. When we look at the balance sheet for 2017 and look at how much do we have in work in progress, then that is actually based on a portfolio of only public contracts, but clearly calculated out of the total revenue. So adjusting for that also, the development in work in progress is actually flattish over the last couple of years. Important also to stress that we have not seen any of our work in progress not being invoiced, and that's, of course, important because to a certain extent, work in progress can be viewed as unbillable receivables. And therefore, it is important that we are able to raise an invoice and then subsequently collect that invoice into money so that we are not just parking any problems per se in the work in progress. That has not been the case, and it doesn't look to be the case going forward either. A little bit on balance sheet more here. From 2021, so basically at the end of 2020, based on our cash flow and based on our projections of cash flow into 2021 and onwards, we envision to start paying money back to our shareholders, both in terms of share buybacks and in terms of dividends. Our plans now, and that is subsequent, of course, approval to the AGM, is to repay DKK 100 million to the shareholders in connection with the Annual General Meeting for 2020, which is in March 2021. And that will be DKK 50 million most likely in divis and DKK 50 million in share buybacks. Our leverage is coming down comfortably. And on the slide here, you can see the leverage on a 12-month rolling basis. And we are moving from around 2x EBITA in Q2 2019 to now below 1 and all the way actually down to 0.8. And with the current cash flow projections and the current projection of earnings into 2021, we expect that leverage to continue to come down, which makes it possible for us to start to pay out dividends and also to start to initiate share buybacks. So those were some of the main characteristics that are important to have a highlight on for our financials. I don't have any specific slides on our Q3. We've just been through that on a lot of investor meetings.

So what I'll do now is that is to open up the floor, and I'll take some of the questions that was asked earlier on that has a more financial view. And bear with me a little bit while I look at the questions that are here in front of me. So I'll just start here. First, one of the question goes here. Are you looking at Germany as a potential market to enter? And what is the reason for not having already entered Germany? Germany is a country with a lower level of digitalization than the countries we're currently in and also Sweden and Finland. Germany is currently -- or is 16 different Bundesländer, and what works in one Bundesländ does not necessarily work in another one. So we think that we have a better chance of and better likelihood of success by focusing more on the countries adjacent to Denmark and the ones that have the same level of digitalization and the same level of public service digitalization than we see in Denmark. So that was one question answered. Then there's a question as to when do we expect to see margins picking up in the U.K. And for 2020, clearly, the U.K. is not a great year. For 2021, depending on when the U.K. economy is starting to recover, we would see some changes and improvements in the performance of the U.K. operation. The U.K. operation as such is not going to be to 20%, 25% margin in 2021. Initially, when we go into a country, we say that it's going to take between 3 and 5 years to get to 20% to 25% growth and 20% to 25% margin. The U.K., we clearly said that's closer to 5 years. And with 2020 being somewhat a lost year, as André was alluding to, it's going to take us another 2, 3 years before we see those margins in the U.K. Then there's a question here on the margin guidance. It goes, the margin guidance for 2020 implies a "year-over-year" contraction in Q4 margins. Do you think this is realistic? And this looks back to the first slide I showed here where normally, we do see a lower margin in Q4. And that is because of mainly the holidays. Year-to-date margins, so the 9 months, in Netcompany are strong. The margin in Q3 is comforting at 28%. So we are comfortable with the around -- "around" 25% in adjusted EBITA that we have guided for, for 2020. Feel free to add more questions to the roller, if there are any. I'm just going to look at some of the other questions here. Then there was a question earlier on as to what is our plans in Sweden and Finland. Can it be different than only going in organic or via acquisition? And I'd say, like André said, we're looking to enter Sweden together with a customer. And once that is more set in stone, we'll potentially start the greenfield Sweden. Could it be a bolt-on acquisition? We're not ruling out anything. Finland, a little further away. And that's also why, timing-wise, it probably is Sweden before Finland. I'll pause a little bit and see if there's anyone who has any questions they want to ask. There's a question here on how has the U.K. trended in October and November. And not really going into detailed analysis as to what is the performance of each country by each quarter. But what we saw in Q1 to Q2 in the U.K. was a drop, a fairly large drop in revenue, and then it kind of flattened out in Q3. And then in connection with our Q3 reporting, we said that we expected Q4 probably to be "flattish", and that is also what we continue to expect for the U.K. Then there's a question here on any M&A opportunity in Denmark. And that would then be a bolt-on opportunity since we are fairly big already in Denmark. As of now, we're not really looking active into that. There's a follow-up question as to whether cBrain is a competitor. And cBrain are doing case systems for part of the public sector. They are not really in the same area as we are and the systems that they do are, to a certain extent, not the