Adesso (Xetra:ADN1) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

0:00 So, once again, good morning, everybody. This is Matti Molina of adesso IR speaking. First of all, I'd like you to thank you for joining our q two and half year one earnings call regarding our half year report we have published today. Within our release this morning, you found adesso keeping up its fast organic growth pace with 30% in sales to €794,300,000. The operating result was improved by 21% to euro €45,800,000. This is 8,000,000 more than last year's EBITDA contribution. Since the second half of the year in Germany provides a significantly larger number of working days than the first half, a larger portion of EBITDA contribution is expected to be earned later in the year.

0:49 And there is more good news. Utilization improved noticeably since May. I now like to welcome as well our CFO, Michael Knop, who will give us a deeper insight into the figures of the first half of the year and, of course, the outlook for the remainder of the current year. As always, I like you to mute yourself during the presentation. Feel free to open up the channel for the q and a session afterwards. Participants on phones may want to mute or unmute their microphones via the star key followed by the number six of their phones. Thank you, Thufur. And, Michael, please go ahead.

1:27 Good morning, everybody. I will guide you now to our 2026 half year figures. And as always, I will start with our revenues. Revenues came in with DKK $794,000,000, which is an increase of 13%. And if we look a little bit more in detail into this, first quarter contributed DKK $398,000,000, which was a plus of 30%. And the second quarter contributed DKK $396,000,000, which is a plus of 12%. So in total consolidated for both quarters, it's plus 13%.

2:12 Actually, we are very happy with this growth rate. It's in line with our expectations and with our budget. And if we look at the environment in Germany, and Germany is the most important market, contributes 83% of our revenues. Germany is still a difficult environment. If you look at the gross domestic product, gross domestic product is growing by 0.5%. But on the other hand, it's already halved compared with the expectations at the beginning of the year. And if we look back last year, was also only a growth rate slightly above the zero level. The two years before that, Germany was in recession. Despite this challenging environment, adesso again has shown a double digit growth rate, and we are very happy and a little bit proud about that.

3:16 What helped a little bit and provided some tailwind, last year, Q3, Q4, we were pretty disappointed because we couldn't see the impact of the two additional budgets for the armed forces and the infrastructure. There was no activities, no tenders coming to the market. Actually, this has changed. Since the beginning of the year, we see this activity, We see the additional tenders, and we also were able to win some of them. I will talk a little bit later about that. Say, different to sales growth, also headcount growth continued, however, a little bit more slowly.

4:08 If we look at the average growth, at the growth rate of the average number of employees in the first half of this year compared to the first half last year, it's a growth rate of 9%. If we compare with Q1, it was a growth rate of 10%. And if we look at the total number of employees as of June 2026, it's 11,515. Compared to last year, it's an increase of 721 employees or an increase of 7%. If we look a little bit in deep more in detail into this, half of this growth was generated abroad, especially in those countries where we do shoring.

5:00 For example, in India, we are pretty close to the former employee threshold. Some positive impact was also generated from those subsidiaries which were set up in the last few quarters, for example, Belgium. In Germany, where we also grew our workforce, here's the growth rate of 4%. This was mainly a contribution from growing our SAP business. If we look on the growth rate since the beginning of the year, headcount grew by 2%. So if we look at the development in total, we still grow our headcount but significantly less than what are you have seen, what you are used to from adesso in the past.

6:00 Now I have a look at our sales split. And here we begin with the sales by industry. Insurance, sales growth of 22%, a very, very nice development, mainly driven by strong order entry last year, especially in Q4. Banking, 14. And here, we see a lot of activity as well. Very strong order entry also this year, first half of the year, surprisingly good. Health, a little bit less dynamic than what we have seen in the past, but still a double digit growth rate. And then we have public, 10% growth.

6:48 It's back on track. If you remember, Q1, it was only a growth rate of 5%. So this is the impact of the additional tenders, the additional activity we have seen in the public sector. Automotive declined by 16%. Actually, that's not surprising. It's a very difficult environment. Positive thing with that is it's by far our smallest sector. Manufacturing, also double digit growth rate, 12%. Retail, 15%. And utilities, again, the strongest sector, 32% growth. And this is mainly driven by our strong market positioning with our SAP services for this sector.

7:41 In total, it has not much changed. We are very diversified. It's a very nice situation for us. Our most important sectors contribute 1516% to our revenues. If we dig a little bit more in detail into this, our first top 10 customers in terms of sales contribute 22.4% of our revenues, the biggest customer, 2.9%. So it's very diversified. And what's very important, especially in the right sectors, insurance, banking, public, utilities, all these sectors are, let's say, a little bit less dependent from the hiccups in the economy, from high energy prices, tariff increases or decreases by the US government.

8:39 So it's a very good positioning here. Let's have a look at the sales split by region. And here on the first view, everything, as always, 95% of our revenues are generated in the DACH region. However, Germany grew its revenues by 12%, so a little bit less than the overall growth rate for the whole group. And this is a shift because for the last few quarters, Germany was always growing a little bit more than the total number. Why do we see this shift abroad? There are some very nice activity in Switzerland. Switzerland grew its business by 16%.

9:30 And if we look a little bit back, Switzerland last year was very difficult market environment. We started with minus 7%, improved to minus 5% and ended up with minus 3%. But this year, Switzerland is back on the growth track. We have seen some nice order entry at the end of last year, and this continued this year as well. So a very, very nice development. And that's important because Switzerland contributes more than 50% of our revenues abroad. Nice sales growth also in Austria and Italy. Turkey, it's a little bit challenging at the moment. Difficult market environment, high inflation.

10:19 Here, we need to keep in mind that we have similar revenues, what is shown here with shoring activities, but these revenues are showing up in The Netherlands and Germany, for example. Strong sales growth also in regions other. Here we have two contributors. One contributor is that we have set up new subsidiaries abroad, which now start to generate revenues. And the other reason is that we have some activity, some activity with single customers in France and in Ireland at the moment. So therefore, we have some positive impact on our sales development here.

11:07 Now let's have a look at our EBITDA. EBITDA improved to €45,800,000 This is an improvement of 21%. We generated €27,000,000 EBITDA in the first quarter, which was an improvement of €10,000,000 compared to prior year. And we generated €18,800,000 EBITDA in the second quarter, which is €2,000,000 less than what we have seen last year in Q2. Overall, this is driven by strong organic sales growth. We have an impact from a disproportional higher increase of material costs.

11:55 And on the other hand, this is very substantial. Other operating expenses grew disproportionately lower than sales, and this helped a lot to improve these figures. But let's have a look at this a little bit more in detail. Here we have some key figures. We already talked about our employees. In average, this is the sales an an an headcount growth of 9%. We have a sales growth of 13%. Gross profit only grew by 12%, so slightly less. And this is actually caused by an increase of our material cost, which grew 18%.

12:40 And this is mainly driven by relying more on suppliers, on third parties.

12:48 We quite often act as a general contractor, and therefore, invoice via us, which increases our sales but also our material costs. In addition, we have increasing expenses in this line for cloud consumption and what's new this year, also token for the usage of AI. If we look at the personal cost, a 12% increase was slightly below sales. And we have the other operating expenses growing only by 3%. So if we look at our EBITDA, we have two main contributors for this EBITDA improvement.

13:36 One is more sales, therefore, more gross profit contribution and EBITDA.

13:41 And the other one is a disproportionately lower increase of other operating expenses, just 3%. EBITDA margin improved to 5.8% from 5.4%. So it's a little improvement. We are still not at that level what we would like to see, but the next little step here is done. Profit drivers. Utilization actually caused a lot of headache at the beginning of this year. We had a very slow start. The first four months were below prior year and also below our expectations and budget.