same as the one that we have. So we don't see cBrain as a direct competitor in Denmark. Feel free to shoot questions, if you have any. There's a few coming here. Focusing on U.K. 2021, given the weak revenue in 2020, could revenue growth in 2021 be closer to the targeted 20% to 25%? I think it's premature to go into specific guidance per country, given the fact that what we've said so far is that our expectations for 2021 at this point in time is that we'll grow 15% to 20%. So clearly, that reflects that there are still uncertainty in the world. There's still uncertainty, specifically in the U.K., not only from COVID, but also how Brexit will impact. Will there be a increased business activity in the U.K.? We're quite sure that, that will happen. But it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, at this point in time to say whether that's going to be Q1, Q2 or Q3. So I'll refrain from going into more specific as to what the growth rates will look like in the U.K. for 2021. There's a question here that says, as you expand into new markets, do you see more sales costs ramping up? As you build more platforms and the Copenhagen joint venture, would you see more new investments required? So when we go into new markets, it's not really our modus operandi to build a big sales organization. Now what we've learned though in the 3 acquisitions that we have done so far in Norway, U.K. and Holland is that early on in an acquisition like that, it does make sense to add 1 or 2 senior resources to the organization to ensure that we have also locally the right level of senior management that can facilitate talks, discussions with both public entities and large corporates, if needed, and basically to drive sales. So that, we are adding, but we're not adding a 5%, 10% cost base from sales into new organizations. In terms of the Copenhagen joint venture, that has been established with an equity of DKK 150 million, of which DKK 100 million has been paid in cash in equity at the start, and then the joint venture has the opportunity to call another DKK 50 million in cash when needed. 50-50 joint venture. So that means that we have so far paid DKK 50 million in equity, and the airport has paid DKK 50 million in equity. We don't envision a large add-on investment into the JV to basically continue the development and also to develop new solutions. There will be cash flow generated in the JV on a stand-alone basis. The first customer will be -- as Thomas Woldbye said, it will be Copenhagen Airport in itself. And then more airports will come on, and that will generate cash flow in the JV. That will mean that the funding is available for additional projects. Another question coming up here. Can you explain how margins would look in 2021 if you hit the upper end of the growth guidance? Well, what I can say there is that we're comfortable with the 25% margin throughout the range. So we are comfortable with 25%, both at 15% and at 20%. And then, of course, there are some mechanisms in terms of how do we get to the top end of that range and in the effect that more and more "bench" can be utilized that potentially can have an impact on margins. Then there can be other things that can subtract a little bit. But we're comfortable with the 25% or around 25% throughout the range. Can you give more detail about the accumulated value of the project wins in Norway in Q4? And that we cannot, because it's not disclosed in terms of value on how that is. But as you could also hear from Geir, the Norwegian organization is running on a lot of strong energy these days. We start to see more and more of the bench here that has been existing in Norway, not only in Q3, but basically since the summer of 2019. We are seeing more and more of that bench being utilized, which, of course, is great, not only for Q4, but also into 2021. Is there any cost for Stockholm office setup in 2021? Is this baked into your 2021 guidance? Well, it's not going to be a office of the size of Grønningen, Copenhagen. So the cost for a potential office expansion into Stockholm in 2021 will be embedded in the overall cost, and it is manageable. It's not something which is having a high margin dilutive impact on the numbers of 2021. That's another question here. Could you give us an idea of how you break down projects by nature initially? Digitalization of workspace, automization of processes, cloud migration? Is it possible to disclose anything around the revenue weight? We don't break down the revenue on those types of different technologies in lack of a better word. We'll view our top line as development revenue and maintenance and operations revenue. And then development has different types of projects embedded in them, but that is how we view the business. That's also how we run the business. To us, it's more important that it's complex digitalization projects, and that can have lots of different formats. But to start to break that down would be a fairly detailed analysis, which I'm not quite sure would add tremendous value. We don't run our business on that. And as we don't run the business on that, we will not be reporting on that. All right. I'll give it 30 more seconds for one last question to pop up. Otherwise, we are coming close to the end of the day. All right. Doesn't seem to be the question. So from my side, I want to thank you for tuning in. I hope it has been eventful and interesting and insightful to follow the Capital Markets Day. We will make all the presentations available subsequent to this event so that you can go in and revisit some of the presentations. So if there are additional questions that you would like to pose or things that you would like to have more information on, feel free to reach out, then I'll be happy to discuss them in more detail. So for now, thank you very much for tuning into Netcompany's Capital Markets Day 2020. Have a good day, and thank you for now.