14:26 This turned around at the end of April. May was the first month this year where utilization was above budget and prior year. This trend continued in June. And actually in July, we have seen the strongest utilization since 2024. So it was a very, very nice start into the third quarter. And it's important because July has twenty three working days, so this will have a very nice impact. So therefore, we are, let's say,

15:02 at the moment, that this trend will continue. Daily rates, we were able to increase daily rates. It's not much because competition is really tough in some areas. But at least it's in the range that it will offset the impact of inflation. License. Here, we always look at our business with our Injure software solution and the license sales were pretty much in line with that what we have seen last year. Last year, it was 3,500,000. This year, it's 3,300,000. So it's within our expectations. As always, we expect to see some more and higher license sales in the second half of the year.

15:52 And if we look at the personnel cost per FTE, personnel cost per FTE grew by 2%. Here, we have different contributors. On the first hand, we have a salary increase in line with inflation. On the other hand, we have hired more senior people. So cost per FTE is a little bit increasing due to that. On the other hand, the percentage of employees in our shoring countries is increasing. Those colleagues have lower salaries. And so it's a mix of all these three contributors.

16:39 Now I have look at some other key figures of our p and l. EBITDA. We started with that. Depreciation as an increase. This is also caused by an extraordinary depreciation, a write off of intangible assets at our group company Material One. This company offers a solution for the supply chain for the automotive industry. At the moment, the underlying business case is a little bit less optimistic than what we have seen in the past due to the different difficult environment this company is acting in.

17:30 This also caused a depreciation of goodwill, extraordinary one of 2,100,000. So in total, this impact in this section is €3,400,000 Income from investments, that's from our equity investments, it's minus €2,000,000 And the financial result is slightly more negative due to higher interest we have to pay for leasing and also the loans we have drawn.

18:02 Earnings before taxes, minus €2,500,000 compared to minus €3,900,000 Please keep in mind there we have included this €3,400,000 extraordinary write off for these assets related to Material One. Income taxes minus 4,800,000 So the consolidated earnings are pretty much the same what we have seen last year. If we look at the tax quota, looks terrible, minus 194%. However, if you look at the depreciation of Woodville, 2,100,000, this has no tax impact. There's nothing you can deduct from your taxes. If you exclude this item, your tax quota is already down to minus 100%.

18:51 Why is the tax quota, especially in the first half of the year, comparably high? It's because the most the higher part portion of our earnings, around about 70%, is generated in the second half of the year. But you have the same number of expenses which are not tax deductible or losses which cannot be put as a deferred tax asset on the balance sheet. Therefore, the tax quota will improve in the second half of the year. So the overall tax quota for the whole year will look much better.

19:27 If we look at the earnings per share, earnings per share minus €0.87 We started in Q1 with plus €0.39 in Q2, minus 1.26 mainly caused by the write off of the assets at Material One. However, it's still an improvement compared to last year. Now let's have a look at some balance sheet items and our net working capital. If we look at net debt, increased by DKK12 million to DKK155 million. Our operating cash flow improved a little bit more than DKK10 million to minus DKK28 million.

20:18 However, in the first view, it looks a little bit strange. Net working capital increased by DKK $259,000,000. It's a plus of 22%. Operating cash flow is for the first half of this year. Net working capital compares to the net working capital at June last year. And therefore, this figure includes the very negative development of our net working capital in Q4. However, we are already on the way of improvement. If you look at net working capital at the end of Q1, this was there. We had a plus of 28%. Now it's 22%. We expect further improvements in the second half of the year. Normally, net working capital should not grow faster than our sales growth. So normally, it should be a figure there of 13%, 14% in this line.

21:15 Goodwill, a little bit less due to the extraordinary write off of the goodwill of Material One. Equity plus €16,000,000 and equity ratio due to the growth of the company and therefore the totals of our balance sheet. Equity ratio, pretty much the same than what we have seen last year on the June 30.

21:42 Cash development, free cash flow improved by €12,000,000 CapEx is pretty much the same what we have seen last year. Lease repayments are shown as CapEx due to the recommendation of the IFRS foundation. Now let's have a look at the acquisition of Omnius. We have announced this two days ago, and I will now talk a little bit about our thoughts and why we have done this. I will start with a look at our group company, adesso insurance solution. That's the company who has the injure product line. We just talked about the licenses we sold this year in the first half of the year. And actually, we have three solutions there for the property and casualty market, for life and health, different platforms.

22:43 And we are one of the market leaders in Germany, in the DACH region actually. And we are one of the technology leaders there and have an in-depth knowledge of these different domains. Our acquisition now targets the property and casualty market. And this is an actually a very interesting market as it is growing a little bit more than the others. What is important for our business in this area as all other businesses we have, also the software business, our solution business there, is impacted by AI. And the claims market is a very nice entry point because here you have a high transaction volume, a high automization potential and therefore, which is important for the for our customers, the insurance customers has a very nice p and l impact if you are successful in managing your claims effectively.

23:49 So why did we acquire Omnios?

23:51 Omnios is a company which is since ten years in this market. Omnios already has customers despite the fact that it is, let's say, kind of start up and so far was VC financed. But Omnios already processed more than 1,000,000 claims per year. They have trained their solution with 80,000,000 cases, so it's a lot. And I think the next two items are the most important ones. With using Omnios the Omnios solution, you can process your you can

24:31 set up your processes with efficiency gains of 35%. And what's even more important, your claims ratio improves by four percentage points. So this is a huge improvement. And therefore, there are some we cannot name all of them, but these three we are allowed to name. Allianz, Unica, for example, they are using this solution. So if we look at the claims operating model, yeah, you get a loss notification from the insurance company gets a loss notification from a client. The claim needs to be assessed. It needs to be it just needs to be made a decision, and then this needs to be settled. And if you can get here a high percentage of automatization, this is a very, very interesting business model here for insurance companies.

25:26 And that's actually why we believe that this could be a very nice addition to our existing portfolio. At the beginning, we believe that we can short term convert the existing pipeline of Omnios with our support. It helps for sure that this is now not only in a VC business comp it is now part of the adesso group. So it has a strong background. This will help to convert this pipeline. We also will do cross selling within our portfolio.

26:13 We already have, prior to the acquisition, already checked with our customers if they are interested in that. And the platform will differentiate whole our business case for the property and as a team market. So it's a very nice value proposition there. And what we also will do is we will leverage the AI expertise of Omnios for our solution and actually for all solutions we have in this area. Now let's have a look at our guidance. As already pointed out, the market has not changed much.

26:58 It's a very demanding market, but IT services and the the need for IT services is growing. This has not changed. AI the demand for AI and AI supported development processes is increasing very, very quickly. We have stabilized our utilization and actually at the moment have we are well above budget and prior year. So this helps a lot. It's also, for sure, a little bit supported by reduced hiring speeds. And we will see some additional improvements in the second half of the year as we have two additional working days compared to last year and in total nine additional working days compared to the first half of this year.

27:56 So it's a very good chance to achieve our guidance. And let's have a look at that. If we look at our guidance in terms of revenue, we have our target is to improve revenues between 916%, which translates into 1,600,000,000 to €1,700,000,000 in revenues. At the moment, we have already achieved almost half of that. And if you keep in mind, the nine additional working days. So we are very, very sure that we will stay within this guidance as we already have achieved half of our target here. EBITDA is a little bit, let's say, not that obvious.

28:52 And at the moment, it looks not that nice, 31% to 35% of our guidance after half of the year has passed. But this is a normal development. Last year, we have also achieved 70% of our EBITDA in the second half of the year. And if we look at the €45,800,000 we are absolutely on track, slightly ahead of our internal budget. And on this budget, our guidance is based. So at the moment, we confirm, therefore, our guidance for sales and EBITDA. Everything is on track. EBITDA margin, yes, it's only 5.8%. Last year, for the whole year, we achieved 8.4%.

29:41 And here, our target is to achieve EBITDA margin 8.4% plus something. Improvement, well, not that sharp than what we have seen last year, but we hope that we can generate some little improvements here as well. Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you, Michael. That was helpful. We're now heading for the q and a session. And as far as I can see, there are some questions already. Mr. Saul will have a start. And then Mr. Spang, please.

30:30 Yes. Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two. I was wondering if you could first try and quantify or explain to us what exactly triggered the reversal in the capacity utilization and why it has been so volatile this year, starting also weak and then recovering very strongly? And the second question is if you could provide some transaction details on the Omnias deal that you did regarding price, sales and earnings contribution. Yes. Utilization actually was a is a very interesting point this year.

31:21 It's always, let's say, a little risk if you end finish the year and then to start a new year as a lot of activities need to be renewed and contracts need to be signed again with customers. This year, this took significantly longer than what we have seen last year. Certain projects started later than what we expected. And on the other hand, order entry so far this year was very nice again. And therefore, a lot of projects started later this year. There's a lot of activity at the moment. And on the other hand, what helps a little bit as well at adesso SE, our headcount increase, we reduced this a little bit and to make sure that our utilization is back on track. So there are two impacts from that, increased business activity and a little bit slower headcount increase.

32:29 Omnius, actually, we will not disclose the purchase price of the sales figures. However, as you can assume, it's not that significant as this is a start up. We expect not a significant impact this year on our business. Next year, company should provide a positive EBITDA contribution. As this company is, I mean, they have business activities since ten years. They have really some very nice brands on as a customer there. So we hope to to improve this business as we now can support this with our power, with our sales power, for example. We have and on the other hand, we hope that we can be able also to sell some licenses there or to increase the SaaS business because at the moment, it's mainly the SaaS business, what this company is doing.

33:40 Great. Thank you. Mr. Span, please. Yes. Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. First, congrats to the continued strong revenue growth. But I'm a little bit wondering about the Q2 earnings development because if I try to bring all the dots together, I'm still struggling because you have this continued 12% growth in Q2. You have a similar number of working days. You have a higher utilization since May. You had a substantially higher EBITDA growth in Q2 with still subdued one, sorry, with a still subdued utilization.

34:33 So I'm wondering why you were not able to increase the EBITDA in Q2. So were there any extraordinary effects which are in the EBITDA which we have to bear in mind? Or anything you can share with us in regards to Q2 earnings development? Actually, for us, it's not surprising. And if you remember, during Q1 call, I mentioned that Q1, despite the improvement of €10,000,000 in EBITDA, was below our expectations also due to the development of the utilization. And Q2 actually is came in better than our budget because this year and we need to especially look at the German market here because we generate 83% of our revenues there.

35:28 Due to the vacation, the Easter vacation, all these breaks related to that, we expected Q2 to come in much weaker than last year. So actually, we are at the end of the day, we were better doing better than we expected at the time where we have done the budget and therefore prepared our guidance. So for us, it's not surprising. It's within our expectations. April actually was a pretty weak month in terms of utilization and EBIT contribution. And we were able to offset this in May and June and have pointed out a little bit more expected because at the end of the day, Q2 was came in better than what we have expected.

36:18 So for us, it's not surprising. It's and one of the key reasons actually is the depreciation period in Germany. Yes. Okay. That helps for understanding it better. Then coming to the public sector. It's good to hear that tenders are now coming to the market since the beginning of the year, and it's also nice to see that you are accelerating in Q2. So what is your expectation for the coming quarters in regards to the public sector? Will this acceleration further continue? Or how should we expect the public sector in the coming quarters? I mean forecast for the future, for especially if we look forward to some more quarters, that is always difficult.

37:12 However, what's for sure is Germany has a huge task in terms of digitalization of the public sector. And therefore, there should be a lot of demand for that. On the other hand, as we all know, the German government has some problems with the budgets. And therefore, it's also the question how this will be financed in the future. So normally, we would expect that this is a growing market. We have a very good positioning in there. And if you look at our pipeline, at least for this year, we should see a nice order entry also for the second half of the year. But it's difficult to predict what will happen in the next few years.

38:02 Normally, this should be a market which is which should develop very, very well because there's a huge need and therefore, should be a huge demand due to the task of digitalization in Germany. Yes. Okay. But regarding your pipeline, you are seeing currently everything is developing nicely in the last quarter. Yes. In general, our pipeline at the moment for this year is okay. We have seen a nice order entry, if you would define it as book to bill book was book to bill ratio is bigger than one. And we expect also nice order entry and to this trend to continue in the second half of the year, yes.

38:55 And overall statement to our expected order entry. And then regarding license revenues or license pipeline, it's always the same that the second half of the year is more pronounced in terms of license revenue. So can you share any insights to your current license pipeline? Is it, for example, bigger than last year? Or is it broader? Is it more related to a few customers? Or yes, anything you can share with us. Yes. I mean we are always talking only about a few customers. It's not that we have, let's say, a pipeline of 10 customers where we have a probability, let's say, of 60%, 70% today that we might close this. So the number of customers which might buy a license is smaller, at least where the percentage probability is high.

40:00 We will see, hopefully, some licenses. It looks pipeline looks okay. But we have seen it last year. Last year, I already told you, maybe Q2, then Q3. And actually, most of it came in shortly before Christmas. So this is really, really difficult to predict. Let's say, these words, we don't need very significant number here to be within our guidance. So there should be some license sales, but let's see. It's really difficult to say because these are huge customers, big organizations where a lot of people need to give their approval to buy a license or some more licenses.

40:47 There are some very promising projects within our pipeline, but it's difficult to say which of them we will close until the end of the year. But is it then just a matter of timing or also in terms of competition that a competitor could win these projects? Some of them is a matter of also of competition. Some, we I would say, we have a very strong position within this customer. There's probably more a question, will the customer invest or will he delay the invest? Okay. Thank you. Because some of them already have licenses. That's the question, will they increase their setup there? Mhmm. Okay. Thanks. It's from my side.

41:37 Thank you. Then we'll have mister Specht from Berenberg, and afterwards, mister Ziering from Warburg Research. Yes. Hello. Good morning. Thanks. Two additional ones from my end. The first on the order book, mentioned book to bill, BaF1, but is this actually better than when you entered half year two in 2025? That would be interesting. And then also the duration of the book, is there a tendency that it's more short term yet? Or is there a lot of overflow into 2027? And then again, on IT Solutions, still negative EBITDA contribution of around 2,500,000 in Q2.

42:29 But as you mentioned, you see a promising pipeline. Will the new assets, OmniAb, be completely charged in IT solutions? Yeah. If we look at our development of order entry this year so far compared with last year. Order entry was was we have seen a significantly better development of order entry. Pipeline is probably comparable with with last year. Let's see what we will be able to close. It's always difficult to say which periods in the future will be covered than with the existing backdrop because some of the orders are for multiple years, year orders. For example, last year in December, one of the biggest orders we got so far in company's history, it's an order which covers a period of, I think, four or five years.

43:35 So they are they are already part of the backlog already is for revenues related to '27, '28, '29. So that's the reason why you also always need orders short term to cover your revenue needs for the next quarter. But again, everything looks promising here so far. If we talk about Omnius, Omnius is will be part of our solutions business. That's right. And it's our goal that the our solutions business next year will be in the range of breakeven.

44:23 That's what we already talked about last year. And so far, everything is unchanged. We are improving the situation there. It's still some way to go for the turnaround, but we are making progress. And therefore, at the moment, the statement is unchanged. Break even, that's the target for next year. Thanks a lot. Thank you, mister Strecht. Next one was, mister Seering from, VALP Research, and afterwards, Doctor. Jakobowski from SMC Research. Mister Zeri?

45:22 Okay. In case you're on the phone, you can, unmute your phone with a star key followed by the number six of your phone. Otherwise, mister Jakobowski, please. Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah. We can hear you. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I have some questions. The first one regards the topic AI. Could you give us some details on the productivity gains you're already achieving with the usage of AI, especially with AgenTek software development? And in this context, do you see some pressure from the customers to lower your prices because of the efficiency gains on your side?

46:26 First of all, we have depends on on the project or, let's say, on the activity you are using AI for. You have higher or, let's say, a little bit lower productivity gains. If we look we have we have different different areas for that. First of all, we use AI internally. We have a lot of in internal R and D agents for for our general and admin area, for the sales area, where AI supports our our work. We are implementing that's, I think, very important. It's not that you just reuse it a little bit, that you change your processes within the company.

47:12 That's something where we spent at the moment a lot of efforts for. That's what we do internally. And then within our customers, there are certain projects where you have efficiency gains up to 60%. It always depends a little bit what you are doing. If you look at the customer situations, actually, it's you have everything. You have customers who say, look. You are much more productive. Therefore, we want to pay less because you don't need the time. I think that's something which is, from customer perspective, acceptable. On the other hand, then the question, you have to talk about you have certain productivity gains on the one hand side. On the other hand, you have the token usage, so you need to talk about this.

48:07 And you have certain product projects. For example, we have one customer where we entered into an agreement two years ago. In the first year, we saw a lot of different fixed price projects per year. And in the first year, it was very difficult to earn money with that. Actually, we lost some money. Last year, we improved that. And this year, we are really earning nice money with that because we can now use AI. We are much more productive with that, but the the pricing from the customer side is the same. So you have everything. You have some customers where you talk that you need less time. Therefore, customer wants to pay less. But at some customers, have projects based they own Carbikainen PIN code.

49:00 Because with with AI, things are not possible, which were not possible in the past. So you have everything. Sometimes at the moment, you have an advantage. Sometimes it might be a disadvantage. But there's a lot of activity on the customer side to talk with us about the usage of AI. And as we also have published today, there are a lot of projects starting now, which are inspired by the usage of AI. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Can you already see some clear consequences for your headcount needs in the future? So is the slower growth in the headcount now to be expected for next quarters?

49:54 Let's say it in these words, I don't expect a sharp increase in headcount back to the old levels for the remaining part of the year. And what's for sure, if you look a little bit midterm and long term, our revenue development is in the past, it was very directly linked to the development of our headcount, strong growth of our headcount, strong sales growth. And these two things will be much more decoupled in the future. So you a company will grow even if headcount is not growing that quickly because of the new tools, because of the usage of AI. In certain areas, it will be decoupled. And therefore, I think the assumption is pretty fair that headcount growth will slow down significantly in the future, midterm, long term, which does not mean that the headcount is decreasing because, as you have seen, headcount is still growing.

50:55 But growth rate is significantly lower than what we have seen in the past. Okay. So the challenge is now to decouple the growth from the cost of cloud and AI, yes? Right. I mean at the moment, adesso has a lot of time and material business, some fixed price projects. And all the models we have just explained that we have a lot of different customer situations and also the pricing model due to the way what how we think how we will deliver things will change. And part of this is that this will be headcount and the hours we have delivered. This will be decoupled from our revenues much more than in the past.

51:49 Okay. And second question is regarding one smaller item of the P and L. The capitalized own work fell quite strongly in Q2. Is this the finalization of the SaaS platforms? Right. Exactly. It's related to the SaaS platforms at, I guess, with Zoom Solutions, the one off platform for life insurance and the platform for the other insurances. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Jakobowski. And now we'll have another try to take the question of Mr. Zui.

52:38 Yes. Excuse me. Does it work now? Yes. Great. Perfect. Thank you. I have a few questions left. So the first one would be on the segment EBIT. We saw that reconciliation and consolidation improved or increased quite a bit. Could you explain the drivers here just to get a clean bridge to the group results then? And yes, maybe to get a better feeling for the moving parts. And the other one second one would be, again, on the Gen AI influenced order intake that you published. That's very interesting. Maybe you could provide some color here on the gross margins of this work and also if this is really incremental volume or if this is also, to a certain extent, substitute for your classic project work. I mean, you did mention that 44% are new customers.

53:35 But yes, also here, some additional color would be much appreciated. And the last one would be on daily rates. Maybe you can provide a feeling how the development was in H1 and yes, how also the exit rate was in H1? If we look at our two segments, IT Solutions and IT Services, I mean IT Services shows a nice improvement compared to last year. IT Solutions is a little bit different, difficult, more difficult to understand. On one hand side, if you look at revenues there, last year, adesso mobile solutions was for the first half of the year still part of the solutions business.

54:26 Then we merged the company with adesso SE, and now it's part of the IT services business. So therefore, the first view, there's a decrease of revenues. But actually, it's only because of this shift and disregarding that business was growing. And the other major item there, which needs to be considered. Adesso, the the the material one business, I explained this write off of a goodwill and intangible assets for the supply chain platform there. This is something with the solutions business.

55:15 So actually, we have a little improvement here in this business as well. And therefore, everything here is on track to achieve this breakeven level next year. If we look at the second question, AI business, I mean, what we have published today is a business which is inspired by AI, which is related to AI. This does not mean that this is 70,000,000 only generated with AI because you cannot decouple AI and say this is AI business and this is the normal business. So development is a different one.

56:02 The normal work changes because AI is used. And AI provides capabilities to do certain things which were not possible in the past. And yes, certain business might be there, which is really very much AI inspired. But it's difficult to say you have these margins with AI, And this is the margin without AI because there is not this pure AI project where you can say margins have this euro and this percentage and others have this percentage.

56:50 I mean, you also need to consider that you might have less personal expenses there. But on the other hand, you have a token consumption. For example, at the moment, just to Germany, it does not include the token consumption of all companies. Token consumption in July actually is more than 700,000 already. There will be months in in the second half of the year where we pass the 1,000,000 threshold. So you have also expenses which lower, for example, your margins. And the third one was the daily rates. I mean, we are working on that since one and a half year. That's the time where we set up an internal group to improve that, to go through all the contracts, to negotiate with customers.

57:44 And therefore, our goal is to keep daily rates at least growing as much as the inflation rate. On the other hand, at the moment, in some areas, there's really huge price pressure because if we especially look at those IT services and consulting companies who in the past had a lot of work within the automotive industry, for example. They are looking for new areas to generate business. And so there is a tough competition at the moment. So we are happy if we are successful in growing our rates slightly to at least keep track with the inflation.

58:33 Can you say how the development was after this 1.7% and minus 2% in 2025? Or is it difficult for you I mean you get a very nice idea If you look at on our key figures here, we have provide the gross profit per employee. It's 116,000 compared to 112,000. And this is this improvement of 3%, 23%, 4%. Fluctuates a little bit per quarter. And I think that's important. But this gives you a little idea about this development. Okay.

59:18 Great. Thank you. Thank you. We're over with some with some time. But but in case there is one question more, so we are happy take this. But I haven't seen any ah, Mr. Jakob Boski again? Yes. Thank you. One additional short questions short question. The result from investments has become more negative in Q2. What's your expectation for the rest of the year and maybe for 2027 regarding this item? Yeah. We have, let's say, two, three contributors there.

1:00:13 I think it would stay at a level for the the second half of the year, what we have seen in the first half of the year. I don't see a significant improvement yet. Okay. And 2027, it's too early to say? One of the customers companies there is in a turnaround situation, which is one, let's say, one of the more important contributors to the negative results. And if this turnaround continues, then we have a chance that this figure will improve. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much for your interest in our call today and your participation and all those interesting questions.

1:01:04 Wish you all the best, hope to see you in person maybe on one of the September conferences. For now, I have to say goodbye.